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ESSAYS ON LIFE-
ART AND SCENCE

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THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND

MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

ESSAYS ON LIFE, ART
AND SCIENCE

Re-issue of the Works of the late
Samuel Butler

Author of « Erewhon," « The Way of All Flc«h," etc.

Mr, FiriKLD has pleasure in announcing he has taken over the publication
of the entire works (save one) of the late Samuel Butler, novelist, philosopher,
scientist, satirist and classicist ; " in his own department," says Mr. Bernard
Shaw, "the greatest English writer of the latter half of the 19th century.*'
** The Way of All Flesh" and "Erewhon '* which have been out of print for
some time are now reprinted, and all the other works with one exception are
now offered at more popular prices.

The Way of All Flesh. A Novel. New Edition. 6s.

Erewhon. i ith, Revised Edition. 3rd Impression. 2S. 6d. nett.

Erewhon Revisited. 2nd Impression, 340 pages. 2s. 6d. nett.

(A few copies of the original edition, gilt top, 6s.)
Essays on Life, Art and Science. 340 pages. 2s. 6d. nett.

(A few copies of the original edition, gilt top, 6s.)
The Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the

Canton Ticino. Profusely illustrated by Charles

Gogin, H. F. Jones and the Author. Pott 4to,

cloth gilt. I OS. 6d.

The Fair Haven. 5s. nett.

Life and Habit. An essay after a completer view

of Evolution. 2nd edition. 5s. nett.

Evolution Old and New. A comparison of the

theories of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck,

with that of Charles Darwin.

Luck or Cunning, as the main means of organic

modification.
The Authoress of the Odyssey, who and what

she was, when and where she wrote, etc.
The Iliad of Homer, rendered into English prose.
The Odyssey, rendered into English prose.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, with notes and original text.

Ex Voto. An account of the Sacro Monte or New

Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia. 5s. nett.

Selections from Butler's Works. 5 s. nett.

London : A. C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, E.C.

5s.

nett.

5s.

nett.

5s.

nett.

5s.

nett.

5s.

nett.

5s.

nett.

ESSAYS ON LIFE
ART AND SCIENCE

SAMUEL BUTLER

AUTHOR OF "eREWHON," ** EREWHON RE-VISITED,"

"the way of all flesh," etc.

EDITED BY

R. A. STREATFEILD

LONDON
A. C. FIFIELD

1908

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson <5r» Co
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

QUIS DESIDERIO . . . ?

RAMBLINGS IN CHEAPSIDE .

THE AUNT, THE NIECES AND THE DOG

HOW TO MAKE THE BEST OF LIFE .

THE SANCTUARY OF MONTRIGONE .

A MEDIEVAL GIRL SCHOOL .

ART IN THE VALLEY OF SAAS .

THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE .

THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM .

PAOB

vii

45
(59
87
108
143
176
234

ivi368l41

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/essaysonlifeartsOObutlrich

INTRODUCTION

It is hardly necessary to apologise for the
miscellaneous character of the following col-
lection of essays. Samuel Butler was a man
of such unusual versatility, and his interests
were so many and so various that his literary
remains were bound to cover a wide field.
Nevertheless it will be found that several of the
subjects to which he devoted much time and
labour are not represented in these pages. I
have not thought it necessary to reprint any of
the numerous pamphlets and articles which he
wrote upon the Iliad and Odyssey, since these
were all merged in " The Authoress of the
Odyssey," which gives his matured views upon
everything relating to the Homeric poems.
For a similar reason I have not included an
essay on the evidence for the Resurrection of
Jesus Christ, which he printed in 1865 for
private circulation, since he subsequently made
extensive use of it in " The Fair Haven."

Introduction

Two of the essays in this collection were
originally delivered as lectures ; the remainder
were published in The Universal Review dur-
ing 1888, 1889, and 1890.

I should perhaps explain why two other
essays of his, which also appeared in The
Universal Review, have been omitted.

The first of these, entitled "L'AfFaire
Holbein - Rippel," relates to a drawing of
Holbein's "Danse des Paysans," in the
Basle Museum, which is usually described as
a copy, but which Butler believed to be the
work of Holbein himself. This essay requires
to be illustrated in so elaborate a manner that
it was impossible to include it in a book of
this size.

The second essay, which is a sketch of the
career of the sculptor Tabachetti, was pub-
lished as the first section of an article entitled
"A Sculptor and a Shrine," of which the
second section is here given under the title,
" The Sanctuary of Montrigone." The sec-
tion devoted to the sculptor represents all
that Butler then knew about Tabachetti, but
since it was written various documents have

Introduction

come to light, principally owing to the inves-
tigations of Cavaliere Francesco Negri, of
Casale Monferrato, which negative some of
Butler's most cherished conclusions. Had
Butler lived he would either have rewritten
his essay in accordance with Cavaliere Negri's
discoveries, of which he fully recognised the
value, or incorporated them into the revised
edition of " Ex Voto," which he intended to
publish. As it stands, the essay requires so
much revision that I have decided to omit it
altogether, and to postpone giving English
readers a full account of Tabachetti's career
until a second edition of " Ex Voto " is re-
quired. Meanwhile I have given a brief
summary of the main facts of Tabachetti's
life in a note (page 154) to the essay on '* Art
in the Valley of Saas." Any one who wishes
for further details of the sculptor and his work
will find them in Cavaliere Negri's pamphlet,
" II Santuario di Crea " (Alessandria, 1902).

The three essays grouped together under
the title of "The Deadlock in Darwinism"
may be regarded as a postscript to Butler's
four books on evolution, viz., ''Life and

Introduction

Habit/' ^^ Evolution, Old and New," "Un-
conscious Memory " and " Luck or Cunning."
An occasion for the publication of these essays
seemed to be afforded by the appearance in
1889 of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace's "Dar-
winism " ; and although nearly fourteen years
have elapsed since they were published in the
Universal Review, I have no fear that they
will be found to be out of date. How far,
indeed, the problem embodied in the deadlock
of which Butler speaks is from solution was
conclusively shown by the correspondence
which appeared in the Times in May 1903,
occasioned by some remarks made at Univer-
sity College by Lord Kelvin in moving a
vote of thanks to Professor Henslow after his
lecture on " Present Day Rationalism." Lord
Kelvin's claim for a recognition of the fact
that in organic nature scientific thought is
compelled to accept the idea of some kind
of directive power, and his statement that
biologists are coming once more to a firm
acceptance of a vital principle, drew from
several distinguished men of science retorts
heated enough to prove beyond a doubt that

Introduction

the gulf between the two main divisions of
evolutionists is as wide to-day as it was when
Butler wrote. It will be well, perhaps, for
the benefit of readers who have not followed
the history of the theory of evolution during
its later developments, to state in a few words
what these two main divisions are. All evolu-
tionists agree that the differences between
species are caused by the accumulation and
transmission of variations, but they do not
agree as to the causes to which the varia-
tions are due. The view held by the older
evolutionists, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck, who have been followed by many
modern thinkers, including Herbert Spencer
and Butler, is that the variations occur mainly
as the result of effort and design ; the oppo-
site view, which is that advocated by Mr.
Wallace in ''Darwinism," is that the varia-
tions occur merely as the result of chance.
The former is sometimes called the teleo-
logical view, because it recognises the presence
in organic nature of design, whether it be
called creative power, directive force, direc-
tivity, or vital principle ; the latter view, in

Introduction

which the existence of design is absolutely
negatived, is now usually described as Weis-
mannism, from the name of the writer who
has been its principal advocate in recent
years.

In conclusion, I must thank my friend Mr.
Henry Festing Jones most warmly for the
invaluable assistance which he has given me
in preparing these essays for publication, in
correcting the proofs, and in compiling the
introduction and notes.

R. A. STREATFEILD.

ESSAYS ON LIFE, ART
AND SCIENCE

QUIS DESIDERIO . . . ? ^

Like Mr. Wilkie Collins, I, too, have been
asked to lay some of my literary experiences
before the readers of the Universal Review.
It occurred to me that the Review must be
indeed universal before it could open its pages
to one so obscure as myself; but, nothing
daunted by the distinguished company among
which I was for the first time asked to move,
I resolved to do as I was told, and went to
the British Museum to see what books I had
written. Having refreshed my memory by a
glance at the catalogue, I was about to try
and diminish the large and ever -increasing
circle of my non-readers when I became
aware of a calamity that brought me to a
standstill, and indeed bids fair, so far as I can

^ Published in the Universal Review, July 1888.

Essays on Life

see at present, to put an end to my literary
existence altogether.

I should explain that I cannot write unless
I have a sloping desk, and the reading-room
of the British Museum, where alone I can
compose freely, is unprovided with sloping
desks. Like every other organism, if I can-
not get exactly what I want I make shift with
the next thing to it ; true, there are no desks
in the reading-room, but, as I once heard a
visitor from the country say, "it contains a
large number of very interesting works." I
know it was not right, and hope the Museum
authorities will not be severe upon me if any
of them reads this confession ; but I wanted a
desk, and set myself to consider which of the
many very interesting works which a grateful
nation places at the disposal of its would-be
authors was best suited for my purpose.

For mere reading I suppose one book is
pretty much as good as another; but the choice
of a desk-book is a more serious matter. It
must be neither too thick nor too thin; it
must be large enough to make a substantial
support ; it must be strongly bound so as not

Art and Science

to yield or give ; it must not be too trouble-
some to carry backwards and forwards ; and it
must live on shelf C, D, or E, so that there
need be no stooping or reaching too high.
These are the conditions which a really good
book must fulfil ; simple, however, as they are,
it is surprising how few volumes comply with
them satisfactorily; moreover, being perhaps
too sensitively conscientious, I allowed another
consideration to influence me, and was sincerely
anxious not to take a book which would be in
constant use for reference by readers, more
especially as, if 1 did this, I might find myself
disturbed by the officials.

For weeks I made experiments upon sundry
poetical and philosophical works, whose names
I have forgotten, but could not succeed in
finding my ideal desk, until at length, more by
luck than cunning, I happened to Ught upon
Frost's " Lives of Eminent Christians," which
I had no sooner tried than I discovered it to
be the very perfection and ne plus ultra of
everything that a book should be. It lived
in Case No. 2008, and I accordingly took

at once to sitting in Row B, where for

Essays on Life

the last dozen years or so I have sat ever
since.

The first thing I have done whenever I went
to the Museum has been to take down Frost's
" Lives of Eminent Christians " and carry it
to my seat. It is not the custom of modern
writers to refer to the works to which they are
most deeply indebted, and I have never, that
I remember, mentioned it by name before;
but it is to this book alone that I have looked
for support during many years of literary
labour, and it is round this to me invaluable
volume that all my own have page by page
grown up. There is none in the Museum to
which I have been under anything hke such
constant obligation, none which I can so ill
spare, and none which I would choose so
readily if I were allowed to select one single
volume and keep it for my own.

On finding myself asked for a contribution
to the Universal Review, I went, as I have
explained, to the Museum, and presently re-
paired to bookcase No. 2008 to get my favourite
volume. Alas ! it was in the room no longer.
It was not in use, for its place was fiUed up

Art and Science

already ; besides, no one ever used it but my-
self. Whether the ghost of the late Mr. Frost
has been so eminently unchristian as to inter-
fere, or whether the authorities have removed
the book in ignorance of the steady demand
which there has been for it on the part of at
least one reader, are points I cannot determine.
All I know is that the book is gone, and I feel
as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have
felt when he became aware that Lucy was in
her grave, and exclaimed so emphatically that
this would make a considerable difference to
him, or words to that effect.

Now I think of it. Frost's "Lives of
Eminent Christians" was very like Lucy.
The one resided at Dovedale in Derbyshire,
the other in Great Russell Street, Blooms-
bury. I admit that I do not see the resem-
blance here at this moment, but if I try to
develop my perception I shall doubtless ere
long find a marvellously striking one. In
other respects, however, than mere local
habitat the likeness is obvious. Lucy was
not particularly attractive either inside or out
— no more was Frost's "Lives of Eminent

Essays on Life

Christians " ; there were few to praise her,
and of those few still fewer could bring
themselves to like her; indeed, Wordsworth
himself seems to have been the only person
who thought much about her one way or the
other. In like manner, I believe I was the
only reader who thought much one way or
the other about Frost's "Lives of Eminent
Christians," but this in itself was one of the
attractions of the book ; and as for the grief
we respectively felt and feel, I believe my
own to be as deep as Wordsworth's, if not
more so.

I said above, " as Wordsworth is generally
supposed to have felt " ; for any one imbued
with the spirit of modern science will read
Wordsworth's poem with different eyes from
those of a mere literary critic. He will note
that Wordsworth is most careful not to
explain the nature of the difference which
the death of Lucy will occasion to him. He
tells us that there will be a difference; but
there the matter ends. The superficial reader
takes it that he was very sorry she was dead ;
it is, of course, possible that he may have

Art and Science

actually been so, but he has not said this.
On the contrary, he has hinted plainly that
she was ugly, and generally disliked ; she was
only like a violet when she was half-hidden
from the view, and only fair as a star when
there were so few stars out that it was prac-
tically impossible to make an invidious com-
parison. If there were as many as even two
stars the likeness was felt to be at an end. If
Wordsworth had imprudently promised to
marry this young person during a time when
he had been unusually long in keeping to
good resolutions, and had afterwards seen
some one whom he liked better, then Lucy's
death would undoubtedly have made a con-
siderable difference to him, and this is all
that he has ever said that it would do.
What right have we to put glosses upon the
masterly reticence of a poet, and credit him
with feelings possibly the very reverse of
those he actually entertained ?

Sometimes, indeed, I have been inclined to
think that a mystery is being hinted at more
dark than any critic has suspected. I do not
happen to possess a copy of the poem, but

Essays on Life

the writer, if I am not mistaken, says that
"few could know when Lucy ceased to
be." "Ceased to be" is a suspiciously eu-
phemistic expression, and the words "few
could know " are not applicable to the ordi-
nary peaceful death of a domestic servant
such as Lucy appears to have been. No
matter how obscure the deceased, any number
of people commonly can know the day and
hour of his or her demise, whereas in this case
we are expressly told it would be impossible
for them to do so. Wordsworth was nothing
if not accurate, and would not have said that
few could know, but that few actually did
know, unless he was aware of circumstances
that precluded all but those implicated in the
crime of her death from knowing the precise
moment of its occurrence. If Lucy was the
kind of person not obscurely pourtrayed in
the poem ; if Wordsworth had murdered her,
either by cutting her throat or smothering
her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends
Southey and Coleridge; and if he had thus
found himself released from an engagement
which had become irksome to him, or pos-

Art and Science

sibly from the threat of an action for breach
of promise, then there is not a syllable in
the poem with which he crowns his crime
that is not alive with meaning. On any
other supposition to the general reader it is
unintelligible.

We cannot be too guarded in the inter-
pretations we put upon the words of great
poets. Take the young lady who never loved
the dear gazelle — and I don't believe she did ;
we are apt to think that Moore intended us
to see in this creation of his fancy a sweet,
amiable, but most unfortunate young woman,
whereas all he has told us about her points
to an exactly opposite conclusion. In reality,
he wished us to see a young lady who had
been an habitual complainer from her earliest
childhood ; whose plants had always died as
soon as she bought them, while those belong-
ing to her neighbours had flourished. The
inference is obvious, nor can we reasonably
doubt that Moore intended us to draw it ; if
her plants were the very first to fade away,
she was evidently the very first to neglect or
otherwise maltreat them. She did not give

Essays on Life

them enough water, or left the door of her
fern-case open when she was cooking her
dinner at the gas stove, or kept them too near
the paraffin oil, or other like folly ; and as for
her temper, see what the gazelles did ; as long
as they did not know her " well," they could
just manage to exist, but when they got
to understand her real character, one after
another felt that death was the only course
open to it, and accordingly died rather than
live with such a mistress. True, the young
lady herself said the gazelles loved her ; but
disagreeable people are apt to think them-
selves amiable, and in view of the course
invariably taken by the gazelles themselves
any one accustomed to weigh evidence will
hold that she was probably mistaken.

I must, however, return to Frost's " Lives
of Eminent Christians." I will leave none of
the ambiguity about my words in which
Moore and Wordsworth seem to have de-
lighted. I am very sorry the book is gone,
and know not where to turn for its successor.
Till I have found a substitute I can write no
more, and I do not know how to find even

Art and Science

a tolerable one. 1 should try a volume of
Migne's " Complete Course of Patrology,"
but I do not like books in more than one
volume, for the volumes vary in thickness,
and one never can remember which one
took ; the four volumes, however, of Bede in
Giles's " Anglican Fathers " are not open to
this objection, and I have reserved them
for favourable consideration. Mather's " Mag-
nalia " might do, but the binding does not
please me ; Cureton's " Corpus Ignatianum "
might also do if it were not too thin. I do
not like taking Norton's " Genuineness of the
Gospels," as it is just possible some one may
be wanting to know whether the Gospels are
genuine or not, and be unable to find out
because I have got Mr. Norton's book.
Baxter's " Church History of England," Lin-
gard's " Anglo - Saxon Church," and Card-
well's " Documentary Annals," though none
of them as good as Frost, are works of con-
siderable merit ; but on the whole I think
Arvine's " Cyclopedia of Moral and Reli-
gious Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in
the room which comes within measurable

Essays on Life

distance of Frost. I should probably try this
book first, but it has a fatal objection in its
too seductive title. " I am not curious," as
Miss Lottie Venne says in one of her parts,
'' but I like to know," and I might be tempted
to pervert the book from its natural uses and
open it, so as to find out what kind of a thing
a moral and religious anecdote is. I know, of
course, that there are a great many anecdotes
in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling them
either moral or religious, though some of them
certainly seem as if they might fairly find a
place in Mr. Arvine's work. There are some
things, however, which it is better not to
know, and take it all round I do not think I
should be wise in putting myself in the way
of temptation, and adopting Arvine as the
successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.

Some successor I must find, or I must give
up writing altogether, and this I should be
sorry to do. I have only as yet written about
a third, or from that — counting works written
but not published — to a half, of the books
which I have set myself to write. It would
not so much matter if old age was not staring

Art and Science

me in the face. Dr. Parr said it was " a beastly
shame for an old man not to have laid down
a good cellar of port in his youth"; I, like
the greater number, I suppose, of those who
write books at all, write in order that I may
have something to read in my old age when
I can write no longer. I know what I shall
like better than any one can tell me, and
write accordingly ; if my career is nipped in
the bud, as seems only too likely, I really do
not know where else I can turn for present
agreeable occupation, nor yet how to make
suitable provision for my later years. Other
writers can, of course, make excellent pro-
vision for their own old ages, but they cannot
do so for mine, any more than I should suc-
ceed if I were to try to cater for theirs. It
is one of those cases in which no man can
make agreement for his brother.

I have no heart for continuing this article,
and if I had, I have nothing of interest to
say. No one's literary career can have been
smoother or more unchequered than mine.
I have published all my books at my own
expense, and paid for them in due course.

Essays on Life

What can be conceivably more unromantic?
For some years I had a httle hterary grievance
against the authorities of the British Museum
because they would insist on saying in their
catalogue that I had published three sermons
on Infidelity in the year 1820. I thought I
had not, and got them out to see. They were
rather funny, but they were not mine. Now,
however, this grievance has been removed. I
had another little quarrel with them because
they would describe me as "of St. John's
College, Cambridge," an establishment for
which I have the most profound veneration,
but with which I have not had the honour to
be connected for some quarter of a century.
At last they said they would change this
description if I would only tell them what I
was, for, though they had done their best to
find out, they had themselves failed. I replied
with modest pride that I was a Bachelor of
Arts. I keep all my other letters inside my
name, not outside. They mused and said it
was unfortunate that I was not a Master of
Arts. Could I not get myself made a
Master ? I said I understood that a Master-

Art and Science

ship was an article the University could not
do under about five pounds, and that I was
not disposed to go sixpence higher than three
ten. They again said it was a pity, for it
would be very inconvenient to them if I did
not keep to something between a bishop and
a poet. I might be anything I liked in
reason, provided I showed proper respect for
the alphabet; but they had got me between
" Samuel Butler, bishop," and " Samuel
Butler, poet." It would be very trouble-
some to shift me, and bachelor came before
bishop. This was reasonable, so I replied that,
under those circumstances, if they pleased, I
thought I would like to be a philosophical
writer. They embraced the solution, and, no
matter what I write now, I must remain a
philosophical writer as long as I live, for the
alphabet will hardly be altered in my time,
and I must be something between " Bis " and
" Poe." If I could get a volume of my ex-
cellent namesake's " Hudibras " out of the list
of my works, I should be robbed of my last
shred of literary grievance, so I say nothing

about this, but keep it secret, lest some

Essays on Life

worse thing should happen to me. Besides, I
have a great respect for my namesake, and
always say that if "Erewhon" had been a
racehorse it would have been got by " Hudi-
bras " out of " Analogy." Some one said this
to me many years ago, and I felt so much
flattered that I have been repeating the re-
mark as my own ever since.

But how small are these grievances as com-
pared with those endured without a murmur
by hundreds of writers far more deserving
than myself. When I see the scores and
hundreds of workers in the reading-room who
have done so much more than I have, but
whose work is absolutely fruitless to them-
selves, and when I think of the prompt recog-
nition obtained by my own work, I ask
myself what I have done to be thus rewarded.
On the other hand, the feeling that I have
succeeded far beyond my deserts hitherto,
makes it all the harder for me to acquiesce
without complaint in the extinction of a
career which I honestly believe to be a pro-
mising one ; and once more I repeat that,
unless the Museum authorities give me back

Art and Science

my Frost, or put a locked clasp on Arvine,
my career must be extinguished. Give me
back Frost, and, if life and health are spared,
I will write another dozen of volumes yet
before I hang up my fiddle — if so serious a
confusion of metaphors may be pardoned. I
know from long experience how kind and
considerate both the late and present super-
intendents of the reading-room were and are,
but I doubt how far either of them would be
disposed to help me on this occasion; con-
tinue, however, to rob me of my Frost, and,
whatever else I may do, I will write no more
books.

Note hy Dr. Garnett, British Museum. —
The frost has broken up. Mr. Butler is
restored to literature. Mr. Mudie may make
himself easy. England will still boast a
humourist ; and the late Mr. Darwin (to
whose posthumous machinations the removal
of the book was owing) will continue to be
confounded. — R. Garnett.

RAMBLINGS IN CHEAPSIDE^

Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw
some turtles in Mr. Sweeting's window, and
was tempted to stay and look at them. As I
did so I was struck not more by the defences
with which they were hedged about, than by
the fatuousness of trying to hedge that in at
all which, if hedged thoroughly, must die of its
own defencefulness. The holes for the head
and feet through which the turtle leaks out,
as it were, on to the exterior world, and
through which it again absorbs the exterior
world into itself — "catching on" through
them to things that are thus both turtle and
not turtle at one and the same time — these
holes stultify the armour, and show it to have
been designed by a creature with more of
faithfulness to a fixed idea, and hence one-
sidedness, than of that quick sense of relative
importances and their changes, which is the
main factor of good living.

^ Published in the Universal Review, December 1890.

Art and Science

The turtle obviously had no sense of pro-
portion ; it differed so widely from myself that
I could not comprehend it ; and as this word
occurred to me, it occurred also that until my
body comprehended its body in a pliysical
material sense, neither would my mind be
able to comprehend its mind with any
thoroughness. For unity of mind can only
be consummated by unity of body ; every-
thing, therefore, must be in some respects
both knave and fool to all that which has not
eaten it, or by which it has not been eaten.
As long as the turtle was in the window and I
in the street outside, there was no chance of
our comprehending one another.

Nevertheless I knew that I could get it to
agree with me if I could so effectually button-
hole and fasten on to it as to eat it. Most
men have an easy method with turtle soup,
and I had no misgiving but that if I could
bring my first premise to bear I should prove
the better reasoner. My difficulty lay in this
initial process, for I had not with me the
argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweet-
ing to think that I ought to be allowed to

Essays on Life

convert the turtles — I mean I had no money
in my pocket. No missionary enterprise can
be carried on without any money at all, but
even so small a sum as half-a-crown vi^ould, I
suppose, have enabled me to bring the turtle
partly round, and with many half-crowns I
could in time no doubt convert the lot, for the
turtle needs must go where the money drives.
If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle,
the turtle stands on money. No money no
turtle. As for money, that stands on opinion,
credit, trust, faith — things that, though highly
material in connection with money, are still
of immaterial essence.

The steps are perfectly plain. The men
who caught the turtles brought a fairly strong
and definite opinion to bear upon them, that
passed into action, and later on into money.
They thought the turtles would come that
way, and verified their opinion ; on this, will
and action were generated, with the result that
the men turned the turtles on their backs and
carried them off. Mr. Sweeting touched these
men with money, which is the outward and
visible sign of verified opinion. The customer

Art and Science

touches Mr. Sweeting with money, Mr. Sweet-
ing touches the waiter and the cook with
money. They touch the turtle with skill and
verified opinion. Finally, the customer applies
the clinching argument that brushes all soph-
isms aside, and bids the turtle stand proto-
plasm to protoplasm with himself, to know
even as it is known.

But it must be all touch, touch, touch ;
skill, opinion, power, and money, passing in
and out with one another in any order we
like, but still link to link and touch to touch.
If there is failure anywhere in respect of
opinion, skill, power, or money, either as re-
gards quantity or quality, the chain can be no
stronger than its weakest link, and the turtle
and the clinching argument will fly asunder.
Of course, if there is an initial failure in con-
nection, through defect in any member of the
chain, or of connection between the links, it
will no more be attempted to bring the turtle
and the clinching argument together, than it
will to chain up a dog with two pieces of
broken chain that are disconnected. The
contact throughout must be conceived as

Essays on Life

absolute ; and yet perfect contact is inconceiv-
able by us, for on becoming perfect it ceases
to be contact, and becomes essential, once for
all inseverable, identity. The most absolute
contact short of this is still contact by courtesy
only. So here, as everywhere else, Eurydice
glides off as we are about to grasp her. We
can see nothing face to face ; our utmost see-
ing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in
an overcrowded pocket.

Presently my own blind finger-ends fished
up the conclusion, that as I had neither time
nor money to spend on perfecting the chain
that would put me in full spiritual contact
with Mr. Sweeting's turtles, I had better leave
them to complete their education at some one
else's expense rather than mine, so I walked
on towards the Bank. As I did so it struck
me how continually we are met by this melt-
ing of one existence into another. The limits
of the body seem well defined enough as
definitions go, but definitions seldom go far.
What, for example, can seem more distinct
from a man than his banker or his solicitor ?
Yet these are commonly so much parts of him

Art and Science

that he can no more cut them off and grow
new ones, than he can grow new legs or
arms ; neither must he wound his sohcitor ; a
wound in the sohcitor is a very serious thing.
As for his bank— failure of his bank's action
may be as fatal to a man as failure of his
heart. I have said nothing about the medical
or spiritual adviser, but most men grow into
the society that surrounds them by the help
of these four main tap-roots, and not only
into the world of humanity, but into the
universe at large. We can, indeed, grow
butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost ad
libitum, but these are low developments, and
correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails. Those
of us again who are not highly enough organ-
ised to have grown a solicitor or banker can
generally repair the loss of whatever social or-
ganisation they may possess as freely as lizards
are said to grow new tails ; but this with the
higher social, as well as organic, developments
is only possible to a very limited extent.

The doctrine of metempsychosis, or trans-
migration of souls — a doctrine to which the

foregoing considerations are for the most part

Essays on Life

easy corollaries — crops up no matter in what
direction we allow our thoughts to wander.
And we meet instances of transmigration of
body as well as of soul. I do not mean that
both body and soul have transmigrated to-
gether, far from it ; but that, as we can often
recognise a transmigrated mind in an alien
body, so we not less often see a body that is
clearly only a transmigration, linked on to
some one else's new and alien soul. We meet
people every day whose bodies are evidently
those of men and women long dead, but
whose appearance we know through their por-
traits. We see them going about in omnibuses,
railway carriages, and in all public places.
The cards have been shuffled, and they have
drawn fresh lots in life and nationalities, but
any one fairly well up in mediaeval and last
century portraiture knows them at a glance.

Going down once towards Italy I saw a
young man in the train whom I recognised,
only he seemed to have got younger. He was
with a friend, and his face was in continual play,
but for some little time I puzzled in vain to

recollect where it was that I had seen him

Art and Science

before. All of a sudden I remembered he was
King Francis I. of France. I had hitherto
thought the face of this king impossible, but
when I saw it in play I understood it. His great
contemporary Henry VIII. keeps a restaurant
in Oxford Street. FalstafF drove one of the
St. Gothard diligences for many years, and
only retired when the railway was opened.
Titian once made me a pair of boots at
Vicenza, and not very good ones. At Modena
I had my hair cut by a young man whom I
perceived to be Raffaelle. The model who
sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first
lady in a confectionery establishment at Mont-
real. She has a little motherly pimple on
the left side of her nose that is misleading at
first, but on examination she is readily recog-
nised ; probably RafFaelle's model had the
pimple too, but Raffaelle left it out — as he
would.

Handel, of course, is Madame Patey. Give
Madame Patey Handel's wig and clothes, and
there would be no telling her from Handel.
It is not only that the features and the shape
of the head are the same, but there is a certain

Essays on Life

imperiousness of expression and attitude about
Handel which he hardly attempts to conceal
in Madame Patey. It is a curious coincidence
that he should continue to be such an in-
comparable renderer of his own music.
Pope Julius II. was the late Mr. Darwin.
Rameses II. is a blind woman now, and
stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug. I
never could understand why I always found
myself humming " They oppressed them with
burthens" when I passed her, till one day I
was looking in Mr. Spooner's window in the
Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses II.
Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots
and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe
in Tottenham Court Road.

Michael Angelo is a commissionaire ; I saw
him on board the G-len Rosa, which used to
run every day from London to Clacton-on-
Sea and back. It gave me quite a turn when
I saw him coming down the stairs from the
upper deck, with his bronzed face, flattened
nose, and with the familiar bar upon his fore-
head. I never liked Michael Angelo, and

never shall, but I am afraid of him, and was

Art and Science

near trying to hide when I saw him coming
towards me. He had not got his commis-
sionaire's uniform on, and I did not know he
was one till I met him a month or so later in
the Strand. When we got to Blackwall the
music struck up and people began to dance.
I never saw a man dance so much in my life.
He did not miss a dance all the way to
Clacton, nor all the way back again, and
when not dancing he was flirting and cracking
jokes. I could hardly believe my eyes when I
reflected that this man had painted the famous
"Last Judgment," and had made all those
statues.

Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter
at Brissago on the Lago Maggiore, only he is
better-tempered-looking, and has a more in-
tellectual expression. He gave me his ideas
upon beauty : " Tutto ch' e vero e bello," he
exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence. I
am not afraid of Dante. I know people by
their friends, and he went about with Virgil,
so I said with some severity, " No, Dante, il
naso della Signora Robinson e vero, ma non

e bello"; and he admitted I was right.

Essays on Life

Beatrice's name is Towler ; she is waitress at

a small inn in German Switzerland. I used

to sit at my window and hear people call

"Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty times in a

forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to

Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come

before they called her name, but no matter

how often they called Towler, every one came

before she did. I suppose they spelt her name

Taula, but to me it sounded Towler ; I never,

however, met any one else with this name.

She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who

made me play the piano to her, and she said

it was lovely. Of course I only played my

own compositions; so I believed her, and it

all went off very nicely. I thought it might

save trouble if I did not tell her who she

really was, so I said nothing about it.

I met Socrates once. He was my muleteer

on an excursion which I will not name, for

fear it should identify the man. The moment

I jsaw my guide I knew he was somebody,

but for the life of me I could not remember

who. All of a sudden it flashed across me

that he was Socrates. He talked enough for

Art and Science

six, but it was all in dialetto, so I could not
understand him, nor, when I had discovered
who he was, did I much try to do so. He
was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing
fruit and vegetables, but an amiable man
enough. He had had a long day with his
mule and me, and he only asked me five
francs. I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor
old patched boots, and there was a meekness
about him that touched me. " And now,
Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our
several ways, you to steal tomatoes, I to filch
ideas from other people ; for the rest — which
of these two roads will be the better going,
our father which is in heaven knows, but we
know not."

I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there
is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air
dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is
not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by
his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of
some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a
cigar, and appears to be making an offer of mar-
riage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend

Mr. H. Festing .Tones and I have had the good

Essays on Life

fortune to meet ; he is an engineer now, and
does not know one note from another ; he has
quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of
course, a Httle squat man with the same re-
fractory hair that he always had. It was very
interesting to watch him, and Jones remarked
that before the end of dinner he had become
positively posthumous. One morning I was
told the Beethovens were going away, and
before long I met their two heavy boxes
being carried down the stairs. The boxes
were so squab and like their owners, that I
half thought for a moment that they were
inside, and should hardly have been surprised
to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-
in-the-box. " Sono indentro ? " said I, with
a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes.
The porters knew what I meant, and laughed.
But there is no end to the list of people whom
I have been able to recognise, and before 1
had got through it myself, I found I had
walked some distance, and had involuntarily
paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.
I do not like books. I believe I have the

smallest library of any literary man in London,

Art and Science

and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my
books at the British Museum and at Mudie's,
and it makes me very angry if any one gives
me one for my private library. I once heard
tvi^o ladies disputing in a railway carriage as
to whether one of them had or had not been
wasting money. " I spent it in books," said
the accused; ''and it's not wasting money to
buy books." " Indeed, my dear, I think it
is," was the rejoinder, and in practice I agree
with it. Webster's Dictionary, Whitaker's
Almanack, and Bradshaw's Railway Guide
should be sufficient for any ordinary library ;
it will be time enough to go beyond these
when the mass of useful and entertaining
matter which they provide has been mastered.
Nevertheless, 1 admit that sometimes, if not
particularly busy, I stop at a second-hand
bookstall and turn over a book or two from
mere force of habit.

I know not what made me pick up a
copy of iEschylus — of course in an English
version — or rather I know not what made
iEschylus take up with me, for he took me
rather than I him ; but no sooner had he got

Essays on Life

me than he began puzzling me, as he has done
any time this forty years, to know wherein
his transcendent merit can be supposed to
lie. To me he is, like the greater number of
classics in all ages and countries, a literary
Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed
immortal. There are true immortals, but
they are few and far between ; most classics
are as great impostors dead as they were
when living, and while posing as gods are,
five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It
comforts me to remember that Aristophanes
liked iEschylus no better than I do. True,
he praises him by comparison with Sophocles
and Euripides, but he only does so that he
may run down these last more effectively.
Aristophanes is a safe man to follow, nor do
I see why it should not be as correct to laugh
with him as to pull a long face with the
Greek Professors ; but this is neither here nor
there, for no one really cares about iEschylus ;
the more interesting question is how he con-
trived to make so many people for so many
years pretend to care about him.

Perhaps he married somebody's daughter.
32

Art and Science

If a man would get hold of the public ear,
he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never
understood that iEschylus was a man of
means, and the fighters do not write poetry,
so I suppose he must have married a theatrical
manager's daughter, and got his plays brought
out that way. The ear of any age or country
is like its land, air, and water ; it seems limit-
less but is really limited, and is already in
the keeping of those who naturally enough
will have no squatting on such valuable pro-
perty. It is written and talked up to as
closely as the means of subsistence are bred
up to by a teeming population. There is not
a square inch of it but is in private hands, and
he who would freehold any part of it must do
so by purchase, marriage, or fighting, in the
usual way — and fighting gives the longest,
safest tenure. The public itself has hardly
more voice in the question who shall have its
ear, than the land has in choosing its owners.
It is farmed as those who own it think most
profitable to themselves, and small blame to
them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of
mulishness which the land has not, and does

33 C

Essays on Life

sometimes dispossess its tenants. It is in
this residuum that those who fight place their
hope and trust.

Or perhaps ^schylus squared the leading
critics of his time. When one comes to think
of it, he must have done so, for how is it con-
ceivable that such plays should have had such
runs if he had not ? I met a lady one year in
Switzerland who had some parrots that always
travelled with her and were the idols of her
life. These parrots would not let any one
read aloud in their presence, unless they heard
their own names introduced from time to time.
If these were freely interpolated into the text
they would remain as still as stones, for they
thought the reading was about themselves. If
it was not about them it could not be allowed.
The leaders of literature are like these parrots ;
they do not look at what a man writes, nor
if they did would they understand it much
better than the parrots do ; but they like the
sound of their own names, and if these are
freely interpolated in a tone they take as
friendly, they may even give ear to an outsider.
Otherwise they will scream him off if they can,

Art and Science

I should not advise any one with ordinary
independence of mind to attempt the pubHc
ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung
and out-last his own generation ; for if he has
any force, people will and ought to be on
their guard against him, inasmuch as there is
no knowing where he may not take them.
Besides, they have staked their money on the
wrong men so often without suspecting it,
that when there comes one whom they do
suspect it would be madness not to bet against
him. True, he may die before he has out-
screamed his opponents, but that has nothing
to do with it. If his scream was well pitched
it will sound clearer when he is dead. We do
not know what death is. If we know so little
about life which we have experienced, how
shall we know about death which we have not
— and in the nature of things never can?
Every one, as I said years ago in " Alps and
Sanctuaries," is an immortal to himself, for he
cannot know that he is dead until he is dead,
and when dead how can he know anything
about anything ? All we know is, that even
the humblest dead may live long after all

Essays on Life

trace of the body has disappeared ; we see
them doing it in the bodies and memories of
those that come after them; and not a few
live so much longer and more effectually than
is desirable, that it has been necessary to get
rid of them by Act of Parliament. It is love
that alone gives life, and the truest life is
that which we live not in ourselves but vica-
riously in others, and with which w^e have
no concern. Our concern is so to order our-
selves that we may be of the number of them
that enter into life — although we know it
not.

JEschylus did so order himself ; but his
life is not of that inspiriting kind that can be
won through fighting the good fight only —
or being believed to have fought it. His
voice is the echo of a drone, drone-begotten
and drone-sustained. It is not a tone that a
man must utter or die — nay, even though he
die ; and likely enough half the allusions and
hard passages in iEschylus of which we can
make neither head nor tail are in reality only
puffs of some of the literary leaders of his

time,

Art and Science

The lady above referred to told me more
about her parrots. She was like a Nasmyth's
hammer going slow — very gentle, but irre-
sistible. She always read the newspaper to
them. What was the use of having a
newspaper if one did not read it to one's
parrots ?

" And have you divined," I asked, " to
which side they incline in politics ? "

" They do not like Mr. Gladstone," was the
somewhat freezing answer ; " this is the only
point on which we disagree, for I adore
him. Don't ask more about this, it is a
great grief to me. I tell them everything,"
she continued, " and hide no secret from
them."

" But can any parrot be trusted to keep
a secret?"

''Mine can."

"And on Sundays do you give them the
same course of reading as on a week-day, or
do you make a difference ? "

" On Sundays I always read them a genea-
logical chapter from the Old or New Testa-
ment, for I can thus introduce their names

Essays on Life

without profanity. I always keep tea by me
in case they should ask for it in the night, and
I have an Etna to warm it for them ; they
take milk and sugar. The old white-headed
clergyman came to see them last night ; it
was very painful, for Jocko reminded him so
strongly of his late ..."

I thought she was going to say " wife," but
it proved to have been only of a parrot that
he had once known and loved.

One evening she was in difficulties about
the quarantine, which was enforced that year
on the Italian frontier. The local doctor had
gone down that morning to see the Italian
doctor and arrange some details. " Then,
perhaps, my dear," she said to her husband,
" he is the quarantine." " No, my love," re-
plied her husband. " The quarantine is not
a person, it is a place where they put people " ;
but she would not be comforted, and suspected
the quarantine as an enemy that might at any
moment pounce out upon her and her parrots.
So a lady told me once that she had been in
like trouble about the anthem. She read in
her prayer-book that in choirs and places

Art and Science

where they sing " here followeth the anthem,"
yet the person with this most mysteriously
sounding name never did follow. They had a
choir, and no one could say the church was
not a place where they sang, for they did
sing — both chants and hymns. Why, then,
this persistent slackness on the part of the
anthem, who at this juncture should follow
her papa, the rector, into the reading-desk?
No doubt he would come some day, and
then what would he be like ? Fair or dark ?
Tall or short? Would he be bald and wear
spectacles like papa, or would he be young and
good-looking ? Anyhow, there was something
wrong, for it was announced that he would fol-
low, and he never did follow ; therefore there
was no knowing what he might not do next.

I heard of the parrots a year or two later as
giving lessons in Italian to an English maid.
T do not know what their terms were. Alas 1
since then both they and their mistress have
joined the majority. When the poor lady
felt her end was near she desired (and the
responsibility for this must rest with her, not
me) that the birds might be destroyed, as

Essays on Life

fearing that they might come to be neglected,
and knowing that they could never be loved
again as she had loved them. On being told
that all was over, she said, " Thank you," and
immediately expired.

Reflecting in such random fashion, and
strolling with no greater method, I worked
my way back through Cheapside and found
myself once more in front of Sweeting's
window. Again the turtles attracted me.
They were alive, and so far at any rate they
agreed with me. Nay, they had eyes, mouths,
legs, if not arms, and feet, so there was much
in which we were both of a mind, but surely
they must be mistaken in arming themselves
so very heavily. Any creature on getting
what the turtle aimed at would overreach
itself and be landed not in safety but annihila-
tion. It should have no communion with the
outside world at all, for death could creep in
wherever the creature could creep out ; and it
must creep out somewhere if it was to hook
on to outside things. What death can be
more absolute than such absolute isolation?

Perfect death, indeed, if it were attainable

Art and Science

(which it is not), is as near perfect security
as we can reach, but it is not the kind of
security aimed at by any animal that is at the
pains of defending itself. For such want to
have things both ways, desiring the livingness
of life without its perils, and the safety of
death without its deadness, and some of us do
actually get this for a considerable time, but
we do not get it by plating ourselves with
armour as the turtle does. We tried this in
the Middle Ages, and no longer mock our-
selves with the weight of armour that our
forefathers carried in battle. Indeed the more
deadly the weapons of attack become the
more we go into the fight slug- wise.

Slugs have ridden their contempt for de-
fensive armour as much to death as the
turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly
more than skin enough to hold themselves
together; they court death every time they
cross the road. Yet death comes not to them
more than to the turtle, whose defences are
so great that there is little left inside to be
defended. Moreover, the slugs fare best in

the long run, for turtles are dying out, while

Essays on Life

slugs are not, and there must be millions of
slugs all the world over for every single turtle.
Of the two vanities, therefore, that of the slug
seems most substantial.

In either case the creature thinks itself safe,
but is sure to be found out sooner or later;
nor is it easy to explain this mockery save by
reflecting that everything must have its meat
in due season, and that meat can only be
found for such a multitude of mouths by
giving everything as meat in due season to
something else. This is like the Kilkenny cats,
or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it is the
way of the world, and as every animal must
contribute in kind to the picnic of the universe,
one does not see what better arrangement
could be made than the providing each race
with a hereditary fallacy, which shall in the
end get it into a scrape, but which shall
generally stand the wear and tear of life for
some time. " Do ut des " is the writing on all
flesh to him that eats it ; and no creature is
dearer to itself than it is to some other that
would devour it.

Nor is there any statement or proposition

Art and Science

more invulnerable than living forms are. Pro-
positions prey upon and are grounded upon one
another just like living forms. They support
one another as plants and animals do ; they are
based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than
the cash of irrefragable conviction. The whole
universe is carried on on the credit system, and
if the mutual confidence on which it is based
were to collapse, it must itself collapse im-
mediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith ;
it is based on vague and impalpable opinion
that by some inscrutable process passes into
will and action, and is made manifest in matter
and in flesh : it is meteoric — suspended in mid-
air ; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast,
so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can
seem more broad than such stupendous base-
lessness, and yet any man can bring it about
his ears by being over-curious ; when faith fails
a system based on faith fails also.

Whether the universe is really a paying con-
cern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that
must burst sooner or later, this is another
matter. If people were to demand cash pay-
ment in irrefragable certainty for everything

Essays on Life

that they have taken hitherto as paper money
on the credit of the bank of pubHc opinion,
is there money enough behind it all to stand
so great a drain even on so great a reserve ?
Probably there is not, but happily there can
be no such panic, for even though the cultured
classes may do so, the uncultured are too dull
to have brains enough to commit such stupen-
dous folly. It takes a long course of academic
training to educate a man up to the standard
which he must reach before he can entertain
such questions seriously, and by a merciful
dispensation of Providence, university training
is almost as costly as it is unprofitable. The
majority will thus be always unable to afford
it, and will base their opinions on mother
wit and current opinion rather than on de-
monstration.

So I turned my steps homewards ; I saw a
good many more things on my way home, but
I was told that I was not to see more this time
than I could get into twelve pages of the
Universal Review; I must therefore reserve
any remark which I think might perhaps
entertain the reader for another occasion.

THE AUNT, THE NIECES, AND
THE DOG^

When a thing is old, broken, and useless we
throw it on the dust-heap, but when it is suffi-
ciently old, sufficiently broken, and sufficiently
useless we give money for it, put it into a
museum, and read papers over it which people
come long distances to hear. By-and-by, when
the whirligig of time has brought on another
revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-
heap, and remains so till after long ages it is
re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a
neo-rubbish age — containing, perhaps, traces
of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation. So
when people are old, indigent, and in all re-
spects incapable, we hold them in greater and
greater contempt as their poverty and impo-
tence increase, till they reach the pitch when

1 Published in the Universal Review, May 1889. As I have
several times been asked if the letters here reprinted were not
fabricated by Butler himself, I take this opportunity of stating
that they are authentic in every particular, and that the
originals are now in my possession. — R. A. S.

Essays on Life

they are actually at the point to die, whereon
they become sublime. Then we place every
resource our hospitals can command at their
disposal, and show no stint in our considera-
tion for them.

It is the same with all our interests. We
care most about extremes of importance and
of unimportance ; but extremes of importance
are tainted with fear, and a very imperfect fear
casteth out love. Extremes of unimportance
cannot hurt us, therefore we are well disposed
towards them ; the means may come to do so,
therefore we do not love them. Hence we
pick a fiy out of a milk-jug and watch with
pleasure over its recovery, for we are confident
that under no conceivable circumstances will
it want to borrow money from us ; but we feel
less sure about a mouse, so we show it no
quarter. The compilers of our almanacs well
know this tendency of our natures, so they tell
us, not when Noah went into the ark, nor
when the temple of Jerusalem was dedicated,
but that Lindley Murray, grammarian, died
January 16, 1826. This is not because they

could not find so many as three hundred and

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sixty-five events of considerable interest since
the creation of the world, but because they
well know we would rather hear of something
less interesting. We care most about what
concerns us either very closely, or so little that
practically we have nothing whatever to do
with it.

I once asked a young Italian, who professed
to have a considerable knowledge of English
literature, which of all our poems pleased him
best. He replied without a moment's hesita-
tion : —

" Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon ;
The little dog laughed to see such sport.
And the dish ran away with the spoon."

He said this was better than anything in
Italian. They had Dante and Tasso, and
ever so many more great poets, but they had
nothing comparable to " Hey diddle diddle,"
nor had he been able to conceive how any
one could have written it. Did I know the
author's name, and had we given him a statue ?
On this I told him of the young lady of
Harrow who would go to church in a barrow,

Essays on Life

and plied him with whatever rhyming non-
sense I could call to mind, but it was no use ;
all of these things had an element of reality
that robbed them of half their charm, whereas
"Hey diddle diddle" had nothing in it that
could conceivably concern him.

So again it is with the things that gall us
most. What is it that rises up against us at
odd times and smites us in the face again and
again for years after it has happened ? That
we spent all the best years of our life in learn-
ing what we have found to be a swindle, and
to have been known to be a swindle by those
who took money for misleading us ? That
those on whom we most leaned most betrayed
us? That we have only come to feel our
strength when there is little strength left of
any kind to feel? These things will hardly
much disturb a man of ordinary good temper.
But that he should have said this or that
little unkind and wanton saying; that he
should have gone away from this or that hotel
and given a shilling too little to the waiter ;
that his clothes were shabby at such or such

a garden-party — these things gall us as I a corn

Art and Science

will sometimes do, though the loss of a limb
may not be seriously felt.

I have been reminded lately of these con-
siderations with more than common force by
reading the very voluminous correspondence
left by my grandfather, Dr. Butler, of Shrews-
bury, whose memoirs I am engaged in writing.
I have found a large number of interesting
letters on subjects of serious import, but must
confess that it is to the hardly less numerous
lighter letters that I have been most attracted,
nor do I feel sure that my eminent namesake
did not share my predilection. Among other
letters in my possession I have one bundle
that has been kept apart, and has evidently
no connection with Dr. Butler's own life. I
cannot use these letters, therefore, for my
book, but over and above the charm of their
inspired spelling, I find them of such an ex-
tremely trivial nature that I incline to hope
the reader may derive as much amusement
from them as I have done myself, and venture
to give them the publicity here which I must
refuse them in my book. The dates and
signatures have, with the exception of

49 D

Essays on Life

Mrs. Newton's, been carefully erased, but I
have collected that they were written by the
two servants of a single lady who resided at
no great distance from London, to two nieces
of the said lady who lived in London itself.
The aunt never writes, but always gets one
of the servants to do so for her. She appears
either as '' your aunt " or as " She " ; her name
is not given, but she is evidently looked upon
with a good deal of awe by all who had to do
with her.

The letters almost all of them relate to
visits either of the aunt to London, or of the
nieces to the aunt's home, which, from occa-
sional allusions to hopping, I gather to have
been in Kent, Sussex, or Surrey. I have
arranged them to the best of my power, and
take the following to be the earliest. It has
no signature, but is not in the handwriting of
the servant who styles herself Elizabeth, or
Mrs. Newton. It runs : —

"Madam, — Your Aunt Wishes me to in-
form you she will be glad if you will let hir

know if you think of coming To hir House

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thiss month or Next as she cannot have you

in September on a kount of the Hoping If

you ar coming she thinkes she had batter Go

to London on the Day you com to hir House

she says you shall have everry Thing raddy

for you at hir House and Mrs. Newton to

meet you and stay with you till She returnes

a gann.

" if you arnot Coming thiss Summer She will

be in London before thiss Month is out and

will Sleep on the Sofy As She willnot be

in London more thann two nits, and She

Says she willnot truble you on anny a kount

as She Will returne the Same Day before

She will plage you anny more, but She thanks

you for asking hir to London, but She says

She cannot leve the house at prassant She

sayhir Survants ar to do for you as she cannot

lodge yours nor she willnot have thim in at

the house anny more to brake and destroy

hir thinks and beslive hir and make up Lies

by hir and Skandel as your too did She says

she mens to pay fore 2 Nits and one day, She

says the Pepelwill let hir have it if you ask

thim to let hir: you Will be so good as to

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let hir know sun : wish She is to do,
as She says She dos not care anny thing
a bout it. which way tiss she is batter
than She was and desirs hir Love to bouth
bouth.

" Your aunt wises to know how the silk
Clocks ar madup [how the silk cloaks are
made up] with a Cape or a wood as she is a
goin to have one madeup to rideout in in hir
littel shas [chaise].

" Charles is a butty and so good.

" Mr & Mrs Newton ar quite wall & desires
to be remembered to you."

I can throw no light on the meaning of the
verb to " beslive." Each letter in the MS. is
so admirably formed that there can be no
question about the word being as I have given
it. Nor have I been able to discover what is
referred to by the words " Charles is a butty
and so good." We shall presently meet with
a Charles who "flies in the Fier," but that
Charles appears to have been in London,
whereas this one is evidently in Kent, or
wherever the aunt lived.

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The next letter is from Mrs. Newton : —

" Der Miss , I Receve your Letter

your Aunt is vary 111 and Lowspireted I
Donte think your Aunt wood Git up all
Day if My Sister Wasnot to Persage her We
all Think hir lif is two monopolous. you
Wish to know Who Was Liveing With your

Aunt, that is My Sister and Willian

and Cariline as Cock and Old Poll

Pepper is Come to Stay With her a Littel
Wile and I hoped [hopped] for Your Aunt,
and Harry has Worked for your Aunt all the
Summer. Your Aunt and Harry Whent to
the Wells Races and Spent a very Pleasant
Day your Aunt has Lost Old Fanney Sow
She Died about a Week a Go Harry he
Wanted your Aunt to have her killed and
send her to London and Shee Wold Fech her
£11 the Farmers have Lost a Greet Deal of
Cattel such as Hogs and Cows What theay
call the Plage I Whent to your Aunt as you
Wish Mee to Do But She Told Mee She Did
not wont aney Boddy She Told Mee She
Should Like to Come up to see you But She

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Cant Come know for she is Boddyley ill and

Harry Donte Work there know But he Go

up there Once in Two or Three Day Harry

Offered is self to Go up to Live With your

Aunt But She Made him know Ancer. I

hav Been up to your Aunt at Work for 5

Weeks Hopping and Ragluting Your Aunt

Donte Eat nor Drink But vary Littel indeed.

" I am Happy to Say We are Both Quite

Well and I am Glad no hear you are Both

Quite Well

"Mrs Newton."

This seems to have made the nieces propose
to pay a visit to their aunt, perhaps to try and
relieve the monopoly of her existence and
cheer her up a little. In their letter, doubt-
less, the dog motive is introduced that is so
finely developed presently by Mrs. Newton.
I should like to have been able to give the
theme as enounced by the nieces themselves,
but their letters are not before me. Mrs.
Newton writes : —

" My Dear Girls, — Your Aunt receiv

your Letter your Aunt will Be vary glad to

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see you as it quite a greeable if it tis to you
and Shee is Quite Willing to Eair the beds
and the Rooms if you Like to Trust to hir
and the Servantes ; if not I may Go up there
as you Wish. My Sister Sleeps in the Best
Room as she allways Did and the Coock in
the garret and you Can have the Rooms the
same as you allways Did as your Aunt
Donte set in the Parlour She Continlery Sets
in the Ciching. your Aunt says she Cannot
Part from the dog know hows and She Says
he will not hurt you for he is Like a Child
and I can safeley say My Self he wonte hurt
you as She Cannot Sleep in the Room With
out him as he allWay Sleep in the Same
Room as She Dose, your Aunt is agreeable
to Git in What Coles and Wood you Wish for
I am know happy to say your Aunt is in as
Good health as ever She Was and She is
happy to hear you are Both Well your Aunt
Wishes for Ancer By Return of Post."

The nieces replied that their aunt must
choose between the dog and them, and
Mrs. Newton sends a second letter which

Essays on Life

brings her development to a climax. It
runs : —

"Dear Miss , I have Receve your

Letter and i Whent up to your Aunt as you

Wish me and i Try to Perveal With her

about the Dog But she Wold not Put the

Dog away nor it alow him to Be Tied up But

She Still Wishes you to Come as Shee says

the Dog Shall not interrup you for She Donte

alow the Dog nor it the Cats to Go in the

Parlour never sence She has had it Donup

ferfere of Spoiling the Paint your Aunt think

it vary Strange you Should Be so vary Much

afraid of a Dog and She says you Cant Go

out in London But What you are up a gance

one and She says She Wonte Trust the Dog

in know one hands But her Owne for She is

afraid theay Will not fill is Belley as he Lives

upon Rost BeefF and Rost and Boil Moutten

Wich he Eats More then the Servantes in the

House there is not aney One Wold Beable to

Give Sattefacktion upon that account Harry

oiFerd to Take the Dog But She Wood not

Trust him in our hands so I Cold not Do

Art and Science

aney thing With her your Aunt youse to Tell
Me When we was at your House in London
She Did not know how to make you amens
and i Told her know it was the Time to Do
it But i Considder She sets the Dog Before
you your Aunt keep know Beer know Sprits
know Wines in the House of aney Sort
Oneley a Little Barl of Wine I made her in
the Summer the Workmen and servantes are
a Blige to Drink wauter Morning Noon and
Night your Aunt the Same She Donte Low
her Self aney Tee nor Coffee But is Loocking
Wonderful Well

"I Still Remane your Humble Servant
Mrs Newton

" I am vary sorry to think the Dog Per-
ventes your Comeing

" I am Glad to hear you are Both Well and
we are the same."

The nieces remained firm, and from the

following letter it is plain the aunt gave

way. The dog motive is repeated pianissimo,

and is not returned to — not at least by Mrs.

Newton.

Essays on Life

"Dear Miss , I Receve your Letter

on Thursday i Whent to your Aunt and i
see her and She is a Greable to everry thing
i asked her and seme so vary Much Please
to see you Both Next Tuseday and she has
sent for the Faggots to Day and she Will
Send for the Coles to Morrow and i will Go
up there to Morrow Morning and Make the
Fiers and Tend to the Beds and sleep in it
Till you Come Down your Aunt sends her
Love to you Both and she is Quite well your
Aunt Wishes you wold Write againe Before
you Come as she ma Expeckye and the Dog
is not to Gointo the Parlor a Tall

"your Aunt kind Love to you Both &
hopes you Wonte Fail in Coming according
to Prommis Mrs Newton."

From a later letter it appears that the

nieces did not pay their visit after all, and what

is worse a letter had miscarried, and the aunt

sat up expecting them from seven till twelve

at night, and Harry had paid for " Faggots

and Coles quarter of Hund. Faggots Half

tun of Coles i/. is. ^d." Shortly afterwards,

Art and Science

however, " She " again talks of coming up
to London herself and writes through her
servant —

" My Dear girls i Receve your kind letter
& I am happy to hear you ar both Well and
I Was in hopes of seeing of you Both Down
at My House this spring to stay a Wile I am
Quite well my self in Helth But vary Low
Spireted I am vary sorry to hear the Mis-
forting of Poor charles & how he cum to flie
in the Fier I cannot think. I should like to
know if he is dead or a Live, and I shall come
to London in August & stay three or four
dales if it is agreable to you. Mrs. Newton
has lost her mother in Law 4 day March & I
hope you send me word Wather charles is
Dead or a Live as soon as possible, and will
you send me word what Little Betty is for I
cannot make her out."

The next letter is a new handwriting, and
tells the nieces of their aunt's death in the
following terms : —

" Dear Miss , It is my most painful

Essays on Life

duty to inform you that your dear aunt ex-
pired this morning comparatively easy as
Hannah informs me and in so doing restored
her soul to the custody of him whom she con-
sidered to be alone worthy of its care.

''The doctor had visited her about five
minutes previously and had applied a blister.

" You and your sister will I am sure excuse
further details at present and believe me with
kindest remembrances to remain

" Yours truly, &c."

After a few days a lawyer's letter informs
the nieces that their aunt had left them the
bulk of her not very considerable property,
but had charged them with an annuity of £1
a week to be paid to Harry and Mrs. Newton
so long as the dog lived.

The only other letters by Mrs. Newton are
written on paper of a different and more
modern size ; they leave an impression of
having been written a good many years later.
I take them as they come. The first is very
short : —

" Dear Miss , i write to say i cannot

Art and Science

possiblely come on Wednesday as we have
killed a pig. your's truely,

" Elizabeth Newton."

The second runs : —

"Dear Miss , i hope you are both

quite well in health & your Leg much better
i am happy to say i am getting quite well
again i hope Amandy has reached you safe
by this time i sent a small parcle by Amandy,
there was half a dozen Pats of butter & the
Cakes was very homely and not so light as i
could wish i hope by this time Sarah Ann
has promised she will stay untill next monday
as i think a few daies longer will not make
much diferance and as her young man has
been very considerate to wait so long as he
has i think he would for a few days Longer

dear Miss I wash for William and i have

not got his clothes yet as it has been delayed
by the carrier & i cannot possiblely get it done
before Sunday and i do not Like traviling on
a Sunday but to oblige you i would come but
to come sooner i cannot possiblely but i hope
Sarah Ann will be prevailed on once more as

Essays on Life

She has so many times i feel sure if she tells
her young man he will have patient for he is
a very kind young man

" i remain your sincerely

" Elizabeth Newton."

The last letter in my collection seems
written almost within measurable distance of
the Christmas-card era. The sheet is headed
by a beautifully embossed device of some
holly in red and green, wishing the recipient
of the letter a merry Xmas and a happy
new year, while the border is crimped and
edged with blue. I know not what it is,
but there is something in the writer's highly
finished style that reminds me of Mendels-
sohn. It would almost do for the words of
one of his celebrated " Lieder ohne Worte " :

" Dear Miss Maria, — I hasten to acknow-
ledge the receipt of your kind note with the
inclosure for which I return my best thanks.
I need scarcely say how glad I was to know
that the volumes secured your approval, and
that the announcement of the improvement

in the condition of your Sister's legs afforded

Art and Science

me infinite pleasure. The gratifying news
encouraged me in the hope that now the
nature of the disorder is comprehended her
legs will — notwithstanding the process may-
be gradual — ultimately get quite well. The
pretty Robin Redbreast which lay ensconced
in your epistle, conveyed to me, in terms
more eloquent than words, how much you
desired me those Compliments which the
little missive he bore in his bill expressed ;
the emblem is sweetly pretty, and now that
we are again allowed to felicitate each other
on another recurrence of the season of the
Christian's rejoicing, permit me to tender to
yourself, and by you to your Sister, mine
and my Wife's heartfelt congratulations and
warmest wishes with respect to the coming
year. It is a common belief that if we take
a retrospective view of each departing year,
as it behoves us annually to do, we shall find
the blessings which we have received to im-
measurably outnumber our causes of sorrow.
Speaking for myself I can fully subscribe to
that sentiment, and doubtless neither Miss

nor yourself are exceptions. Miss 's

Essays on Life

illness and consequent confinement to the
house has been a severe trial, but in that
trouble an opportunity was afforded you to
prove a Sister's devotion and she has been
enabled to realise a larger (if possible) display
of sisterly affection.

" A happy Christmas to you both, and may
the new year prove a Cornucopia from which
still greater blessings than even those we have
hitherto received, shall issue, to benefit us all
by contributing to our temporal happiness and,
what is of higher importance, conducing to
our felicity hereafter.

"I was sorry to hear that you were so annoyed
with mice and rats, and if I should have an
opportunity to obtain a nice cat I will do so
and send my boy to your house with it.

" I remain,

" Yours truly."

How little what is commonly called educa-
tion can do after all towards the formation of
a good style, and what a delightful volume
might not be entitled " Half Hours with the

Worst Authors." Why, the finest word I

Art and Science

know of in the English language was coined,
not by my poor old grandfather, whose educa-
tion had left little to desire, nor by any of
the admirable scholars whom he in his turn
educated, but by an old matron who presided
over one of the halls, or houses of his school.
This good lady, whose name by the way was
Bromfield, had a fine high temper of her own,
or thought it politic to affect one. One night
when the boys were particularly noisy she
burst like a hurricane into the hall, collared a
youngster, and told him he was " the ramp-
ingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-
roaringest boy in the whole school." Would
Mrs. Newton have been able to set the aunt
and the dog before us so vividly if she had
been more highly educated? Would Mrs.
Bromfield have been able to forge and hurl
her thunderbolt of a word if she had been
taught how to do so, or indeed been at much
pains to create it at all? It came. It was
her x^picTixa. She did not probably know that
she had done what the greatest scholar would
have had to rack his brains over for many an

hour before he could even approach. Tradition

65 E

Essays on Life

says that having brought down her boy she
looked round the hall in triumph, and then
after a moment's lull said, " Young gentlemen,
prayers are excused," and left them.

I have sometimes thought that, after all,
the main use of a classical education consists
in the check it gives to originality, and the
way in which it prevents an inconvenient
number of people from using their own eyes.
That we will not be at the trouble of looking
at things for ourselves if we can get any one
to tell us what we ought to see goes without
saying, and it is the business of schools and
universities to assist us in this respect. The
theory of evolution teaches that any power
not worked at pretty high pressure will
deteriorate : originality and freedom from
affectation are all very well in their way,
but we can easily have too much of them,
and it is better that none should be either
original or free from cant but those who insist
on being so, no matter what hindrances ob-
struct, nor what incentives are offered them
to see things through the regulation medium.
To insist on seeing things for oneself is to be

Art and Science

an iSidoTtjg, or in plain English, an idiot ; nor do
I see any safer check against general vigour
and clearness of thought, with consequent
terseness of expression, than that provided by
the curricula of our universities and schools
of public instruction. If a young man, in
spite of every effort to fit him with blinkers,
will insist on getting rid of them, he must do
so at his own risk. He will not be long in
finding out his mistake. Our public schools
and universities play the beneficent part in our
social scheme that cattle do in forests : they
browse the seedlings down and prevent the
growth of all but the luckiest and sturdiest.
Of course, if there are too many either cattle
or schools, they browse so effectually that
they find no more food, and starve till equili-
brium is restored ; but it seems to be a pro-
vision of nature that there should always be
these alternate periods, during which either
the cattle or the trees are getting the best
of it ; and, indeed, without such provision we
should have neither the one nor the other.
At this moment the cattle, doubtless, are in

the ascendant, and if university extension

Essays on Life

proceeds much farther, we shall assuredly
have no more Mrs. Newtons and Mrs. Brom-
fields; but whatever is is best, and, on the
whole, I should propose to let things find
pretty much their own level.

However this may be, who can question
that the treasures hidden in many a country
house contain sleeping beauties even fairer
than those that I have endeavoured to waken
from long sleep in the foregoing article ?
How many Mrs. Quicklys are there not
Uving in London at this present moment ?
For that Mrs. Quickly was an invention of
Shakespeare's I will not believe. The old
woman from whom he drew said every word
that he put into Mrs. Quickly 's mouth, and
a great deal more which he did not and
perhaps could not make use of. This ques-
tion, however, would again lead me far from
my subject, which I should mar were I to
dwell upon it longer, and therefore leave
with the hope that it may give my readers
absolutely no food whatever for reflection.

HOW TO MAKE THE BEST
OF LIFE^

I HAVE been asked to speak on the question
how to make the best of Ufe, but may as well
confess at once that I know nothing about it.
I cannot think that I have made the best of
my own life, nor is it likely that I shall make
much better of what may or may not remain
to me. I do not even know how to make the
best of the twenty minutes that your com-
mittee has placed at my disposal, and as for
life as a^; whole, who ever yet made the best
of such a colossal opportunity by conscious
effort and deliberation? In little things no
doubt deliberate and conscious effort will help
us, but we are speaking of large issues, and
such kingdoms of heaven as the making the
best of these come not by observation.

The question, therefore, on which I have
undertaken to address you is, as you must all

^ An address delivered at the Somerville Club, February 27,
1895.

Essays on Life

know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life is
like playing a violin solo in public and learning
the instrument as one goes on. One cannot
make the best of such impossibiUties, and
the question is doubly fatuous until we are
told which of our two lives — the conscious or
the unconscious — is held by the asker to be
the truer life. Which does the question con-
template— the life we know, or the life which
others may know, but which we know not ?

Death gives a life to some men and women
compared with which their so-called existence
here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of
Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who
wrote the " Odyssey," and of Jane Austen —
the life which palpitated with sensible warm
motion within their own bodies, or that in
virtue of which they are still palpitating in
ours ? In whose consciousness does their
truest life consist — their own, or ours ? Can
Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life
till a hundred years or so after he was dead
and buried ? His physical life was but as an
embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness,

a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that

Art and Science

life of the world to come which he was to
enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after
we are gone hence, but we are for the most
part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as
regards that life which every age and country
has recognised as higher and truer than the
one of which we are now sentient. As the
life of the race is larger, longer, and in all re-
spects more to be considered than that of the
individual, so is the life we live in others
larger and more important than the one we
live in ourselves. This appears nowhere per-
haps more plainly than in the case of great
teachers, who often in the lives of their pupils
produce an effect that reaches far beyond any-
thing produced while their single lives were
yet unsupplemented by those other lives into
which they infused their own.

Death to such people is the ending of a
short life, but it does not touch the Ufe they
are already living in those whom they have
taught ; and happily, as none can know when
he shall die, so none can make sure that he
too shall not live long beyond the grave ; for
the hfe after death is like money before it —

Essays on Life

no one can be sure that it may not fall to him
or her even at the eleventh hour. Money
and immortality come in such odd unaccount-
able ways that no one is cut off from hope.
We may not have made either of them for
ourselves, but yet another may give them to
us in virtue of his or her love, which shall illu-
mine us for ever, and establish us in some
heavenly mansion whereof we neither dreamed
nor shall ever dream. Look at the Doge
Loredano Loredani, the old man's smile upon
whose face has been reproduced so faithfully
in so many lands that it can never henceforth
be forgotten — would he have had one hun-
dredth part of the life he now lives had he not
been linked awhile with one of those heaven-
sent men who know che cosa e amor ? Look
at Rembrandt's old woman in our National
Gallery ; had she died before she was eighty-
three years old she would not have been living
now. Then, when she was eighty-three, im-
mortality perched upon her as a bird on a
withered bough.

1 seem to hear some one say that this is a

mockery, a piece of special pleading, a giving

Art and Science

of stones to those that ask for bread. Life is
not hfe unless we can feel it, and a life limited
to a knowledge of such fraction of our work
as may happen to survive us is no true life in
other people ; salve it as we may, death is not
life any more than black is white.

The objection is not so true as it sounds. I
do not deny that we had rather not die, nor
do I pretend that much even in the case of
the most favoured few can survive them be-
yond the grave. It is only because this is so
that our own life is possible; others have
made room for us, and we should make room
for others in our turn without undue repining.
What I maintain is that a not inconsiderable
number of people do actually attain to a life
beyond the grave which we can all feel forcibly
enough, whether they can do so or not — that
this life tends with increasing civilisation to
become more and more potent, and that it is
better worth considering, in spite of its being
unfelt by ourselves, than any which we have
felt or can ever feel in our own persons.

Take an extreme case. A group of people
are photographed by Edison's new process —

Essays on Life

say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with
any two of the finest men singers the age has
known — let them be photographed incessantly
for half an hour while they perform a scene in
" Lohengrin " ; let all be done stereoscopically.
Let them be phonographed at the same time
so that their minutest shades of intonation
are preserved, let the slides be coloured by a
competent artist, and then let the scene be
called suddenly into sight and sound, say a
hundred years hence. Are those people dead
or alive? Dead to themselves they are, but
while they live so powerfully and so livingly
in us, which is the greater paradox — to say
that they are alive or that they are dead ? To
myself it seems that their life in others would
be more truly life than their death to them-
selves is death. Granted that they do not
present all the phenomena of life — who ever
does so even when he is held to be alive ?
We are held to be alive because we present
a sufficient number of living phenomena to let
the others go without saying ; those who see
us take the part for the whole here as in every-
thing else, and surely, in the case supposed

Art and Science

above, the phenomena of life predominate so
powerfully over those of death, that the people
themselves must be held to be more alive than
dead. Our living personality is, as the word
implies, only our mask, and those who still own
such a mask as I have supposed have a living
personality. Granted again that the case just
put is an extreme one ; still many a man and
many a woman has so stamped him or herself
on his work that, though we would gladly
have the aid of such accessories as we doubt-
less presently shall have to the livingness of
our great dead, we can see them very suffi-
ciently through the master pieces they have
left us.

As for their own unconsciousness I do not
deny it. The life of the embryo was uncon-
scious before birth, and so is the life — I am
speaking only of the life revealed to us by
natural religion — after death. But as the
embryonic and infant life of which we were
unconscious was the most potent factor in our
after life of consciousness, so the effect which
we may unconsciously produce in others after
death, and it may be even before it on those

Essays on Life

who have never seen us, is in all sober serious-
ness our truer and more abiding life, and the
one which those who would make the best of
their sojourn here will take most into their
consideration.

Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness.
Our conscious actions are a drop in the sea as
compared with our unconscious ones. Could
we know all the life that is in us by way of
circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste and
repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally
small part consciousness plays in our present
existence ; yet our unconscious life is as truly
life as our conscious life, and though it is un-
conscious to itself it emerges into an indirect
and vicarious consciousness in our other and
conscious self, which exists but in virtue of
our unconscious self. So we have also a
vicarious consciousness in others. The un-
conscious life of those that have gone before
us has in great part moulded us into such
men and women as we are, and our own
unconscious lives will in like manner have a
vicarious consciousness in others, though we
be dead enough to it in ourselves.

Art and Science

If it is again urged that it matters not to
us how much we may be aUve in others, if
we are to know nothing about it, I reply that
the common instinct of all who are worth
considering gives the lie to such cynicism. I
see here present some who have achieved,
and others who no doubt will achieve, success
in literature. Will one of them hesitate to
admit that it is a lively pleasure to her to feel
that on the other side of the world some one
may be smiling happily over her work, and
that she is thus living in that person though
she knows nothing about it ? Here it seems
to me that true faith comes in. Faith does
not consist, as the Sunday School pupil said,
" in the power of believing that which we
know to be untrue." It consists in holding
fast that which the healthiest and most kindly
instincts of the best and most sensible men
and women are intuitively possessed of, with-
out caring to require much evidence further
than the fact that such people are so con-
vinced ; and for my own part I find the best
men and women I know unanimous in feel-
ing that life in others, even though we know

Essays on Life

nothing about it, is nevertheless a thing to^be
desired and gratefully accepted if we can get
it either before death or after. I observe also
that a large number of men and women do
actually attain to such life, and in some cases
continue so to live, if not for ever, yet to what
is practically much the same thing. Our life
then in this world is, to natural religion as
much as to revealed, a period of probation.
The use we make of it is to settle how far we
are to enter into another, and whether that
other is to be a heaven of just affection or a
hell of righteous condemnation.

Who, then, are the most likely so to run
that they may obtain this veritable prize of
our high calling? Setting aside such lucky
numbers drawn as it were in the lottery of
immortality, which I have referred to casually
above, and setting aside also the chances and
changes from which even immortality is not
exempt, who on the whole are most likely to
live anew in the affectionate thoughts of those
who never so much as saw them in the flesh,
and know not even their names ? There is a
nisus, a straining in the dull dumb economy

Art and Science

of things, in virtue of which some, whether
they will it and know it or no, are more likely
to live after death than others, and who are
these? Those who aimed at it as by some
great thing that they would do to make them
famous ? Those who have lived most in
themselves and for themselves, or those who
have been most ensouled consciously, but per-
haps better unconsciously, directly but more
often indirectly, by the most living souls past
and present that have flitted near them ? Can
we think of a man or woman who grips us
firmly, at the thought of whom we kindle
when we are alone in our honest daw's plumes,
with none to admire or shrug his shoulders,
can we think of one such, the secret of whose
power does not lie in the charm of his or her
personality — that is to say, in the wideness of
his or her sympathy with, and therefore life
in and communion with other people ? In the
wreckage that comes ashore from the sea of
time there is much tinsel stuff that we must
preserve and study if we would know our own
times and people ; granted that many a dead
charlatan lives long and enters largely and

Essays on Life

necessarily into our own lives ; we use them
and throw them away when we have done
with them. I do not speak of these, I do
not speak of the Virgils and Alexander Popes,
and who can say how many more whose
names I dare not mention for fear of offend-
ing. They are as stuffed birds or beasts in a
Museum ; serviceable no doubt from a scien-
tific standpoint, but with no vivid or vivify-
ing hold upon us. They seem to be alive,
but are not. I am speaking of those who do
actually live in us, and move us to higher
achievements though they be long dead,
whose life thrusts out our own and overrides
it. I speak of those who draw us ever more
towards them from youth to age, and to think
of whom is to feel at once that we are in the
hands of those we love, and whom we would
most wish to resemble. What is the secret of
the hold that these people have upon us ? Is
it not that while, conventionally speaking,
alive, they most merged their lives in, and
were in fullest communion with those among
whom they lived ? They found their lives in

losing them. We never love the memory of

Art and Science

any one unless we feel that he or she was
hiniself or herself a lover.

I have seen it urged, again, in querulous
accents, that the so-called immortality even of
the most immortal is not for ever. I see a
passage to this effect in a book that is making
a stir as I write. I will quote it. The writer
says : —

" So, it seems to me, is the immortality we
so glibly predicate of departed artists. If
they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life
they live, moving on through the gradations
of slow decay to distant but inevitable death.
They can no longer, as heretofore, speak
directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evok-
ing their tears or laughter, and all the pleasures,
be they sad or merry, of which imagination
holds the secret. Driven from the market-
place they become first the companions of the
student, then the victims of the specialist. He
who would still hold familiar intercourse with
them must train himself to penetrate the veil
which in ever-thickening folds conceals them
from the ordinary gaze ; he must catch the

8i F

Essays on Life

tone of a vanished society, he must move in a
circle of alien associations, he must think in a
language not his own."^

This is crying for the moon, or rather pre-
tending to cry for it, for the writer is obviously
insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the
passage I have just quoted " reaches almost to
poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses
in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose
is free from an occasional blank verse, and a
good writer will not go hunting over his work
to rout them out, but nine or ten in little
more than as many lines is indeed reaching
too near to poetry for good prose. This, how-
ever, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of
the writer was not so obviously that of cheap
pessimism. I know not which is cheapest,
pessimism or optimism. One forces lights, the
other darks ; both are equally untrue to good
art, and equally sure of their effect with the
groundlings. The one extenuates, the other
sets down in malice. The first is the more

1 '' The Foundations of Belief/' by the Right Hon. A. J.
Balfour. Longmans, 1895, p. 48.

Art and Science

amiable lie, but both are lies, and are known
to be so by those who utter them. Talk about
catching the tone of a vanished society to un-
derstand Rembrandt or Giovanni Bellini ! It
is nonsense — the folds do not thicken in front
of these men ; we understand them as well as
those among whom they went about in the
jflesh, and perhaps better. Homer and Shake-
speare speak to us probably far more effectually
than they did to the men of their own time,
and most likely we have them at their best. I
cannot think that Shakespeare talked better
than we hear him now in "Hamlet" or "Henry
the Fourth " ; like enough he would have been
found a very disappointing person in a draw-
ing-room. People stamp themselves on their
work ; if they have not done so they are
naught, if they have we have them ; and for
the most part they stamp themselves deeper
on their work than on their talk. No doubt
Shakespeare and Handel will be one day clean
forgotten, as though they had never been
born. The world will in the end die ; mor-
tality therefore itself is not immortal, and
when death dies the life of these men will die

Essays on Life

with it — but not sooner. It is enough that
they should live within us and move us for
many ages as they have and will. Such
immortality, therefore, as some men and
women are born to, achieve, or have thrust
upon them, is a practical if not a technical
immortality, and he who would have more let
him have nothing.

I see I have drifted into speaking rather of
how to make the best of death than of life,
but who can speak of life without his thoughts
turning instantly to that which is beyond
it ? He or she who has made the best of the
life after death has made the best of the life
before it ; who cares one straw for any such
chances and changes as will commonly be-
fall him here if he is upheld by the full and
certain hope of everlasting life in the affec-
tions of those that shall come after ? If the
hfe after death is happy in the hearts of
others, it matters little how unhappy was the
life before it.

And now I leave my subject, not without
misgiving that I shall have disappointed you.
But for the great attention which is being

Art and Science

paid to the work from which I have quoted
above, I should not have thought it well to
insist on points with which you are, I doubt
not, as fully impressed as I am : but that
book weakens the sanctions of natural rehgion,
and minimises the comfort which it affords us,
while it does more to undermine than to
support the foundations of what is commonly
called belief Therefore I was glad to embrace
this opportunity of protesting. Otherwise I
should not have been so serious on a matter
that transcends all seriousness. Lord Beacons-
field cut it shorter with more effect. When
asked to give a rule of life for the son of a
friend he said, " Do not let him try and find
out who wrote the letters of Junius." Pressed
for further counsel he added, '' Nor yet who
was the man in the iron mask " — and he would
say no more. Don't bore people. And yet
I am by no means sure that a good many
people do not think themselves ill-used unless
he who addresses them has thoroughly well
bored them — especially if they have paid any
money for hearing him. My great name-
sake said, " Surely the pleasure is as great

Essays on Life

of being cheated as to cheat," and great as
the pleasure both of cheating and boring
undoubtedly is, I believe he was right. So
I remember a fpoem which came out some
thirty years ago in Punch, about a young
lady who went forth in quest to " Some
burden make or burden bear, but which
she did not greatly care, oh Miserie." So,
again, all the holy men and women who in
the Middle Ages professed to have discovered
how to make the best of life took care that
being bored, if not cheated, should have a
large place in their programme. Still there
are limits, and I close not without fear that I
may have exceeded them.

THE SANCTUARY OF
MONTRIGONE^

The only place in the Valsesia, except Varallo,
where 1 at present suspect the presence of
Tabachetti ^ is at Montrigone, a little-known
sanctuary dedicated to St. Anne, about three-
quarters of a mile south of Borgo-Sesia station.
The situation is, of course, lovely, but the
sanctuary does not offer any features of archi-
tectural interest. The sacristan told me it
was founded in 1631 ; and in 1644 Giovanni
d'Enrico, while engaged in superintending
and completing the work undertaken here
by himself and Giacomo Ferro, fell ill and
died. I do not know whether or no there
was an earlier sanctuary on the same site,
but was told it was built on the demolition

^ Published in the Universal Review^ November 1888.

2 Since this essay was written it has been ascertained by
Cavaliere Francesco Negri, of Casale Monferrato, that Tabachetti
died in 1615. If, therefore, the Sanctuary of Montrigone was
not founded until 1631, it is plain that Tabachetti cannot have
worked there. All the latest discoveries about Tabachetti's
career will be found in Cavaliere Negri's pamphlet " 11 Santuario
di Crea " (Alessandria, 1902). See also note on p. 154. — R. A. S.

Essays on Life

of a stronghold^ belonging to the Counts of
Biandrate.

The incidents which it illustrates are treated
with even more than the homeliness usual in
works of this description when not dealing
with such solemn events as the death and
passion of Christ. Except when these sub-
jects were being represented, something of
the latitude, and even humour, allowed in the
old mystery plays was permitted, doubtless
from a desire to render the work more attrac-
tive to the peasants, who were the most
numerous and most important pilgrims. It
is not until faith begins to be weak that it
fears an occasionally lighter treatment of
semi-sacred subjects, and it is impossible to
convey an accurate idea of the spirit prevail-
ing at this hamlet of sanctuary without
attuning oneself somewhat to the more
pagan character of the place. Of irrever-
ence, in the sense of a desire to laugh at
things that are of high and serious import,
there is not a trace, but at the same time
there is a certain unbending of the bow at
Montrigone which is not perceivable at Varallo.

Art and Science

The first chapel to the left on entering the

church is that of the Birth of the Virgin. St.

Anne is sitting up in bed. She is not at all

ill — in fact, considering that the Virgin has

only been born about five minutes, she is

wonderful ; still the doctors think it may be

perhaps better that she should keep her room

for half an hour longer, so the bed has been

festooned with red and white paper roses, and

the counterpane is covered with bouquets in

baskets and in vases of glass and china. These

cannot have been there during the actual birth

of the Virgin, so I suppose they had been

in readiness, and were brought in from an

adjoining room as soon as the baby had been

born. A lady on her left is bringing in some

more flowers, which St. Anne is receiving

with a smile and most gracious gesture of the

hands. The first thing she asked for, when

the birth was over, was for her three silver

hearts. These were immediately brought to

her, and she has got them all on, tied

round her neck with a piece of blue silk

ribbon.

Dear mamma has come. We felt sure she
89

Essays on Life

would, and that any little misunderstandings
between her and Joachim would ere long be
forgotten and forgiven. They are both so
good and sensible if they would only under-
stand one another. At any rate, here she is,
in high state at the right hand of the bed.
She is dressed in black, for she has lost her
husband some few years previously, but I do
not believe a smarter, sprier old lady for her
years could be found in Palestine, nor yet that
either Giovanni d'Enrico or Giacomo Ferro
could have conceived or executed such a
character. The sacristan wanted to have it
that she was not a woman at all, but was a
portrait of St. Joachim, the Virgin's father.
" Sembra una donna," he pleaded more than
once, " ma non e donna." Surely, however,
in works of art even more than in other
things, there is no " is " but seeming, and if a
figure seems female it must be taken as such.
Besides, I asked one of the leading doctors at
Varallo whether the figure was man or woman.
He said it was evident I was not married, for
that if I had been I should have seen at once

that she was not only a woman but a mother-

Art and Science

in-law of the first magnitude, or, as he called
it, '' una suocera tremenda," and this without
knowing that I wanted her to be a mother-in-
law myself. Unfortunately she had no real
drapery, so I could not settle the question as
my friend Mr. H. F. Jones and I had been
able to do at Varallo with the figure of Eve
that had been turned into a Roman soldier
assisting at the capture of Christ. I am not,
however, disposed to waste more time upon
anything so obvious, and will content myself
with saying that we have here the Virgin's
grandmother. I had never had the pleasure,
so far as I remembered, of meeting this lady
before, and was glad to have an opportunity
of making her acquaintance.

Tradition says that it was she who chose
the Virgin's name, and if so, what a debt of
gratitude do we not owe her for her judicious
selection ! It makes one shudder to think
what might have happened if she had named
the child Keren - Happuch, as poor Job's
daughter was called. How could we have
said, " Ave Keren-Happuch ! " What would
the musicians have done? 1 forget whether

Essays on Life

Maher - Shalal - Hash - Baz was a man or a

woman, but there were plenty of names quite

as unmanageable at the Virgin's grandmother's

option, and we cannot sufficiently thank her

for having chosen one that is so euphonious

in every language which we need take into

account. For this reason alone we should

not grudge her her portrait, but we should

try to draw the line here. I do not think we

ought to give the Virgin's great-grandmother

a statue. Where is it to end? It is like

Mr. Crookes's ultimissimate atoms; we used

to draw the line at ultimate atoms, and now

it seems we are to go a step farther back

and have ultimissimate atoms. How long, I

wonder, will it be before we feel that it will

be a material help to us to have ultimissimis-

simate atoms ? Quavers stopped at demi-

semi-demi, but there is no reason to suppose

that either atoms or ancestresses of the Virgin

will be so complacent.

I have said that on St. Anne's left hand

there is a lady who is bringing in some flowers.

St. Anne was always passionately fond of

flowers. There is a pretty story told about
^ 92

Art and Science

her in one of the Fathers, I forget which, to
the effect that when a child she was asked
which she Uked best — cakes or flowers ? She
could not yet speak plainly and lisped out,
" Oh fowses, pretty fowses " ; she added, how-
ever, with a sigh and as a kind of wistful
corollary, " but cakes are very nice." She is
not to have any cakes just now, but as soon
as she has done thanking the lady for her
beautiful nosegay, she is to have a couple of
nice new-laid eggs, that are being brought her
by another lady. Valsesian women immedi-
ately after their confinement always have eggs
beaten up with wine and sugar, and one can
tell a Valsesian Birth of the Virgin from a
Venetian or a Florentine by the presence of
the eggs. I learned this from an eminent
Valsesian professor of medicine, who told me
that, though not according to received rules,
the eggs never seemed to do any harm. Here
they are evidently to be beaten up, for there
is neither spoon nor egg-cup, and we cannot
suppose that they were hard-boiled. On the
other hand, in the Middle Ages Italians never
used egg-cups and spoons for boiled eggs.

Essays on Life

The mediseval boiled egg was always eaten by
dipping bread into the yolk.

Behind the lady who is bringing in the eggs
is the under-under-nurse who is at the fire
warming a towel. In the foreground we have
the regulation midwife holding the regulation
baby (who, by the way, was an astonishingly
fine child for only five minutes old). Then
comes the under-nurse — a good buxom crea-
ture, who, as usual, is feeling the water in
the bath to see that it is of the right tempera-
ture. Next to her is the head-nurse, who is
arranging the cradle. Behind the head-nurse
is the under-under-nurse's drudge, who is just
going out upon some errands. Lastly — for
by this time we have got all round the chapel
— we arrive at the Virgin's grandmother's
body - guard, a stately, responsible - looking
lady, standing in waiting upon her mistress.
I put it to the reader — is it conceivable that
St. Joachim should have been allowed in such
a room at such a time, or that he should have
had the courage to avail himself of the per-
mission, even though it had been extended to
him ? At any rate, is it conceivable that he

Art and Science

should have been allowed to sit on St. Anne's
right hand, laying down the law with a
" Marry, come up here," and a " Marry, go
down there," and a couple of such unabashed
collars as the old lady has put on for the
occasion ?

Moreover (for I may as well demolish this
mischievous confusion between St. Joachim
and his mother-in-law once and for all), the
merest tyro in hagiology knows that St.
Joachim was not at home when the Virgin
was born. He had been hustled out of the
temple for having no children, and had fled
desolate and dismayed into the wilderness.
It shows how silly people are, for all the time
he was going, if they had only waited a little,
to be the father of the most remarkable person
of purely human origin who had ever been
born, and such a parent as this should surely
not be hurried. The story is told in the
frescoes of the chapel of Loreto, only a
quarter of an hour's walk from Varallo, and
no one can have known it better than
D'Enrico. The frescoes are explained by
written passages that tell us how, when

Essays on Life

Joachim was in the desert, an angel came to
him in the guise of a fair, civil young gentle-
man, and told him the Virgin was to be born.
Then, later on, the same young gentleman
appeared to him again, and bade him "in
God's name be comforted, and turn again to
his content," for the Virgin had been actually
born. On which St. Joachim, who seems to
have been of opinion that marriage after all
was rather a failure, said that, as things were
going on so nicely without him, he would stay
in the desert just a little longer, and offered
up a lamb as a pretext to gain time. Perhaps
he guessed about his mother-in-law, or he
may have asked the angel. Of course, even in
spite of such evidence as this, I may be mis-
taken about the Virgin's grandmother's sex,
and the sacristan may be right ; but I can
only say that if the lady sitting by St. Anne's
bedside at Montrigone is the Virgin's father
— well, in that case I must reconsider a good
deal that I have been accustomed to believe
was beyond question.

Taken singly, I suppose that none of the

figures in the chapel, except the Virgin's grand-

Art and Science

mother, should be rated very highly. The
under-nurse is the next best figure, and might
very well be Tabachetti's, for neither Giovanni
d'Enrico nor Giacomo Ferro was successful
with his female characters. There is not a
single really comfortable woman in any chapel
by either of them on the Sacro Monte at
Varallo. Tabachetti, on the other hand, de-
lighted in women; if they were young he
made them comely and engaging, if they
were old he gave them dignity and individual
character, and the under-nurse is much more
in accordance with Tabachetti's habitual men-
tal attitude than with D'Enrico's or Giacomo
Ferro's. Still there are only four figures out
of the eleven that are mere otiose supers, and
taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant
impression as being throughout naive and
homely, and sometimes, which is of less im-
portance, technically excellent.

Allowance must, of course, be made for
tawdry accessories and repeated coats of shiny
oleaginous paint — very disagreeable where it
has peeled off and almost more so where it has
not. What work could stand against such

97 G

Essays on Life

treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures
have had to put up with ? Take the Venus of
Milo ; let her be done in terra-cotta, and have
run, not much, but still something, in the
baking ; paint her pink, two oils, all over,
and then varnish her — it will help to preserve
the paint ; glue a lot of horsehair on to her
pate, half of which shall have come ojfF, leaving
the glue still showing; scrape her, not too
thoroughly, get the village drawing-master to
paint her again, and the drawing-master in the
next provincial town to put a forest back-
ground behind her with the brightest emerald-
green leaves that he can do for the money ;
let this painting and scraping and repainting
be repeated several times over; festoon her
with pink and white flowers made of tissue
paper ; surround her with the cheapest German
imitations of the cheapest decorations that
Birmingham can produce; let the night air
and winter fogs get at her for three hundred
years, and how easy, I wonder, will it be to
see the goddess who will be still in great part
there ? True, in the case of the Birth of the

Virgin chapel at Montrigone, there is no real

Art and Science

hair and no fresco background, but time has
had abundant opportunities without these. I
will conclude my notice of this chapel by say-
ing that on the left, above the door through
which the under-under-nurse's drudge is about
to pass, there is a good painted terra-cotta
bust, said — but I believe on no authority — to
be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico. Others
say that the Virgin's grandmother is Giovanni
d'Enrico, but this is even more absurd than
supposing her to be St. Joachim.

The next chapel to the Birth of the Virgin
is that of the Sposalizio. There is no figure
here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there
are some very good ones. The best have no
taint of barocco ; the man who did them, who-
ever he may have been, had evidently a good
deal of life and go, was taking reasonable
pains, and did not know too much. Where
this is the case no work can fail to please.
Some of the figures have real hair and some
terra cotta. There is no fresco background
worth mentioning. A man sitting on the steps
of the altar with a book on his lap, and holding
up his hand to another, who is leaning over

Essays on Life

him and talking to him, is among the best
figures ; some of the disappointed suitors who
are breaking their wands are also very good.

The angel in the Annunciation chapel,
which comes next in order, is a fine, burly,
ship's - figurehead, commercial-hotel sort of
being enough, but the Virgin is very ordinary.
There is no real hair and no fresco background,
only three dingy old blistered pictures of no
interest whatever.

In the visit of Mary to Elizabeth there are
three pleasing subordinate lady attendants, two
to the left and one to the right of the principal
figures ; but these figures themselves are not
satisfactory. There is no fresco background.
Some of the figures have real hair and some
terra cotta.

In the Circumcision and Purification chapel
— for both these events seem contemplated in
the one that follows — there are doves, but
there is neither dog nor knife. Still Simeon,
who has the infant Saviour in his arms, is
looking at him in a way which can only mean
that, knife or no knife, the matter is not going
to end here. At Varallo they have now got a

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dreadful knife for the Circumcision chapel.
They had none last winter. What they have
now got would do very well to kill a bullock
with, but could not be used professionally with
safety for any animal smaller than a rhinoceros.
I imagine that some one was sent to Novara
to buy a knife, and that, thinking it was for
the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, he got
the biggest he could see. Then when he
brought it back people said " chow " several
times, and put it upon the table and went
away.

Returning to Montrigone, the Simeon is an
excellent figure, and the Virgin is fairly good,
but the prophetess Anna, who stands just be-
hind her, is by far the most interesting in the
group, and is alone enough to make me feel
sure that Tabachetti gave more or less help
here, as he had done years before at Orta.
She, too, like the Virgin's grandmother, is a
widow lady, and wears collars of a cut that
seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin
was born some twenty years previously. There
is a largeness and simplicity of treatment about
the figure to which none but an artist of the

Essays on Life

highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not
more than a second or third-rate man. The
hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon the
broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that
nothing but the old experience of a great poet
can reach. The lips of the prophetess are for
the moment closed, but she has been prophesy-
ing all the morning, and the people round the
wall in the background are in ecstasies at the
lucidity with which she has explained all sorts
of difficulties that they had never been able to
understand till now. They are putting their
forefingers on their thumbs and their thumbs
on their forefingers, and saying how clearly
they see it all and what a wonderful woman
Anna is. A prophet indeed is not generally
without honour save in his own country, but
then a country is generally not without honour
save with its own prophet, and Anna has been
glorifying her country rather than reviling
it. Besides, the rule may not have applied to
prophetesses.

The Death of the Virgin is the last of the
six chapels inside the church itself. The
Apostles, who of course are present, have all

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of them real hair, but, if I may say so, they
want a wash and a brush-up so very badly
that I cannot feel any confidence in writing
about them. I should say that, take them all
round, they are a good average sample of
apostle as apostles generally go. Two or
three of them are nervously anxious to find
appropriate quotations in books that lie open
before them, which they are searching with
eager haste; but I do not see one figure
about which I should like to say positively
that it is either good or bad. There is a good
bust of a man, matching the one in the Birth
of the Virgin chapel, which is said to be a
portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico, but it is not
known whom it represents.

Outside the church, in three contiguous cells
that form part of the foundations, are : —

1. A dead Christ, the head of which is very
impressive, while the rest of the figure is poor.
I examined the treatment of the hair, which
is terra-cotta, and compared it with all other
like hair in the chapels above described; I
could find nothing like it, and think it most
likely that Giacomo Ferro did the figure, and

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got Tabachetti to do the head, or that they
brought the head from some unused figure by
Tabachetti at Varallo, for I know no other
artist of the time and neighbourhood who
could have done it.

2. A Magdalene in the desert. The desert
is a little coal-cellar of an arch, containing a
skull and a profusion of pink and white paper
bouquets, the two largest of which the Mag-
dalene is hugging while she is saying her
prayers. She is a very self-sufficient lady,
who we may be sure will not stay in the
desert a day longer than she can help, and
while there will flirt even with the skull if
she can find nothing better to flirt with. I
cannot think that her repentance is as yet
genuine, and as for her praying there is no
object in her doing so, for she does not want
anything.

3. In the next desert there is a very beau-
tiful figure of St. John the Baptist kneeling
and looking upwards. This figure puzzles
me more than any other at Montrigone; it
appears to be of the fifteenth rather than the

sixteenth century; it hardly reminds me of

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Gaudenzio, and still less of any other Valsesian

artist. It is a work of unusual beauty, but I

can form no idea as to its authorship.

I wrote the foregoing pages in the church

at Montrigone itself, having brought my

camp-stool with me. It was Sunday ; the

church was open all day, but there was no

mass said, and hardly any one came. The

sacristan was a kind, gentle, little old man,

who let me do whatever I wanted. He sat

on the doorstep of the main door, mending

vestments, and to this end was cutting up a

fine piece of figured silk from one to two

hundred years old, which, if I could have

got it, for half its value, I should much Uke

to have bought. I sat in the cool of the

church while he sat in the doorway, which

was still in shadow, snipping and snipping,

and then sewing, I am sure with admirable

neatness. He made a charming picture, with

the arched portico over his head, the green

grass and low church wall behind him, and

then a lovely landscape of wood and pasture

and valleys and hillside. Every now and

then he would come and chirrup about

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Joachim, for he was pained and shocked at
my having said that his Joachim was some
one else and not Joachim at all. I said I was
very sorry, but I was afraid the figure was a
woman. He asked me what he was to do.
He had known it, man and boy, this sixty
years, and had always shown it as St. Joachim;
he had never heard any one but myself ques-
tion his ascription, and could not suddenly
change his mind about it at the bidding of a
stranger. At the same time he felt it was a
very serious thing to continue showing it as
the Virgin's father if it was really her grand-
mother. I told him I thought this was a case
for his spiritual director, and that if he felt
uncomfortable about it he should consult his
parish priest and do as he was told.

On leaving Montrigone, with a pleasant
sense of having made acquaintance with a
new and, in many respects, interesting work,
I could not get the sacristan and our differ-
ence of opinion out of my head. What, I
asked myself, are the differences that un-
happily divide Christendom, and what are
those that divide Christendom from modern

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schools of thought, but a seeing of Joachims
as the Virgin's grandmothers on a larger scale ?
True, we cannot call figures Joachim when we
know perfectly well that they are nothing of
the kind ; but I registered a vow that hence-
forward when I called Joachims the Virgin's
grandmothers I would bear more in mind
than I have perhaps always hitherto done,
how hard it is for those who have been taught
to see them as Joachims to think of them as
something different. I trust that I have not
been unfaithful to this vow in the preceding
article. If the reader differs from me, let me
ask him to remember how hard it is for one
who has got a figure well into his head as the
Virgin's grandmother to see it as Joachim.

107

A MEDIEVAL GIRL SCHOOL^

This last summer I revisited Oropa, near
Biella, to see what connection I could find
between the Oropa chapels and those at
Varallo. I will take this opportunity of
describing the chapels at Oropa, and more
especially the remarkable fossil, or petrified
girl school, commonly known as the Dimoray
or Sojourn of the Virgin Mary in the
Temple.

If I do not take these works so seriously as
the reader may expect, let me beg him, before
he blames me, to go to Oropa and see the
originals for himself. Have the good people of
Oropa themselves taken them very seriously ?
Are we in an atmosphere where we need be
at much pains to speak with bated breath ?
We, as is well known, love to take even our
pleasures sadly; the Italians take even their
sadness allegi^aviente, and combine devotion
with amusement in a manner that we shall

1 Published in the Universal Review, December 1889.
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Art and Science

do well to study if not imitate. For this best
agrees with what we gather to have been the
custom of Christ himself, who, indeed, never
speaks of austerity but to condemn it. If
Christianity is to be a living faith, it must
penetrate a man's whole life, so that he can
no more rid himself of it than he can of his
flesh and bones or of his breathing. The
Christianity that can be taken up and laid
down as if it were a watch or a book is Chris-
tianity in name only. The true Christian can
no more part jfrom Christ in mirth than in
sorrow. And, after all, what is the essence of
Christianity ? What is the kernel of the nut ?
Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with
unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms
and Pharisaisms of a man's own times. The
essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma,
nor yet in abnormally holy life, but in faith
in an unseen world, in doing one's duty, in
speaking the truth, in finding the true life
rather in others than in oneself, and in the
certain hope that he who loses his life on
these behalfs finds more than he has lost.

What can Agnosticism do against such Chris-

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Essays on Life

tianity as this ? I should be shocked if any-
thing I had ever written or shall ever write
should seem to make light of these things.
I should be shocked also if I did not know
how to be amused with things that amiable
people obviously intended to be amusing.

The reader may need to be reminded that
Oropa is among the somewhat infrequent
sanctuaries at which the Madonna and infant
Christ are not white, but black. I shall
return to this peculiarity of Oropa later on,
but will leave it for the present. For the
general characteristics of the place I must
refer the reader to my book, " Alps and Sanc-
tuaries."^ I propose to confine myself here
to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-
sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature,
that form one of the main features of the
place. At a first glance, perhaps, all these
chapels will seem uninteresting ; I venture to
think, however, that some, if not most of
them, though falling a good deal short of the
best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in
their own way of considerable importance.

1 Longmans & Co., 1890.
no

Art and Science

The first chapel with which we need concern
ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Con-
ception of the Virgin Mary. It represents
St. Anne as kneeling before a terrific dragon
or, as the Italians call it, " insect," about the
size of a Crystal Palace pleiosaur. This
"insect" is supposed to have just had its
head badly crushed by St. Anne, who seems
to be begging its pardon. The text "Ipsa
conteret caput tuum" is written outside the
chapel. The figures have no artistic interest.
As regards dragons being called insects, the
reader may perhaps remember that the island
of S. Giulio, in the Lago d'Orta, was in-
fested with insetti, which S. Giulio destroyed,
and which appear, in a fresco underneath the
church on the island, to have been monstrous
and ferocious dragons ; but I cannot remember
whether their bodies are divided into three
sections, and whether or no they have exactly
six legs — without which, I am told, they can-
not be true insects.

The fifth chapel represents the birth of the
Virgin. Having obtained permission to go

inside it, I found the date 1715 cut large and

Essays on Life

deep on the back of one figure before baking,
and I imagine that this date covers the whole.
There is a Queen Anne feeHng throughout
the composition, and if we were told that the
sculptor and Francis Bird, sculptor of the
statue in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, had
studied under the same master, we could very-
well believe it. The apartment in which the
Virgin was born is spacious, and in striking
contrast to the one in which she herself gave
birth to the Redeemer. St. Anne occupies
the centre of the composition, in an enormous
bed ; on her right there is a lady of the
George Cruikshank style of beauty, and on
the left an older person. Both are gesti-
culating and impressing upon St. Anne the
enormous obligation she has just conferred
upon mankind ; they seem also to be imploring
her not to overtax her strength, but, strange
to say, they are giving her neither flowers
nor anything to eat and drink. I know no
other birth of the Virgin in which St. Anne
wants so little keeping up.

I have explained in my book " Ex Voto," ^

1 Longmans & Co., 1890.
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Art and Science

but should perhaps repeat here, that the dis-
tinguishing characteristic of the Birth of the
Virgin, as rendered by Valsesian artists, is
that St. Anne always has eggs immediately
after the infant is born, and usually a good
deal more, whereas the Madonna never has
anything to eat or drink. The eggs are in
accordance with a custom that still prevails
among the peasant classes in the Valsesia,
where women on giving birth to a child gene-
rally are given a sabagUone—sn egg beaten
up with a Uttle wine, or rum, and sugar.
East of Milan the Virgin's mother does not
have eggs, and I suppose, from the absence of
the eggs at Oropa, that the custom above re-
ferred to does not prevail in the Biellese dis-
trict. The Virgin also is invariably washed.
St. John the Baptist, when he is born at all,
which is not very often, is also washed ; but I
have not observed that St. Elizabeth has any-
thing like the attention paid her that is given
to St. Anne. What, however, is wanting
here at Oropa in meat and drink is made up
in Cupids ; they swarm like flies on the walls,
clouds, cornices, and capitals of columns.

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Essays on Life

Against the right-hand wall are two lady-
helps, each warming a towel at a glowing fire,
to be ready against the baby should come out
of its bath ; while in the right-hand foreground
we have the levatrice, who having discharged
her task, and being now so disposed, has re-
moved the bottle from the chimney-piece, and
put it near some bread, fruit and a chicken,
over which she is about to discuss the confine-
ment with two other gossips. The levatrice
is a very characteristic figure, but the best in
the chapel is the one of the head nurse, near
the middle of the composition; she has now
the infant in full charge, and is showing it to
St. Joachim, with an expression as though
she were telling him that her husband was
a merry man. I am afraid Shakespeare was
dead before the sculptor was born, otherwise
I should have felt certain that he had drawn
Juliet's nurse from this figure. As for the
little Virgin herself, I believe her to be a fine
boy of about ten months old. Viewing the
work as a whole, if I only felt more sure
what artistic merit really is, I should say

that, though the chapel cannot be rated very

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highly from some standpoints, there are
others from which it may be praised warmly
enough. It is innocent of anatomy-worship,
free from affectation or swagger, and not de-
void of a good deal of homely naivete. It
can no more be compared with Tabachetti or
Donatello than Hogarth can with Rembrandt
or Giovanni Bellini ; but as it does not tran-
scend the limitations of its age, so neither is
it wanting in whatever merits that age pos-
sessed ; and there is no age without merits of
some kind. There is no inscription saying
who made the figures, but tradition gives
them to Pietro Aureggio Termine, of Biella,
commonly called Aureggio. This is con-
firmed by their strong resemblance to those
in the Dimora Chapel, in which there is
an inscription that names Aureggio as the
sculptor.

The sixth chapel deals with the Presentation
of the Virgin in the Temple. The Virgin is
very small, but it must be remembered that she
is only seven years old, and she is not nearly
so small as she is at Crea, where, though a
life-sized figure is intended, the head is hardly

Essays on Life

bigger than an apple. She is rushing up the
steps with open arms towards the High Priest,
who is standing at the top. For her it is
nothing alarming ; it is the High Priest who
appears frightened ; but it will all come right
in time. The Virgin seems to be saying,
" Why, don't you know me ? I'm the Virgin
Mary." But the High Priest does not feel so
sure about that, and will make further in-
quiries. The scene, which comprises some
twenty figures, is animated enough, and
though it hardly kindles enthusiasm, still
does not fail to please. It looks as though
of somewhat older date than the Birth of
the Virgin chapel, and I should say shows
more signs of direct Valsesian influence. In
Marocco's book about Oropa it is ascribed to
Aureggio, but I find it difficult to accept
this.

The seventh, and in many respects most
interesting chapel at Oropa, shows what is in
reality a medieval Italian girl school, as nearly
like the thing itself as the artist could make
it ; we are expected, however, to see in this the
high-class kind of Girton College for young

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gentlewomen that was attached to the Temple
at Jerusalem, under the direction of the Chief
Priest's wife, or some one of his near female
relatives. Here all well-to-do Jewish young
women completed their education, and here
accordingly we find the Virgin, whose parents
desired she should shine in every accomplish-
ment, and enjoy all the advantages their ample
means commanded.

I have met with no traces of the Virgin
during the years between her Presentation in
the Temple and her becoming head girl at
Temple College. These years, we may be
assured, can hardly have been other than
eventful ; but incidents, or bits of life, are
like living forms — it is only here and here, as
by rare chance, that one of them gets arrested
and fossilised; the greater number disappear
Uke the greater number of antediluvian mol-
luscs, and no one can say why one of these
flies, as it were, of life should get preserved
in amber more than another. Talk, indeed,
about luck and cunning ; what a grain of sand
as against a hundredweight is cunning's share

here as against luck's. What moment could

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be more humdrum and unworthy of special
record than the one chosen by the artist for
the chapel we are considering ? Why should
this one get arrested in its flight and made
immortal when so many worthier ones have
perished ? Yet preserved it assuredly is ; it
is as though some fairy's wand had struck the
medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and
others who do duty instead of the Hebrew
originals. It has locked them up as sleeping
beauties, whose charms all may look upon.
Surely the hours are like the women grinding
at the mill — the one is taken and the other
left, and none can give the reason more than
he can say why Gallio should have w^on
immortality by caring for none of "these
things."

It seems to me, moreover, that fairies have
changed their practice now in the matter of
sleeping beauties, much as shopkeepers have
done in Regent Street. Formerly the shop-
keeper used to shut up his goods behind
strong shutters, so that no one might see them
after closing hours. Now he leaves everything
open to the eye and turns the gas on. So

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Art and Science

the fairies, who used to lock up their sleeping
beauties in impenetrable thickets, now leave
them in the most public places they can jfind,
as knowing that they will there most certainly
escape notice. Look at De Hooghe ; look at
'' The Pilgrim's Progress," or even Shakespeare
himself — how long they slept unawakened,
though they were in broad daylight and on
the public thoroughfares all the time. Look
at Tabachetti, and the masterpieces he left at
Varallo. His figures there are exposed to the
gaze of every passer-by ; yet who heeds them ?
Who, save a very few, even know of their
existence ? Look again at Gaudenzio Ferrari,
or the '' Danse des: Paysans," by Holbein, to
which I ventured to call attention in the
Universal Review. No, no ; if a thing be in
Central Africa, it is the glory of this age to
find it out; so the fairies think it safer to
conceal their proteges under a show of open-
ness ; for the schoolmaster is much abroad,
and there is no hedge so thick or so thorny
as the dulness of culture.

It may be, again, that ever so many years

hence, when Mr. Darwin's earth-worms shall

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Essays on Life

have buried Oropa hundreds of feet deep,
some one sinking a well or making a railway-
cutting will unearth these chapels, and will
believe them to have been houses, and to
contain the exuvice of the living forms that
tenanted them. In the meantime, however,
let us return to a consideration of the chapel
as it may now be seen by any one who cares
to pass that way.

The work consists of about forty figures in
all, not counting Cupids, and is divided into
four main divisions. First, there is the large
public sitting-room or drawing-room of the
College, where the elder young ladies are
engaged in various elegant employments.
Three, at a table to the left, are making a
mitre for the Bishop, as may be seen from the
model on the table. Some are merely spin-
ning or about to spin. One young lady,
sitting rather apart from the others, is doing
an elaborate piece of needlework at a tambour-
frame near the window ; others are making
lace or slippers, probably for the new curate ;
another is struggling with a letter, or perhaps

a theme, which seems to be giving her a good

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Art and Science

deal of trouble, but which, when done, will, I
am sure, be beautiful. One dear little girl is
simply reading "Paul and Virginia" under-
neath the window, and is so concealed that I
hardly think she can be seen from the outside
at all, though from inside she is delightful ; it
was with great regret that I could not get her
into any photograph. One most amiable
young woman has got a child's head on her
lap, the child having played itself to sleep.
All are industriously and agreeably employed
in some way or other ; all are plump ; all are
nice looking ; there is not one Becky Sharp in
the whole school; on the contrary, as in
"Pious Orgies," all is pious — or sub-pious —
and all, if not great, is at least eminently re-
spectable. One feels that St. Joachim and
St. Anne could not have chosen a school more
judiciously, and that if one had a daughter
oneself this is exactly where one would wish
to place her. If there is a fault of any kind in
the arrangements, it is that they do not keep
cats enough. The place is overrun with mice,
though what these can find to eat I know not.
It occurs to me also that the young ladies

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might be kept a little more free of spiders'
webs ; but in all these chapels, bats, mice and
spiders are troublesome.

Off the main drawing-room on the side
facing the window there is a dais, which is
approached by a large raised semicircular step,
higher than the rest of the floor, but lower
than the dais itself The dais is, of course,
reserved for the venerable Lady Principal and
the under-mistresses, one of whom, by the
way, is a little more mondaine than might
have been expected, and is admiring herself in
a looking-glass — unless, indeed, she is only
looking to see if there is a spot of ink on her
face. The Lady Principal is seated near a
table, on which lie some books in expensive
bindings, which I imagine to have been pre-
sented to her by the parents of pupils who
were leaving school. One has given her a
photographic album ; another a large scrap-
book, for illustrations of all kinds ; a third
volume has red edges, and is presumably of
a devotional character. If I dared venture
another criticism, I should say it would be
better not to keep the ink-pot on the top of

Art and Science

these books. The Lady Principal is being
read to by the monitress for the week, whose
duty it was to recite selected passages from
the most approved Hebrew writers ; she ap-
pears to be a good deal outraged, possibly at
the faulty intonation of the reader, which she
has long tried vainly to correct; or perhaps
she has been hearing of the atrocious way in
which her forefathers had treated the prophets,
and is explaining to the young ladies how im-
possible it would be, in their own more enlight-
ened age, for a prophet to fail of recognition.

On the half-dais, as I suppose the large
semicircular step between the main room and
the dais should be called, we find, first, the
monitress for the week, who stands up while
she recites ; and secondly, the Virgin herself,
who is the only pupil allowed a seat so near to
the august presence of the Lady Principal.
She is ostensibly doing a piece of embroidery
which is stretched on a cushion on her lap, but
I should say that she was chiefly interested in
the nearest of four pretty little Cupids, who
are all trying to attract her attention, though

they pay no court to any other young lady.

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I have sometimes wondered whether the ob-
viously scandalised gesture of the Lady Prin-
cipal might not be directed at these Cupids,
rather than at anything the monitress may
have been reading, for she would surely find
them disquieting. Or she may be saying,
" Why, bless me ! I do declare the Virgin has
got another hamper, and St. Anne's cakes
are always so terribly rich ! " Certainly the
hamper is there, close to the Virgin, and the
Lady Principal's action may be well directed
at it, but it may have been sent to some other
young lady, and be put on the sub-dais for
public exhibition. It looks as if it might have
come from Fortnum and Mason's, and I half
expected to find a label, addressing it to '' The
Virgin Mary, Temple College, Jerusalem,"
but if ever there was one the mice have long
since eaten it. The Virgin herself does not
seem to care much about it, but if she has
a fault it is that she is generally a little
apathetic.

Whose the hamper was, however, is a point
we shall never now certainly determine, for the

best fossil is worse than the worst living form.

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Art and Science

Why, alas ! was not Mr. Edison alive when
this chapel was made ? We might then have
had a daily phonographic recital of the con-
versation, and an announcement might be put
outside the chapels, telling us at what hours
the figures would speak.

On either of side the main room there are
two annexes opening out from it ; these are re-
served chiefly for the younger children, some
of whom, I think, are little boys. In the left-
hand annex, behind the ladies who are making
a mitre, there is a child who has got a cake,
and another has some fruit — possibly given
them by the Virgin — and a third child is
begging for some of it. The light failed so
completely here that I was not able to photo-
graph any of these figures. It was a dull Sep-
tember afternoon, and the clouds had settled
thick round the chapel, which is never very
light, and is nearly 4000 feet above the sea. I
waited till such twilight as made it hopeless that
more detail could be got — and a queer ghostly
place enough it was to wait in — but after
giving the plate an exposure of fifty minutes,

I saw I could get no more, and desisted.

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These long photographic exposures have
the advantage that one is compelled to study
a work in detail through mere lack of other
employment, and that one can take one's
notes in peace without being tempted to hurry
over them ; but even so I continually find I
have omitted to note, and have clean forgotten,
much that I want later on.

In the other annex there are also one or
two younger children, but it seems to have
been set apart for conversation and relaxation
more than any other part of the establish-
ment.

I have already said that the work is
signed by an inscription inside the chapel, to
the effect that the sculptures are by Pietro
Aureggio Termine di Biella. It will be seen
that the young ladies are exceedingly like one
another, and that the artist aimed at nothing
more than a faithful rendering of the life of his
own times. Let us be thankful that he aimed
at nothing less. Perhaps his wife kept a girls'
school ; or he may have had a large family of
fat, good-natured daughters, whose little ways

he had studied attentively; at all events the

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work is full of spontaneous incident, and
cannot fail to become more and more interest-
ing as the age it renders falls farther back
into the past. It is to be regretted that many
artists, better known men, have not been
satisfied with the humbler ambitions of this
most amiable and interesting sculptor. If he
has left us no laboured life-studies, he has at
least done something for us which we can
find nowhere else, which we should be very
sorry not to have, and the fidelity of which
to Italian life at the beginning of the last
century will not be disputed.

The eighth chapel is that of the Sposalizio,
is certainly not by Aureggio, and I should say
was mainly by the same sculptor who did the
Presentation in the Temple. On going inside
I found the figures had come from more than
one source ; some of them are constructed so
absolutely on Valsesian principles, as regards
technique, that it may be assumed they came
from Varallo. Each of these last figures is in
three pieces, that are baked separately and
cemented together afterwards, hence they are

more easily transported ; no more clay is used

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than is absolutely necessary ; and the off-side
of the figure is neglected ; they will be found
chiefly, if not entirely, at the top of the steps.
The other figures are more solidly built, and
do not remind me in their business features
of anything in the Valsesia. There was a
sculptor, Francesco Sala, of Locarno (doubtless
the village a short distance below Varallo,
and not the Locarno on the Lago Maggiore),
who made designs for some of the Oropa
chapels, and some of whose letters are still
preserved, but whether the Valsesian figures
in this present work are by him or not I
cannot say.

The statues are twenty-five in number ; I
could find no date or signature; the work
reminds me of Montrigone; several of the
figures are not at all bad, and several have
horsehair for hair, as at Varallo. The effect
of the whole composition is better than we
have a right to expect from any sculpture
dating from the beginning of the last century.

The ninth chapel, the Annunciation, pre-
sents no feature of interest ; nor yet does the

tenth, the Visit of Mary to Elizabeth. The

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eleventh, the Nativity, though rather better,
is still not remarkable.

The twelfth, the Purification, is absurdly-
bad, but I do not know whether the expres-
sion of strong personal dislike to the Virgin
which the High Priest wears is intended as
prophetic, or whether it is the result of incom-
petence, or whether it is merely a smile gone
wrong in the baking. It is amusing to find
Marocco, who has not been strict about archaeo-
logical accuracy hitherto, complain here that
there is an anachronism, inasmuch as some
young ecclesiastics are dressed as they would
be at present, and one of them actually carries
a wax candle. This is not as it should be ; in
works like those at Oropa, where implicit re-
liance is justly placed on the earnest endea-
vours that have been so successfully made to
thoroughly and carefully and patiently ensure
the accuracy of the minutest details, it is a
pity that even a single error should have
escaped detection ; this, however, has most
unfortunately happened here, and Marocco
feels it his duty to put us on our guard. He

explains that the mistake arose from the

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sculptor s having taken both his general ar-
rangement and his details from some picture
of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, when
the value of the strictest historical accuracy
was not yet so fully understood.

It seems to me that in the matter of accu-
racy, priests and men of science whether lay
or regular on the one hand, and plain people
whether lay or regular on the other, are trying
to play a different game, and fail to under-
stand one another because they do not see
that their objects are not the same. The
cleric and the man of science (who is only the
cleric in his latest development) are trying to
develop a throat with two distinct passages —
one that shall refuse to pass even the smallest
gnat, and another that shall gracefully gulp
even the largest camel ; whereas we men of
the street desire but one throat, and are con-
tent that this shall swallow nothing bigger
than a pony. Every one knows that there
is no such effectual means of developing the
power to swallow camels as incessant watch-
fulness for opportunities of straining at gnats,

and this should explain many passages that

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puzzle us in the work both of our clerics and
our scientists. I, not being a man of science,
still continue to do what I said I did in
"Alps and Sanctuaries," and make it a rule
to earnestly and patiently and carefully swal-
low a few of the smallest gnats I can find
several times a day, as the best astringent for
the throat I know of.

The thirteenth chapel is the Marriage Feast
at Cana of Galilee. This is the best chapel
as a work of art ; indeed, it is the only one
which can claim to be taken quite seriously.
Not that all the figures are very good ; those
to the left of the composition are common-
place enough ; nor are the Christ and the
giver of the feast at all remarkable ; but the
ten or dozen figures of guests and attendants
at the right-hand end of the work are as good
as anything of their kind can be, and remind
me so strongly of Tabachetti that I cannot
doubt they were done by some one who was
indirectly influenced by that great sculptor's
work. It is not likely that Tabachetti was alive
long after 1640, by which time he would have

been* about eighty years old ; and the founda-

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tions of this chapel were not laid till about
1690 ; the statues are probably a few years
later; they can hardly, therefore, be by one who
had even studied under Tabachetti ; but until
I found out the dates, and went inside the
chapel to see the way in which the figures had
been constructed, I was inclined to think they
might be by Tabachetti himself, of whom, in-
deed, they are not unworthy. On examining
the figures I found them more heavily con-
structed than Tabachetti's are, with smaller
holes for taking out superfluous clay, and
more finished on the off-sides. Marocco says
the sculptor is not known. I looked in vain
for any date or signature. Possibly the right-
hand figures (for the left-hand ones can hardly
be by the same hand) may be by some sculptor
from Crea, which is at no very great distance
from Oropa, who was penetrated by Taba-
chetti's influence ; but whether as regards
action and concert with one another, or as
regards excellence in detail, I do not see how
anything can be more realistic, and yet more
harmoniously composed. The placing of the

musicians in a minstrels' gallery helps the

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effect; these musicians are six in number,
and the other figures are twenty-three. Under
the table, between Christ and the giver of the
feast, there is a cat.

The fourteenth chapel, the Assumption of
the Virgin Mary, is without interest.

The fifteenth, the Coronation of the Virgin,
contains forty-six angels, twenty-six cherubs,
fifty-six saints, the Holy Trinity, the Madonna
herself, and twenty -four innocents, making
156 statues in all. Of these I am afraid
there is not one of more than ordinary merit ;
the most interesting is a half-length nude life-
study of Disma — ^the good thief. After what
had been promised him it was impossible to
exclude him, but it was felt that a half-length ^
nude figure would be as much as he could
reasonably expect.

Behind the sanctuary there is a semi-ruinous

and wholly valueless work, which shows the

finding of the black image, which is now

in the church, but is only shown on great

festivals.

This leads us to a consideration that I

have delayed till now. The black image is

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the central feature of Oropa ; it is the raison
d'etre of the whole place, and all else is a mere
incrustation, so to speak, around it. Accord-
ing to this image, then, which was carved by
St. Luke himself, and than which nothing can
be better authenticated, both the Madonna
and the infant Christ were as black as any-
thing can be conceived. It is not likely that
they were as black as they have been painted ;
no one yet ever was so black as that ; yet,
even allowing for some exaggeration on St.
Luke's part, they must have been exceedingly
black if the portrait is to be accepted ; and
uncompromisingly black they accordingly are
on most of the wayside chapels for many a
mile around Oropa. Yet in the chapels we
have been hitherto considering — works in
which, as we know, the most punctilious
regard has been shown to accuracy — both
the Virgin and Christ are uncompromisingly
white. As in the shops under the Colonnade
where devotional knick-knacks are sold, you
can buy a black china image or a white one,
whichever you like ; so with the pictures — the

black and white are placed side by side —

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pagando il danaro si pud scegliere. It rests
not with history or with the Church to say
whether the Madonna and Child were black
or white, but you may settle it for yourself,
whichever way you please, or rather you are
required, with the acquiescence of the Church,
to hold that they were both black and white
at one and the same time.

It cannot be maintained that the Church
leaves the matter undecided, and by tolerating
both types proclaims the question an open
one, for she acquiesces in the portrait by St.
Luke as genuine. How, then, justify the
whiteness of the Holy Family in the chapels ?
If the portrait is not known as genuine, why
set such a stumbling-block in our paths as to
show us a black Madonna and a white one,
both as historically accurate, within a few
yards of one another?

I ask this not in mockery, but as knowing
that the Church must have an explanation to
give, if she would only give it, and as my-
self unable to find any, even the most far-
fetched, that can bring what we see at
Oropa, Loreto and elsewhere into harmony

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with modern conscience, either intellectual or
ethical.

I see, indeed, from an interesting article in
the Atlantic Monthly for September 1889,
entitled " The Black Madonna of Loreto," that
black Madonnas were so frequent in ancient
Christian art that " some of the early writers
of the Church felt obliged to account for it
by explaining that the Virgin was of a very
dark complexion, as might be proved by the
verse of Canticles which says, ' I am black, but
comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.' Others
maintained that she became black during her
sojourn in Egypt. . . . Priests, of to-day, say
that extreme age and exposure to the smoke
of countless altar-candles have caused that
change in complexion which the more naive
fathers of the Church attributed to the power
of an Egyptian sun " ; but the writer ruth-
lessly disposes of this supposition by pointing
out that in nearly all the instances of black
Madonnas it is the flesh alone that is entirely
black, the crimson of the lips, the white of
the eyes, and the draperies having preserved

their original colour. The authoress of the

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article (Mrs. Hilliard) goes on to tell us that
Pausanias mentions two statues of the black
Venus, and says that the oldest statue of Ceres
among the Phigalenses was black. She adds
that Minerva Aglaurus, the daughter of
Cecrops, at Athens, was black ; that Corinth
had a black Venus, as also the Thespians ;
that the oracles of Dodona and Delphi were
founded by black doves, the emissaries of
Venus, and that the Isis Multimammia in
the Capitol at Rome is black.

Sometimes I have asked myself whether
the Church does not intend to suggest that
the whole story falls outside the domain of
history, and is to be held as the one great
epos, or myth, common to all mankind ;
adaptable by each nation according to its
own several needs ; translatable, so to speak,
into the facts of each individual nation, as the
written word is translatable into its lan-
guage, but appertaining to the realm of the
imagination rather than to that of the under-
standing, and precious for spiritual rather than
literal truths. More briefly, I have wondered
whether she may not intend that such details

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as whether the Virgin was white or black are
of very little importance in comparison with
the basing of ethics on a story that shall ap-
peal to black races as well as to white ones.

If so, it is time we were made to understand
this more clearly. If the Church, whether
of Rome or England, would lean to some
such view as this — tainted though it be
with mysticism — if we could see either great
branch of the Church make a frank, authori-
tative attempt to bring its teaching into
greater harmony with the educated under-
standing and conscience of the time, instead
of trying to fetter that understanding with
bonds that gall it daily more and more pro-
foundly ; then I, for one, in view of the
difficulty and graciousness of the task, and
in view of the great importance of historical
continuity, would gladly sink much of my
own private opinion as to the value of the
Christian ideal, and would gratefully help
either Church or both, according to the best
of my very feeble ability. On these terms,
indeed, I could swallow not a few camels

myself cheerfully enough.

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Art and Science

Can we, however, see any signs as though
either Rome or England will stir hand or
foot to meet us ? Can any step be pointed
to as though either Church wished to make
things easier for men holding the opinions
held by the late Mr. Darwin, or by Mr.
Herbert Spencer and Professor Huxley ?
How can those who accept evolution with
any thoroughness accept such doctrines as the
Incarnation or the Redemption with any but
a quasi-allegorical and poetical interpretation ?
Can we conceivably accept these doctrines in
the literal sense in which the Church advances
them ? And can the leaders of the Church
be blind to the resistlessness of the current
that has set against those literal interpretations
which she seems to hug more and more closely
the more religious life is awakened at all ?
The clergyman is wanted as supplement-
ing the doctor and the lawyer in all civilised
communities ; these three keep watch on
one another, and prevent one another from
becoming too powerful. I, who distrust the
doctrinaire in science even more than the

doctrinaire in religion, should view with dis-

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may the abolition of the Church of England,

as knowing that a blatant bastard science

would instantly step into her shoes ; but if

some such deplorable consummation is to be

avoided in England, it can only be through

more evident leaning on the part of our

clergy to such an interpretation of the Sacred

History as the presence of a black and white

Madonna almost side by side at Oropa appears

to suggest.

I fear that in these last paragraphs I may

have trenched on dangerous ground, but it is

not possible to go to such places as Oropa

without asking oneself what they mean and

involve. As for the average Italian pilgrims,

they do not appear to give the matter so

much as a thought. They love Oropa, and

flock to it in thousands during the summer ;

the President of the Administration assured

me that they lodged, after a fashion, as many

as ten thousand pilgrims on the 15th of last

August. It is astonishing how living the

statues are to these people, and how the

wicked are upbraided and the good applauded.

At Varallo, since I took the photographs I

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published in my book " Ex Voto," an angry
pilgrim has smashed the nose of the dwarf in
Tabachetti's Journey to Calvary, for no other
reason than inability to restrain his indigna-
tion against one who was helping to inflict
pain on Christ. It is the real hair and the
painting up to nature that does this. Here at
Oropa I found a paper on the floor of the
Sposalizio Chapel, which ran as follows : —

'' By the grace of God and the will of the
administrative chapter of this sanctuary, there

have come here to work , mason,

, carpenter, and , plumber,

all of Chiavazza, on the twenty-first day of
January 1886, full of cold {pieni difreddo).

" They write these two lines to record their
visit. They pray the Blessed Virgin that she
will maintain them safe and sound from
everything equivocal that may befall them
{sempre sard e salvi da ogni equivoco li possa
accadere). Oh, farewell ! We reverently salute
all the present statues, and especially the
Blessed Virgin, and the reader."

Through the Universal Review, I suppose, all

its readers are to consider themselves saluted ;

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at any rate, these good fellows, in the effusive-
ness of their hearts, actually wrote the above
in pencil. I was sorely tempted to steal it,
but, after copying it, left it in the Chief
Priest's hands instead.

142

ART IN THE VALLEY OF SAAS^

Having been told by Mr. Fortescue, of the
British Museum, that there were some chapels
at Saas-Fee which bore analogy to those at
Varallo, described in my book " Ex Voto, " ^ I
went to Saas during this last summer, and
venture now to lay my conclusions before the
reader.

The chapels are fifteen in number, and lead
up to a larger and singularly graceful one,
rather more than half-way between Saas and
Saas-Fee. This is commonly but wrongly
called the chapel of St. Joseph, for it is
dedicated to the Virgin, and its situation is
of such extreme beauty — the great Fee
glaciers showing through the open portico —
that it is in itself worth a pilgrimage. It is
surrounded by noble larches and overhung by
rock ; in front of the portico there is a small
open space covered with grass, and a huge

^ Published in the Universal Review, November 1890.

2 Longmans & Co., 1890.

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larch, the stem of which is girt by a rude
stone seat. The portico itself contains seats
for worshippers, and a pulpit from which the
preacher's voice can reach the many who
must stand outside. The walls of the inner
chapel are hung with votive pictures, some
of them very quaint and pleasing, and not
overweighted by those qualities that are
usually dubbed by the name of artistic merit.
Innumerable wooden and waxen representa-
tions of arms, legs, eyes, ears and babies tell
of the cures that have been effected during
two centuries of devotion, and can hardly fail
to awaken a kindly sympathy with the long
dead and forgotten folks who placed them
where they are.

The main interest, however, despite the
extreme loveliness of the St. Mary's Chapel,
centres rather in the small and outwardly
unimportant oratories (if they should be so
called) that lead up to it. These begin
immediately with the ascent from the level
ground on which the village of Saas-im-Grund
is placed, and contain scenes in the history of

the Redemption, represented by rude but

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spirited wooden figures, each about two feet
high, painted, gilt, and rendered as Hfe-hke in
all respects as circumstances would permit.
The figures have suffered a good deal from
neglect, and are still not a little misplaced.
With the assistance, however, of the Rev.
E. J. Selwyn, English Chaplain at Saas-im-
Grund, I have been able to replace many of
them in their original positions, as indicated
by the parts of the figures that are left rough-
hewn and unpainted. They vary a good deal
in interest, and can be easily sneered at by
those who make a trade of sneering. Those,
on the other hand, who remain unsophisticated
by overmuch art-culture will find them full of
character in spite of not a little rudeness of
execution, and will be surprised at coming
across such works in a place so remote from
any art-centre as Saas must have been at the
time these chapels were made. It will be my
business therefore to throw what light I can
upon the questions how they came to be
made at all, and who was the artist who
designed them.

The only documentary evidence consists in

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a chronicle of the valley of Saas written in the
early years of this century by the Rev. Peter
Jos. Ruppen, and published at Sion in 1851.
This work makes frequent reference to a
manuscript by the Rev. Peter Joseph Clemens
Lommatter, cure of Saas-Fee from 1738 to
1751, which has unfortunately been lost, so
that we have no means of knowing how
closely it was adhered to. The Rev. Jos.
Ant. Ruppen, the present excellent cure of
Saas-im-Grund, assures me that there is no
reference to the Saas-Fee oratories in the
"Actes de I'Eglise" at Saas, which I under-
stand go a long way back ; but I have not
seen these myself. Practically, then, we
have no more documentary evidence than is
to be found in the published chronicle above
referred to.

We there find it stated that the large
chapel, commonly, but as above explained,
wrongly called St. Joseph's, was built in
1687, and enlarged by subscription in 1747.
These dates appear on the building itself, and
are no doubt accurate. The writer adds that

there was no actual edifice on this site before

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the one now existing was built, but there was
a miraculous picture of the Virgin placed in
a mural niche, before which the pious herds-
men and devout inhabitants of the valley
worshipped under the vault of heaven.^ A
miraculous (or miracle-working) picture was
always more or less rare and important ; the
present site, therefore, seems to have been
long one of peculiar sanctity. Possibly the
name Fee may point to still earlier Pagan
mysteries on the same site.

As regards the fifteen small chapels, the
writer says they illustrate the fifteen mysteries
of the Psalter, and were built in 1709, each

^ M. Ruppen*s words run : ^^ 1687 wurde die Kapelle zur
hohen Stiege gebaut^ 1747 durcli Zusatz vergrossert und 1755
mit Orgeln ausgestattet. Anton Ruppen^ ein geschickter
Steinhauer und Maurermeister leitete den Kapellebau_, und
machte darin das kleinere Altarlein. Bei der hohen Stiege
war friiher kein Gebetshauslein ; nur ein wunderthatiges
Bildlein der Mutter Gottes stand da in einer Mauer vor dem
from me Hirten und viel andachtiges Volk unter freiem Himmel
beteten.

'^ 1709 wurden die kleinen Kapellelein die 15 Geheimnisse
des Psalters vorstellend auf dem Wege zur hohen Stiege
gebaut. Jeder Haushalter des Viertels Fee iibernahm den Bau
eines dieser Geheimnisskapellen, und ein besonderer Gutthater
dieser frommen Unternehmung war Heinrich Andeumatten,
nachher Bruder der Gesellschaft Jesu/^

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householder of the Saas-Fee contributing one
chapel. He adds that Heinrich Andenmatten,
afterwards a brother of the Society of Jesus,
was an especial benefactor or promoter of the
undertaking. One of the chapels, the Ascen-
sion (No. 12 of the series), has the date 1709
painted on it; but there is no date on any-
other chapel, and there seems no reason why
this should be taken as governing the whole
series.

Over and above this, there exists in Saas
a tradition, as I was told immediately on my
arrival, by an English visitor, that the chapels
were built in consequence of a flood, but I
have vainly endeavoured to trace this story
to an indigenous source.

The internal evidence of the wooden figures
themselves — nothing analogous to which, it
should be remembered, can be found in the
chapel of 1687 — points to a much earlier date.
I have met with no school of sculpture belong-
ing to the early part of the eighteenth cen-
tury to which they can be plausibly assigned ;
and the supposition that they are the work

of some unknown local genius who was not

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led up to and left no successors may be dis-
missed, for the work is too scholarly to have
come from any one but a trained sculptor.
I refer of course to those figures which the
artist must be supposed to have executed with
his own hand, as, for example, the central
figure of the Crucifixion group and those of
the Magdalene and St. John. The greater
number of the figures were probably, as was
suggested to me by Mr. Ranshaw, of Lowth,
executed by a local woodcarver from models
in clay and wax furnished by the artist him-
self. Those who examine the play of line in
the hair, mantle, and sleeve of the Magdalene
in the Crucifixion group, and contrast it with
the greater part of the remaining draperies,
will find little hesitation in concluding that
this was the case, and will ere long readily
distinguish the two hands from which the
figures have mainly come. I say "mainly,"
because there is at least one other sculptor
who may well have belonged to the year
1709, but who fortunately has left us little.
Examples of his work may perhaps be seen

in the nearest villain with a big hat in the

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Flagellation chapel, and in two cherubs in
the Assumption of the Virgin.

We may say, then, with some certainty,
that the designer was a cultivated and prac-
tised artist. We may also not less certainly
conclude that he was of Flemish origin, for the
horses in the Journey to Calvary and Cruci-
fixion chapels, where alone there are any
horses at all, are of Flemish breed, with no
trace of the Arab blood adopted by Gaudenzio
at Varallo. The character, moreover, of the
villains is Northern — of the Quentin Matsys,
Martin Schongauer type, rather than Italian ;
the same sub-Rubensesque feeling which is
apparent in more than one chapel at Varallo
is not less evident here — especially in the
Journey to Calvary and Crucifixion chapels.
There can hardly, therefore, be a doubt that
the artist was a Fleming who had worked for
several years in Italy.

It is also evident that he had Tabachetti's
work at Varallo well in his mind. For not
only does he adopt certain details of cos-
tume (I refer particularly to the treatment

of soldiers' tunics) which are pecuUar to

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Tabachetti at Varallo, but whenever he treats
a subject which Tabachetti had treated at
Varallo, as in the Flagellation, Crowning
with Thorns, and Journey to Calvary chapels,
the work at Saas is evidently nothing but
a somewhat modified abridgement 'of that at
Varallo. When, however, as in the Annun-
ciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and
other chapels, the work at Varallo is by
another than Tabachetti, no allusion is made
to it. The Saas artist has Tabachetti's Varallo
work at his finger-ends, but betrays no ac-
quaintance whatever with Gaudenzio Ferrari,
Gio. Ant. Paracca, or Giovanni D'Enrico.

Even, moreover, when Tabachetti's work
at Varallo is being most obviously drawn
from, as in the Journey to Calvary chapel,
the Saas version differs materially from that
at Varallo, and is in some respects an im-
provement on it. The idea of showing
other horsemen and followers coming up from
behind, whose heads can be seen over the
crown of the interposing hill, is singularly
effective as suggesting a number of others

that are unseen, nor can I conceive that any

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one but the original designer would follow
Tabachetti's Varallo design with as much
closeness as it has been followed here, and
yet make such a brilliantly successful modi-
fication. The stumbling, again, of one horse
(a detail almost hidden, according to Taba-
chetti's wont) is a touch which Tabachetti
himself might add, but which no Saas wood-
carver who was merely adapting from a
reminiscence of Tabachetti's Varallo chapel
would be likely to introduce. These consid-
erations have convinced me that the designer
of the chapels at Saas is none other than
Tabachetti himself, who, as has been now
conclusively shown, was a native of Dinant,
in Belgium.

The Saas chronicler, indeed, avers that the
chapels were not built till 1709 — a statement
apparently corroborated by a date now visible
on one chapel ; but we must remember that
the chronicler did not write until a century or
so later than 1709, and though, indeed, his
statement may have been taken from the lost
earlier manuscript of 1738, we know nothing

about this either one way or the other. The

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writer may have gone by the still existing
1709 on the Ascension chapel, whereas this
date may in fact have referred to a restoration,
and not to an original construction. There
is nothing, as I have said, in the choice of the
chapel on which the date appears, to suggest
that it was intended to govern the others. I
have explained that the work is isolated and
exotic. It is by one in whom Flemish and
Italian influences are alike equally predom-
inant; by one who was saturated with
Tabachetti's Varallo work, and who can
improve upon it, but over whom the other
Varallo sculptors have no power. The style
of the work is of the sixteenth and not of the
eighteenth century — with a few obvious ex-
ceptions that suit the year 1709 exceedingly
well. Against such considerations as these,
a statement made at the beginning of this
century referring to a century earlier, and a
promiscuous date upon one chapel, can carry
but little weight. I shall assume, therefore,
henceforward, that we have here groups de-
signed in a plastic material by Tabachetti,
and reproduced in wood by the best local

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wood-sculptor available, with the exception
of a few figures cut by the artist himself

We ask, then, at what period in his life
did Tabachetti design these chapels, and what
led to his coming to such an out-of-the-way
place as Saas at all? We should remember
that, according both to Fassola and Torrotti
(writing in 1671 and 1686 respectively), Ta-
bachetti ^ became insane about the year 1586
or early in 1587, after having just begun the
Salutation chapel. I have explained in '' Ex
Voto" that I do not believe this story. I
have no doubt that Tabachetti was declared
to be mad, but I believe this to have been due
to an intrigue, set on foot in order to get a

^ The story of Tabachetti's incarceration is very doubtful.
Cavaliere F. Negri^ to whose book on Tabachetti and his work
at Crea I have already referred the reader^ does not mention it.
Tabachetti left his native Dinant in 1585^ and from that date
until his death in 1615 he appears to have worked chiefly at
Varallo and Crea. There is a document in existence stating
that in 1588 he executed a statue for the hermitage of S. Rocco,
at Crea, which, if it is to be relied on, disposes both of the in-
carceration and of the visit to Saas. It is possible, however, that
the date is 1598, in which case Butler's theory of the visit to
Saas may hold good. In 1590 Tabachetti was certainly at
Varallo, and again in 1594, 1599, and 1602. He died in 1615,
possibly during a visit to Varallo, though his home at that time
was Costigliole, near Asti. — R. A. S.

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Art and Science

foreign artist out of the way, and to secure
the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, at that
precise time undertaken, for Gio. Ant. Paracca,
who was an ItaUan.

Or he may have been sacrificed in order to
facilitate the return of the workers in stucco
whom he had superseded on the Sacro Monte.
He may have been goaded into some impru-
dence which was seized upon as a pretext for
shutting him up; at any rate, the fact that
when in 1587 he inherited his father's property
at Dinant, his trustee (he being expressly stated
to be " eocpatrie ") was " datif,'' " dativus,'' ap-
pointed not by himself but by the court, lends
colour to the statement that he was not his
own master at the time ; for in later kindred
deeds, now at Namur, he appoints his own
trustee. I suppose, then, that Tabachetti was
shut up in a madhouse at Varallo for a con-
siderable time, during which I can find no
trace of him, but that eventually he escaped
or was released.

Whether he was a fugitive, or whether he
was let out from prison, he would in either
case, in all reasonable probability, turn his face

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homeward. If he was escaping, he would
make immediately for the Savoy frontier,
within which Saas then lay. He would cross
the Baranca above Fobello, coming down on
to Ponte Grande in the Val Anzasca. He
would go up the Val Anzasca to Macugnaga,
and over the Monte Moro, which would bring
him immediately to Saas. Saas, therefore, is
the nearest and most natural place for him to
make for, if he were flying from Varallo, and
here I suppose him to have halted.

It so happened that on the 9th of Septem-
ber, 1589, there was one of the three great
outbreaks of the Mattmark See that have from
time to time devastated the valley of Saas.^
It is probable that the chapels were decided
upon in consequence of some grace shown by
the miraculous picture of the Virgin, which
had mitigated a disaster occurring so soon after

1 This is thus chronicled by M. Ruppen : " 1589 den 9 Sep-
tember war eine Wassergrosse, die viel Schaden verursachte.
Die Thalstrasse, die von den Steinmatten an bis zur Kirche am
Ufer der Visp lag_, wurde ganz zerstort. Man ward gezwungen
eine neue Strasse in einiger Entfernung vom Wasser durch
einen alten Fussweg auszuhauen welche vier und einerhalben
Viertel der Klafter^ oder 6 Schuh und 9 ZoU breit sollte."
(p. 43).

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Art and Science

the anniversary of her own Nativity. Taba-
chetti, arriving at this juncture, may have
offered to undertake them if the Saas people
would give him an asylum. Here, at any
rate, I suppose him to have stayed till some
time in 1590, probably the second half of it ;
his design of eventually returning home, if he
ever entertained it, being then interrupted by
a summons to Crea near Casale, where I believe
him to have worked with a few brief interrup-
tions thenceforward for little if at all short of
half a century, or until about the year 1640.
I admit, however, that the evidence for assign-
ing him so long a life rests solely on the sup-
posed identity of the figure known as " II
Vecchietto," in the Varallo Descent from the
Cross chapel, with the portrait of Tabachetti
himself in the Ecce Homo chapel, also at
Varallo.

I find additional reason for thinking the
chapels owe their origin to the inundation of
September 9, 1589, in the fact that the 8th
of September is made a day of pilgrimage to
the Saas-F^e chapels throughout the whole
valley of Saas. It is true the 8th of September

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Essays on Life

is the festival of the Nativity of the Virgin
Mary, so that under any circumstances this
would be a great day, but the fact that not
only the people of Saas, but the whole valley
down to Visp, flock to this chapel on the 8th
of September, points to the belief that some
special act of grace on the part of the Virgin
was vouchsafed on this day in connection with
this chapel. A belief that it was owing to
the intervention of St. Mary of Fee that the
inundation was not attended with loss of life
would be very likely to lead to the foundation
of a series of chapels leading up to the place
where her miraculous picture was placed, and
to the more special celebration of her Nativity
in connection with this spot throughout the
valley of Saas. I have discussed the subject
with the Rev. Jos. Ant. Ruppen, and he told
me he thought the fact that the great fete
of the year in connection with the Saas-
Fee chapels was on the 8th of September
pointed rather strongly to the supposition
that there was a connection between these
and the recorded flood of September 9,

1589.

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Art and Science

Turning to the individual chapels they are
as follows : —

1. The Annunciation. The treatment here
presents no more analogy to that of the same
subject at Varallo than is inevitable in the
nature of the subject. The Annunciation
figures at Varallo have proved to be mere
draped dummies with wooden heads ; Taba-
chetti, even though he did the heads, which he
very likely did, would take no interest in the
Varallo work with the same subject. The
Annunciation, from its very simplicity as well
as from the transcendental nature of the sub-
ject, is singularly hard to treat, and the work
here, whatever it may once have been, is now
no longer remarkable.

2. The Salutation of Mary by EHzabeth.

This group, again, bears no analogy to the

Salutation chapel at Varallo, in which Taba-

chetti's share was so small that it cannot be

considered as in any way his. It is not to be

expected, therefore, that the Saas chapel

should follow the Varallo one. The figures,

four in number, are pleasing and well arranged.

St. Joseph, St. Elizabeth, and St. Zacharias

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Essays on Life

are all talking at once. The Virgin is alone
silent.

3. The Nativity is much damaged and hard
to see. The treatment bears no analogy to
that adopted by Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo.
There is one pleasing young shepherd stand-
ing against the wall, but some figures have no
doubt (as in others of the chapels) disappeared,
and those that remain have been so shifted
from their original positions that very little
idea can be formed of what the group was
like when Tabachetti left it.

4. The Purification. I can hardly say why
this chapel should remind me, as it does, of
the Circumcision chapel at Varallo, for there
are more figures here than space at Varallo
will allow. It cannot be pretended that any
single figure is of extraordinary merit, but
amongst them they tell their story with ex-
cellent effect. Two, those of St. Joseph and
St. Anna (?), that doubtless were once more
important factors in the drama, are now so
much in corners near the window that they
can hardly be seen.

5. The Dispute in the Temple. This subject

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Art and Science

is not treated at Varallo. Here at Saas there

are only six doctors now ; whether or no there

were originally more cannot be determined.

6. The Agony in the Garden. Tabachetti

had no chapel with this subject at Varallo,

and there is no resemblance between the Saas

chapel and that by D'Enrico. The figures

are no doubt approximately in their original

positions, but I have no confidence that I

have rearranged them correctly. They were

in such confusion when I first saw them that

the Rev.'E. J. Selwyn and myself determined

to rearrange them. They have doubtless

been shifted more than once since Tabachetti

left them. The sleeping figures are all good.

St. James is perhaps a Httle prosaic. One

Roman soldier who is coming into the garden

with a lantern, and motioning silence with his

hand, does duty for the others that are to

follow him. I should think more than one of

these figures is actually carved in wood by

Tabachetti, allowance being made for the fact

that he was working in a material with which

he was not familiar, and which no sculptor of

the highest rank has ever found congenial.

l6i L,

Essays

on Life

7. The Flagellation. Tabachetti has a chapel

with this subject at Varallo, and the Saas

group is obviously a descent with modification

from his work there. The figure of Christ is

so like the one at Varallo that I think it must

have been carved by Tabachetti himself. The

man with the hooked nose, who at Varallo is

stooping to bind his rods, is here upright : it

was probably the intention to emphasise him

in the succeeding scenes as well as this, in the

same way as he has been emphasised at Varallo,

but his nose got pared down in the cutting of

later scenes, and could not easily be added to.

The man binding Christ to the column at

Varallo is repeated {longo intervallo) here, and

the whole work is one inspired by that at

Varallo, though no single figure except that

of the Christ is adhered to with any very great

closeness. I think the nearer malefactor, with

a goitre, and wearing a large black hat, is

either an addition of the year 1709, or was

done by the journeyman of the local sculptor

who carved the greater number of the figures.

The man stooping down to bind his rods can

hardly be by the same hand as either of the

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Art and Science

two black-hatted malefactors, but it is im-
possible to speak with certainty. The general
effect of the chapel is excellent, if we consider
the material in which it is executed, and the
rudeness of the audience to whom it addresses
itself.

8. The Crowning with Thorns. Here again
the inspiration is derived from Tabachetti's
Crowning with Thorns at Varallo. The
Christs in the two chapels are strikingly-
alike, and the general effect is that of a
residuary impression left in the mind of one
who had known the Varallo Flagellation ex-
ceedingly well.

9. Sta. Veronica. This and the next suc-
ceeding chapels are the most important of the
series. Tabachetti's Journey to Calvary at
Varallo is again the source from which the
present work was taken, but, as I have already
said, it has been modified in reproduction.
Mount Calvary is still shown, as at Varallo,
towards the left-hand corner of the work, but
at Saas it is more towards the middle than at
Varallo, so that horsemen and soldiers may

be seen coming up behind it — a stroke that

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Essays on Life

deserves the name of genius none the less for
the manifest imperfection with which it has
been carried into execution. There are only
three horses fully shown, and one partly shown.
They are all of the heavy Flemish type
adopted by Tabachetti at Varallo. The man
kicking the fallen Christ and the goitred man
(with the same teeth missing), who are so
conspicuous in the Varallo Journey to Calvary,
reappear here, only the kicking man has much
less nose than at Varallo, probably because
(as explained) the nose got whittled away and
could not be whittled back again. I observe
that the kind of lapelled tunic which Taba-
chetti, and only Tabachetti, adopts at Varallo,
is adopted for the centurion in this chapel,
and indeed throughout the Saas chapels this
particular form of tunic is the most usual for
a Roman soldier. The work is still a very
striking one, notwithstanding its translation
into wood and the decay into which it has
been allowed to fall ; nor can it fail to impress
the visitor who is familiar with this class of
art as coming from a man of extraordinary

dramatic power and command over the almost

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Art and Science

impossible art of composing many figures
together effectively in all-round sculpture.
Whether all the figures are even now as
Tabachetti left them I cannot determine, but
Mr. Selwyn has restored Simon the Cyrenian
to the position in which he obviously ought
to stand, and between us we have got the
chapel into something more like order.

10. The Crucifixion. This subject was
treated at Varallo not by Tabachetti but by
Gaudenzio Ferrari. It confirms therefore my
opinion as to the designer of the Saas chapels
to find in them no trace of the Varallo Cruci-
fixion, while the kind of tunic which at Varallo
is only found in chapels wherein Tabachetti
worked again appears here. The work is in
a deplorable state of decay. Mr. Selwyn
has greatly improved the arrangement of the
figures, but even now they are not, I imagine,
quite as Tabachetti left them. The figure of
Christ is greatly better in technical execution
than that of either of the two thieves; the
folds of the drapery alone will show this even
to an unpractised eye. I do not think there
can be a doubt but that Tabachetti cut this

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Essays on Life

figure himself, as also those of the Magdalene
and St. John, who stand at the foot of the
cross. The thieves are coarsely executed,
with no very obvious distinction between the
penitent and the impenitent one, except that
there is a fiend painted on the ceiling over the
impenitent thief. The one horse introduced
into the composition is again of the heavy
Flemish type adopted by Tabachetti at
Varallo. There is great difference in the care
with which the folds on the several draperies
have been cut, some being stiff and poor enough,
while others are done very sufficiently. In spite
of smallness of scale, ignoble material, disar-
rangement and decay, the work is still striking.
11. The Resurrection. There being no
chapel at Varallo with any of the remaining
subjects treated at Saas, the sculptor has
struck out a line for himself. The Christ in
the Resurrection Chapel is a carefully modelled
figure, and if better painted might not be in-
effective. Three soldiers, one sleeping, alone
remain. There were probably other figures
that have been lost. The sleeping soldier is
very pleasing.

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Art and Science

12. The Ascension is not remarkably inter-
esting ; the Christ appears to be, but perhaps
is not, a much more modern figure than the
rest.

13. The Descent of the Holy Ghost. Some
of the figures along the end wall are very
good, and were, I should imagine, cut by
Tabachetti himself. Those against the two
side walls are not so well cut.

14. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
The two large cherubs here are obviously by a
later hand, and the small ones are not good.
The figure of the Virgin herself is unexcep-
tionable. There were doubtless once other
figures of the Apostles which have disappeared ;
of these a single St. Peter (?), so hidden away
in a corner near the window that it can only
be seen with difficulty, is the sole survivor.

15. The Coronation of the Virgin is of later
date, and has probably superseded an earlier
work. It can hardly be by the designer of the
other chapels of the series. Perhaps Tabachetti
had to leave for Crea before all the chapels at
Saas were finished.

Lastly, we have the larger chapel dedicated

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Essays on Life

to St. Mary, which crowns the series. Here
there is nothing of more than common artistic
interest, unless we except the stone altar men-
tioned in Ruppen's chronicle. This is of course
classical in style, and is, I should think, very
good.

Once more I must caution the reader against
expecting to find highly-finished gems of art
in the chapels I have been describing. A
wooden figure not more than two feet high
clogged with many coats of paint can hardly
claim to be taken very seriously, and even
those few that were cut by Tabachetti himself
were not meant to have attention concentrated
on themselves alone. As mere wood-carving
the Saas-Fee chapels will not stand comparison,
for example, with the triptych of unknown
authorship in the Church of St. Anne at Gliss,
close to Brieg. But, in the first place, the
work at Gliss is worthy of Holbein himself:
I know no wood-carving that can so rivet the
attention ; moreover it is coloured with water-
colour and not oil, so that it is tinted, not
painted ; and, in the second place, the Gliss
triptych belongs to a date (1519) when artists

1 68

Art and Science

held neither time nor impressionism as objects,
and hence, though greatly better than the
Saas-Fee chapels as regards a certain Japanese
curiousness of finish and naivete of literal tran-
scription, it cannot even enter the lists with
the Saas work as regards elan and dramatic
effectiveness. The difference between the two
classes of work is much that between, say, John
Van Eyck or Memling and Rubens or Rem-
brandt, or, again, between Giovanni Bellini
and Tintoretto ; the aims of the one class of
work are incompatible with those of the other.
Moreover, in the diss triptych the intention
of the designer is carried out (whether by him-
self or no) with admirable skill; whereas at
Saas the wisdom of the workman is rather of
Ober-Ammergau than of the Egyptians, and
the voice of the poet is not a little drowned
in that of his mouthpiece. If, however, the
reader will bear in mind these somewhat ob-
vious considerations, and will also remember
the pathetic circumstances under which the
chapels were designed — for Tabachetti when
he reached Saas was no doubt shattered in

body and mind by his four years' imprison-

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Essays on Life

ment — he will probably be not less attracted
to them than I observed were many of the
visitors both at Saas-Grund and Saas-Fee with
whom I had the pleasure of examining them.

I will now run briefly through the other
principal works in the neighbourhood to which
I think the reader would be glad to have his
attention directed.

At Saas-F^e itself the main altar-piece is
without interest, as also one with a figure of
St. Sebastian. The Virgin and Child above
the remaining altar are, so far as I remember
them, very good, and greatly superior to the
smaller figures of the same altar-piece.

At Almagel, an hour's walk or so above
Saas-Grund — a village, the name of which,
like those of the Alphubel, the Monte Moro,
and more than one other neighbouring site, is
supposed to be of Saracenic origin — the main
altar-piece represents a female saint with folded
arms being beheaded by a vigorous man to the
left. These two figures are very good. There
are two somewhat inferior elders to the right,
and the composition is crowned by the Assump-
tion of the Virgin. I like the work, but have

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Art and Science

no idea who did it. Two bishops flanking the
composition are not so good. There are two
other altars in the church : the right-hand one
has some pleasing figures, not so the left-hand.

In St. Joseph's Chapel, on the mule-road
between Saas-Grund and Saas-F^e, the St.
Joseph and the two children are rather nice.
In the churches and chapels which I looked
into between Saas and Stalden, I saw many
florid extravagant altar-pieces, but nothing that
impressed me favourably.

In the parish church at Saas-Grund there
are two altar-pieces which deserve attention.
In the one over the main altar the arrangement
of the Last Supper in a deep recess half-way
up the composition is very pleasing and effec-
tive ; in that above the right-hand altar of the
two that stand in the body of the church there
are a number of round lunettes, about eight
inches in diameter, each containing a small
but spirited group of wooden figures. I have
lost my notes on these altar-pieces and can
only remember that the main one has been
restored, and now belongs to two different

dates, the earlier date being, I should imagine,

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Essays on Life

about 1670. A similar treatment of the Last
Supper may be found near Brieg in the church
of Naters, and no doubt the two altar-pieces
are by the same man. There are, by the way,
two very ambitious altars on either side the
main arch leading to the chancel in the church
at Naters, of which the one on the south side
contains obvious reminiscences of Gaudenzio
Ferrari's Sta. Maria frescoes at Varallo ; but
none of the four altar-pieces in the two tran-
septs tempted me to give them much atten-
tion. As regards the smaller altar-piece at
Saas-Grund, analogous work may be found at
Cravagliana, half-way between Varallo and
Fobello, but this last has suffered through the
inveterate habit which Italians have of show-
ing their hatred towards the enemies of Christ
by mutilating the figures that represent them.
Whether the Saas work is by a Valsesian artist
who came over to Switzerland, or whether the
Cravagliana work is by a Swiss who had come
to Italy, I cannot say without further con-
sideration and closer examination than I have
been able to give. The altar-pieces of Mai-

rengo, Chiggiogna, and, I am told, Lavertezzo,

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Art and Science

all in the Canton Ticino, are by a Swiss or
German artist who has migrated southward ;
but the reverse migration was equally common.
Being in the neighbourhood, and wishing to
assure myself whether the sculptor of the
Saas-Fee chapels had or had not come lower
down the valley, I examined every church and
village which I could hear of as containing
anything that might throw light on this point.
I was thus led to Vispertimenen, a village
some three hours above either Visp or Stal-
den. It stands very high, and is an almost
untouched example of a mediseval village.
The altar-piece of the main church is even
more floridly ambitious in its abundance of
carving and gilding than the many other am-
bitious altar-pieces with which the Canton
Valais abounds. The Apostles are receiving
the Holy Ghost on the first storey of the com-
position, and they certainly are receiving it
with an overjoyed alacrity and hilarious ecstasy
of allegria spirituale which it would not be
easy to surpass. Above the village, reaching
almost to the limits beyond which there is no

cultivation, there stands a series of chapels

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Essays on Life

like those I have been describing at Saas-Fee,
only much larger and more ambitious. They
are twelve in number, including the church
that crowns the series. The figures they con-
tain are of wood (so I was assured, but I did
not go inside the chapels) : they are life-size,
and in some chapels there are as many as a
dozen figures. I should think they belonged
to the later half of the last century, and here,
one would say, sculpture touches the ground ;
at least, it is not easy to see how cheap exag-
geration can sink an art more deeply. The
only things that at all pleased me were a
smiling donkey and an ecstatic cow in the
Nativity chapel. Those who are not allured
by the prospect of seeing perhaps the very
worst that can be done in its own line, need
not be at the pains of climbing up to Visperti-
menen. Those, on the other hand, who may
find this sufficient inducement will not be dis-
appointed, and they will enjoy magnificent
views of the Weisshorn and the mountains
near the Dom.

I have already referred to the triptych at

diss. This is figured in Wolfs work on

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Art and Science

Chamonix and the Canton Valais, but a larger
and clearer reproduction of such an extraordi-
nary work is greatly to be desired. The small
wooden statues above the triptych, as also
those above its modern companion in the
south transept, are not less admirable than the
triptych itself. I know of no other like work
in wood, and have no clue whatever as to who
the author can have been beyond the fact that
the work is purely German and eminently Hol-
beinesque in character.

I was told of some chapels at Rarogne, five
or six miles lower down the valley than Visp.
I examined them, and found they had been
stripped of their figures. The few that re-
mained satisfied me that we have had no loss.
Above Brieg there are two other like series
of chapels. I examined the higher and more
promising of the two, but found not one single
figure left. I was told by my driver that the
other series, close to the Pont Napoleon on
the Simplon road, had been also stripped of
its figures, and, there being a heavy storm at
the time, have taken his word for it that this
was so.

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THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE^

Three well-known writers, Professor Max
Miiller, Professor Mivart, and Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace have lately maintained that
though the theory of descent with modification
accounts for the development of all vegetable
life, and of all animals lower than man, yet
that man cannot — not at least in respect of
the whole of his nature — be held to have
descended from any animal lower than him-
self, inasmuch as none lower than man pos-
sesses even the germs of language. Reason, it
is contended — more especially by Professor
Max Miiller in his " Science of Thought," to
which I propose confining our attention this
evening — is so inseparably connected with
language, that the two are in point of fact
identical ; hence it is argued that, as the lower
animals have no germs of language, they can

1 A lecture delivered at the Working Men's College in Great
Ormond Street^ March 15, 1890 ; rewritten and delivered again
at the Somerville Club, February 13, 1894.

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Art and Science

have no germs of reason, and the inference
is drawn that man cannot be conceived as
having derived his ow^n reasoning powers and
command of language through descent from
beings in which no germ of either can
be found. The relations therefore between
thought and language, interesting in them-
selves, acquire additional importance from the
fact of their having become the battle-ground
between those who say that the theory of
descent breaks down with man, and those
who maintain that we are descended from
some ape-like ancestor long since extinct.

The contention of those who refuse to ad-
mit man unreservedly into the scheme of
evolution is comparatively recent. The great
propounders of evolution, Buffon, Erasmus
Darwin and Lamarck — not to mention a
score of others who wrote at the close of the
last and early part of this present century —
had no qualms about admitting man into
their system. They have been followed in
this respect by the late Mr. Charles Darwin,
and by the greatly more influential part of

our modern biologists, who hold that whatever

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loss of dignity we may incur through being
proved to be of humble origin, is compensated
by the credit we may claim for having ad-
vanced ourselves to such a high pitch of
civilisation; this bids us expect still further
progress, and glorifies our descendants more
than it abases our ancestors. But to whichever
view we may incline on sentimental grounds
the fact remains that, while Charles Darwin
declared language to form no impassable
barrier between man and the lower animals.
Professor Max Muller calls it the Rubicon
which no brute dare cross, and deduces hence
the conclusion that man cannot have descended
from an unknown but certainly speechless ape.
It may perhaps be expected that I should
begin a lecture on the relations between
thought and language with some definition of
both these things; but thought, as Sir William
Grove said of motion, is a phenomenon " so
obvious to simple apprehension, that to define
it would make it more obscure." ^ Definitions
are useful where things are new to us, but
they are superfluous about those that are

^ ^^ Correlation of Forces " : Longmans, 1874, p. 15.
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Art and Science

already familiar, and mischievous, so far as they
are possible at all, in respect of all those things
that enter so profoundly and intimately into
our being that in them we must either live
or bear no life. To vivisect the more vital
processes of thought is to suspend, if not to
destroy them ; for thought can think about
everything more healthily and easily than
about itself. It is like its instrument the
brain, which knows nothing of any injuries
inflicted upon itself. As regards what is new
to us, a definition will sometimes dilute a diffi-
culty, and help us to swallow that which might
choke us undiluted ; but to define when we
have once well swallowed is to unsettle, rather
than settle, our digestion. Definitions, again,
are like steps cut in a steep slope of ice, or
shells thrown on to a greasy pavement ; they
give us foothold, and enable us to advance,
but when we are at our journey's end we
want them no longer. Again, they are useful
as mental fluxes, and as helping us to fuse
new ideas with our older ones. They present
us with some tags and ends of ideas that we

have already mastered, on to which we can

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hitch our new ones ; but to multiply them in
respect of such a matter as thought, is like
scratching the bite of a gnat ; the more we
scratch the more we want to scratch ; the
more we define the more we shall have to go
on defining the words we have used in our
definitions, and shall end by setting up a
serious mental raw in the place of a small
uneasiness that was after all quite endurable.
We know too well what thought is, to be
able to know that we know it, and I am per-
suaded there is no one in this room but
understands what is meant by thought and
thinking well enough for all the purposes of
this discussion. Whoever does not know this
without words will not learn it for all the
words and definitions that are laid before him.
The more, indeed, he hears, the more confused
he will become. I shall, therefore, merely
premise that I use the word " thought " in the
same sense as that in which it is generally
used by people who say that they think this
or that. At any rate, it will be enough if I
take Professor Max Miiller's own definition,

and say that its essence consists in a bringing

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together of mental images and ideas with
deductions therefrom, and with a correspond-
ing power of detaching them from one another.
Hobbes, the Professor tells us, maintained
this long ago, when he said that all our think-
ing consists of addition and subtraction — that
is to say, in bringing ideas together, and in
detaching them from one another.

Turning from thought to language, we ob-
serve that the word is derived from the French
langue, or tongue. Strictly, therefore, it means
tonguage. This, however, takes account of
but a very small part of the ideas that under-
lie the word. It does, indeed, seize a familiar
and important detail of everyday speech,
though it may be doubted whether the tongue
has more to do with speaking than lips, teeth
and throat have, but it makes no attempt at
grasping and expressing the essential charac-
teristic of speech. Anything done with the
tongue, even though it involve no speaking
at all, is tonguage ; eating oranges is as much
tonguage as speech is. The word, therefore,
though it tells us in part how speech is
effected, reveals nothing of that ulterior mean-

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ing which is nevertheless inseparable from any-
right use of the words either " speech " or
" language." It presents us with what is in-
deed a very frequent adjunct of conversation,
but the use of written characters, or the finger-
speech of deaf mutes, is enough to show that
the word "language" omits all reference to the
most essential characteristics of the idea, which
in practice it nevertheless very sufficiently pre-
sents to us. I hope presently to make it clear
to you how and why it should do so. The
word is incomplete in the first place, because
it omits all reference to the ideas which words,
speech or language are intended to convey,
and there can be no true word without its
actually or potentially conveying an idea.
Secondly, it makes no allusion to the person
or persons to whom the ideas are to be con-
veyed. Language is not language unless it
not only expresses fairly definite and coherent
ideas, but unless it also conveys these ideas
to some other living intelligent being, either
man or brute, that can understand them. We
may speak to a dog or horse, but not to a

stone. If we make pretence of doing so we

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are in reality only talking to ourselves. The
person or animal spoken to is half the battle
— a half, moreover, which is essential to there
being any battle at all. It takes two people
to say a thing — a sayee as well as a sayer.
The one is as essential to any true saying as
the other. A. may have spoken, but if B. has
not heard, there has been nothing said, and he
must speak again. True, the belief on A.'s
part that he had a bond fide sayee in B., saves
his speech qua him, but it has been barren
and left no fertile issue. It has failed to fulfil
the conditions of true speech, which involve
not only that A. should speak, but also that
B. should hear. True, again, we often speak
of loose, incoherent, indefinite language ; but
by doing so we imply, and rightly, that we
are calling that language which is not true
language at all. People, again, sometimes
talk to themselves without intending that any
other person should hear them, but this is
not well done, and does harm to those who
practise it. It is abnormal, whereas our con-
cern is with normal and essential character-
istics ; we may, therefore, neglect both delirious

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babblings, and the cases in which a person is
regarding him or herself, as it were, from out-
side, and treating himself as though he were
some one else.

Inquiring, then, what are the essentials,
the presence of which constitutes language,
while their absence negatives it altogether,
we find that Professor Max Miiller restricts
them to the use of grammatical articulate
words that we can write or speak, and denies
that anything can be called language unless
it can be written or spoken in articulate words
and sentences. He also denies that we can
think at all unless we do so in words ; that
is to say, in sentences with verbs and nouns.
Indeed he goes so far as to say upon his title-
page that there can be no reason — which I
imagine comes to much the same thing as
thought — without language, and no language
without reason.

Against the assertion that there can be no
true language without reason I have nothing
to say. But when the Professor says that
there can be no reason, or thought, without

language, his opponents contend, as it seems

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to me, with greater force, that thought, though
infinitely aided, extended and rendered definite
through the invention of words, nevertheless
existed so fully as to deserve no other name
thousands, if not millions of years before
words had entered into it at all. Words,
they say, are a comparatively recent inven-
tion, for the fuller expression of something
that was already in existence.

Children, they urge, are often evidently
thinking and reasoning, though they can
neither think nor speak in words. If you
ask me to define reason, I answer as before
that this can no more be done than thought,
truth or motion can be defined. Who has
answered the question, " What is truth ? "
Man cannot see God and live. We cannot
go so far back upon ourselves as to under-
mine our own foundations ; if we try to do
so we topple over, and lose that very reason
about which we vainly try to reason. If we
let the foundations be, we know well enough
that they are there, and we can build upon
them in all security. We cannot, then, define

reason nor crib, cabin and confine it within a

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thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-further. Who
can define heat or cold, or night or day ?
Yet, so long as jwe hold fast by current
consent, our chances of error for want of
better definition are so small that no sensible
person will consider them. In like manner,
if we hold by current consent or common
sense, which is the same thing, about reason,
we shall not find the want of an academic
definition hinder us from a reasonable con-
clusion. What nurse or mother will doubt
that her infant child can reason within the
limits of its own experience, long before it
can formulate its reason in articulately worded
thought? If the development of any given
animal is, as our opponents themselves admit,
an epitome of the history of its whole anterior
development, surely the fact that speech is
an accomplishment acquired after birth so
artificially that children who have gone wild
in the woods lose it if they have ever
learned it, points to the conclusion that
man's ancestors only learned to express them-
selves in articulate language at a compara-
tively recent period. Granted that they learn

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to think and reason continually the more and
more fully for having done so, will common
sense permit us to suppose that they could
neither think nor reason at all till they could
convey their ideas in words ?

I will return later to the reason of the
lower animals, but will now deal with the
question what it is that constitutes language
in the most comprehensive sense that can be
properly attached to it. I have said already
that language to be language at all must not
only convey fairly definite coherent ideas, but
must also convey them to another living being.
Whenever two living beings have conveyed
and received ideas, there has been language,
whether looks or gestures or words spoken or
written have been the vehicle by means of which
the ideas have travelled. Some ideas crawl,
some run, some fly ; and in this case words are
the wings they fly with, but they are only
the wings of thought or of ideas, they are not
the thought or ideas themselves, nor yet, as
Professor Max Miiller would have it, insepar-
ably connected with them. Last summer I

was at an inn in Sicily, where there was a

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deaf and dumb waiter ; he had been born so,
and could neither write nor read. What
had he to do with words or words with him ?
Are we to say, then, that this most active,
amiable and intelligent fellow could neither
think nor reason? One day I had had my
dinner and had left the hotel. A friend came
in, and the waiter saw him look for me in
the place I generally occupied. He instantly
came up to my friend, and moved his two
forefingers in a way that suggested two
people going about together, this meant
" your friend " ; he then moved his forefingers
horizontally across his eyes, this meant, " who
wears divided spectacles " ; he made two
fierce marks over the sockets of his eyes, this
meant, " with the heavy eyebrows " ; he pulled
his chin, and then touched his white shirt,
to say that my beard was white. Having
thus identified me as a friend of the person
he was speaking to, and as having a white
beard, heavy eyebrows, and wearing divided
spectacles, he made a munching movement
with his jaws to say that I had had my dinner ;
and finally, by making two fingers imitate

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walking on the table, he explained that I had
gone away. My friend, however, wanted to
know how long I had been gone, so he pulled
out his watch and looked inquiringly. The
man at once slapped himself on the back, and
held up the five fingers of one hand, to say
it was five minutes ago. All this was done
as rapidly as though it had been said in words ;
and my friend, who knew the man well, under-
stood without a moment's hesitation. Are
we to say that this man had no thought, nor
reason, nor language, merely because he had
not a single word of any kind in his head,
which I am assured he had not ; for, as I have
said, he could not speak with his fingers ? Is
it possible to deny that a dialogue — an intel-
ligent conversation — had passed between the
two men? And if conversation, then surely
it is technical and pedantic to deny that
all the essential elements of language were
present. The signs and tokens used by this
poor fellow were as rude an instrument of
expression, in comparison with ordinary lan-
guage, as going on one's hands and knees is

in comparison with walking, or as walking

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compared with going by train ; but it is as
great an abuse of words to limit the word
'' language " to mere words written or spoken,
as it would be to limit the idea of a locomotive
to a railway engine. This may indeed pass
in ordinary conversation, where so much must
be suppressed if talk is to be got through at
all, but it is intolerable when we are inquir-
ing about the relations between thought and
words. To do so is to let words become as
it were the masters of thought, on the ground
that the fact of their being only its servants
and appendages is so obvious that it is gen-
erally allowed to go without saying.

If all that Professor Max Miiller means to
say is, that no animal but man commands an
articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or
is ever likely to command one (and I question
whether in reality he means much more than
this), no one will differ from him. No dog or
elephant has one word for bread, another for
meat, and another for water. Yet, when we
watch a cat or dog dreaming, as they often
evidently do, can we doubt that the dream is

accompanied by a mental image of the thing

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that is dreamed of, much Hke what we experi-
ence in dreams ourselves, and much doubt-
less like the mental images which must have
passed through the mind of my deaf and
dumb waiter? If they have mental images
in sleep, can we doubt that waking, also, they
picture things before their mind's eyes, and
see them much as we do — too vaguely indeed
to admit of our thinking that we actually see
the objects themselves, but definitely enough
for us to be able to recognise the idea or
object of which we are thinking, and to con-
nect it with any other idea, object, or sign that
we may think appropriate ?

Here we have touched on the second essen-
tial element of language. We laid it down,
that its essence lay in the communication of
an idea from one intelligent being to another ;
but no ideas can be communicated at all
except by the aid of conventions to which
both parties have agreed to attach an identical
meaning. The agreement may be very in-
formal, and may pass so unconsciously from
one generation to another that its existence

can only be recognised by the aid of much

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introspection, but it will be always there. A
sayer, a sayee, and a convention, no matter
what, agreed upon between them as insepar-
ably attached to the idea which it is intended
to convey — these comprise all the essentials
of language. Where these are present there
is language ; where any of them are wanting
there is no language. It is not necessary for
the sayee to be able to speak and become a
sayer. If he comprehends the sayer — that is
to say, if he attaches the same meaning to a
certain symbol as the sayer does — if he is a
party to the bargain whereby it is agreed
upon by both that any given symbol shall be
attached invariably to a certain idea, so that
in virtue of the principle of associated ideas
the symbol shall never be present without
immediately carrying the idea along with it,
then all the essentials of language are com-
plied with, and there has been true speech
though never a word was spoken.

The lower animals, therefore, many of them,
possess a part of our own language, though
they cannot speak it, and hence do not possess

it so fully as we do. They cannot say " bread,"

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" meat," or " water," but there are many that
readily learn what ideas they ought to attach
to these symbols when they are presented to
them. It is idle to say that a cat does not
know what the cat's-meat man means when
he says " meat." The cat knows just as well,
neither better nor worse than the cat's-meat
man does, and a great deal better than I
myself understand much that is said by some
very clever people at Oxford or Cambridge.
There is more true employment of language,
more bond fide currency of speech, between a
sayer and a sayee who understand each other,
though neither of them can speak a word,
than between a sayer who can speak with the
tongues of men and of angels without being
clear about his own meaning, and a sayee
who can himself utter the same words, but
who is only in imperfect agreement with the
sayer as to the ideas which the words or
symbols that he utters are intended to convey.
The nature of the symbols counts for nothing ;
the gist of the matter is in the perfect har-
mony between sayer and sayee as to the sig-
nificance that is to be associated with them.

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Professor Max Miiller admits that we share
with the lower animals what he calls an emo-
tional language, and continues that we may
call their interjections and imitations language
if we like, as we speak of the language of the
eyes or the eloquence of mute nature, but he
warns us against mistaking metaphor for fact.
It is indeed mere metaphor to talk of the
eloquence of mute nature, or the language of
winds and waves. There is no intercom-
munion of mind with mind by means of a
covenanted symbol ; but it is only an apparent,
not a real, metaphor to say that two pairs of
eyes have spoken when they have signalled
to one another something which they both
understand. A schoolboy at home for the
holidays wants another plate of pudding, and
does not like to apply officially for more.
He catches the servant's eye and looks at the
pudding; the servant understands, takes his
plate without a word, and gets him some. Is
it metaphor to say that the boy asked the
servant to do this, or is it not rather pedantry
to insist on the letter of a bond and deny its

spirit, by denying that language passed, on the

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ground that the symbols covenanted upon and
assented to by both were uttered and received
by eyes and not by mouth and ears ? When
the lady drank to the gentleman only with
her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there
no conversation because there was neither
noun nor verb ? Eyes are verbs, and glasses
of wine are good nouns enough as between
those who understand one another. Whether
the ideas underlying them are expressed and
conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail
that matters nothing.

But everything we say is metaphorical if we
choose to be captious. Scratch the simplest
expressions, and you will find the metaphor.
Written words are bandage, inkage and paper-
age ; it is only by metaphor, or substitution
and transposition of ideas, that we can call
them language. They are indeed potential
language, and the symbols employed presup-
pose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of
speech ; but for the most part it is in what
we read between the lines that the profounder
meaning of any letter is conveyed. There are

words unwritten and untranslatable into any

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nouns that are nevertheless felt as above, about
and underneath the gross material symbols
that lie scrawled upon the paper; and the
deeper the feeUng with which anything is
written the more pregnant will it be of mean-
ing which can be conveyed securely enough,
but which loses rather than gains if it is
squeezed into a sentence, and limited by the
parts of speech. The language is not in the
words but in the heart-to-heartness of the
thing, which is helped by words, but is nearer
and farther than they. A correspondent
wrote to me once, many years ago, "If I
could think to you without words you would
understand me better." But surely in this
he was thinking to me, and without words,
and I did understand him better. ... So it
is not by the words that I am too presump-
tuously venturing to speak to-night that your
opinions will be formed or modified. They
will be formed or modified, if either, by some-
thing that you will feel, but which I have not
spoken, to the full as much as by anything
that I have actually uttered. You may say

that this borders on mysticism. Perhaps it

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does, but there really is some mysticism in
nature.

To return, however, to terra jirvia. I be-
lieve I am right in saying that the essence
of language lies in the intentional conveyance
of ideas from one living being to another
through the instrumentality of arbitrary
tokens or symbols agreed upon, and under-
stood by both as being associated with the
particular ideas in question. The nature of
the symbol chosen is a matter of indifference ;
it may be anything that appeals to human
senses, and is not too hot or too heavy ; the
essence of the matter lies in a mutual cove-
nant that whatever it is it shall stand invari-
ably for the same thing, or nearly so.

We shall see this more easily if we observe

the differences between written and spoken

language. The written word "stone," and

the spoken word, are each of them symbols

arrived at in the first instance arbitrarily.

They are neither of them more like the other

than they are to the idea of a stone which

rises before our minds, when we either see or

hear the word, or than this idea again is like

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the actual stone itself, but nevertheless the
spoken symbol and the written one each alike
convey with certainty the combination of ideas
to which we have agreed to attach them.

The written symbol is formed with the
hand, appeals to the eye, leaves a material
trace as long as paper and ink last, can travel
as far as paper and ink can travel, and can be
imprinted on eye after eye practically ad in-
finitum both as regards time and space.

The spoken symbol is formed by means of
various organs in or about the mouth, appeals
to the ear, not the eye, perishes instantly with-
out material trace, and if it lives at all does so
only in the minds of those who heard it. The
range of its action is no wider than that within
which a voice can be heard ; and every time a
fresh impression is wanted the type must be
set up anew.

The written symbol extends infinitely, as

regards time and space, the range within which

one mind can communicate with another ;

it gives the writer's mind a life limited by

the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as

against that of his flesh and blood body. On

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the other hand, it takes longer to learn the
rules so as to be able to apply them with ease
and security, and even then they cannot be
applied so quickly and easily as those attaching
to spoken symbols. Moreover, the spoken
symbol admits of a hundred quick and subtle
adjuncts by way of action, tone and expres-
sion, so that no one will use written symbols
unless either for the special advantages of per-
manence and travelling power, or because he
is incapacitated from using spoken ones. This,
however, is hardly to the point ; the point is
that these two conventional combinations of
symbols, that are as unlike one another as the
Hallelujah Chorus is to St. Paul's Cathedral,
are the one as much language as the other ;
and we therefore inquire what this very patent
fact reveals to us about the more essential
characteristics of language itself. What is
the common bond that unites these two
classes of symbols that seem at first sight to
have nothing in common, and makes the one
raise the idea of language in our minds as
readily as the other? The bond lies in the

fact that both are a set of conventional tokens

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or symbols, agreed upon between the parties
to whom they appeal as being attached invari-
ably to the same ideas, and because they are
being made as a means of communion between
one mind and another, — for a memorandum
made for a person's own later use is nothing
but a communication from an earlier mind to
a later and modified one ; it is therefore in
reality a communication from one mind to
another as much as though it had been ad-
dressed to another person.

We see, therefore, that the nature of the
outward and visible sign to which the inward
and spiritual idea of language is attached does
not matter. It may be the firing of a gun ; it
may be an old semaphore telegraph; it may
be the movements of a needle ; a look, a ges-
ture, the breaking of a twig by an Indian to
tell some one that he has passed that way : a
twig broken designedly with this end in view
is a letter addressed to whomsoever it may
concern, as much as though it had been written
out in full on bark or paper. It does not
matter one straw what it is, provided it is
agreed upon in concert, and stuck to. Just

Art and Science

as the lowest forms of life nevertheless present
us with all the essential characteristics of living-
ness, and are as much alive in their own humble
way as the most highly developed organisms,
so the rudest intentional and effectual com-
munication between two minds through the
instrumentality of a concerted symbol is as
much language as the most finished oratory
of Mr. Gladstone. I demur therefore to the
assertion that the lower animals have no lan-
guage, inasmuch as they cannot themselves
articulate a grammatical sentence. I do not
indeed pretend that when the cat calls upon
the tiles it uses what it consciously and intro-
spectively recognises as language ; it says what
it has to say without introspection, and in
the ordinary course of business, as one of the
common forms of courtship. It no more
knows that it has been using language than
M. Jourdain knew he had been speaking prose,
but M. Jourdain's knowing or not knowing
was neither here nor there.

Anything which can be made to hitch on
invariably to a definite idea that can carry
some distance— say an inch at the least, and

Essays on Life

which can be repeated at pleasure, can be
pressed into the service of language. Mrs.
Bentley, wife of the famous Dr. Bentley of
Trinity College, Cambridge, used to send her
snuff-box to the college buttery when she
wanted beer, instead of a written order. If
the snuff-box came the beer was sent, but if
there was no snuff-box there was no beer.
Wherein did the snuff-box differ more from
a written order, than a written order differs
from a spoken one? The snuff-box was for
the time being language. It sounds strange to
say that one might take a pinch of snuff out
of a sentence, but if the servant had helped
him or herself to a pinch while carrying it to
the buttery this is what would have been
done ; for if a snuff-box can say " Send me a
quart of beer," so efficiently that the beer is
sent, it is impossible to say that it is not a
bond fide sentence. As for the recipient of
the message, the butler did not probably trans-
late the snuff-box into articulate nouns and
verbs ; as soon as he saw it he just went down
into the cellar and drew the beer, and if he
thought at all, it was probably about some-

Art and Science

thing else. Yet he must have been thinking
without words, or he would have drawn too
much beer or too little, or have spilt it in the
bringing it up, and we may be sure that he did
none of these things.

You will, of course, observe that if Mrs.
Bentley had sent the snufF-box to the buttery
of St. John's College instead of Trinity, it
would not have been language, for there
would have been no covenant between sayer
and sayee as to what the symbol should repre-
sent, there would have been no previously
established association of ideas in the mind of
the butler of St. John's between beer and
snuff-box ; the connection was artificial, arbi-
trary, and by no means one of those in respect
of which an impromptu bargain might be pro-
posed by the very symbol itself, and assented
to without previous formality by the person
to whom it was presented. More briefly, the
butler of St. John's would not have been able
to understand and read it aright. It would
have been a dead letter to him — a snuff-box
and not a letter; whereas to the butler of

Trinity it was a letter and not a snuff-box.

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You will also note that it was only at the
moment when he was looking at it and ac-
cepting it as a message that it flashed forth
from snuff*-box-hood into the light and life of
living utterance. As soon as it had kindled
the butler into sending a single quart of beer,
its force was spent until Mrs. Bentley threw
her soul into it again and charged it anew
by wanting more beer, and sending it down
accordingly.

Again, take the ring which the Earl of Essex
sent to Queen Elizabeth, but which the queen
did not receive. This was intended as a
sentence, but failed to become effectual lan-
guage because the sensible material symbol
never reached those sentient organs which it
was intended to affect. A book, again, how-
ever full of excellent words it may be, is not
language when it is merely standing on a
bookshelf. It speaks to no one, unless
when being actually read, or quoted from
by an act of memory. It is potential
language as a lucifer - match is potential
fire, but it is no more language till it is

in contact with a recipient mind, than a

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match is fire till it is struck, and is being
consumed.

A piece of music, again, without any words
at all, or a song with words that have nothing
in the world to do with the ideas which it is
nevertheless made to convey, is often very
effectual language. Much lying, and all irony
depends on tampering with covenanted sym-
bols, and making those that are usually asso-
ciated with one set of ideas convey by a sleight
of mind others of a different nature. That is
why irony is intolerably fatiguing unless very
sparingly used. Take the song which Blondel
sang under the window of King Richard's
prison. There was not one syllable in it to
say that Blondel was there, and was going to
help the king to get out of prison. It was
about some silly love affair, but it was a letter
all the same, and the king made language
of what would otherwise have been no lan-
guage, by guessing the meaning, that is to
say by perceiving that he was expected to
enter then and there into a new covenant
as to the meaning of the symbols that

were presented to him, understanding what

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this covenant was to be, and acquiescing
in it.

On the other hand, no ingenuity can torture
language into being a fit word to use in con-
nection with either sounds or any other sym-
bols that have not been intended to convey
a meaning, or again in connection with either
sounds or symbols in respect of which there
has been no covenant between sayer and sayee.
When we hear people speaking a foreign lan-
guage— we will say Welsh — we feel that
though they are no doubt using what is very
good language as between themselves, there is
no language whatever as far as we are con-
cerned. We call it lingo, not language. The
Chinese letters on a tea-chest might as well
not be there, for all that they say to us, though
the Chinese find them very much to the pur-
pose. They are a covenant to which we have
been no parties — to which our intelligence has
affixed no signature.

We have already seen that it is in virtue of

such an understood covenant that symbols

so unlike one another as the written word

"stone" and the spoken word alike at once

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raise the idea of a stone in our minds. See
how the same holds good as regards the dif-
ferent languages that pass current in different
nations. The letters p, i, e, r, r, e convey
the idea of a stone to a Frenchman as readily
as s, t, o, n, e do to ourselves. And why?
because that is the covenant that has been
struck between those who speak and those
who are spoken to. Our " stone " conveys no
idea to a Frenchman, nor his '' pierre " to us,
unless we have done what is commonly called
acquiring one another's language. To acquire a
foreign language is only to learn and adhere to
the covenants in respect of symbols which the
nation in question has adopted and adheres to.
Till we have done this we neither of us know
the rules, so to speak, of the game that the
other is playing, and cannot, therefore, play to-
gether ; but the convention being once known
and assented to, it does not matter whether
we raise the idea of a stone by the word
"lapis," or by "lithos," "pietra," "pierre,"
" stein," " stane " or " stone " ; we may choose
what symbols written or spoken we choose,

and one set, unless they are of unwieldy length

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will do as well as another, if we can get other
people to choose the same and stick to them ;
it is the accepting and sticking to them that
matters, not the symbols. The whole power
of spoken language is vested in the in variable-
ness with which certain symbols are associated
with certain ideas. If we are strict in always
connecting the same symbols with the same
ideas, we speak well, keep our meaning clear
to ourselves, and convey it readily and accu-
rately to any one who is also fairly strict. If,
on the other hand, we use the same combina-
tion of symbols for one thing one day and for
another the next, we abuse our symbols in-
stead of using them, and those who indulge
in slovenly habits in this respect ere long lose
the power alike of thinking and of expressing
themselves correctly. The symbols, however,
in the first instance, may be anything in the
wide world that we have a fancy for. They
have no more to do with the ideas they serve
to convey than money has with the things that
it serves to buy.

The principle of association, as every one
knows, involves that whenever two things

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have been associated sufficiently together, the
suggestion of one of them to the mind shall
immediately raise a suggestion of the other.
It is in virtue of this principle that language,
as we so call it, exists at all, for the essence
of language consists, as I have said perhaps
already too often, in the fixity with which
certain ideas are invariably connected with
certain symbols. But this being so, it is hard
to see how we can deny that the lower animals
possess the germs of a highly rude and un-
specialised, but still true language, unless we
also deny that they have any ideas at all ; and
this I gather is what Professor Max Miiller in
a quiet way rather wishes to do. Thus he
says, " It is easy enough to show that animals
communicate, but this is a fact which has never
been doubted. Dogs who growl and bark
leave no doubt in the minds of other dogs or
cats, or even of man, of what they mean, but
growling and barking are not language, nor do
they even contain the elements of language." ^
I observe the Professor says that animals

1 '' Tliree Lectures on the Science of Language," Longmans,
1889, p. 4.

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communicate without saying what it is that
they communicate. I beUeve this to have
been because if he said that the lower animals
communicate their ideas, this would be to
admit that they have ideas ; if so, and if, as
they present every appearance of doing, they
can remember, reflect upon, modify these ideas
according to modified surroundings, and inter-
change them with one another, how is it pos-
sible to deny them the germs of thought,
language, and reason — not to say a good deal
more than the germs ? It seems to me that
not knowing what else to say that animals
communicated if it was not ideas, and not
knowing what mess he might not get into if
he admitted that they had ideas at all, he
thought it safer to omit his accusative case
altogether.

That growling and barking cannot be called
a very highly specialised language goes with-
out saying ; they are, however, so much diver-
sified in character, according to circumstances,
that they place a considerable number of
symbols at an animal's command, and he
invariably attaches the same symbol to the

Art and Science

same idea. A cat never purrs when she is
angry, nor spits when she is pleased. When
she rubs her head against any one affectionately
it is her symbol for saying that she is very
fond of him, and she expects, and usually
finds that it will be understood. If she sees
her mistress raise her hand as though to pre-
tend to strike her, she knows that it is the
symbol her mistress invariably attaches to the
idea of sending her away, and as such she
accepts it. Granted that the symbols in use
among the lower animals are fewer and less
highly differentiated than in the case of any
known human language, and therefore that
animal language is incomparably less subtle
and less capable of expressing delicate shades
of meaning than our own, these differences
are nevertheless only those that exist between
highly developed and inchoate language ; they
do not involve those that distinguish language
from no language. They are the differences
between the undifferentiated protoplasm of
the amoeba and our own complex organisation ;
they are not the differences between life and
no life. In animal language as much as in

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human there is a mind intentionally making
use of a symbol accepted by another mind as
invariably attached to a certain idea, in order
to produce that idea in the mind which it is
desired to affect — more briefly, there is a sayer,
a sayee, and a covenanted symbol designedly
applied. Our own speech is vertebrated and
articulated by means of nouns, verbs, and the
rules of grammar. A dog's speech is inverte-
brate, but I do not see how it is possible to
deny that it possesses all the essential elements
of language.

I have said nothing about Professor R. L.
Garner's researches into the language of apes,
because they have not yet been so far verified
and accepted as to make it safe to rely upon
them ; but when he lays it down that all
voluntary sounds are the products of thought,
and that, if they convey a meaning to another,
they perform the functions of human speech,
he says what I believe will commend itself
to any unsophisticated mind. I could have
wished, however, that he had not limited him-
self to sounds, and should have preferred his
saying what I doubt not he would readily

Art and Science

accept — I mean, that all symbols or tokens of
whatever kind, if voluntarily adopted as such,
are the products of thought, and perform the
functions of human speech ; but I cannot too
often remind you that nothing can be con-
sidered as fulfilling the conditions of language,
except a voluntary application of a recognised
token in order to convey a more or less definite
meaning, with the intention doubtless of thus
purchasing as it were some other desired mean-
ing and consequent sensation. It is astonish-
ing how closely in this respect money and
words resemble one another. Money indeed
may be considered as the most universal and
expressive of all languages. For gold and
silver coins are no more money when not in
the actual process of being voluntarily used
in purchase, than words not so in use are
language. Pounds, shillings and pence are
recognised covenanted tokens, the outward
and visible, signs of an inward and spiritual
purchasing power, but till in actual use they
are only potential money, as the symbols of
language, whatever they may be, are only

potential language till they are passing be-

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tween two minds. It is the power and will to
apply the symbols that alone gives life to
money, and as long as these are in abeyance
the money is in abeyance also ; the coins may
be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as
a log till they begin to burn in it, and so are
our words till they begin to burn within us.

The real question, however, as to the sub-
stantial underlying identity between the lan-
guage of the lower animals and our own, turns
upon that other question whether or no, in
spite of an immeasurable difference of degree,
the thought and reason of man and of the
lower animals is essentially the same. No one
will expect a dog to master and express the
varied ideas that are incessantly arising in con-
nection with human affairs. He is a pauper
as against a millionaire. To ask him to do so
would be like giving a street-boy sixpence
and telling him to go and buy himself a
founder's share in the New River Company.
He would not even know what was meant, and
even if he did it would take several millions of
sixpences to buy one. It is astonishing what

a clever workman will do with very modest

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tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will
make a very small sumi of money go, or again
in like manner how many ideas an inteUigent
brute can receive and convey with its very
limited vocabulary; but no one will pretend
that a dog's intelligence can ever reach the
level of a man's. What we do maintain is
that, within its own limited range, it is of the
same essential character as our own, and that
though a dog's ideas in respect of human
affairs are both vague and narrow, yet in
respect of canine affairs they are precise
enough and extensive enough to deserve no
other name than thought or reason. We hold
"moreover that they communicate their ideas
in essentially the same manner as we do — that
is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of
symbols attached to certain states of mind
and material objects, in the first instance arbi-
trarily, but so persistently, that the presentation
of the symbol immediately carries with it the
idea which it is intended to convey. Animals
can thus receive and impart ideas on all that
most concerns them. As my great namesake

said some two hundred years ago, they know

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"what's what, and that's as high as meta-
physic wit can fly." And they not only
know what's what themselves, but can impart
to one another any new what's-whatness
that they may have acquired, for they are
notoriously able to instruct and correct one
another.

Against this Professor Max Miiller con-
tends that we can know nothing of what
goes on in the mind of any lower animal,
inasmuch as we are not lower animals our-
selves. "We can imagine anything we like
about what passes in the mind of an animal,"
he writes, " we can know absolutely nothing." ^
It is something to have it in evidence that he
conceives animals as having a mind at all, but
it is not easy to see how they can be supposed
to have a mind, without being able to acquire
ideas, and having acquired, to read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest them. Surely the
mistake of requiring too much evidence is
hardly less great than that of being contented
with too little. We, too, are animals, and can
no more refuse to infer reason from certain

1 " Science of Thought," Longmans, 1887, p. 9.

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visible actions in their case than we can in our
own. If Professor Max Miiller's plea were
allowed, we should have to deny our right to
infer confidently what passes in the mind of
any one not ourselves, inasmuch as we are not
that person. We never, indeed, can obtain
irrefragable certainty about this or any other
matter, but we can be sure enough in many
cases to warrant our staking all that is most
precious to us on the soundness of our opinion.
Moreover, if the Professor denies our right to
infer that animals reason, on the ground that
we are not animals enough ourselves to be
able to form an opinion, with what right does
he infer so confidently himself that they do
not reason ? And how, if they present every
one of those appearances which we are ac-
customed to connect with the communication
of an idea from one mind to another, can we
deny that they have a language of their own,
though it is one which in most cases we can
neither speak nor understand ? How can we
say that a sentinel rook, when it sees a man
with a gun and warns the other rooks by

a concerted note which they all show that

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they understand by immediately taking flight,
should not be credited both with reason and
the germs of language ?

After all, a professor, whether of philology,
psychology, biology, or any other ology, is
hardly the kind of person to whom we should
appeal on such an elementary question as
that of animal intelligence and language.
We might as well ask a botanist to tell us
whether grass grows, or a meteorologist to
tell us if it has left off raining. If it is neces-
sary to appeal to any one, I should prefer the
opinion of an intelligent gamekeeper to that of
any professor, however learned. The keepers,
again, at the Zoological Gardens, have excep-
tional opportunities for studying the minds of
animals— modified, indeed, by captivity, but
still minds of animals. Grooms, again, and
dog-fanciers, are to the full as able to form an
intelligent opinion on the reason and language
of animals as any University Professor, and so
are cats'-meat men. I have repeatedly asked
gamekeepers and keepers at the Zoological
Gardens whether animals could reason and

converse with one another, and have always

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Art and Science

found myself regarded somewhat contemptu-
ously for having even asked the question.
I once said to a friend, in the hearing of a
keeper at the Zoological Gardens, that the
penguin was very stupid. The man was
furious, and jumped upon me at once. '' He's
not stupid at all," said he ; " he's very
intelligent."

Who has not seen a cat, when it wishes to
go out, raise its fore paws on to the handle of
the door, or as near as it can get, and look
round, evidently asking some one to turn it
for her? Is it reasonable to deny that a
reasoning process is going on in the cat's
mind, whereby she connects her wish with the
steps necessary for its fulfilment, and also
with certain invariable symbols which she
knows her master or mistress will interpret ?
Once, in company with a friend, I watched a
cat playing with a house-fly in the window
of a ground-floor room. We were in the
street, while the cat was inside. When we
came up to the window she gave us one
searching look, and, having satisfied herself

that we had nothing for her, went on with her

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Essays on Life

game. She knew all about the glass in the
window, and was sure we could do nothing
to molest her, so she treated us with absolute
contempt, never even looking at us again.

The game was this. She was to catch the
fly and roll it round and round under her paw
along the window-sill, but so gently as not to
injure it nor prevent it from being able to fly
again when she had done rolling it. It was
very early spring, and flies were scarce, in fact
there was not another in the whole window.
She knew that if she crippled this one, it
would not be able to amuse her further, and
that she would not readily get another instead,
and she liked the feel of it under her paw. It
was soft and living, and the quivering of its
wings tickled the ball of her foot in a manner
that she found particularly grateful ; so she
rolled it gently along the whole length of the
window-sill. It then became the fly's turn.
He was to get up and fly about in the win-
dow, so as to recover himself a little ; then she
was to catch him again, and roll him softly all
along the window-sill, as she had done before.

It was plain that the cat knew the rules of

Art and Science

her game perfectly well, and enjoyed it keenly.
It was equally plain that the fly could not
make head or tail of what it was all about. If
it had been able to do so it would have gone
to play in the upper part of the window, where
the cat could not reach it. Perhaps it was
always hoping to get through the glass, and
escape that way; anyhow, it kept pretty
much to the same pane, no matter how often
it was rolled. At last, however, the fly, for
some reason or another, did not reappear on
the pane, and the cat began looking every-
where to find it. Her annoyance when she
failed to do so was extreme. It was not only
that she had lost her fly, but that she could
not conceive how she should have ever come
to do so. Presently she noted a small knot in
the woodwork of the sill, and it flashed upon
her that she had accidentally killed the fly,
and that this was its dead body. She tried to
move it gently with her paw, but it was no
use, and for the time she satisfied herself that
the knot and the fly had nothing to do with
one another. Every now and then, however,
she returned to it as though it were the only

Essays on Life

thing she could think of, and she would try it
again. She seemed to say she was certain
there had been no knot there before — she
must have seen it if there had been ; and yet,
the fly could hardly have got jammed so
firmly into the wood. She was puzzled and
irritated beyond measure, and kept looking in
the same place again and again, just as we do
when we have mislaid something. She was
rapidly losing temper and dignity when sud-
denly we saw the fly reappear from under the
cat's stomach and make for the window-pane,
at the very moment when the cat herself
was exclaiming for the fiftieth time that she
wondered where that stupid fly ever could
have got to. No man who has been hunting
twenty minutes for his spectacles could be
more delighted when he suddenly finds them
on his own forehead. " So that's where you
were," we seemed to hear her say, as she pro-
ceeded to catch it, and again began rolling it
very softly without hurting it, under her paw.
My friend and I both noticed that the cat,
in spite of her perplexity, never so much as
hinted that we were the culprits. The question

Art and Science

whether anything outside the window could
do her good or harm had long since been
settled by her in the negative, and she was
not going to reopen it ; she simply cut us
dead, and though her annoyance was so great
that she was manifestly ready to lay the blame
on anybody or anything with or without
reason, and though she must have perfectly
well known that we were watching the whole
affair with amusement, she never either asked
us if we had happened to see such a thing as
a fly go down our way lately, or accused us of
having taken it from her — both of which ideas
she would, I am confident, have been very
well able to convey to us if she had been so
minded.

Now what are thought and reason if the pro-
cesses that were going through this cat's mind
were not both one and the other ? It would
be childish to suppose that the cat thought in
words of its own, or in anything like words.
Its thinking was probably conducted through
the instrumentality of a series of mental
images. We so habitually think in words

ourselves that we find it difficult to realise

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thought without words at all; our difficulty,
however, in imagining the particular manner
in which the cat thinks has nothing to do with
the matter. We must answer the question
whether she thinks or no, not according to
our own ease or difficulty in understanding
the particular manner of her thinking, but
according as her action does or does not
appear to be of the same character as other
action that we commonly call thoughtful.
To say that the cat is not intelligent, merely
on the ground that we cannot ourselves
fathom her intelligence — this, as I have else-
where said, is to make intelligence mean the
power of being understood, rather than the
power of understanding. This nevertheless
is what, for all our boasted intelligence, we
generally do. The more we can understand
an animal's ways, the more intelligent we call
it, and the less we can understand these, the
more stupid do we declare it to be. As for
plants — whose punctuality and attention to
all the details and routine of their somewhat
restricted lines of business is as obvious as it

is beyond all praise — we understand the work-

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Art and Science

ing of their minds so little that by common
consent we declare them to have no intelligence
at all.

Before concluding I should wish to deal a
little more fully with Professor Max Miiller's
contention that there can be no reason with-
out language, and no language without reason.
Surely when two practised pugilists are fight-
ing, parrying each other's blows, and watching
keenly for an unguarded point, they are think-
ing and reasoning very subtly the whole time,
without doing so in words. The machination
of their thoughts, as well as its expression, is
actual — I mean, effectuated and expressed by
action and deed, not words. They are un-
aware of any logical sequence of thought that
they could follow in words as passing through
their minds at all. They may perhaps think
consciously in words now and again, but such
thought will be intermittent, and the main
part of the fighting will be done without any
internal concomitance of articulated phrases.
Yet we cannot doubt that their action, how-
ever much we may disapprove of it, is guided

by intelligence and reason; nor should we

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doubt that a reasoning process of the same
character goes on in the minds of two dogs or
fighting-cocks when they are striving to master
their opponents.

Do we think in words, again, when we wind
up our watches, put on our clothes, or eat our
breakfasts ? If we do, it is generally about
something else. We do these things almost
as much without the help of words as we wink
or yawn, or perform any of those other actions
that we call reflex, as it would almost seem
because they are done without reflection.
They are not, however, the less reasonable
because wordless.

Even when we think we are thinking in
words, we do so only in half measure. A
running accompaniment of words no doubt
frequently attends our thoughts ; but, unless
we are writing or speaking, this accompani-
ment is of the vaguest and most fitful kind,
as we often find out when we try to write
down or say what we are thinking about,
though we have a fairly definite notion of it,
or fancy that we have one, all the time.
The thought is not steadily and coherently

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Art and Science

governed by and moulded in words, nor does
it steadily govern them. Words and thought
interact upon and help one another, as any
other mechanical appliances interact on and
help the invention that first hit upon them ;
but reason or thought, for the most part, flies
along over the heads of w^ords, working its
own mysterious way in paths that are beyond
our ken, though whether some of our depart-
mental personalities are as unconscious of
what is passing, as that central government is
which we alone dub with the name of " we "
or " us," is a point on which I will not now
touch.

1 cannot think, then, that Professor Max
Mliller's contention that thought and lan-
guage are identical — and he has repeatedly
affirmed this — will ever be generally accepted.
Thought is no more identical with language
than feeling is identical with the nervous
system. True, we can no more feel without
a nervous system than we can discern certain
minute organisms without a microscope.
Destroy the nervous system, and we destroy

feeling. Destroy the microscope, and we can

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no longer see the animalcules ; but our sight
of the animalcules is not the microscope,
though it is effectuated by means of the
microscope, and our feeling is not the nervous
system, though the nervous system is the
instrument that enables us to feel.

The nervous system is a device which living
beings have gradually perfected — I believe I
may say quite truly — through the will and
power which they have derived from a foun-
tain-head, the existence of which we can infer,
but which we can never apprehend. By the
help of this device, and in proportion as they
have perfected it, living beings feel ever with
greater definiteness, and hence formulate their
feelings in thought with more and more pre-
cision. The higher evolution of thought has
reacted on the nervous system, and the con-
sequent higher evolution of the nervous system
has again reacted upon thought. These things
are as power and desire, or supply and de-
mand, each one of which is continually out-
stripping, and being in turn outstripped by
the other ; but, in spite of their close connec-
tion and interaction, power is not desire, nor

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demand supply. Language is a device evolved
sometimes by leaps and bounds, and some-
times exceedingly slowly, whereby we help
ourselves alike to greater ease, precision, and
complexity of thought, and also to more con-
venient interchange of thought among our-
selves. Thought found rude expression, which
gradually among other forms assumed that of
words. These reacted upon thought, and
thought again on them, but thought is no
more identical with words than words are
with the separate letters of which they are
composed.

To sum up, then, and to conclude. I would
ask you to see the connection between words
and ideas, as in the first instance arbitrary.
No doubt in some cases an imitation of the
cry of some bird or wild beast would suggest
the name that should be attached to it ; occa-
sionally the sound of an operation such as
grinding may have influenced the choice of
the letters g, r, as the root of many words
that denote a grinding, grating, grasping,
crushing, action; but I understand that the

number of words due to direct imitation is

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comparatively few in number, and that they
have been mainly coined as the result of con-
nections so far-fetched and fanciful as to
amount practically to no connection at all.
Once chosen, however, they were adhered to
for a considerable time among the dwellers in
any given place, so as to become acknowledged
as the vulgar tongue, and raise readily in the
mind of the inhabitants of that place the ideas
with which they had been artificially associated.
As regards our being able to think and
reason without words, the Duke of Argyll
has put the matter as soundly as I have yet
seen it stated. " It seems to me," he wrote,
" quite certain that we can and do constantly
think of things without thinking of any sound
or word as designating them. Language
seems to me to be necessary for the progress
of thought, but not at all for the mere act of
thinking. It is a product of thought, an ex-
pression of it, a vehicle for the communication
of it, and an embodiment which is essential to
its growth and continuity ; but it seems to
me altogether erroneous to regard it as an

inseparable part of cogitation."

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Art and Science

The following passages, again, are quoted
from Sir William Hamilton in Professor Max
Miiller's own book, with so much approval as
to lead one to suppose that the differences
between himself and his opponents are in
reality less than he believes them to be : —

" Language," says Sir W. Hamilton, " is the
attribution of signs to our cognitions of things.
But as a cognition must have already been
there before it could receive a sign, conse-
quently that knowledge which is denoted by
the formation and application of a word must
have preceded the symbol that denotes it. A
sign, however, is necessary to give stability to
our intellectual progress — to establish each
step in our advance as a new starting-point
for our advance to another beyond. A country
may be overrun by an armed host, but it is
only conquered by the establishment of for-
tresses. Words are the fortresses of thought.
They enable us to realise our dominion over
what we have already overrun in thought ; to
make every intellectual conquest the base of
operations for others still beyond."

" This," says Professor Max Midler, " is a

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most happy illustration/' and he proceeds to
quote the following, also from Sir William
Hamilton, which he declares to be even hap-
pier still.

"You have all heard," says Sir William
Hamilton, "of the process of tunnelling
through a sandbank. In this operation it is
impossible to succeed unless every foot, nay,
almost every inch of our progress be secured
by an arch of masonry before we attempt the
excavation of another. Now language is to
the mind precisely what the arch is to the
tunnel. The power of thinking and the power
of excavation are not dependent on the words
in the one case or on the mason- work in the
other ; but without these subsidiaries neither
could be carried on beyond its rudimentary
commencement. Though, therefore, we allow
that every movement forward in language
must be determined by an antecedent move-
ment forward in thought, still, unless thought
be accompanied at each point of its evolutions
by a corresponding evolution of language, its
further development is arrested."

Man has evolved an articulate language,

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whereas the lower animals seem to be without
one. Man, therefore, has far outstripped them
in reasoning faculty as well as in power of
expression. This, however, does not bar the
communications which the lower animals
make to one another from possessing all the
essential characteristics of language, and as a
matter of fact, wherever we can follow them
we find such communications effectuated by
the aid of arbitrary symbols covenanted upon
by the living beings that wish to communicate,
and persistently associated with certain cor-
responding feelings, states of mind, or material
objects. Human language is nothing more
than this in principle, however much further
the principle has been carried in our own case
than in that of the lower animals.

This being admitted, we should infer that
the thought or reason on which the language
of men and animals is alike founded differs as
between men and brutes in degree but not in
kind. More than this cannot be claimed on
behalf of the lower animals, even by their most
enthusiastic admirer.

233

THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM '

PART I

It will be readily admitted that of all living
writers Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is the one
the peculiar turn of whose mind best fits him
to write on the subject of natural selection, or
the accumulation of fortunate but accidental
variations through descent and the struggle
for existence. His mind in all its more essen-
tial characteristics closely resembles that of
the late Mr. Charles Darwin himself, and it
is no doubt due to this fact that he and Mr.
Darwin elaborated their famous theory at the
same time, and independently of one another.
I shall have occasion in the course of the fol-
lowing article to show how misled and mislead-
ing both these distinguished men have been,
in spite of their unquestionable familiarity
with the whole range of animal and vegetable

^ Published in the Universal Review^ April, May, and June
1890.

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Art and Science

phenomena. I believe it will be more respectful
to both of them to do this in the most out-
spoken way. I believe their work to have
been as mischievous as it has been valuable,
and as valuable as it has been mischievous ;
and higher, whether praise or blame, I know
not how to give. Nevertheless I would in
the outset, and with the utmost sincerity,
admit concerning Messrs. Wallace and Darwin
that neither can be held as the more profound
and conscientious thinker ; neither can be put
forward as the more ready to acknowledge
obligation to the great writers on evolution
who had preceded him, or to place his own
developments in closer and more conspicuous
historical connection with earlier thought upon
the subject ; neither is the more ready to
welcome criticism and to state his opponent's
case in the most pointed and telling way in
which it can be put ; neither is the more quick
to encourage new truth ; neither is the more
genial, generous adversary, or has the pro-
founder horror of anything even approaching
literary or scientific want of candour; both

display the same inimitable power of putting

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Essays on Life

their opinions forward in the way that shall
best ensure their acceptance ; both are equally
unrivalled in the tact that tells them when
silence will be golden, and when on the other
hand a whole volume of facts may be advan-
tageously brought forward. Less than the
foregoing tribute both to Messrs. Darwin and
Wallace I will not, and more I cannot pay.

Let us now turn to the most authoritative
exponent of latter-day evolution — I mean
to Mr. Wallace, whose work, entitled ''Dar-
winism," though it should have been entitled
" Wallaceism," is still so far Darwinistic that
it develops the teaching of Mr. Darwin
in the direction given to it by Mr. Darwin
himself — so far, indeed, as this can be ascer-
tained at all — and not in that of Lamarck.
Mr. Wallace tells us, on the first page of his
preface, that he has no intention of dealing
even in outline with the vast subject of evolu-
tion in general, and has only tried to give
such an account of the theory of natural
selection as may facilitate a clear conception
of Darwin's work. How far he has succeeded

is a point on which opinion will probably be

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divided. Those who find Mr. Darwin's works
clear will also find no difficulty in under-
standing Mr. Wallace; those, on the other
hand, who find Mr. Darwin puzzling are little
likely to be less puzzled by Mr. Wallace.
He continues : —

" The objections now made to Darwin's
theory apply solely to the particular means by
which the change of species has been brought
about, not to the fact of that change."

But "Darwin's theory" — as Mr. Wallace

has elsewhere proved that he understands —

has no reference " to the fact of that change "

— that is to say, to the fact that species have

been modified in course of descent from other

species. This is no more Mr. Darwin's theory

than it is the reader's or my own. Darwin's

theory is concerned only with " the particular

means by which the change of species has

been brought about " ; his contention being

that this is mainly due to the natural survival

of those individuals that have happened by

some accident to be born most favourably

adapted to their surroundings, or, in other

words, through accumulation in the common

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Essays on Life

course of nature of the more lucky varia-
tions that chance occasionally purveys. Mr.
Wallace's words, then, in reality amount to
this, that the objections now made to Darwin's
theory apply solely to Darwin's theory, which
is all very well as far as it goes, but might
have been more easily apprehended if he had
simply said, " There are several objections now
made to Mr. Darwin's theory."

It must be remembered that the passage
quoted above occurs on the first page of a
preface dated March 1889, when the writer
had completed his task, and was most fully
conversant with his subject. Nevertheless, it
seems indisputable either that he is still con-
fusing evolution with Mr. Darwin's theory,
or that he does not know when his sentences
have point and when they have none.

I should perhaps explain to some readers
that Mr. Darwin did not modify the main
theory put forward, first by Buffon, to whom
it indisputably belongs, and adopted from him
by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and many
other writers in the latter half of the last

century and the earlier years of the present.

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Art and Science

The early evolutionists maintained that all
existing forms of animal and vegetable life,
including man, were derived in course of de-
scent with modification from forms resembling
the lowest now known.

Mr. Darwin went as far as this, and farther
no one can go. The point at issue between
him and his predecessors involves neither the
main fact of evolution, nor yet the geometrical
ratio of increase, and the struggle for exist-
ence consequent thereon. Messrs. Darwin and
Wallace have each thrown invaluable light
upon these last two points, but BufFon, as early
as 1756, had made them the keystone of his
system. '' The movement of nature," he then
wrote, " turns on two immovable pivots : one,
the illimitable fecundity which she has given
to all species : the other, the innumerable
difficulties which reduce the results of that
fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck
followed in the same sense. They thus admit
the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr.
Darwin himself, though they do not make
use of this particular expression. The dispute
turns not upon natural selection, which is

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on Life

common to all writers on evolution, but upon
the nature and causes of the variations that
are supposed to be selected from and thus
accumulated. Are these mainly attributable
to the inherited effects of use and disuse,
supplemented by occasional sports and happy
accidents ? Or are they mainly due to sports
and happy accidents, supplemented by occa-
sional inherited effects of use and disuse ?

The Lamarckian system has all along been
maintained by Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, in
his " Principles of Biology," pubUshed in 1865,
showed how impossible it was that accidental
variations should accumulate at all. I am not
sure how far Mr. Spencer would consent to
being called a Lamarckian pure and simple,
nor yet how far it is strictly accurate to call
him one ; nevertheless, I can see no important
difference in the main positions taken by him
and by Lamarck.

The question at issue between the Lamarck-
ians, supported by Mr. Spencer and a growing
band of those who have risen in rebellion
against the Charles-Darwinian system on the

one hand, and Messrs. Darwin and Wallace

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Art and Science

with the greater number of our more promi-
nent biologists on the other, involves the very-
existence of evolution as a workable theory.
For it is plain that what Nature can be sup-
posed able to do by way of choice must
depend on the supply of the variations from
which she is supposed to choose. She cannot
take what is not offered to her ; and so again
she cannot be supposed able to accumulate
unless what is gained in one direction in one
generation, or series of generations, is little
likely to be lost in those that presently suc-
ceed. Now variations ascribed mainly to use
and disuse can be supposed capable of being
accumulated, for use and disuse are fairly
constant for long periods among the indi-
viduals of the same species, and often over
large areas ; moreover, conditions of existence
involving changes of habit, and thus of organi-
sation, come for the most part gradually ; so
that time is given during which the organism
can endeavour to adapt itself in the requisite
respects, instead of being shocked out of exist-
ence by too sudden change. Variations, on
the other hand, that are ascribed to mere

241 Q

Essays on Life

chance cannot be supposed as likely to be
accumulated, for chance is notoriously incon-
stant, and would not purvey the variations in
sufficiently unbroken succession, or in a suffi-
cient number of individuals, modified similarly
in all the necessary correlations at the same
time and place to admit of their being accu-
mulated. It is vital therefore to the theory
of evolution, as was early pointed out by the
late Professor Fleeming Jenkin and by Mr,
Herbert Spencer, that variations should be
supposed to have a definite and persistent
principle underlying them, which shall tend
to engender similar and simultaneous modifi-
cation, however small, in the vast majority of
individuals composing any species. The exist-
ence of such a principle and its permanence is
the only thing that can be supposed capable
of acting as rudder and compass to the accu-
mulation of variations, and of making it hold
steadily on one course for each species, till
eventually many havens, far remote from one
another, are safely reached.

It is obvious that the having fatally im-
paired the theory of his predecessors could

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Art and Science

not warrant Mr. Darwin in claiming, as he
most fatuously did, the theory of evolution.
That he is still generally believed to have
been the originator of this theory is due to
the fact that he claimed it, and that a power-
ful literary backing at once came forward to
support him. It seems at first sight improb-
able that those who too zealously urged his
claims were unaware that so much had been
written on the subject, but when we find even
Mr. Wallace himself as profoundly ignorant
on this subject as he still either is, or affects
to be, there is no limit assignable to the
ignorance or affected ignorance of the kind
of biologists who would write reviews in lead-
ing journals thirty years ago. Mr. Wallace
writes : —

"A few great naturalists, struck by the
very slight difference between many of these
species, and the numerous links that exist
between the most different forms of animals
and plants, and also observing that a great
many species do vary considerably in their
forms, colours and habits, conceived the idea

that they might be all produced one from the

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Essays on Life

other. The most eminent of these writers
was a great French naturaUst, Lamarck, who
pubUshed an elaborate work, the Philosophie
Zoologique, in which he endeavoured to prove
that all animals whatever are descended from
other species of animals. He attributed the
change of species chiefly to the effect of
changes in the conditions of life — such as
climate, food, &c. ; and especially to the de-
sires and efforts of the animals themselves to
improve their condition, leading to a modifi-
cation of form or size in certain parts, owing
to the well-known physiological law that all
organs are strengthened by constant use, while
they are weakened or even completely lost by
disuse. . . .

"The only other important work dealing
with the question was the celebrated 'Vestiges
of Creation,' published anonymously, but now
acknowledged to have been written by the late
Robert Chambers."

None are so blind as those who will not see,
and it would be waste of time to argue with
the invincible ignorance of one who thinks

Lamarck and Buffbn conceived that all species

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Art and Science

were produced from one another, more especi-
ally as I have already dealt at some length
with the early evolutionists in my work,
"Evolution, Old and New," first published
ten years ago, and not, so far as I am aware,
detected in serious error or omission. If, how-
ever, Mr. Wallace still thinks it safe to pre-
sume so far on the ignorance of his readers as
to say that the only two important works on
evolution before Mr. Darwin's were Lamarck's
Philosophie Zoologique and the "Vestiges of
Creation," how fathomable is the ignorance of
the average reviewer likely to have been thirty
years ago, when the " Origin of Species " was
first published? Mr. Darwin claimed evolu-
tion as his own theory. Of course, he would
not claim it if he had no right to it. Then by
all means give him the credit of it. This was
the most natural view to take, and it was
generally taken. It was not, moreover, sur-
prising that people failed to appreciate all the
niceties of Mr. Darwin's " distinctive feature "
which, whether distinctive or no, was assuredly
not distinct, and was never frankly contrasted
with the older view, as it would have been by

245

Essays on Life

one who wished it to be understood and judged
upon its merits. It was in consequence of
this omission that people failed to note how
fast and loose Mr. Darwin played with his
distinctive feature, and how readily he dropped
it on occasion.

It may be said that the question of what
was thought by the predecessors of Mr. Darwin
is, after all, personal, and of no interest to the
general public, comparable to that of the main
issue — whether we are to accept evolution or
not. Granted that BuiFon, Erasmus Darwin,
and Lamarck bore the burden and heat of the
day before Mr. Charles Darwin was born, they
did not bring people round to their opinion,
whereas Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace did,
and the public cannot be expected to look
beyond this broad and indisputable fact.

The answer to this is, that the theory which
Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have persuaded
the public to accept is demonstrably false, and
that the opponents of evolution are certain
in the end to triumph over it. Paley, in his
"Natural Theology," long since brought for-
ward far too much evidence of design in animal

246

Art and Science

organisation to allow of our setting down its
marvels to the accumulations of fortunate ac-
cident, undirected by will, effort and intelli-
gence. Those who examine the main facts
of animal and vegetable organisation without
bias will, no doubt, ere long conclude that all
animals and vegetables are derived ultimately
from unicellular organisms, but they will not
less readily perceive that the evolution of
species without the concomitance and direc-
tion of mind and effort is as inconceivable as
is the independent creation of every individual
species. The two facts, evolution and design,
are equally patent to plain people. There is
no escaping from either. According to Messrs.
Darwin and Wallace, we may have evolution,
but are on no account to have it as mainly
due to intelligent effort, guided by ever higher
and higher range of sensations, perceptions,
and ideas. We are to set it down to the
shuffling of cards, or the throwing of dice
without the play, and this will never stand.

According to the older men, cards did in-
deed count for much, but play counted for

more. They denied the teleology of the time

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Essays on Life

— that is to say, the teleology that saw all
adaptation to surroundings as part of a plan
devised long ages since by a quasi-anthropo-
morphic being who schemed everything out
much as a man would do, but on an infinitely
vaster scale. This conception they found re-
pugnant alike to intelligence and conscience,
but, though they do not seem to have per-
ceived it, they left the door open for a design
more true and more demonstrable than that
which they excluded. By making their varia-
tions mainly due to effort and intelligence,
they made organic development run on all-
fours with human progress, and with inven-
tions which we have watched growing up from
small beginnings. They made the develop-
ment of man from the amoeba part and parcel
of the story that may be read, though on an
infinitely smaller scale, in the development of
our most powerful marine engines from the
common kettle, or of our finest microscopes
from the dew-drop.

The development of the steam-engine and
the microscope is due to intelligence and

design, which did indeed utilise chance sug-

248

Art and Science

gestions, but which improved on these, and
directed each step of their accumulation,
though never foreseeing more than a step or
two ahead, and often not so much as this.
The fact, as I have elsewhere urged, that the
man who made the first kettle did not foresee
the engines of the Great Eastern, or that he
who first noted the magnifying power of the
dew-drop had no conception of our pre-
sent microscopes — the very limited amount,
in fact, of design and intelligence that was
called into play at any one point — ^this does
not make us deny that the steam-engine and
microscope owe their development to design.
If each step of the road was designed, the
whole journey was designed, though the par-
ticular end was not designed when the journey
was begun. And so is it, according to the
older view of evolution, with the development
of those living organs, or machines, that are
born with us, as part of the perambulating
carpenter's chest we call our bodies. The
older view gives us our design, and gives us
our evolution too. If it refuses to see a quasi-
anthropomorphic God modelling each species

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Essays on Life

from without as a potter models clay, it gives
us God as vivifying and indwelling in all His
creatures — He in them, and they in Him. If
it refuses to see God outside the universe, it
equally refuses to see any part of the universe
as outside God. If it makes the universe the
body of God, it also makes God the soul of
the universe. The question at issue, then,
between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin
and the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not
a personal one, nor anything like a personal
one. It not only involves the existence of
evolution, but it affects the view we take of
life and things in an endless variety of most
interesting and important ways. It is im-
perative, therefore, on those who take any
interest in these matters, to place side by side
in the clearest contrast the views of those who
refer the evolution of species mainly to ac-
cumulation of variations that have no other
inception than chance, and of that older
school which makes design perceive and de-
velop still further the goods that chance pro-
vides.

But over and above this, which would be in

250

Art and Science

itself sufficient, the historical mode of study-
ing any question is the only one which will
enable us to comprehend it effectually. The
personal element cannot be eliminated from
the consideration of works written by living
persons for living persons. We want to know
who is who — whom we can depend upon to
have no other end than the making things
clear to himself and his readers, and whom we
should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on
which he is more intent than on the further-
ing of our better understanding. We want to
know who is doing his best to help us, and
who is only trying to make us help him, or to
bolster up the system in which his interests
are vested. There is nothing that will throw
more light upon these points than the way in
which a man behaves towards those who have
worked in the same field with himself, and,
again, than his style. A man's style, as
Buffon long since said, is the man himself.
By style, I do not, of course, mean grammar
or rhetoric, but that style of which BufFon
again said that it is like happiness, and vient

de la douceur de Tame. When we find a

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Essays on Life

man concealing worse than nullity of meaning
under sentences that sound plausibly enough,
we should distrust him much as we should
a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to
steal our watch. We often cannot judge of
the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves,
but we most of us know enough of human
nature to be able to tell a good witness from
a bad one.

However this may be, and whatever we
may think of judging systems by the direct-
ness or indirectness of those who advance
them, biologists, having committed themselves
too rashly, would have been more than human
if they had not shown some pique towards
those who dared to say, first, that the theory
of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace was unwork-
able ; and secondly, that even though it were
workable it would not justify either of them
in claiming evolution. When biologists show
pique at all they generally show a good deal
of pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned
Mr. Spencer's objection above referred to with
a persistency more unanimous and obstinate

than I ever remember to have seen displayed

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Art and Science

even by professional truth-seekers. I find no
rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin himself,
between 1865 when it was first put forward,
and 1882 when Mr. Darwin died. It has
been similarly " ostrichised " by all the lead-
ing apologists of Darwinism, so far at least
as I have been able to observe, and I have
followed the matter closely for many years.
Mr. Spencer has repeated and amplified it in
his recent work, "The Factors of Organic
Evolution," but it still remains without so
much as an attempt at serious answer, for
the perfunctory and illusory remarks of Mr.
Wallace at the end of his " Darwinism " can-
not be counted as such. The best proof of its
irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin, though
maintaining silence in respect to it, retreated
from his original position in the direction that
would most obviate Mr. Spencer's objection.

Yet this objection has been repeatedly
urged by the more prominent anti-Charles-
Darwinian authorities, and there is no sign
that the British public is becoming less
rigorous in requiring people either to reply
to objections repeatedly urged by men of

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Essays on Life

even moderate weight, or to let judgment
go by default. As regards Mr. Darwin's
claim to the theory of evolution generally,
Darwinians are beginning now to perceive
that this cannot be admitted, and either say
with some hardihood that Mr. Darwin never
claimed it, or after a few saving clauses to
the effect that this theory refers only to the
particular means by which evolution has been
brought about, imply forthwith thereafter
none the less that evolution is Mr. Darwin's
theory. Mr. Wallace has done this repeatedly
in his recent " Darwinism." Indeed, I should
be by no means sure that on the first page of
his preface, in the passage about '' Darwin's
theory," which I have already somewhat
severely criticised, he was not intending
evolution by "Darwin's theory," if in his
preceding paragraph he had not so clearly
shown that he knew evolution to be a theory
of greatly older date than Mr. Darwin's.

The history of science — well exemplified
by that of the development theory — is the
history of eminent men who have fought

against light and have been worsted. The

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tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their
accumulation of fortuitous variations is on
a par with the like tenacity shown by the
illustrious Cuvier, who did his best to crush
evolution altogether. It always has been
thus, and always will be ; nor is it desirable
in the interests of Truth herself that it should
be otherwise. Truth is like money — lightly
come, lightly go ; and if she cannot hold her
own against even gross misrepresentation, she
is herself not worth holding. Misrepresenta-
tion in the long run makes Truth as much as
it mars her; hence our law courts do not
think it desirable that pleaders should speak
their bond fide opinions, much less that they
should profess to do so. Rather let each side
hoodwink judge and jury as best it can, and
let truth flash out from collision of defence
and accusation. When either side will not
collide, it is an axiom of controversy that
it desires to prevent the truth from being
elicited.

Let us now note the courses forced upon
biologists by the difficulties of Mr. Darwin's
distinctive feature. Mr. Darwin and Mr.

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Wallace, as is well known, brought the feature
forward simultaneously and independently of
one another, but Mr. Wallace always believed
in it more firmly than Mr. Darwin did. Mr.
Darwin as a young man did not believe in it.
He wrote before 1839, " Nature, by making
habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary,
has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and
productions of his country," ^ a sentence than
which nothing can coincide more fully with
the older view that use and disuse were the
main purveyors of variations, or conflict more
fatally with his own subsequent distinctive
feature. Moreover, as T showed in my last
work on evolution,^ in the peroration to his
" Origin of Species," he discarded his acci-
dental variations altogether, and fell back on
the older theory, so that the body of the
" Origin of Species " supports one theory, and
the peroration another that differs from it
toto coelo. Finally, in his later editions, he
retreated indefinitely from his original posi-

1 "Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle,'' iii. p. 237.

2 '^ Luckj or Cunning,, as the main means of Organic Modi-
fication?" (Longmans)^ pp. 179_, 180.

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tion, edging always more and more continually
towards the theory of his grandfather and
Lamarck. These facts convince me that he
was at no time a thorough-going Darwinian,
but was throughout an unconscious Lam-
arckian, though ever anxious to conceal
the fact alike from himself and from his
readers.

Not so with Mr. Wallace, who was both
more outspoken in the first instance, and who
has persevered along the path of Wallaceism
just as Mr. Darwin with greater sagacity was
ever on the retreat from Darwinism. Mr.
Wallace's profounder faith led him in the
outset to place his theory in fuller daylight
than Mr. Darwin was inclined to do. Mr.
Darwin just waved Lamarck aside, and said
as little about him as he could, while in his
earlier editions Erasmus Darwin and Buffon
were not so much as named. Mr. Wallace,
on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian
spectre, and declared it exorcised. He said
the Lamarckian hypothesis was '^ quite un-
necessary." The giraffe did not "acquire its
long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of

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the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretch-
ing its neck for this purpose, but because any
varieties which occurred among its antitypes
with a longer neck than usual at once secured
a fresh range of pasture over the same ground
as their shorter-necked companions, and on
the first scarcity of food were thus enabled
to outlive them." ^

" Which occurred " is evidently " which
happened to occur " by some chance or acci-
dent unconnected with use and disuse. The
word " accident " is never used, but Mr.
Wallace must be credited with this instance
of a desire to give his readers a chance of
perceiving that according to his distinctive
feature evolution is an affair of luck, rather
than of cunning. Whether his readers actu-
ally did understand this as clearly as Mr.
Wallace doubtless desired that they should,
and whether greater development at this point
would not have helped them to fuller appre-
hension, we need not now inquire. What
was gained in distinctness might have been

^ Journals of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Zoology^
vol. iii.), 1859, p. 61.

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Art and Science

lost in distinctiveness, and after all he did
technically put us upon our guard.

Nevertheless he too at a pinch takes refuge
in Lamarckism. In relation to the manner in
which the eyes of soles, turbots, and other
flat-fish travel round the head so as to become
in the end unsymmetrically placed, he says : —

"The eyes of these fish are curiously dis-
torted in order that both eyes may be upon
the upper side, where alone they would be of
any use. . . . Now if we suppose this process,
which in the young is completed in a few days
or weeks, to have been spread over thousands
of generations during the development of these
fish, those usually surviving whose eyes retained
more and more of the position into which the
young fish tried to twist them [italics mine],
the change becomes intelligible."^ When it
was said by Professor Ray Lankester — who
knows as well as most people what Lamarck
taught — that this was "flat Lamarckism,"
Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was the survival
of the modified individuals that did it all, not
the efforts of the young fish to twist their

1 '^ Darwinism" (Macmillan^ 1889), p. 129.
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Essays on Life

eyes, and the transmission to descendants of
the effects of those efforts. But this, as I
said in my book, " Evolution, Old and New," ^
is like saying that horses are swift runners, not
by reason of the causes, whatever they were,
that occasioned the direct line of their pro-
genitors to vary towards ever greater and
greater swiftness, but because their more
slow-going uncles and aunts go away. Plain
people will prefer to say that the main cause
of any accumulation of favourable modifica-
tions consists rather in that which brings about
the initial variations, and in the fact that these
can be inherited at all, than in the fact that
the unmodified individuals were not successful.
People do not become rich because the poor
in large numbers go away, but because they
have been lucky, or provident, or more
commonly both. If they would keep their
wealth when they have made it they must
exclude luck thenceforth to the utmost of
their power, and their children must follow
their example, or they will soon lose their
money. The fact that the weaker go to the

1 Longmans, 1890, p. 376.
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Art and Science

wall does not bring about the greater strength
of the stronger ; it is the consequence of this
last and not the cause — unless, indeed, it be
contended that a knowledge that the weak go
to the wall stimulates the strong to exertions
which they would not otherwise so make, and
that these exertions produce inheritable modi-
fications. Even in this case, however, it would
be the exertions, or use and disuse, that would
be the main agents in the modification. But it
is not often that Mr. Wallace thus backslides.
His present position is that acquired (as dis-
tinguished from congenital) modifications are
not inherited at all. He does not indeed put
his faith prominently forward and pin himself
to it as plainly as could be wished, but under
the heading, " The Non-Heredity of Acquired
Characters," he writes a,s follows on p. 440 of
his recent work in reference to Professor
Weismann's Theory of Heredity : —

" Certain observations on the embryology of
the lower animals are held to afford direct
proof of this theory of heredity, but they are
too technical to be made clear to ordinary

readers. A logical result of the theory is the

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Essays on Life

impossibility of the transmission of acquired
characters, since the molecular structure of the
germ-plasm is already determined within the
embryo ; and Weismann holds that there are
no facts which really prove that acquired
characters can be inherited, although their
inheritance has, by most writers, been con-
sidered so probable as hardly to stand in need
of direct proof.

" We have already seen in the earlier part
of this chapter that many instances of change,
imputed to the inheritance of acquired varia-
tions, are really cases of selection."

And the rest of the remarks tend to convey
the impression that Mr. Wallace adopts Pro-
fessor Weismann's view, but, curiously enough,
though I have gone through Mr. Wallace's
book with a special view to this particular
point, I have not been able to find him
definitely committing himself either to the
assertion that acquired modifications never
are inherited, or that they sometimes are so.
It is abundantly laid down that Mr. Darwin
laid too much stress on use and disuse, and a

residuary impression is left that Mr. Wallace

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Art and Science

is endorsing Professor Weismann's view, but
I have found it impossible to collect any-
thing that enables me to define his position
confidently in this respect.

This is natural enough, for Mr. Wallace has
entitled his book " Darwinism," and a work
denying that use and disuse produced any
effect could not conceivably be called Dar-
winism. Mr. Herbert Spencer has recently
collected many passages from '' The Origin of
Species " and from " Animals and Plants under
Domestication," ^ which show how largely, after
all, use and disuse entered into Mr. Darwin's
system, and we know that in his later years he
attached still more importance to them. It
was out of the question, therefore, that Mr.
Wallace should categorically deny that their
effects were inheritable. On the other hand,
the temptation to adopt Professor Weismann's
view must have been overwhelming to one
who had been already inclined to minimise
the effects of use and disuse. On the whole,
one does not see what Mr. Wallace could do,
other than what he has done — unless, of course,

1 See Nature, March 6, 1890.
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Essays on Life

he changed his title, or had been no longer
Mr. Wallace.

Besides, thanks to the works of Mr. Spencer,
Professor Mivart, Professor Semper, and very
many others, there has for some time been a
growing perception that the Darwinism of
Charles Darwin was doomed. Use and dis-
use must either do even more than is officially
recognised in Mr. Darwin's later concessions,
or they must do a great deal less. If they
can do as much as Mr. Darwin himself said
they did, why should they not do more ? Why
stop where Mr. Darwin did ? And again,
where in the name of all that is reasonable did
he really stop ? He drew no line, and on what
principle can we say that so much is possible
as effect of use and disuse, but so much more
impossible? If, as Mr. Darwin contended,
disuse can so far reduce an organ as to render
it rudimentary, and in many cases get rid of it
altogether, why cannot use create as much as
disuse can destroy, provided it has anything,
no matter how low in structure, to begin
with ? Let us know where we stand. If it is

admitted that use and disuse can do a good

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Art and Science

deal, what does a good deal mean ? And what
is the proportion between the shares attribut-
able to use and disuse and to natural selec-
tion respectively ? If we cannot be told with
absolute precision, let us at any rate have
something more definite than the statement
that natural selection is " the most important
means of modification."

Mr. Darwin gave us no help in this respect ;
and worse than this, he contradicted himself
so flatly as to show that he had very little
definite idea upon the subject at all. Thus
in respect to the winglessness of the Madeira
beetles he wrote : —

" In some cases we might easily put down
to disuse modifications of structure, which
are wholly or mainly due to natural selection.
Mr. WoUaston has discovered the remarkable
fact that 200 beetles, out of the 550 species
(but more are now known) inhabiting Madeira,
are so far deficient in wings that they cannot
fly ; and that of the 29 endemic genera no less
than 23 have all their species in this condition !
Several facts, — namely, that beetles in many

parts of the world are frequently blown out to

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Essays on Life

sea and perish ; that the beetles in Madeira, as
observed by Mr. Wollaston, lie much concealed
until the wind lulls and the sun shines ; that
the proportion of wingless beetles is larger on
the exposed Desertas than in Madeira itself;
and especially the extraordinary fact, so strongly
insisted on by Mr. WoUaston, that certain large
groups of beetles, elsewhere excessively nume-
rous, which absolutely require the use of their
wings are here almost entirely absent ; — these
several considerations make me believe that
the wingless condition of so many Madeira
beetles is mainly due to the action of natural
selection, combined probably with disuse [italics
mine]. For during many successive genera-
tions each individual beetle which flew least,
either from its wings having been ever so
little less perfectly developed or from indo-
lent habit, will have had the best chance of
surviving, from not being blown out to sea ;
and, on the other hand, those beetles which
most readily took to flight would oftenest
have been blown to sea, and thus de-
stroyed." ^

^ ^^ Origin of Species," sixth edition, 1888^ vol. i. p. 168.

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Art and Science

We should like to know, first, somewhere
about how much disuse was able to do after
all, and moreover why, if it can do anything
at all, it should not be able to do all. Mr.
Darwin says : " Any change in structure and
function which can be effected by small stages
is within the power of natural selection."
"And why not," we ask, "within the power
of use and disuse?" Moreover, on a later
page we find Mr. Darwin saying : —

" It appears probable that disuse has been the
main agent in rendering organs rudimentary
[italics mine]. It would at first lead by slow
steps to the more and more complete reduction
of a part, until at last it has become rudimentary
— as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabit-
ing dark caverns, and of the wings of birds
inhabiting oceanic islands, which have seldom
been forced by beasts of prey to take flight,
and have ultimately lost the power of flying.
Again, an organ, useful under certain condi-
tions, might become injurious under others, as
with the wings of beetles living on small and
exposed islands ; and in this case natural selec-
tion will have aided in reducing the organ,

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Essays on Life

until it was rendered harmless and rudimen-
tary [italics mine]." ^

So that just as an undefined amount of use
and disuse was introduced on the earlier page
to supplement the effects of natural selection
in respect of the wings of beetles on small and
exposed islands, we have here an undefined
amount of natural selection introduced to
supplement the effects of use and disuse in
respect of the identical phenomena. In the
one passage we find that natural selection has
been the main agent in reducing the wings,
though use and disuse have had an appreciable
share in the result ; in the other, it is use and
disuse that have been the main agents, though
an appreciable share in the result must be
ascribed to natural selection.

Besides, who has seen the uncles and aunts
going away with the uniformity that is neces-
sary for Mr. Darwin's contention ? We know
that birds and insects do often get blown out
to sea and perish, but in order to establish
Mr. Darwin's position we want the evidence
of those who watched the reduction of the

1 ^^ Origin of Species/* sixth edition^ 1888^ vol. ii. p. 261.
268

Art and Science

wings during the many generations in the
course of which it was being effected, and
who can testify that all, or the overwhelming
majority, of the beetles born with fairly well-
developed wings got blown out to sea, while
those alone survived whose wings were con-
genitally degenerate. Who saw them go, or
can point to analogous cases so conclusive as
to compel assent from any equitable thinker ?
Darwinians of the stamp of Mr. Thiselton
Dyer, Professor Ray Lankester, or Mr. Ro-
manes, insist on their pound of flesh in the
matter of irrefragable demonstration. They
complain of us for not bringing forward some
one who has been able to detect the move-
ment of the hour-hand of a watch during a
second of time, and when we fail to do so,
declare triumphantly that we have no evidence
that there is any connection between the beat-
ing of a second and the movement of the
hour-hand. When we say that rain comes
from the condensation of moisture in the
atmosphere, they demand of us a rain-drop
from moisture not yet condensed. If they

stickle for proof and cavil on the ninth part

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Essays on Life

of a hair, as they do when we bring forward
what we deem excellent instances of the
transmission of an acquired characteristic,
why may not we, too, demand at any rate
some evidence that the unmodified beetles
actually did always, or nearly always, get
blown out to sea, during the reduction above
referred to, and that it is to this fact, and not
to the masterly inactivity of their fathers and
mothers, that the Madeira beetles owe their
winglessness ? If we began stickling for proof
in this way, our opponents would not be long
in letting us know that absolute proof is un-
attainable on any subject, that reasonable
presumption is our highest certainty, and that
crying out for too much evidence is as bad as
accepting too little. Truth is like a photo-
graphic sensitised plate, which is equally ruined
by over and by under exposure, and the just
exposure for which can never be absolutely
determined.

Surely if disuse can be credited with the
vast powers involved in Mr. Darwin's state-
ment that it has probably "been the main

agent in rendering organs rudimentary," no

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Art and Science

limits are assignable to the accumulated effects
of habit, provided the effects of habit, or
use and disuse, are supposed, as Mr. Darwin
supposed them, to be inheritable at all. Dar-
winians have at length woke up to the
dilemma in which they are placed by the
manner in which Mr. Darwin tried to sit on
the two stools of use and disuse, and natural
selection of accidental variations, at the same
time. The knell of Charles - Darwinism is
rung in Mr. Wallace's present book, and in
the general perception on the part of biologists
that we must either assign to use and disuse
such a predominant share in modification as
to make it the feature most proper to be in-
sisted on, or deny that the modifications,
whether of mind or body, acquired during a
single lifetime, are ever transmitted at all.
If they can be inherited at all, they can be
accumulated. If they can be accumulated at
all, they can be so, for anything that appears
to the contrary, to the extent of the specific
and generic differences with which we are sur-
rounded. The only thing to do is to pluck

them out root and branch : they are as a

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Essays on Life

cancer which, if the smallest fibre be left un-
excised, will grow again, and kill any system
on to which it is allowed to fasten. Mr.
Wallace, therefore, may well be excused if he
casts longing eyes towards Weismannism.

And what was Mr. Darwin's system ? Who
can make head or tail of the inextricable
muddle in which he left it ? The " Origin
of Species " in its latest shape is the reduction
of hedging to an absurdity. How did Mr.
Darwin himself leave it in the last chapter of
the last edition of the '' Origin of Species " ?
He wrote : —

" I have now recapitulated the facts and con-
siderations which have thoroughly convinced
me that species have been modified during a
long course of descent. This has been effected
chiefly through the natural selection of numer-
ous, successive, slight, favourable variations ;
aided in an important manner by the inherited
effects of the use and disuse of parts, and in
an unimportant manner — ^that is, in relation
to adaptive structures whether past or present
— by the direct action of external conditions,

and by variations which seem to us in our

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Art and Science

ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears
that I formerly underrated the frequency and
value of these latter forms of variation, as lead-
ing to permanent modifications of structure
independently of natural selection."

The "numerous, successive, slight, favour-
able variations " above referred to are intended
to be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous. It
is the essence of Mr. Darwin's theory that
this should be so. Mr. Darwin's solemn state-
ment, therefore, of his theory, after he had
done his best or his worst with it, is, when
stripped of surplusage, as follows : —

"The modification of species has been
mainly effected by accumulation of spon-
taneous variations; it has been aided in an
important manner by accumulation of varia-
tions due to use and disuse, and in an unim-
portant manner by spontaneous variations; I
do not even now think that spontaneous varia-
tions have been very important, but I used once
to think them less important than I do now."

It is a discouraging symptom of the age
that such a system should have been so long
belauded, and it is a sign of returning intelli-

273 s

Essays on Life

gence that even he who has been more espe-
cially the alter ego of Mr. Darwin should have
felt constrained to close the chapter of Charles-
Darwinism as a living theory, and relegate it
to the important but not very creditable place
in history which it must henceforth occupy.
It is astonishing, however, that Mr. Wallace
should have quoted the extract from the
" Origin of Species " just given, as he has done
on p. 412 of his " Darwinism," without betray-
ing any sign that he has caught its driftlessness
— for drift, other than a desire to hedge, it
assuredly has not got. The battle now turns
on the question whether modifications of either
structure or instinct due to use or disuse are
ever inherited, or whether they are not. Can
the effects of habit be transmitted to progeny
at all ? We know that more usually they are
not transmitted to any perceptible extent, but
we believe also that occasionally, and indeed
not infrequently, they are inherited and even
intensified. What are our grounds for this
opinion ? It will be my object to put these
forward in the following number of the Uni-
versal Review.

274

THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM^

PART II

At the close of my article in last month's
number of the Universal Review, I said I
would in this month's issue show why the
opponents of Charles-Darwinism believe the
effects of habits acquired during the lifetime
of a parent to produce an eifect on their sub-

^ Mr. J. T. Cunningham, of the Marine Biological Laboratory,
Plymouth^ has called my attention to the fact that I have as-
cribed to Professor Ray Lankester a criticism on Mr. Wallace's
remarks upon the eyes of certain flat-fish, which Professor Ray
Lankester was_, in reality, only adopting — with full acknow-
ledgment— from Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham has left
it to me whether to correct my omission publicly or not, but he
would so plainly prefer my doing so that I consider myself
bound to insert this note. Curiously enough I find that in my
book ^^ Evolution Old and New," I gave what Lamarck actually
said upon the eyes of flat-fish, and having been led to return to
the subject, I may as well quote his words. He wrote : —

'' Need — always occasioned by the circumstances in which an
animal is placed, and followed by sustained efi*orts at gratification
— can not only modify an organ — that is to say, augment or
reduce it — but can change its position when the case requires
its removal.

^^ Ocean fishes have occasion to see what is on either side of
275

Essays on Life

sequent offspring, in spite of the fact that we
can rarely find the effect in any one genera-
tion, or even in several, sufficiently marked to
arrest our attention.

I will now show that offspring can be, and
not very infrequently is, affected by occur-
rences that have produced a deep impression
on the parent organism — the effect produced
on the offspring being such as leaves no doubt
that it is to be connected with the impression
produced on the parent. Having thus estab-
lished the general proposition, I will proceed
to the more particular one — that habits, in-
volving use and disuse of special organs, with

them, and have their eyes accordingly placed on either side of
their head. Some fishes^ however, have their abode near coasts
on submarine banks and inclinations, and are thus forced to
flatten themselves as much as possible in order to get as near
as they can to the shore. In this situation they receive more
light from above than from below, and find it necessary to pay
attention to whatever happens to be above them ; this need has
involved the displacement of their eyes^ which now take the
remarkable position which we observe in the case of soles^ tur-
bots, plaice, &c. The transfer of position is not even yet com-
plete in the case of these fishes, and the eyes are not, therefore,
symmetrically placed ; but they are so with the skate, whose
head and whole body are equally disposed on either side a longi-
tudinal section. Hence the eyes of this fish are placed sym-
metrically upon the uppermost side." — Philosophie Zoologique,
torn, i., pp. 250, 251. Edition C. Martins. Paris, 1873.

276

Art and Science

the modifications of structure thereby en-
gendered, produce also an effect upon offspring,
which, though seldom perceptible as regards
structure in a single, or even in several genera-
tions, is nevertheless capable of being accumu-
lated in successive generations till it amounts
to specific and generic difference. I have
found the first point as much as I can treat
within the limits of this present article, and
will avail myself of the hospitality of the
Universal Review next month to deal with
the second.

The proposition which I have to defend is
one which no one till recently would have
questioned, and even now, those who look
most askance at it do not venture to dispute
it unreservedly; they every now and then
admit it as conceivable, and even in some cases
probable ; nevertheless they seek to minimise
it, and to make out that there is little or no
connection between the great mass of the cells
of which the body is composed, and those
cells that are alone capable of reproducing
the entire organism. The tendency is to

assign to these last a life of their own, apart

277

Essays on Life

from, and unconnected with that of the other
cells of the body, and to cheapen all evidence
that tends to prove any response on their part
to the past history of the individual, and hence
ultimately of the race.

Professor Weismann is the foremost ex-
ponent of those who take this line. He has
naturally been welcomed by English Charles-
Darwinians ; for if his view can be sustained,
then it can be contended that use and disuse
produce no transmissible effect, and the ground
is cut from under Lamarck's feet ; if, on the
other hand, his view is unfounded, the La-
marckian reaction, already strong, will gain
still further strength. The issue, therefore,
is important, and is being fiercely contested
by those who have invested their all of repu-
tation for discernment in Charles-Darwinian
securities.

Professor Weismann's theory is, that at
every new birth a part of the substance which
proceeds from parents and which goes to form
the new embryo is not used up in forming the
new animal, but remains apart to generate the

germ-cells — or perhaps I should say ''germ-

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Art and Science

plasm " — which the new animal itself will in
due course issue.

Contrasting the generally received view
with his own, Professor Weismann says that
according to the first of these " the organism
produces germ-cells afresh again and again,
and that it produces them entirely from its
own substance." While by the second ''the
germ-cells are no longer looked upon as the
product of the parent's body, at least as far as
their essential part — the specific germ-plasm —
is concerned ; they are rather considered as
something which is to be placed in contrast
with the tout ensemble of the cells which make
up the parent's body, and the germ-cells of
succeeding generations stand in a similar re-
lation to one another as a series of generations
of unicellular organisms arising by a continued
process of cell-division." ^

On another page he writes : —

" I believe that heredity depends upon the
fact that a small portion of the effective sub-
stance of the germ, the germ-plasm, remains
unchanged during the development of the

1 ** Essays on Heredity/' &c., Oxford, 1889, p. 171.
279

Essays on Life

ovum into an organism, and that this part of
the germ-plasm serves as a foundation from
which the germ-cells of the new organism are
produced. There is, therefore, continuity of
the germ-plasm from one generation to an-
other. One might represent the germ-plasm
by the metaphor of a long creeping root-stock
from which plants arise at intervals, these
latter representing the individuals of suc-
cessive generations."^

Mr. Wallace, who does not appear to have
read Professor Weismann's essays themselves,
but whose remarks are, no doubt, ultimately
derived from the sequel to the passage just
quoted from page 266 of Professor Weis-
mann's book, contends that the impossibility
of the transmission of acquired characters
follows as a logical result from Professor
Weismann's theory, inasmuch as the mole-
cular structure of the germ-plasm that will
go to form any succeeding generation is
already predetermined within the still un-
formed embryo of its predecessor ; " and
Weismann," continues Mr. Wallace, "holds

^ ^'^ Essays on Heredity/' &c., Oxford, 1889, p. 266.
280

Art and Science

that there are no facts which really prove
that acquired characters can be inherited,
although their inheritance has, by most
writers, been considered so probable as hardly
to stand in need of direct proof." ^

Professor Weismann, in passages too nu-
merous to quote, shows that he recognises
this necessity, and acknowledges that the non-
transmission of acquired characters " forms the
foundation of the views " set forth in his book,
p. 291.

Professor Ray Lankester does not commit
himself absolutely to this view, but lends it
support by saying {Nature, December 12,
1889): "It is hardly necessary to say that it
has never yet been shown experimentally that
anything acquired by one generation is trans-
mitted to the next (putting aside diseases)."

Mr. Romanes, writing in Nature, March 13,
1890, and opposing certain details of Professor
Weismann's theory, so far supports it as to
say that " there is the gravest possible doubt
lying against the supposition that any really
inherited decrease is due to the inherited

1 '' Darwinism/' 1889, p. 440.
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Essays on Life

effects of disuse." The ''gravest possible
doubt" should mean that Mr. Romanes re-
gards it as a moral certainty that disuse has
no transmitted effect in reducing an organ,
and it should follow that he holds use to have
no transmitted effect in its development. The
sequel, however, makes me uncertain how
far Mr. Romanes intends this, and I would
refer the reader to the article which Mr.
Romanes has just published on Weismann
in the Conteirvporary Review for this current
month.

The burden of Mr. Thiselton Dyer's con-
troversy with the Duke of Argyll (see Nature,
January 16, 1890, et seq.) was that there was
no evidence in support of the transmission of
any acquired modification. The orthodoxy of
science, therefore, must be held as giving at
any rate a provisional support to Professor
Weismann, but all of them, including even
Professor Weismann himself, shrink from
committing themselves to the opinion that
the germ-cells of any organisms remain in all
cases unaffected by the events that occur to

the other cells of the same organism, and until

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Art and Science

they do this they have knocked the bottom
out of their case.

From among the passages in which Pro-
fessor Weismann himself shows a desire to
hedge I may take the following from page 170
of his book : —

" I am also far from asserting that the
germ-plasm which, as I hold, is transmitted
as the basis of heredity from one generation
to another, is absolutely unchangeable or
totally uninfluenced by forces residing in the
organism within which it is transformed into
germ-cells. I am also compelled to admit it
as conceivable that organisms may exert a
modifying influence upon their germ -cells,
and even that such a process is to a certain
extent inevitable. The nutrition and growth
of the individual must exercise some influence
upon its germ-cells ..."

Professor Weismann does indeed go on to
say that this influence must be extremely
slight, but we do not care how slight the
changes produced may be provided they exist
and can be transmitted. On an earlier page

(p. 101) he said in regard to variations gener-

283

Essays on Life

ally that we should not expect to find them
conspicuous ; their frequency would be enough,
if they could be accumulated. The same
applies here, if stirring events that occur to
the somatic cells can produce any effect at
all on offspring. A very small effect, provided
it can be repeated and accumulated in suc-
cessive generations, is all that even the most
exacting Lamarckian will ask for.

Having now made the reader acquainted
with the position taken by the leading Charles-
Darwinian authorities, I will return to Pro-
fessor Weismann himself, who declares that
the transmission of acquired characters "at
first sight certainly seems necessary," and that
" it appears rash to attempt to dispense with
its aid." He continues : —

" Many phenomena only appear to be in-
telligible if we assume the hereditary trans-
mission of such acquired characters as the
changes which we ascribe to the use or
disuse of particular organs, or to the direct
influence of climate. Furthermore, how can
we explain instinct as hereditary habit, unless

it has gradually arisen by the accumulation,

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Art and Science

through heredity, of habits which were prac-
tised in succeeding generations ? " ^

I may say in passing that Professor Weis-
mann appears to suppose that the view of
instinct just given is part of the Charles-
Darwinian system, for on page 389 of his
book he says "that many observers had
followed Darwin in explaining them [in-
stincts] as inherited habits." This was not
Mr. Darwin's own view of the matter. He
wrote : —

" If we suppose any habitual action to
become inherited — and I think it can be
shown that this does sometimes happen —
then the resemblance between what originally
was a habit and an instinct becomes so close
as not to be distinguished. . . . But it would
be the most serious error to suppose that
the greater number of instincts have been
acquired by habit in one generation, and
then transmitted by inheritance to succeed-
ing generations. It can be clearly shown
that the most wonderful instincts with which
we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-

1 Page 83.
285

Essays on Life

bee and of many ants, could not possibly have
been thus acquired." — [" Origin of Species,"
ed., 1859, p. 209.]

Again we read: "Domestic instincts are
sometimes spoken of as actions which have
become inherited solely from long-continued
and compulsory habit, but this, I think, is
not true." — Ihid., p. 214.

Again : " I am surprised that no one has
advanced this demonstrative case of neuter
insects, against the well-known doctrine of
inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck." —
I" Origin of Species," ed. 1872, p. 233.]

I am not aware that Lamarck advanced
the doctrine that instinct is inherited habit,
but he may have done so in some work that
I have not seen.

It is true, as I have more than once pointed
out, that in the later editions of the " Origin
of Species " it is no longer " the viost serious "
error to refer instincts generally to inherited
habit, but it still remains "a serious error,"
and this slight relaxation of severity does not
warrant Professor Weismann in ascribing to
Mr. Darwin an opinion which he emphatically

286

Art and Science

condemned. His tone, however, is so off-
hand, that those who have little acquaintance
with the literature of evolution would hardly
guess that he is not much better informed on
this subject than themselves.

Returning to the inheritance of acquired
characters, Professor Weismann says that
this has never been proved either by means
of direct observation or by experiment. '' It
must be admitted," he writes, " that there are
in existence numerous descriptions of cases
which tend to prove that such mutilations as
the loss of fingers, the scars of wounds, &c.,
are inherited by the offspring, but in these
descriptions the previous history is invariably
obscure, and hence the evidence loses all
scientific value."

The experiments of M. Brown- Sequard
throw so much light upon the question at
issue that I will quote at some length from
the summary given by Mr. Darwin in his
"Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication." ^ Mr. Darwin writes : —

" With respect to the inheritance of struc-

1 Vol. i. p. 466, &c. Ed. 1885.
287

Essays on Life

tures mutilated by injuries or altered by
disease, it was until lately difficult to come
to any definite conclusion." [Then follow
several cases in which mutilations practised
for many generations are not found to be
transmitted.] " Notwithstanding," continues
Mr. Darwin, "the above several negative
cases, we now possess conclusive evidence
that the effects of operations are sometimes
inherited. Dr. Brown- Sequard gives the fol-
lowing summary of his observations on guinea-
pigs, and this summary is so important that
I will quote the whole : —

" ' 1st. Appearance of epilepsy in animals
born of parents having been rendered epileptic
by an injury to the spinal cord.

" ' 2nd. Appearance of epilepsy also in ani-
mals born of parents having been rendered
epileptic by the section of the sciatic nerve.

" ' 3rd. A change in the shape of the ear in
animals born of parents in which such a
change was the effect of a division of the
cervical sympathetic nerve.

" ' 4th. Partial closure of the eyelids in

animals born of parents in which that state

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Art and Science

of the eyelids had been caused either by the
section of the cervical sympathetic nerve or
the removal of the superior cervical ganglion.

" ' 5th. Exophthalmia in animals born of
parents in which an injury to the restiform
body had produced that protrusion of the eye-
ball. This interesting fact I have witnessed a
good many times, and I have seen the trans-
mission of the morbid state of the eye continue
through four generations. In these animals
modified by heredity, the two eyes generally
protruded, although in the parents usually
only one showed exophthalmia, the lesion
having been made in most cases only on one
of the corpora restiformia.

" ' 6th. Hgematoma and dry gangrene of the
ears in animals born of parents in which
these ear-alterations had been caused by an
injury to the restiform body near the nib of
the calamus.

" ' 7th. Absence of two toes out of the three
of the hind leg, and sometimes of the three,
in animals whose parents had eaten up their
hind-leg toes which had become anaesthetic
from a section of the sciatic nerve alone, or

289 X

Essays on Life

of that nerve and also of the crural. Some-
times, instead of complete absence of the toes,
only a part of one or two or three was
missing in the young, although in the parent
not only the toes but the whole foot was
absent (partly eaten off, partly destroyed by
inflammation, ulceration, or gangrene).

" ' 8th. Appearance of various morbid states
of the skin and hair of the neck and face in
animals born of parents having had similar
alterations in the same parts, as effects of an
injury to the sciatic nerve.'

" It should be especially observed that
Brown- Sequard has bred during thirty years
many thousand guinea-pigs from animals
which had not been operated upon, and not
one of these manifested the epileptic tendency.
Nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born with-
out toes, which was not the offspring of
parents which had gnawed off their own toes
owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided.
Of this latter fact thirteen instances were
carefully recorded, and a greater number were
seen ; yet Brown-Sequard speaks of such cases

as one of the rarer forms of inheritance. It is

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Art and Science

a still more interesting fact, ' that the sciatic
nerve in the congenitally toeless animal has
inherited the power of passing through all the
different morbid states which have occurred
in one of its parents from the time of the
division till after its reunion with the peripheric
end. It is not, therefore, simply the power
of performing an action which is inherited, but
the power of performing a whole series of
actions, in a certain order.'

" In most of the cases of inheritance re-
corded by Brown- Sequard only one of the
two parents had been operated upon and was
affected. He concludes by expressing his
belief that ' what is transmitted is the morbid
state of the nervous system,' due to the
operation performed on the parents."

Mr. Darwin proceeds to give other instances
of inherited effects of mutilations : —

" With the horse there seems hardly a
doubt that exostoses on the legs, caused
by too much travelling on hard roads, are
inherited. Blumenbach records the case of a
man who had his little finger on the right

hand almost cut off, and which in consequence

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Essays on Life

grew crooked, and his sons had the same
finger on the same hand similarly crooked.
A soldier, fifteen years before his marriage, lost
his left eye from purulent ophthalmia, and
his two sons were microphthalmic on the
same side."

The late Professor RoUeston, whose com-
petence as an observer no one is likely to
dispute, gave Mr. Darwin two cases as having
fallen under his own notice, one of a man
whose knee had been severely wounded, and
whose child was born with the same spot
marked or scarred, and the other of one who
was severely cut upon the cheek, and whose
child was born scarred in the same place.
Mr. Darwin's conclusion was that " the effects
of injuries, especially when followed by disease,
or perhaps exclusively when thus followed, are
occasionally inherited."

Let us now see what Professor Weismann
has to say against this. He writes : —

'' The only cases worthy of discussion are
the well-known experiments upon guinea-pigs
conducted by the French physiologist, Brown-

Sequard. But the explanation of his results

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Art and Science

is, in my opinion, open to discussion. In
these cases we have to do with the apparent
transmission of artificially produced malforma-
tions. . . . All these effects were said to be
transmitted to descendants as far as the fifth
or sixth generation.

'' But we must inquire whether these cases
are really due to heredity, and not to simple
infection. In the case of epilepsy, at any rate,
it is easy to imagine that the passage of some
specific organism through the reproductive
cells may take place, as in the case of syphilis.
We are, however, entirely ignorant of the
nature of the former disease. This suggested
explanation may not perhaps apply to the other
cases ; but we must remember that animals
which have been subjected to such severe
operations upon the nervous system have
sustained a great shock, and if they are
capable of breeding, it is only probable that
they will produce weak descendants, and such
as are easily affected by disease. Such a
result does not, however, explain why the
offspring should suffer from the same disease

as that which was artificially induced in the

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Essays on Life

parents. But this does not appear to have
been by any means invariably the case.
Brown-Sequard himself says : ' The changes
in the eye of the offspring were of a very
variable nature, and were only occasionally ex-
actly similar to those observed in the parents.'

" There is no doubt, however, that these
experiments demand careful consideration,
but before they can claim scientific recogni-
tion, they must be subjected to rigid criticism
as to the precautions taken, the nature and
number of the control experiments, &c.

"Up to the present time such necessary
conditions have not been sufficiently observed.
The recent experiments themselves are only
described in short preliminary notices, which,
as regards their accuracy, the possibility of
mistake, the precautions taken, and the exact
succession of individuals affected, afford no
data on which a scientific opinion can be
founded " (pp. 81, 82).

The line Professor Weismann takes, there-
fore, is to discredit the facts ; yet on a later
page we fmd that the experiments have since

been repeated by Obersteiner, "who has

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Art and Science

described them in a very exact and unpre-
judiced manner," and that "the fact" — (I
imagine that Professor Weismann intends
" the facts ") — " cannot be doubted."

On a still later page, however, we read : —
" If, for instance, it could be shown that
artificial mutilation spontaneously reappears
in the offspring with sufficient frequency to
exclude all possibilities of chance, then such
proof [i.e., that acquired characters can be
transmitted] would be forthcoming. The
transmission of mutilations has been fre-
quently asserted, and has been even recently
again brought forward, but all the supposed
instances have broken down when carefully
examined " (p. 390).

Here, then, we are told that proof of the
occasional transmission of mutilations would
be sufficient to establish the fact, but on p. 267
we find that no single fact is known which
really proves that acquired characters can be
transmitted, "for the ascertained facts which
seem to point to the transmission of artificially
pj^oduced diseases cannot be considered as

proof [Italics mine.] Perhaps ; but it was

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Essays on Life

mutilation in many cases that Professor
Weismann practically admitted to have been
transmitted when he declared that Obersteiner
had verified Brown-Sequard's experiments.

That Professor Weismann recognises the
vital importance to his own theory of the
question whether or no mutilations can be
transmitted under any circumstances, is evi-
dent from a passage on p. 425 of his work, on
which he says : " It can hardly be doubted
that mutilations are acquired characters ; they
do not arise from any tendency contained in
the germ, but are merely the reac^tion of the
body under certain external influences. They
are, as I have recently expressed it, purely
somatogenic characters — viz., characters which
emanate from the body {soma) only, as op-
posed to the germ-cells ; they are, therefore,
characters that do not arise from the germ
itself.

" If mutilations must necessarily be trans-
mitted" [which no one that I know of has
maintained], "or even if they might occa-
sionally be transmitted " [which cannot, I ima-
gine, be reasonably questioned], " a powerful

Art and Science

support would be given to the Lamarckian
principle, and the transmission of functional
hypertrophy or atrophy would thus become
highly probable."

I have not found any further attempt in
Professor Weismann's book to deal with the
evidence adduced by Mr. Darwin to show
that mutilations, if followed by diseases, are
sometimes inherited ; and I must leave it to
the reader to determine how far Professor
Weismann has shown reason for rejecting
Mr. Darwin's conclusion. I do not, however,
dwell upon these facts now as evidence of a
transmitted change of bodily form, or of
instinct due to use and disuse or habit ;
what they prove is that the germ-cells within
the parent's body do not stand apart from the
other cells of the body so completely as Pro-
fessor Weismann would have us believe, but
that, as Professor Hering, of Prague, has
aptly said, they echo with more or less fre-
quency and force to the profounder impressions
made upon other cells.

I may say that Professor Weismann does

not more cavalierly wave aside the mass of

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Essays on Life

evidence collected by Mr. Darwin and a host \

of other writers, to the effect that mutilations i

are sometimes inherited, than does Mr. Wal- I

lace, who says that, "as regards mutilations, j

it is generally admitted that they are not in-
herited, and there is ample evidence on this
point." It is indeed generally admitted that
mutilations, when not followed by disease, are
very rarely, if ever, inherited ; and Mr. Wal-
lace's appeal to the "ample evidence" which
he alleges to exist on this head, is much as
though he should say that there is ample
evidence to show that the days are longer in
summer than in winter. "Nevertheless," he
continues, "a few cases of apparent inheritance
of mutilations have been recorded, and these,
if trustworthy, are difficulties in the way of
the theory." ..." The often-quoted case of a
disease induced by mutilation being inherited
(Brown -Sequard's epileptic guinea-pigs) has
been discussed by Professor Weismann and
shown to be not conclusive. The mutilation
itself — a section of certain nerves — was never
inherited, but the resulting epilepsy, or a

general state of weakness, deformity, or sores,

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Art and Science

was sometimes inherited. It is, however, pos-
sible that the mere injury introduced and
encouraged the growth of certain microbes,
which, spreading through the organism, some-
times reached the germ-cells, and thus trans-
mitted a diseased condition to the offspring." ^

I suppose a microbe which made guinea-
pigs eat their toes off was communicated to
the germ-cells of an unfortunate guinea-pig
which had been already microbed by it, and
made the offspring bite its toes off too. The
microbe has a good deal to answer for.

On the case of the deterioration of horses in
the Falkland Islands after a few generations,
Professor Weismann says : —

" In such a case we have only to assume
that the climate which is unfavourable, and
the nutriment which is insufficient for horses,
affect not only the animal as a whole but also
its germ-cells. This would result in the dimi-
nution in size of the germ-cells, the effects
upon the offspring being still further intensi-
fied by the insufficient nourishment supplied
during growth. But such results would not

^ ^^ Darwinism/' p. 440.
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Essays on Life

depend upon the transmission by the germ-
cells of certain peculiarities due to the un-
favourable climate, which only appear in the
full-grown horse."

But Professor Weismann does not like such
cases, and admits that he cannot explain the
facts in connection with the climatic varieties
of certain butterflies, except "by supposing
the passive acquisition of characters produced
by the direct influence of climate."

Nevertheless in his next paragraph but one
he calls such cases " doubtful," and proposes
that for the moment they should be left aside.
He accordingly leaves them, but I have not
yet found what other moment he considered
auspicious for returning to them. He tells us
that " new experiments will be necessary, and
that he has himself already begun to undertake
them." Perhaps he will give us the results of
these experiments in some future book — for
that they will prove satisfactory to him can
hardly, 1 think, be doubted. He writes : —

"Leaving on one side, for the moment, these
doubtful and insufficiently investigated cases,

we may still maintain that the assumption

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Art and Science

that changes induced by external conditions
in the organism as a whole are communicated
to the germ-cells after the manner indicated in
Darwin's hypothesis of pangenesis, is wholly
unnecessary for the explanation of these pheno-
mena. Still we cannot exclude the possibility
of such a transmission occasionally occurring,
for even if the greater part of the effects must
be attributable to natural selection, there might
be a smaller part in certain cases which depends
on this exceptional factor."

I repeatedly tried to understand Mr. Dar-
win's theory of pangenesis, and so often failed
that I long since gave the matter up in despair.
I did so with the less unwillingness because I
saw that no one else appeared to understand
the theory, and that even Mr. Darwin's
warmest adherents regarded it with disfavour.
If Mr. Darwin means that every cell of the
body throws off minute particles that find
their way to the germ-cells, and hence into
the new embryo, this is indeed difficult of
comprehension and belief. If he means that
the rhythms or vibrations that go on cease-
lessly in every cell of the body communicate

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Essays on Life

themselves with greater or less accuracy or
perturbation, as the case may be, to the cells
that go to form offspring, and that since the
characteristics of matter are determined by
vibrations, in communicating vibrations they
in effect communicate matter, according to
the view put forward in the last chapter of
my book ''Luck or Cunning,"^ then we can
better understand it. I have nothing, how-
ever, to do with Mr. Darwin's theory of
pangenesis beyond avoiding the pretence that
I understand either the theory itself or what
Professor Weismann says about it ; all I am
concerned with is Professor Weismann's ad-
mission, made immediately afterwards, that
the somatic cells may, and perhaps sometimes
do, impart characteristics to the germ-cells.

" A complete and satisfactory refutation of
such an opinion," he continues, " cannot be
brought forward at present " ; so I suppose we
must wait a little longer, but in the mean-
time we may again remark that, if we admit
even occasional communication of changes in
the somatic cells to the germ-cells, we have

^ Longmans^ 1890.
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Art and Science

let in the thin end of the wedge, as Mr.
Darwin did when he said that use and disuse
did a good deal towards modification. BufFon,
in his first volume on the lower animals/
dwells on the impossibility of stopping the
breach once made by admission of variation
at all. " If the point," he writes, " were once
gained, that among animals and vegetables
there had been, I do not say several species,
but even a single one, which had been pro-
duced in the course of direct descent from
another species ; if, for example, it could be
once shown that the ass was but a degenera-
tion from the horse — then there is no farther
limit to be set to the power of Nature, and
we should not be wrong in supposing that
with sufficient time she could have evolved
all other organised forms from one primordial
type." So with use and disuse and trans-
mission of acquired characteristics generally —
once show that a single structure or instinct
is due to habit in preceding generations, and
we can impose no limit on the results achiev-
able by accumulation in this respect, nor

1 Tom. iv. p. 383. Ed. 1753.
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Essays on Life

shall we be wrong in conceiving it as possible
that all specialisation,' whether of structure
or instinct, may be due ultimately to habit.

How far this can be shown to be probable
is, of course, another matter, but I am not
immediately concerned with this ; all I am
concerned with now is to show that the germ-
cells not unfrequently become permanently
affected by events that have made a profound
impression upon the somatic cells, in so far
that they transmit an obvious reminiscence
of the impression to the embryos which they
go subsequently towards forming. This is all
that is necessary for my case, and I do not
find that Professor Weismann, after all, dis-
putes it.

But here, again, comes the difficulty of
saying what Professor Weismann does, and
what he does not, dispute. One moment he
gives all that is wanted for the Lamarckian
contention, the next he denies common-sense
the bare necessaries of life. For a more ex-
haustive and detailed criticism of Professor
Weismann's position, I would refer the reader

to an admirably clear article by Mr. Sidney

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Art and Science

H. Vines, which appeared in Nature^ Octo-
ber 24, 1889. I can only say that while read-
ing Professor Weismann's book, I feel as I do
when I read those of Mr. Darwin, and of a
good many other writers on biology whom I
need not name. I become like a fly in a
window-pane. I see the sunshine and free-
dom beyond, and buzz up and down their
pages, ever hopeful to get through them to
the fresh air without, but ever kept back by
a mysterious something, which I feel but
cannot either grasp or see. It was not thus
when I read Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and
Lamarck ; it is not thus when I read such
articles as Mr. Vines's just referred to. Love
of self-display, and the want of singleness of
mind that it inevitably engenders — these, I
suppose, are the sins that glaze the casements
of most men's minds ; and from these, no
matter how hard he tries to free himself, nor
how much he despises them, who is altogether
exempt ?

Finally, then, when we consider the im-
mense mass of evidence referred to briefly,

but sufficiently, by Mr. Charles Darwin, and

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Essays on Life

referred to without other, for the most part,
than off-hand dismissal by Professor Weis-
mann in the last of the essays that have been
recently translated, I do not see how any one
who brings an unbiased mind to the ques-
tion can hesitate as to the side on which
the weight of testimony inclines. Professor
Weismann declares that " the transmission of
mutilations may be dismissed into the domain
of fable." ^ If so, then, whom can we trust ?
What is the use of science at all if the con-
clusions of a man as competent as I readily
admit Mr. Darwin to have been, on the
evidence laid before him from countless
sources, is to be set aside lightly and without
giving the clearest and most cogent explana-
tion of the why and wherefore? When we
see a person " ostrichising " the evidence which
he has to meet, as clearly as I believe Pro-
fessor Weismann to be doing, we shall in
nine cases out of ten be right in supposing
that he knows the evidence to be too strong
for him.

^ Essays^ &c., p. 447.

306

THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM

PART III

Now let me return to the recent division of
biological opinion into two main streams —
Lamarckism and Weismannism. Both Lam-
arckians and Weismannists, not to mention
mankind in general, admit that the better
adapted to its surroundings a living form may
be, the more likely it is to outbreed its com-
peers. The world at large, again, needs not
to be told that the normal course is not un-
frequently deflected through the fortunes of
war ; nevertheless, according to Lamarckians
and Erasmus - Darwinians, habitual effort,
guided by ever-growing intelligence — that is
to say, by continued increase of power in the
matter of knowing our likes and dislikes-
has been so much the main factor throughout
the course of organic development, that the
rest, though not lost sight of, may be allowed

to go without saying. According, on the

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Essays on Life

other hand, to extreme Charles-Darwinians
and Weismannists, habit, effort and intel-
ligence acquired during the experience of any
one life goes for nothing. Not even a little
fraction of it endures to the benefit of offspring.
It dies with him in whom it is acquired, and
the heirs of a man's body take no interest
therein. To state this doctrine is to arouse
instinctive loathing; it is my fortunate task
to maintain that such a nightmare of waste
and death is as baseless as it is repulsive.

The split in biological opinion occasioned
by the deadlock to which Charles-Darwinism
has been reduced, though comparatively recent,
widens rapidly. Ten years ago Lamarck's
name was mentioned only as a byword for
extravagance ; now, we cannot take up a
number of Nature without seeing how hot
the contention is between his followers and
those of Weismann. This must be referred,
as I implied earlier, to growing perception
that Mr. Darwin should either have gone
farther towards Lamarckism or not so far.
In admitting use and disuse as freely as he

did, he gave liamarckians leverage for the

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Art and Science

— — ii^— ^ I I 9

overthrow of a system based ostensibly on
the accumulation of fortunate accidents. In
assigning the lion's share of development to
the accumulation of fortunate accidents, he
tempted fortuitists to try to cut the ground
from under Lamarck's feet by denying that
the effects of use and disuse can be inherited
at all. When the public had once got to
understand what Lamarck had intended, and
wherein Mr. Charles Darwin had differed
from him, it became impossible for Charles-
Darwinians to remain where they were, nor
is it easy to see what course was open to them
except to cast about for a theory by which
they could get rid of use and disuse altogether.
Weismannism, therefore, is the inevitable out-
come of the straits to which Charles-Dar-
winians were reduced through the way in
which their leader had halted between two
opinions.

This is why Charles-Darwinians, from Pro-
fessor Huxley downwards, have kept the
difference between Lamarck's opinions and
those of Mr. Darwin so much in the back-
ground. Unwillingness to make this under-

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Essays on Life

stood is nowhere manifested more clearly than
in Dr. Francis Darwin's life of his father. In
this work Lamarck is sneered at once or
twice, and told to go away, but there is no
attempt to state the two cases side by side ;
from which, as from not a little else, I con-
clude that Dr. Francis Darwin has de-
scended from his father with singularly little
modification.

Proceeding to the evidence for the trans-
misions of acquired habits, I will quote two
recently adduced examples from among the
many that have been credibly attested. The
first was contributed to Nature (March 14,
1889) by Professor Marcus M. Hartog, who
wrote : —

'' A. B. is moderately myopic and very
astigmatic in the left eye ; extremely myopic
in the right. As the left eye gave such bad
images for near objects, he was compelled in
childhood to mask it, and acquired the habit
of leaning his head on his left arm for writing,
so as to blind that eye, or of resting the left
temple and eye on the hand, with the elbow

on the table. At the age of fifteen the eyes

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Art and Science

were equalised by the use of suitable spectacles,
and he soon lost the habit completely and per-
manently. He is now the father of two chil-
dren, a boy and a girl, whose vision (tested
repeatedly and fully) is emmetropic in both
eyes, so that they have not inherited the con-
genital optical defect of their father. All the
same, they have both of them inherited his
early acquired habit, and need constant watch-
fulness to prevent their hiding the left eye
when writing, by resting the head on the left
forearm or hand. Imitation is here quite out
of the question.

" Considering that every habit involves
changes in the proportional development of
the muscular and osseous systems, and hence
probably of the nervous system also, the
importance of inherited habits, natural or
acquired, cannot be overlooked in the general
theory of inheritance. I am fully aware that
I shall be accused of flat Lamarckism, but a
nickname is not an argument."

To this Professor Ray Lankester rejoined
{Nature, March 21, 1889) :—

'^ It is not unusual for children to rest the

Essays on Life

head on the left forearm or hand when writing,
and I doubt whether much value can be
attached to the case described by Professor
Hartog. The kind of observation which his
letter suggests is, however, likely to lead to
results either for or against the transmission
of acquired characters. An old friend of
mine lost his right arm when a schoolboy,
and has ever since written with his left. He
has a large family and grandchildren, but I
have not heard of any of them showing a
disposition to left-handedness."

From Nature (March 21, 1889) I take the
second instance communicated by Mr. J.
Jenner-Weir, who wrote as follows : —

" Mr. Marcus M. Hartog's letter of March
6th, inserted in last week's number (p. 462),
is a very valuable contribution to the grow-
ing evidence that acquired characters may be
inherited. I have long held the view that
such is often the case, and I have myself
observed several instances of the, at least I
may say, apparent fact.

"Many years ago there was a very fine
male of the Copra megaceros in the gardens

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Art and Science

of the Zoological Society. To restrain this

animal from jumping over the fence of the

enclosure in which he was confined, a long

and heavy chain was attached to the collar

round his neck. He was constantly in the

habit of taking this chain up by his horns

and moving it from one side to another over

his back ; in doing this he threw his head very

much back, his horns being placed in a line

with the back. The habit had become quite

chronic with him, and was very tiresome to

look at. I was very much astonished to

observe that his offspring inherited the habit,

and although it was not necessary to attach

a chain to their necks, I have often seen a

young male throwing his horns over his back

and shifting from side to side an imaginary

chain. The action was exactly the same as

that of his ancestor. The case of the kid of

this goat appears to me to be parallel to that

of child and parent given by Mr. Hartog. I

think at the time I made this observation I

informed Mr. Darwin of the fact by letter, and

he did not accuse me of ' flat Lamarckism.' "

To this letter there was no rejoinder. It
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Essays on Life

may be said, of course, that the action of the
offspring in each of these cases was due to
accidental coincidence only. Anything can
be said, but the question turns not on what an
advocate can say, but on what a reasonably
intelligent and disinterested jury will believe ;
granted they might be mistaken in accepting
the foregoing stories, but the world of science,
like that of commerce, is based on the faith
or confidence, which both creates and sustains
them. Indeed the universe itself is but the
creature of faith, for assuredly we know of
no other foundation. There is nothing so
generally and reasonably accepted — not even
our own continued identity — but questions
may be raised about it that will shortly prove
unanswerable. We cannot so test every six-
pence given us in change as to be sure that
we never take a bad one, and had better some-
times be cheated than reduce caution to an
absurdity. Moreover, we have seen from the
evidence given in my preceding article that
the germ-cells issuing from a parent's body
can, and do, respond to profound impressions

made on the somatic-cells. This being so,

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Art and Science

what impressions are more profound, what
needs engage more assiduous attention than
those connected with self-protection, the pro-
curing of food, and the continuation of the
species ? If the mere anxiety connected
with an ill-healing wound inflicted on but
one generation is sometimes found to have
so impressed the germ-cells that they hand
down its scars to offspring, how much more
shall not anxieties that have directed action
of all kinds from birth till death, not in
one generation only but in a longer series of
generations than the mind can realise to itself,
modify, and indeed control, the organisation
of every species ?

1 see Professor S. H. Vines, in the article
on Weismann's theory referred to in my pre-
ceding article, says Mr. Darwin '' held that it
was not the sudden variations due to altered
external conditions which become permanent,
but those slowly produced by what he termed
' the accumulative action of changed conditions
of life.' " Nothing can be more soundly La-
marckian,and nothing should more conclusively

show that, whatever else Mr. Darwin was, he

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Essays on Life

was not a Charles-Darwinian ; but what evi-
dence other than inferential can from the
nature of the case be adduced in support of
this, as I believe, perfectly correct judgment ?
None know better than they who clamour for
direct evidence that their master was right in
taking the position assigned to him by Pro-
fessor Vines, that they cannot reasonably look
for it. With us, as with themselves, modifica-
tion proceeds very gradually, and it violates
our principles as much as their own to ex-
pect visible permanent progress, in any single
generation, or indeed in any number of genera-
tions of wild species which we have yet had
time to observe. Occasionally we can find
such cases, as in that of JBranchipus stagnalis,
quoted by Mr. Wallace, or in that of the New
Zealand Kea whose skin, I was assured by
the late Sir Julius von Haast, has already
been modified as a consequence of its change
of food. Here we can show that in even a
few generations structure is modified under
changed conditions of existence, but as we
believe these cases to occur comparatively

rarely, so it is still more rarely that they occur

316

Art and Science

when and where we can watch them. Nature
is eminently conservative, and fixity of type,
even under considerable change of conditions,
is surely more important for the well-being
of any species than an over-ready power of
adaptation to, it may be, passing changes.
There could be no steady progress if each
generation were not mainly bound by the
traditions of those that have gone before it.
It is evolution and not incessant revolution
that both parties are upholding; and this
being so, rapid visible modification must be
the exception, not the rule. I have quoted
direct evidence adduced by competent ob-
servers, which is, I believe, sufficient to
establish the fact that offspring can be
and is sometimes modified by the acquired
habits of a progenitor. I will now pro-
ceed to the still more, as it appears to me,
cogent proof afforded by general considera-
tions.

What, let me ask, are the principal phe-
nomena of heredity ? There must be physical
continuity between parent, or parents, and

offspring, so that the offspring is, as Erasmus

317

Essays on Life

Darwin well said, a kind of elongation of the
life of the parent.

Erasmus Darwin put the matter so well
that I may as well give his words in full ; he
wrote : —

" Owing to the imperfection of language
the offspring is termed a new animal, but is
in truth a branch or elongation of the parent,
since a part of the embryon animal is, or was,
a part of the parent, and therefore, in strict
language, cannot be said to be entirely new
at the time of its production ; and therefore
it may retain some of the habits of the parent
system.

" At the earliest period of its existence the
embryon would seem to consist of a living
filament with certain capabilities of irritation,
sensation, volition, and association, and also
with some acquired habits or propensities
peculiar to the parent ; the former of these
are in common with other animals ; the latter
seem to distinguish or produce the kind of
animal, whether man or quadruped, with the
similarity of feature or form to the parent."^

1 " Zoonomia/' 1794, vol. i. p. 480.
318

Art and Science

Those who accept evolution insist on un-
broken physical continuity between the earliest
known life and ourselves, so that we both are
and are not personally identical with the uni-
cellular organism from which we have de-
scended in the course of many millions of
years, exactly in the same way as an octogen-
arian both is and is not personally identical
wdth the microscopic impregnate ovum from
which he grew up. Everything both is and
is not. There is no such thing as strict
identity between any two things in any two
consecutive seconds. In strictness they are
identical and yet not identical, so that in
strictness they violate a fundamental rule of
strictness — namely, that a thing shall never
be itself and not itself at one and the same
time ; we must choose between logic and
dealing in a practical spirit with time and
space ; it is not surprising, therefore, that
logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly
paid to her, is told to stand aside when people
come to practice. In practice identity is
generally held to exist where continuity is

only broken slowly and piecemeal, neverthe-

319

Essays

on Life

less, that occasional periods of even rapid
change are not held to bar identity, appears
from the fact that no one denies this to hold
between the microscopically small impregnate
ovum and the born child that springs from it,
nor yet, therefore, between the impregnate
ovum and the octogenarian into which the
child grows ; for both ovum and octogenarian
are held personally identical with the new-
born baby, and things that are identical with
the same are identical with one another.

The first, then, and most important element
of heredity is that there should be unbroken
continuity, and hence sameness of personality,
between parents and offspring, in neither more
nor less than the same sense as that in which
any other two personalities are said to be
the same. The repetition, therefore, of its
developmental stages by any offspring must
be regarded as something which the embryo
repeating them has already done once, in the
person of one or other parent ; and if once,
then, as many times as there have been
generations between any given embryo now

repeating it, and the point in life from which

320

Art and Science

we started — say, for example, the amoeba.
In the case of asexually and sexually pro-
duced organisms alike, the offspring must be
held to continue the personality of the parent
or parents, and hence on the occasion of every
fresh development, to be repeating something
which in the person of its parent or parents
it has done once, and if once, then any num-
ber of times, already.

It is obvious, therefore, that the germ-plasm
(or whatever the fancy word for it may be)
of any one generation is as physically identical
with the germ-plasm of its predecessor as any
two things can be. The difference between
Professor Weismann and, we will say, Herin-
gians consists in the fact that the first main-
tains the new germ-plasm when on the point
of repeating its developmental processes to
take practically no cognisance of anything
that has happened to it since the last occasion
on which it developed itself ; while the latter
maintain that offspring takes much the same
kind of account of what has happened to it
in the persons of its parents since the last
occasion on which it developed itself, as people
in ordinary life take of things that happen to

321 X

Essays on Life

them. In daily life people let fairly normal
circumstances come and go without much
heed as matters of course. If they have been
lucky they make a note of it and try to repeat
their success. If they have been unfortunate
but have recovered rapidly they soon forget
it ; if they have suffered long and deeply they
grizzle over it and are scared and scarred by
it for a long time. The question is one of
cognisance or non-cognisance on the part of
the new germs, of the more profound impres-
sions made on them while they were one with
their parents, between the occasion of their last
preceding development, and the new course on
which they are about to enter. Those who
accept the theory put forward independently
by Professor Hering of Prague (whose work
on this subject is translated in my book,
''Unconscious Memory")^ and by myself in
'' Life and Habit," ^ believe in cognizance, as
do Lamarckians generally. Weismannites,
and with them the orthodoxy of English
science, find non-cognisance more acceptable.
If the Heringian view is accepted, that
heredity is only a mode of memory, and an

1^ Longmans, 1890. ^ Longmans, 1890.
322

Art and Science

extension of memory from one generation to
another, then the repetition of its development
by any embryo thus becomes only the repeti-
tion of a lesson learned by rote ; and, as I have
elsewhere said, our view of life is simplified
by finding that it is no longer an equation of,
say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of
ninety-nine only, inasmuch as two of the un-
known quantities prove to be substantially
identical. In this case the inheritance of
acquired characteristics cannot be disputed,
for it is postulated in the theory that each
embryo takes note of, remembers and is
guided by the profounder impressions made
upon it while in the persons of its parents,
between its present and last preceding de-
velopment. To maintain this is to maintain
use and disuse to be the main factors through-
out organic development ; to deny it is to
deny that use and disuse can have any con-
ceivable effect. For the detailed reasons
which led me to my own conclusions I must
refer the reader to my books, "Life and
Habit " ^ and " Unconscious Memory," i the
conclusions of which have been often adopted,

^ Longmans, 1890.
323

Essays on Life

but never, that I have seen, disputed. A brief
resume of the leading points in the argument
is all that space will here allow me to give.

We have seen that it is a first requirement
of heredity that there shall be physical con-
tinuity between parents and offspring. This
holds good with memory. There must be
continued identity between the person re-
membering and the person to whom the
thing that is remembered happened. We can-
not remember things that happened to some
one else, and in our absence. We can only
remember having heard of them. We have
seen, however, that there is as much bond-fide
sameness of personality between parents and
offspring up to the time at which the off-
spring quits the parent's body, as there is
between the different states of the parent
himself at any two consecutive moments ;
the offspring therefore, being one and the
same person with its progenitors until it
quits them, can be held to remember what
happened to them within, of course, the
limitations to which all memory is subject, as
much as the progenitors can remember what

happened earlier to themselves. Whether it

324

Art and Science

does so remember can only be settled by-
observing whether it acts as living beings
commonly do when they are acting under
guidance of memory. I will endeavour to
show that, though heredity and habit based
on memory go about in different dresses,
yet if we catch them separately — for they
are never seen together — and strip them
there is not a mole nor strawberry-mark, nor
trick nor leer of the one, but we find it in
the other also.

What are the moles and strawberry-marks
of habitual action, or actions remembered and
thus repeated ? First, the more often we
repeat them the more easily and unconsciously
we do them. Look at reading, writing, walk-
ing, talking, playing the piano, &c. ; the longer
we have practised any one of these acquired
habits, the more easily, automatically and
unconsciously, we perform it. Look, on the
other hand, broadly, at the three points
to which I called attention in "Life and
Habit":—

I. That we are most conscious of and
have most control over such habits as speech,

the upright position, the arts and sciences —

325

Essays on Life

which are acquisitions peculiar to the human
race, always acquired after birth, and not
common to ourselves and any ancestor who
had not become entirely human.

II. That we are less conscious of and have
less control over eating and drinking [pro-
vided the food be normal], swallowing, breath-
ing, seeing, and hearing — which were acquisi-
tions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which
we had provided ourselves with all the neces-
sary apparatus before we saw light, but which
are still, geologically speaking, recent.

III. That we are most unconscious of
and have least control over our digestion and
circulation — powers possessed even by our in-
vertebrate ancestry, and, geologically speaking,
of extreme antiquity.

I have put the foregoing very broadly, but
enough is given to show the reader the gist
of the argument. Let it be noted that dis-
turbance and departure, to any serious extent,
from normal practice tends to induce resump-
tion of consciousness even in the case of such
old habits as breathing, seeing, and hearing,
digestion and the circulation of the blood. So

it is with habitual actions in general. Let a

326

Art and Science

player be never so proficient on any instru-
ment, he will be put out if the normal con-
ditions under which he plays are too widely
departed from, and will then do consciously, if
indeed he can do it at all, what he had hitherto
been doing unconsciously. It is an axiom as
regards actions acquired after birth, that we
never do them automatically save as the result
of long practice ; the stages in the case of any
acquired facility, the inception of which we
have been able to watch, have invariably been
from a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a
little somethingness of highly self-conscious,
arduous performance, and thence to the un-
self-consciousness of easy mastery. I saw one
year a poor blind lad of about eighteen sit-
ting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, play-
ing the concertina with his whole body, and
snorting like a child. The next year the
boy no longer snorted, and he played with
his fingers only ; the year after that he seemed
hardly to know whether he was playing or
not, it came so easily to him. I know no
exception to this rule. Where is the intricate
and at one time difficult art in which perfect

automatic ease has been reached except as the

327

Essays on Life

result of long practice ? If, then, wherever we
can trace the development of automatism we
find it to have taken this course, is it not
most reasonable to infer that it has taken the
same even when it has risen in regions that
are beyond our ken ? Ought we not, when-
ever we see a difficult action performed,
automatically to suspect antecedent practice ?
Granted that without the considerations in
regard to identity presented above it would
not have been easy to see where a baby of a
day old could have had the practice which
enables it to do as much as it does uncon-
sciously, but even without these considerations
it would have been more easy to suppose that
the necessary opportunities had not been want-
ing, than that the easy performance could have
been gained without practice and memory.

When I wrote " Life and Habit " (originally
published in 1877) I said in slightly different
words: —

" Shall we say that a baby of a day old
sucks (which involves the whole principle of
the pump and hence a profound practical
knowledge of the laws of pneumatics and

hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood —

328

Art and Science

millions of years before any one had dis-
covered oxygen — sees and hears, operations
that involve an unconscious knowledge of the
facts concerning optics and acoustics com-
pared with which the conscious discoveries
of Newton are insignificant — shall we say
that a baby can do all these things at once,
doing them so well and so regularly without
being even able to give them attention, and yet
without mistake, and shall we also say at the
same time that it has not learnt to do them,
and never did them before ?

'' Such an assertion would contradict the
whole experience of mankind."

I have met with nothing during the thirteen
years since the foregoing was published that
has given me any qualms about its soundness.
From the point of view of the law courts and
everyday life it is, of course, nonsense ; but
in the kingdom of thought, as in that of
heaven, there are many mansions, and what
would be extravagance in the cottage or farm-
house, as it were, of daily practice, is but
common decency in the palace of high philo-
sophy, wherein dwells evolution. If we leave

evolution alone, we may stick to common

329

Essays on Life

practice and the law courts ; touch evolution
and we are in another world ; not higher, not
lower, but different as harmony from counter-
point. As, however, in the most absolute
counterpoint there is still harmony, and in the
most absolute harmony still counterpoint, so
high philosophy should be still in touch with
common sense, and common sense with high
philosophy.

The common-sense view of the matter to
people who are not over-curious and to whom
time is money, will be that a baby is not a
baby until it is born, and that when born it
should be born in wedlock. Nevertheless, as
a sop to high philosophy, every baby is allowed
to be the offspring of its father and mother.

The high-philosophy view of the matter is

that every human being is still but a fresh

edition of the primordial cell with the latest

additions and corrections; there has been no

leap nor break in continuity anywhere ; the

man of to-day is the primordial cell of millions

of years ago as truly as he is the himself of

yesterday; he can only be denied to be the

one on grounds that will prove him not to be

the other. Every one is both himself and all

330

Art and Science

his direct ancestors and descendants as well ;
therefore, if we would be logical, he is one
also with all his cousins, no matter how dis-
tant, for he and they are alike identical with
the primordial cell, and we have already noted
it as an axiom that things which are identical
with the same are identical with one another.
This is practically making him one with all
living things, whether animal or vegetable,
that ever have existed or ever will — something
of all which may have been in the mind of
Sophocles when he wrote : —

" Nor seest thou yet the gathering hosts of ill
That shall en-one thee both with thine own self
And with thine offspring."

And all this has come of admitting that a
man may be the same person for two days
running ! As for sopping common sense it
will be enough to say that these remarks are
to be taken in a strictly scientific sense, and
have no appreciable importance as regards life
and conduct. True they deal with the founda-
tions on which all life and conduct are based,
but like other foundations they are hidden
out of sight, and the sounder they are, the
less we trouble ourselves about them.

331

Essays on Life

What other main common features between
heredity and memory may we note besides
the fact that neither can exist without that
kind of physical continuity which we call
personal identity ? First, the development of
the embryo proceeds in an established order ;
so must all habitual actions based on memory.
Disturb the normal order and the performance
is arrested. The better we know " God save
the Queen/' the less easily can we play or
sing it backwards. The return of memory
again depends on the return of ideas associated
with the particular thing that is remembered
— we remember nothing but for the presence
of these, and when enough of these are pre-
sented to us we remember everything. So, if
the development of an embryo is due to
memory, we should suppose the memory of
the impregnate ovum to revert not to yester-
day, when it was in the persons of its parents,
but to the last occasion on which it was an
impregnate ovum. The return of the old
environment and the presence of old associa-
tions would at once involve recollection of
the course that should be next taken, and the

same should happen throughout the whole

332

Art and Science

course of development. The actual course
of development presents precisely the pheno-
mena agreeable with this. For fuller treat-
ment of this point I must refer the reader to
the chapter on the abeyance of memory in
my book " Life and Habit," already re-
ferred to.

Secondly, we remember best our last few
performances of any given kind, so our present
performance will probably resemble some one
or other of these ; we remember our earlier
performances by way of residuum only, but
every now and then we revert to an earlier
habit. This feature of memory is manifested
in heredity by the way in which offspring
commonly resembles most its nearer ancestors,
but sometimes reverts to earlier ones. Brothers
and sisters, each as it were giving their own
version of the same story, but in different
words, should generally resemble each other
more closely than more distant relations. And
this is what actually we find.

Thirdly, the introduction of slightly new
elements into a method already established
varies it beneficially; the new is soon fused
with the old, and the monotony ceases to be

333

Essays on Life

oppressive. But if the new be too foreign,
we cannot fuse the old and the new — nature
seeming to hate equally too wide a deviation
from ordinary practice and none at all. This
fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial
effects of occasional crossing on the one hand,
and on the other, in the generally observed
sterility of hybrids. If heredity be an affair
of memory, how can an embryo, say of a mule,
be expected to build up a mule on the strength
of but two mule-memories ? Hybridism causes
a fault in the chain of memory, and it is to
this cause that the usual sterility of hybrids
must be referred.

Fourthly, it requires many repeated impres-
sions to fix a method firmly, but when it has
been engrained into us we cease to have much
recollection of the manner in which it came
to be so, or indeed of any individual repetition,
but sometimes a single impression, if prolonged
as well as profound, produces a lasting impres-
sion and is liable to return with sudden force,
and then to go on returning to us at intervals.
As a general rule, however, abnormal impres-
sions cannot long hold their own against the
overwhelming preponderance of normal autho-

334

Art and Science

rity. This appears in heredity as the normal
non-inheritance of mutilations on the one hand,
and on the other as their occasional inheritance
in the case of injuries followed by disease.

Fifthly, if heredity and memory are essen-
tially the same, we should expect that no
animal would develop new structures of im-
portance after the age at which its species
begins ordinarily to continue its race ; for we
cannot suppose offspring to remember any-
thing that happens to the parent subsequently
to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring
within itself. From the average age, there-
fore, of reproduction, offspring should cease
to have any farther steady, continuous memory
to fall back upon ; what memory there is
should be full of faults, and as such unreliable.
An organism ought to develop as long as it
is backed by memory — that is to say, until
the average age at which reproduction begins ;
it should then continue to go for a time on
the impetus already received, and should even-
tually decay through failure of any memory
to support it, and tell it what to do. This
corresponds absolutely with what we observe
in organisms generally, and explains, on the

335

Essays on Life

one hand, why the age of puberty marks the
beginning of completed development — a riddle
hitherto not only unexplained but, so far as
I have seen, unasked ; it explains, on the other
hand, the phenomena of old age — hitherto
without even attempt at explanation.

Sixthly, those organisms that are the longest
in reaching maturity should on the average
be the longest-lived, for they will have re-
ceived the most momentous impulse from the
weight of memory behind them. This har-
monises with the latest opinion as to the facts.
In his article on Weismann in the Contempo-
rary Review for May 1890, Mr. Romanes
writes : " Professor Weismann has shown that
there is throughout the metazoa a general corre-
lation between the natural lifetime of indi-
viduals composing any given species, and the
age at which they reach maturity or first be-
come capable of procreation." This, I believe,
has been the conclusion generally arrived at
by biologists for some years past.

Lateness, then, in the average age of repro-
duction appears to be the principle underlying
longevity. There does not appear at first

sight to be much connection between such

336

Art and Science

distinct and apparently disconnected pheno-
mena as 1, the orderly normal progress of
development ; 2, atavism and the resumption
of feral characteristics ; 3, the more ordinary
resemblance inter se of nearer relatives ; 4, the
benefit of an occasional cross, and the usual
sterility of hybrids ; 5, the unconsciousness
with which alike bodily development and
ordinary physiological functions proceed, so
long as they are normal ; 6, the ordinary non-
inheritance, but occasional inheritance of muti-
lations ; 7, the fact that puberty indicates the
approach of maturity; 8, the phenomena of
middle life and old age ; 9, the principle under-
lying longevity. These phenomena have no
conceivable bearing on one another until
heredity and memory are regarded as part of
the same story. Identify these two things,
and I know no phenomenon of heredity that
does not immediately become infinitely more
intelligible. Is it conceivable that a theory
which harmonises so many facts hitherto re-
garded as without either connection or ex-
planation should not deserve at any rate
consideration from those who profess to take
an interest in biology ?

337 Y

Essays on Life

It is not as though the theory were un-
known, or had been condemned by our leading
men of science. Professor Ray Lankester in-
troduced it to English readers in an appreciative
notice of Professor Hering's address, which ap-
peared in Nature, July 13, 1876. He wrote to
the Athenoeum, March 24, 1884, and claimed
credit for having done so, but I do not believe
he has ever said more in public about it than
what I have here referred to. Mr. Romanes did
indeed try to crush it in Nature, January 27,
1881, but in 1883, in his "Mental Evolution
in Animals," he adopted its main conclusion
without acknowledgment. The Athenceum,
to my unbounded surprise, called him to task
for this (March 1, 1884), and since that time
he has given the Heringian theory a sufficiently
wide berth. Mr. Wallace showed himself
favourably enough disposed towards the view
that heredity and memory are part of the
same story when he reviewed my book '^ Life
and Habit" in Nature, March 27, 1879, but
he has never since betrayed any sign of being
aware that such a theory existed. Mr. Her-
bert Spencer wrote to the Athenceum (April
5, 1884), and claimed the theory for himself.

Art and Science

but, in spite of his doing this, he has never,
that I have seen, referred to the matter again.
I have dealt sufficiently w^ith his claim in my
book, " Luck or Cunning." ^ Lastly, Professor
Hering himself has never that I know of
touched his own theory since the single short
address read in 1870, and translated by me in
1881. Every one, even its originator, except
myself, seems afraid to open his mouth about
it. Of course the inference suggests itself
that other people have more sense than I
have. I readily admit it ; but why have so
many of our leaders shown such a strong
hankering after the theory, if there is nothing
in it?

The deadlock that I have pointed out as
existing in Darwinism will, I doubt not, lead
ere long to a consideration of Professor
Bering's theory. English biologists are little
likely to find Weismann satisfactory for long,
and if he breaks down there is nothing left for
them but Lamarck, supplemented by the im-
portant and elucidatory corollary on his theory
proposed by Professor Hering. When the
time arrives for this to obtain a hearing it will

^ Longmans, 1890.
339

Essays on Life

be confirmed, doubtless, by arguments clearer
and more forcible than any I have been able
to adduce ; I shall then be delighted to resign
the championship which till then I shall con-
tinue, as for some years past, to have much
pleasure in sustaining. Heretofore my satis-
faction has mainly lain in the fact that more
of our prominent men of science have seemed
anxious to claim the theory than to refute it ;
in the confidence thus engendered I leave it
to any fuller consideration which the outline
I have above given may incline the reader to
bestow upon it.

THE END

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &^ Co.
Edinburgh <5r» London

GENERAL LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA— BERKELEY

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