THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT
OF THE AGE
AND OTHER PLEAS AND DISCUSSIONS
BY
FRANCES POWER COBBE
AUTHOR OF "AN ESSAY ON INTUITIVE MORALS," "RELIGIOUS
'THE HOPES OF THE HUMAN
ARIEN," "THE DUTI]
WOMEN," "A FAITHLESS WORLD," ETC.
BOSTON
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET
1888
CONTENTS.
ESSAY
PREFACE ............. v
I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE ... 3
II. THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS ... 37
III. PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM ........ 71
IV. THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING ...... 113
V. To KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW ..... 149
VI. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE 175
PREFACE.
WE are all possessed of friends who, when any
serious belief or matter of practical conduct is in
question, take up at the outset a thesis of their
own which they press on our acceptance with the
best arguments at their disposal. It is a rarer priv-
ilege to enjoy the intercourse of one who does not
invariably start with a ready-made opinion of what
may be true, right, or expedient in the doubtful case
on which we wish to consult him, but who will
patiently turn over the matter with us, suggest
and register the various "pros and cons," refer to
admitted principles and facts, and thus aid us to
form a comprehensive judgment for ourselves rather
than induce us to accept his own. The discourse of
the first order of friends is an Argument, a Plea, a
Contention ; that of the second, a Discussion.
In the same way, of course, an Essay may be
either a Plea or a Discussion. The author may take
the position of Counsel for one side or other of the
case before the reader, or else he may charge as
Judge, and sum up the substance of such arguments
as might have been used by two advocates on the
opposite sides. Either style of writing is perfectly
legitimate ; and each has its particular fitness and
Vi PREFACE
utility. Misunderstanding and perplexity only occur
when the hasty reader (newspaper critics being sig-
nally guilty in this matter) chooses to assume that
an avowedly one-sided Plea is intended for a Judicial
Discussion,* or treats a Discussion as a Plea for the
side which the critic dislikes.
In the present little collection of Essays, written
at various times and for various objects, it will be
found that the first three belong to the class which
I have described as Pleas, and the last three more
or less to that of Discussions.
I plead that the Scientific Spirit of the Age, while
it has given us many precious things, is, in its pres-
ent exorbitant development, depriving us of things
more precious still.
I plead that the Education of the Emotions (to
be carried on chiefly through the contagion of good
and noble sentiments) is an object of paramount
importance, albeit nearly totally ignored in ordinary
systems of education.
I plead that, in the present disintegration of all
religious opinion, Judaism may yet become a pro-
gressive, and cease to be merely a tribal, faith ; and
that, if it absorb the moral and spiritual essence of
Christianity, it may solve the great problem of com-
* Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the
" Scientific Spirit of the Age " when it appeared in the Contemporary
Review for July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to
Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp. 6, 7,
34) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the
glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed
multitude of her followers.
PREFACE Vll
bining a theology consonant to modern philosophy
with a worship hallowed by the sacred associations
of the remotest past.
In the last three Essays, I discuss the relation of
Knowledge to Happiness ; I discuss the real as
distinguished from the conventional character of
our common processes of Thought ; and, finally, I
discuss the respective claims of Town and Country
Life to be esteemed most healthy and felicitous for
body and mind.
I shall much rejoice if I win my readers to adopt
the opinions which I have advocated in the first half
of the book.
I shall remain altogether indifferent as to which
of the alternative views put forth in the concluding
Essays may seem to them most impressive, and
only congratulate myself if I shall have succeeded
in setting forth in due light and order the multitu-
dinous points which together constitute the materials
for forming a sound judgment upon them.
FRANCES POWER COBBE.
HENGWRT, DOLGELLY,
1888.
ESSAY I.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF
THE AGE.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE.
THAT the present is pre-eminently the Age
of Science is a fact equally recognized by the
majority who hail it with triumph and by the
minority who regard it with feelings wherein
regret and apprehension have their place. As
in Literature an age of production is ever
followed by an age of criticism, so in the
general history of human interests War, Relig-
ion, Art, start in early days and run their
swift course, while Science creeps slowly after
them, till at last she passes them on the way
and comes foremost in the race. We still in
our time have War ; but it is no longer the
conflict of valiant soldiers, but the game of
scientific strategists. We still have Religion;
but she no longer claims earth and heaven as
her domain, but meekly goes to church by a
path over which Science has notified, " On
Sufferance Only." We still have Art ; but it
is no longer the Art of Fancy, but the Art of
4 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
the Intellect, wherein the Beautiful is indefi-
nitely postponed to the technically True, as
Truth is discerned by men who think quit riy
a rien de vrai excepte le laid. All our multi-
form activities, from agriculture down to dress-
making, are in these days nothing if not
" scientific," and to thousands of worthy people
it is enough to say that Science teaches this or
that, or that the interests of Science require
such and such a sacrifice, to cause them to bow
their heads, as pious men of old did at the
message of a Prophet. " It is SCIENCE ! Let it
do what seemeth it good." The claims of the
aesthetic faculty, and even of the moral sense,
to speak in arrest of judgment on matters en-
tirely within their own spheres, are ruled out of
court.
By a paradoxical fatality, however, it would
appear as if the obsession of the Scientific
Spirit is likely to be a little lightened for us by
an event which might have been expected to
rivet the yoke on our necks. The recently
published Life of the most illustrious and most
amiable man of Science of this scientific age
has suggested to many readers doubts of the all-
sufficiency of Science to build up not theo-
ries, but men. Mr. Darwin's admirably candid
avowal of the gradual extinction in his mind of
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 5
the aesthetic * and religious elements has proved
startling to a generation which, even when it is
ready to abandon Religion, would be direfully
distressed to lose the pleasures afforded by Art
and Nature, Poetry and Music. Instead of
lifting the scientific vocation to the skies (as
was probably anticipated), this epoch-making
Biography seems to have gone far to throw a
sort of dam across the stream, and to have
arrested not a few Science-worshippers with
the query : " What shall it profit a man if he
discover the origin of species and know exactly
how earth-worms and sun-dews conduct them-
selves, if all the while he grow blind to the
loveliness of nature, deaf to music, insensible
to poetry, and as unable to lift his soul to the
Divine and Eternal as was the primeval Ape
from whom he has descended ? Is this all that
Science can do for her devotee ? Must he be
shorn of the glory of humanity when he is
ordained her Priest ? Does he find his loftiest
faculties atrophied when he has become a
* " Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds,
such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley, gave me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took
intense delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly
pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But
now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I
have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music." Darwin's
Life, vol. i. p. 101.
6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
" machine for grinding general laws out of
large collections of facts"?*
While these reflections are passing through
many minds, it may be permitted to me to re-
view some features of the Scientific Spirit of
the Age. Frankly, I shall do it from an adverse
point of view. There were many years of my
life during which I regarded it with profound,
though always distant, admiration. Grown old,
I have come to think that many spirits in the
hierarchy are loftier and purer ; that the noblest
study of mankind is Man, rather than rock or
insect; and that, even at its best, Knowledge is
immeasurably less precious than Goodness and
Love. Whether in these estimates I err or am
justified, it would, in any case, be superfluous for
me to add my feeble voice to the glorification
of the Scientific Spirit. Diana of the Ephe-
sians was never proclaimed so vociferously
" Great " ; and perhaps, like the worshippers of
the elder goddess, it may be said of those of
Science, " The most part know not wherefore
they have come together." It will suffice if
I succeed in partially exhibiting how much
we are in danger of losing by the Scientific
Spirit, while others show us, more or less truly,
what we gain thereby.
* Darwin's Life, vol. \. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 7
In speaking of " Science " in this paper, I must
be understood to refer only to the Physical
Sciences, not to the mathematical or metaphysi-
cal. The former (especially the Biological
group) have of late years come so much to the
front that the old application of the word to the
exact sciences and to metaphysics and ethics
has almost dropped out of popular use. I also
desire to explain at starting that I am not so
blind as to ignore the splendid achievements of
modern physical science in its own realm, nor
the benefits which many applications of the
Scientific Spirit have brought in various other
directions. It is the intrusiveness and oppres-
sion of the Scientific Spirit in regions where it
has no proper work, and (still more often) its
predominance in others where its place should
be wholly subordinate, against which a protest
appears to be needed. A score of causes have
contributed in our generation to set Science up
and to pull other things down. The levels need
to be redressed. Time will not permit me to
exhibit the results of the excessive share taken
of late years by the Scientific Spirit in many
practical matters wherein experience and com-
mon sense were safer guides, e.g., in Agriculture.
This side of the question I must leave un-
touched, and limit myself to the discussion of
8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
the general influence of the Scientific Spirit in
Education, in Art, in Morals, and in Religion.
Professor Tyndall, in the Preface to his great
work on " Heat as a mode of Motion," calls
Science "the noblest growth of modern times,"
and adds that " as a means of intellectual educa-
tion its claims are still disputed, though, once
properly organized, greater and more benefi-
cent revolutions wait its employment here than
those which have marked its application in
the material world " (2d ed., p. x). Since the
publication of this book, and indeed since the
opening of the Age of Science, the relative
claims of Science and Literature to form the
basis of intellectual instruction have been inces-
santly debated by men qualified by experience
in tuition (which I cannot claim to be) to form
a judgment on the subject. There has been,
however, I think, too little attention given on
either side to the relative moral influences of
the two studies.
In addressing the London Society for the
Extension of University Teaching on March 3
last, Sir James Paget expressed his dissent from
Professor Morley's opinion (given on a similar
occasion last year) that " Literature was an ex-
cellent, if not a better study than Science." Sir
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 9
James maintained, on the contrary, that "noth-
ing could better advance human prosperity than
Science" and he elaborately set forth the specific
benefits of a scientific education as he conceived
them, as follows :
There was first the teaching of the power of observing,
then the teaching of accuracy, then of the difficulty of
attaining to a real knowledge of the truth, and, lastly, the
teaching of the methods by which they could pass from
that which was proved to the thinking of what was prob-
able.*
It would, of course, be unjust to hold Science
to these definitions, as if they exhausted her
claims as our instructress. It may, however,
fairly be assumed that, in the view of one of the
leading men of science of the day, they are
paramount. If any much higher results than
they were to be expected from scientific teach-
ing, Sir James would scarcely have omitted to
present them first or last. To what, then, do
these four great lessons of Science amount ?
They teach and, I think, teach only Obser-
vation, Accuracy, Intellectual Caution, and the
acquirement of a Method of advancing to the
* That organ of the Scientific party, the British Medical Journal,
eulogizing this address, remarked that " Sir James is a master of
English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language."
To the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to
leave something to be desired on the score of "elegance."
IO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
thinking of what was probable, possibly the
method commonly known as Induction.
I must confess that these " great truths " (as
Sir James oddly calls them) represent to my
mind only the culmination of the lower range
of human faculties; or, more strictly speak-
ing, the perfect application to human concerns
of those faculties which are common to man
and the lower animals. A fox may be an " ob-
server" and an exceedingly accurate one of
hen-roosts. He may be deeply sensible of "the
difficulty of attaining to a real knowledge " of
traps. Further than this, he may even "pass
from the proved" existence of a pack of
hounds in his cover to " thinking that it was
probable" he would shortly be chased. To
train a MAN, it is surely indispensable to develop
in him a superior order of powers from these.
His mind must be enriched with the culture of
his own age and country, and of other lands
and ages, and fortified by familiarity with the
thoughts of great souls on the topics of loftiest
interest. He must be accustomed to think on
subjects above those to which his observation,
or accuracy of description, or caution in accept-
ing evidence can apply, and on which (it is to
be hoped) he will reach some anchorage of faith
more firm than Sir James Paget's climax of
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE II
scientific culture, " the passing from that which
was proved to the thinking of what was prob-
able" He ought to handle the method of de-
ductive reasoning at least as well as that of
induction, and beyond these (purely intellect-
ual) attainments a human education making
claim to completeness should cultivate the im-
agination and poetic sentiment; should " soften
manners," as the liter ae humaniores proverbially
did of old; should widen the sympathies, dig-
nify the character, inspire enthusiasm for noble
actions, and chivalrous tenderness towards
women and all who need defence ; and thus
send forth the accomplished student a gentle-
man in the true sense of the word. The benefits
attributed by Sir James Paget to Scientific
education, and even those with which, in can-
dor, we may credit it beyond his four "great
truths," fall, I venture to think, deplorably
short of such a standard of culture as this.
The deficiencies of Scientific education do
not exhaust the objections against it. There
seem to be positive evils almost inseparable
from such training when carried far with the
young. One of the worst is the danger of the
adoption by the student of materialistic views
on all subjects. He need not become a theo-
retic or speculative Materialist : that is another
12 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
risk, which may or may not be successfully
eliminated. But he will almost inevitably fall
into practical materialism. Of the two sides of
human life, his scientific training will compel
him to think always in the first place of the
lower. The material (or, as our fathers would
have called it, the carnal) fact will be upper-
most in his mind, and the spiritual meaning
thereof more or less out of sight. He will
view his mother's tears not as expressions of
her sorrow, but as solutions of muriates and
carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime ;
and he will reflect that they were caused not
by his heartlessness, but by cerebral pressure
on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he
will "peep and botanize" on her grave, not
with the poet's sense of the sacrilegiousness of
such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene
conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate
observation among the scientifically interesting
" Flora " of a cemetery.
To this class of mind, thoroughly imbued
with the Scientific Spirit, Disease is the most
important of facts and the greatest of evils
Sin, on the other hand, is a thing on which
neither microscope nor telescope nor spectro-
scope, nor even stethoscope, can afford instruc-
tion. Possibly the student will think it only a
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 13
spectral illusion ; or he will foresee that it may
be explained by and by scientifically, as a form
of disease. There may be discovered bacilli of
Hatred, Covetousness, and Lust, respectively
responsible for Murder, Theft, and Adultery.
Already hypocrisy is a recognized form of
Hysteria. The state of opinion in " Erewhon "
may be hopefully looked for in England, when
the Scientific Spirit altogether prevails.
Besides its materializing tendency, a Scien-
tific Education involves other evils, among
which may be counted the fostering of a callous
and irreverent spirit. To this I shall return
presently. Of course every tendency of a pur-
suit, good or bad, affects the young who are
engaged in it much more than the old, whose
characters may have been moulded under quite
opposite influences. We must wait for a gen-
eration to see the Scientific Spirit in its full
development.
As to the instruction of young men and
women in Physiological Science in particular,
I am exonerated from treating the subject by
being privileged to cite the opinions of two of
the most eminent and experienced members
of the scholastic profession. I do so with
great thankfulness, believing that it will be
a revelation to many parents, blindly caught
14 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
by scientific claptrap, to learn that such are
the views of men among the best qualified
in England to pronounce judgment on the
subject.
The late lamented Mr. Thring, of Upping-
ham, wrote to me, Sept. 6, 1886:
My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly
I feel on the subject of a literary education, or rather how
confident I am in the judgment that there can be no worthy
education which is not based on the study of the highest
thoughts of the highest men in the best shape. As for
Science (most of it falsely so called), if a few leading
minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull
worker, to no more than a kind of upper shop work,
weighing out and labelling and learning alphabetical for-
mulae, a superior grocer assistant's work, and has not
a single element of higher mental training in it. Not
to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of men and
life, and therefore is eminently fitted for life and its
struggle ! Physiology in its worse sense adds to this a
brutalizing of the average practitioner, or rather a dev-
ilish combination of intellect worship and cruelty at the
expense of feeling and character. For my part, if it
were true that Vivisection had wonderfully relieved bodily
disease for men, if it was at the cost of lost spirits, then
let the body perish. And it is at the cost of lost spirits.
I do not say that under no circumstances should an
experiment take place, but I do say that under no circum-
stances should an experiment take place for teaching
purposes. You will see how decided my judgments are
on this matter.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 15
The Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Head Master of
Harrow, has been good enough to write to me
as follows :
I am most willing to let you quote my words, whether
what I said before or what I say now. You command my
full sympathy in the crusade which you have so nobly
declared against cruelty. I say this frankly, although I
know that there is some difference between us in regard
to the practice of Vivisection. But even if it be neces-
sary that in some cases, and under strict conditions,
vivisectional experiments should be made upon animals, I
cannot doubt that the use of such experiments tends to
exercise a demoralizing influence upon any person who
may be called to make them. I hold, therefore, that
the educational effect of Vivisection is always injurious.
Knowledge is dearly purchased at the cost of tenderness,
and I cannot believe that any morally-minded person
could desire to familiarize the young with the sight of
animal suffering. For my part, I look upon the hardness
of heart with which some distinguished physiologists have
met the protest raised against Vivisection as one of many
signs that materialism means at the last an inversion of
the ethical law ; *>., a preference of knowledge to good-
ness, of mind to spirit, or, in a word, of human things to
divine. Surely it is a paradox that they who minimize the
specific distinction between man and the animals should
be the least tender in their views of animal sufferings, and
that Christians who accentuate that distinction should be
willing to spare animals pain at the cost of enhancing
their own. I conceive it then to be a primary duty of a
modern educator, at School or at College, to cultivate in
his pupils, by all the means in his power, the sympathetic
sentiment towards the animal world.
1 6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
To turn to a less painful part of our subject.
Science and Art are constantly coupled to-
gether in common parlance and in grants of
public money ; but, if ever incompatibility of
temper formed a just ground of divorce, it is
surely in their case. When Science like Pov-
erty comes in at the door, Art like Love
flies out at the window. They move in differ-
ent planes, and touch different parts of human
nature. Science appeals to the Intellect, Art
to the Emotions; and we are so constituted that
our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in
a well. When our Intellects are in the ascend-
ant, our Emotions sink out of sight ; when our
Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects
subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry
of Science which could make intelligent men
overlook the fact that she and Art resemble
two leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways,
and never running together unless there be
some game (shall we surmise an endowment of
public money?) in view. The synthetic, rever-
ential, sympathizing spirit of Art is opposed,
as the different poles of the magnet, to the
analytic, self-asserting, critical spirit of Science.
The artist seeks Beauty ; finds likenesses ; dis-
cerns the Ideal through the Real. The man
of Science seeks Facts; draws distinctions;
strips the Real to the skin and the bones.
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 17
A great light of the Scientific Age has been
heard to say that when he first visited the Vat-
ican he " sat down before Raphael's Transfigu-
ration and filled three pages of his note-book
with its faults." It was the most natural thing
in the world for him to do! How should a
Physicist approve of three figures suspended
in the air in. defiance of the laws of gravita-
tion? Or what could a Zoologist say to an
angel outrageously combining in his person
the wings exclusively belonging to the Order
Aves with the arms and legs of Bimana?
Worst of all, what must be the feelings of a
Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a
Centaur with two stomachs, or of a Cherub
with none ?
Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to
see what Science can do for it, let us take a
typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays
like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,
say Shelley's " Sensitive Plant," for example.
We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly
unscientific statements; e.g., that the lily of the
valley grows pale with passion, that the hya-
cinth rings peals of music from its bells, and
that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream.
Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe
how the garden has been thoroughly drained
1 8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
and scientifically manured with guano and sew-
age. After this the flowers may be mentioned
under their proper classes, as monandria and
polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such
would be the result of bringing the Scientific
Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the
border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring
with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artis-
tic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it
furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the
leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his
aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute
realism of " A Mummer's Wife " and " La Joie
de Vivre." The distance between Walter Scott
and Zola measures that between Art and Sci-
ence in Fiction.
To many readers it may appear that the
antagonism of Science to Art may be con-
doned in favor of her high claim to be the
guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it
indeed Truth, in the sense which we have hith-
erto given to that great and sacred word, at
which Physical Science is now aiming? Can
we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of
Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a
Science, like one of Timur's heaps of skulls?
To collect a million facts, test them, classify
them, raise by induction generalizations con-
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 19
earning them, and hand them down to the next
generation to add a few thousand more facts
and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a
different basis and another plan, if this be
indeed to arrive at " Truth," modern Science
may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in
other days Truth was deemed something no-
bler than this. It was the interests which lay
behind and beyond the facts, their possible
bearing on man's deepest yearnings and sub-
limest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning
to the humblest researches into rock and plant,
and which glorified such discoveries as Kep-
ler's till he cried in rapture, "O God, I think
thy thoughts after thee ! " and Newton's, till he
closed the " Principia " (as Parker said of him)
by "bursting into the Infinite and kneeling
there." In our time, however, Science has
repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw
light in any direction beyond the sequence of
physical causes and effects ; and by doing so
she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be
man's guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller
who engages his guides to scale the summit of
the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in
the Wirthschaft at the bottom, would have no
better right to complain than those who fondly
expected Science to bring them to God, and
2O THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
are informed that she now never proceeds
above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivu-
lets of laws traced by Science flowed freshly
onward towards the sea, our souls drank of
them with thankfulness. Now that they lose
themselves in the sands, they have become
mere stagnant pools of knowledge.
We now turn to the influence of the Scien-
tific Spirit on Morals.
Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-
Scientific Spirit has almost necessarily been
from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental.
To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed
the suggestion that moral intuitions are only
results of hereditary experiences. " I believe,"
he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, "that the experi-
ences of utility, organized and consolidated
through all past generations of the human
race, have been producing corresponding mod-
ifications which, by continued transmission and
accumulation, have become in us certain facul-
ties of moral intuition, certain emotions re-
sponding to right and wrong conduct which
have no apparent basis in the individual expe-
riences of utility." Mr. Darwin took up the
doctrine at this stage, and in his " Descent of
Man" linked on the human conscience to the
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 21
instincts of the lower animals, from whence he
held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he
taught, would have grown up in any other ani-
mal as well endowed as we are, but those other
animals would not necessarily attach their
ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct.
" If, for instance, men were reared under pre-
cisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there
can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried
females would, like the worker-bees, think it a
sacred duty to kill their brothers." (Descent of
Man, vol. i. p. 73.)
These two doctrines that Conscience is
only the " capitalized experience of the human
tribe " (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr.
Spencer) and that there is no such thing as
absolute or immutable Morality, but only a
convenient Rule for each particular class of in-
telligent animals have between them revo-
lutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imper-
illed, so far as they are accepted, the existence
of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is
often entered on the side of faith that, after
'all, Darwin only showed how Conscience has
been evolved, perhaps by Divine prearrange-
ment, and that we may allow its old authority
all the same. He has done much more than
this. He has destroyed the possibility of re-
22 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
taining the same reverence for the dictates of
conscience. As he himself asks, " Would any
of us trust in the convictions of a monkey s
mind? . . . The doubt always arises whether
the convictions of man's mind, which has been
developed from the mind of the lower animals,
are of any value" (Life, vol. i. p. 316.) Who,
indeed, can attach the same solemn authority
to the monitions of the
" Stern daughter of the Voice of God "
and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerg-
ing from apehood ? It was hard enough here-
tofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober,
honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring
for indulgence or want pining for relief. The
basis on which their moral efforts rested needed
to be in their minds as firm as the law of the
universe itself. What fulcrum will they find
henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary ex-
periences of utility?
Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine
under the deepest foundations of Morality. It
may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I be-
lieve that it will be so, and that it will be de-
monstrated that many of our broadest and
deepest moral intuitions can have had no
such origin. The universal human expecta-
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 23
tion of Justice, to which all literature bears
testimony, can never have arisen from such
infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or
rather such large experience of prevailing in-
justice, as our ancestors in any period of
history can have known. Nor can "the set
of our (modern) brains " against the destruc-
tion of sickly and deformed infants have come
to us from the consolidated experience of past
generations, since the " utility " is all on the
side of Spartan infanticide. But for the pres-
ent, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant
the influence of the doctrine of Hereditary
Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more
possible for a man who holds such a theory
to cherish a great moral ambition than for a
stream to rise above its source. The lofty
ideal of Goodness, the hunger and thirst after
righteousness, which have been the main-
spring of heroic and saintly lives, must be ex-
changed at best for a kindly good nature and
a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of
science may be anxious to abolish vice and
crime. They offend his tastes, and distract
him from his pursuits ; but he has no long-
ing to enthrone in their place a positive
virtue, demanding his heart and life's devotion.
He is almost as much disturbed by extreme
24 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been
remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer,
that the companionship of a really great and
entirely blameless man of science invariably
proved a "torpedo touch to aspiration."
An obvious practical result of the present
influence of Science on Morals has been the
elevation of Bodily Health into the summum
bomim, and the consequent accommodation of
the standard of right and wrong to that new
aim. An immense proportion of the argu-
ments employed in Parliament and elsewhere,
when any question touching public health is
under discussion, rest on the unexpressed major
premise " that any action which in the opinion
of experts conduces to the bodily health of
the individual or of the community is ipso
facto lawful and right." I cannot here indicate
the conclusions to which this principle leads.
Much that the Christian conscience now holds
to be Vice must be transferred to the category
of Virtue ; while the medical profession will
acquire a Power of the Keys which it is per-
haps even less qualified to use than the Suc-
cessors of St. Peter.
Another threatening evil from the side of
Science is the growth of a hard and pitiless
temper. From whatsoever cause it arise, it
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 25
seems certain that, with some noteworthy ex-
ceptions, the Scientific Spirit is callous. In
the mass of its literature, the expressions of
sympathy with civilized or savage, healthy or
diseased mankind, or with the races below us,
are few and far between. Men and beasts
are, in scientific language, alike " specimens "
(wretched word!); and, if the men be ill or
dying, they become " clinical material." The
light of Science is a "dry "one. She leaves
no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere.
Nor has she more pity than Nature for the
weak who fall in the struggle for existence.
There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite
sui generis for the "poor in spirit," the simple,
the devoutly believing, in short, for all the
humble and the weak, which constitutes of
the Scientific Spirit of the Age a kind of Neo-
Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity.
I may add that it is no less the antithesis of
Theism, which, while abandoning the Apoca-
lyptic side of Christianity, holds (perhaps with
added consciousness of its supreme value) to
the spiritual part of the old faith, and would
build the Religion of the future on Christ's
lessons of love to God and Man, of self-sacri-
fice and self-consecration.
Prior to experience it might have been con-
26 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
fidently expected that the Darwinian doctrine
of the descent of Man would have called forth
a fresh burst of sympathy towards all races of
men and towards the lower animals. Every
biologist now knows tenfold better reasons
than Saint Francis for calling the birds and
beasts "little brothers and sisters." But, in-
stead of instilling the tenderness of the Saint
of Assisi, Science has taught her devotees to
regard the world as a scene of universal strug-
gle, wherein the rule must be, " Every one for
himself, and no God for any one."
Ten years ago an eminent American phy-
sician remarked to me : " In my country the
ardor of scientific research is rapidly overrid-
ing the proper benevolent objects of my pro-
fession. The cure of disease is becoming quite
a secondary consideration to the achievement
of a correct diagnosis, to be verified by a suc-
cessful /<w/ mortem? How true this now holds
of the state of things in English hospitals, that
remarkable book, "St. Bernard's," and its still
more important key, "Dying Scientifically,"
have just come in time to testify.* No one
* Speaking of this latter book, the Manchester Guardian (March
17) remarked that "the charges in 'St Bernard's' were supported by
details of cases reported in medical journals and by statements made
by lecturers of distinction. The quotations are precise and easily
verified. The hospitals will do well to take some notice of a medical
man who avers that the healing of patients is subordinated to the
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 27
who has read these books will deny that the
purely Scientific Spirit is (at all events some-
times) a merciless spirit ; and that Dr. Draper's
famous boast, so often repeated, that "Science
has never subjected any one to physical tort-
ure " (Preface to " Conflict," p. xi), is untrue.
Irreverence appears to be another " note " of
the Scientific Spirit. Literature always holds
a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings
will never be dethroned. But Science is essen-
tially Jacobin. The one thing certain about a
great man of science is that in a few years his
theories and books, like French Constitutions,
will be laid on the shelf. Like coral insects,
the scientists of yesterday, who built the foun-
dations of the science of to-day, are all dead
from the moment that their successors have
raised over them another inch of the inter-
minable reef. The student of Literature, deal-
ing with human life, cannot forget for a mo-
ment the existence of such things as goodness
which he must honor, and wickedness which
he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing
professional advantages of the staff and the students, that cures are
retarded for clinical study, that new drugs are tried upon hospital
patients, who are needlessly examined and made to undergo unnec-
essary operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement
that the dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blun-
ders of students are covered by their teachers for the credit of the
hospital." Every one of these offences against justice and humanity
is directly due to the inspiration of the Scientific Spirit.
28 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons
to her votaries. There is nothing to revere
even in a well-balanced solar system, and noth-
ing to despise in a microbe. Taking this into
consideration, it might have been foreseen that
the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have
been deficient in reverence ; and, as a matter
of fact, I think it will be conceded that so
it is. It is a spirit to which the terms "im-
perious" and "arrogant" may not unfitly be
applied, and sometimes we may add " over-
bearing," when a man of science thinks fit to
rebuke a theologian for trespassing on his
ground after he has been trampling all over
the ground of theology. Perhaps the differ-
ence between the new " bumptious '' Spirit of
Science and the old exquisitely modest and
reverent tone of Newton and Herschel, Fara-
day and Lyell, is only due to the causes which
distinguish everywhere a Church Triumphant
from a Church Militant. But, whatever they
may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be
in an age of Science that the prophecy will
be fulfilled that "the meek shall inherit the
earth."*
* It was long before Science acquired her natural voice. For
more than a thousand years she submitted servilely to Aristotle and
his interpreters. But the Science of the Dark Ages was only a
branch of learning of which a Picus of Mirandola or an Admirable
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 2Q
Among the delicate and beautiful things
which Science brushes away from life, I cannot
omit to number a certain modesty which has
hitherto prevailed among educated people.
The decline of decency in England, apparent
to every one old enough to recall earlier man-
ners and topics of conversation, is due in great
measure, I think, to the scientific (medical)
spirit. Who would have thought thirty years
ago of seeing young men in public reading-
rooms snatching at the Lancet and the British
Medical Journal from layers of what ought to
be more attractive literature, and poring over
hideous diagrams and revolting details of dis-
ease and monstrosity ? It is perfectly right, no
doubt, for these professional journals to deal
plainly with these horrors, and with the thrice
abominable records of "gynaecology." But,
being so, it follows that it is not proper that
they should form the furniture of a reading-
table at which young men and young women
sit for general not medical instruction.
Nor is it only in the medical journals that
Crichton could master the whole, along with the classics and mathe-
matics of the period. The genuine Scientific Spirit was not yet
born ; and when it woke at last in Galileo and Kepler, and down to
our own day, the Religious spirit was still paramount over the Scien-
tific. It is only in the present generation that w~ witness at once the
evolution of the true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance.
30 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
disease-mongering now obtains. The political
press has adopted the practice of reporting the
details of illness of every eminent man who
falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords
those gentlemen an opportunity of advertising
themselves as his advisers. The last recollec-
tion which the present generation will retain
of many an illustrious statesman, poet, and sol-
dier, will not be that he died like a hero or a
saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed
such and such a medicine, and, perhaps, was
sick in his stomach. Death-beds are desecrated
that doctors may be puffed and public inquisi-
tiveness assuaged.
So far does the materialist spirit penetrate
into literature that in criticising books and men
the most exaggerated importance is attached
by numberless writers to the physical condi-
tions and " environments " of the personages
with whom they are concerned, till we could
almost suppose that given his ancestry and
circumstances we could scientifically con-
struct the Man, with all his gifts and passions.
As if, forsooth, a dozen brothers were alike in
character, or even all the kittens in a litter!
It is refreshing to read the brisk persiflage
on this kind of thing in the Revue des Deux
Mondes for March i. The writer, reviewing
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 31
Mr. Lecky's books, states that but little of
that splendid historian's private life has been
published, and adds:
" Je ne me plains pas de cette secheresse, je la be'nis.
C'est un plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd'hui, de pouvoir lire
un livre sans en connaitre Tauteur : de juger une oeuvre
directement et en elle-meme, sans avoir a etudier ce com-
pose* d'organes et de tissus, de nerfs et de muscles, d'ou
elle est sortie : sans la comrnenter a 1'aide de la physiolo-
gic, de 1'ethnographie, et de la climatologie : sans mettre
en jeu Tatavisme et les diatheses hereditaires ! " *
Turn we lastly to the influences of the
Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too
much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit
has been to individuals and classes the signal
for a subsidence of religious faith and religious
emotion.! Judging from Darwin's experience,
as that of a typical man of science, just as such
a one becomes an embodiment of the Sci-
* While I am writing these pages, the Globe informs us that there
reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and surgical
operations. " It has become the right thing to get up early and hurry
off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the scalpel. The
novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger realism of the medi-
cal treatise, and the picture galleries have the air of a pathological
museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if they want to hold their
own, must represent critical operations in a thoroughly realistic man-
ner on the stage."
t In the very noteworthy paper by Mr. Myers in the Nineteenth
Century for May on the " Disenchantment of France," there occurs
this remark : " In that country where the pure dicta of Science reign
32 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
entific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers
and expires, like a candle in an airless vault.
Speaking of his old feelings of "wonder, admi-
ration, and devotion" experienced while stand-
ing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he
wrote in later years, when Science had made
him all her own: "Now the grandest scenes
would not cause any such convictions and feel-
ings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said
that I am like a man who has become color-
blind" (Life, vol. i. p. 31 1). Nor did the dead-
ening influences stop at his own soul. As one
able reviewer of his " Life " in the Spectator
wrote: "No sane man can deny Darwin's influ-
ence to have been at least contemporaneous
with a general decay of belief in the unseen.
Darwin's Theism faded from his mind without
disturbance, without perplexity, without pain.
These words describe his influence as well as
his experience."
The causes of the anti-religious tendency of
modern science may be found, I believe: ist, in
the closing up of that " Gate called Beautiful,"
through which many souls have been wont to
in the intellectual classes with less interference from custom, senti-
ment, or tradition, than even in Germany itself, we should find that
Science, at her present point, is a depressing disintegrating energy "
(p. 663). Elsewhere he says that France "makes M. Pasteur her
national hero " /
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 33
enter the Temple ; 2d, in the diametric oppo-
sition of its method to the method of spiritual
inquiry ; and, 3d, to the hardness of character
frequently produced (as we have already noted)
by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I
think, sufficiently account for the antagonism
between the modern Scientific and the Relig-
ious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings
of critical or philosophical researches on the
doctrines of either natural or traditional relig-
ion. Had Science inspired her votaries with
religious sentiment, they would have broken
their way through the tangle of theological
difficulties, and have opened for us a highway
of Faith at once devout and rational. But of
all improbable things to anticipate now in the
world is a Scientific Religious Reformation.
Lamennais said there was one thing worse
than Atheism ; namely, indifference whether
Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of the
Age has reached this point. It is contented to
be Agnostic, not Atheistic. It says aloud, " I
don't know." It mutters to those who listen,
" I don't care."
The Scientific Spirit has undoubtedly per-
formed prodigies in the realms of physical
discovery. Its inventions have brought enor-
mous contributions to the material well-being
34 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE
of man, and it has widened to a magnificent
horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet
notwithstanding all its splendid achievements,
if it only foster our lower mental faculties
while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher ; if
Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle
in its shadow; if Art and Poetry shrink at its
touch; if Morality be undermined and per-
verted by it ; and if Religion perish at its ap-
proach as a flower vanishes before the frost,
then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir
James Paget's assertion, that " nothing can ad-
vance human prosperity so much as science'.'
She has given us many precious things; but
she takes away things more precious still.
ESSAY II.
THE EDUCATION OF THE
EMOTIONS.
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS.
HUMAN Emotions the most largely effec-
tive springs of human conduct arise either
at first hand on the pressure of their natural
stimuli, or at second hand by the contagion of
sympathy with the emotions of other men.
This last source of emotion has not, I conceive,
received sufficient attention in practical systems
of education, and to the consideration of ,it the
present paper will be chiefly devoted.
Every human emotion appears to be trans-
missible by contagion, and to be also more
often so developed than it is solitarily evolved.
For once that Courage or Terror, Admiration
or Contempt, or even Good-will and Ill-will,
spring of themselves in the breast of man,
woman, or child, each is many times caught
from another mind possessed of the same feel-
ing. By a subtle sympathy, not unshared by
the lower animals, a sympathy which sometimes
works slowly and imperceptibly and is some-
38 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
times communicated with electric velocity, one
man conveys to another, as if it were a flame,
the emotion which burns in his own soul.
Thenceforth the recipient becomes a fresh
propagator of the emotion to those with whom
he in his turn comes into physical contact. A
few instances may be named to make clear my
meaning.
The most familiar example of the contagious-
ness of the emotions, as the reader will in-
stantly recall, is that of Fear, which has often
spread through whole armies with such inex-
plicable celerity and fatal results that the an-
cients were fain to attribute the frenzy to the
malevolence of a god, and called such terrors
" Panic." The disasters which have occurred
during the last few years in so many European
and American theatres and churches afford sad
evidence that, though " great Pan is dead," our
liability to succumb to such waves of fear has
not been diminished by modern civilization.
The proof of the special power of the con-
tagion lies in this : that there is every reason
to believe that the majority of the persons con-
stituting the terror-stricken crowd would, if
alone, have met the danger with reasonable
composure. There is also happily, we may
remember, such a thing as the contagion of
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 39
Courage as well as that of Terror. And many
a time and oft in our history the captain of a
sinking ship, the commander of a retreating
regiment, has, by his individual intrepidity, re-
stored the morale of his men. Again, a remark-
able instance of the contagiousness of emotion
is afforded by the Popularity of the men who
become in any country the idols of the hour.
The fact is very well known to the organizers
of claques and reclames in theatres, and of ova-
tions in political life, that it is enough for a
small band of friends in an assembly to cheer
and clap hands, to induce hundreds, who had
previously little interest in the work or person
praised, to join the hosannas. When a states-
man has succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for
himself (possibly by persuading scores of people
and associations that " all his sympathies are
with their" totally opposite aims), he may
then safely disappoint each in turn and veer
round to the opposite point of the political and
theological compass from which he sailed with
flowing canvas. His popularity will not be
forfeited or even lessened ; for it is a mere con-
tagion of sentiment, not a rational or critical
judgment. Herein lies the special peril of
democracies, that this kind of contagion of
personal enthusiasm rapidly becomes the larg-
4O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
est factor in their politics. From the nature
of things, the masses cannot form judgments
on questions of state, referring, perhaps, to
countries of which the very names are un-
known to them ; and, therefore, they must of
necessity choose Men, not Measures. When
we further examine who are the Men so chosen
and why, we arrive at the startling discovery
that it is exclusively by rhetoric that the con-
tagious admiration and sympathy of the masses
can be roused. Not sound statesmanship, not
wise patriotism, not incorruptible fidelity, not
dignified consistency, not, in short, any one
quality fitting a man to be a safe or able min-
ister, attracts the enthusiasm of the multitude,
or is even estimated at all by them. The only
gift they can appreciate is that which they
themselves would designate " the Gift of the
Gabr The lesson is a grave one for all free
countries. By such popular idolatry of great
talkers were all the old republics of Greece
and Magna Graecia brought to destruction;
and the men who by such means acquired a
bastard royalty over them so exercised it as to
make the name of " Tyrant " for ever abomi-
nable.
As concerns emotions connected with Relig-
ion, the contagion of them has been notorious
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 4!
in all ages, for good or evil, according to the
character of the religion in question. The
intoxication of the dances of old Maenads and
the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self-
woundings of the priests of Baal and Cybele,
the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch and
the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples
will occur to every reader. Probably those on
the largest scale of all recorded in history were
the first Crusades, when " Europe precipitated
itself on Asia " in a delirium of religious en-
thusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and
Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the
Anabaptists, the Flagellants and Prophets of
the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem
fanatics under Prophets and Mahdis (of which
we have probably by no means heard the last),
and finally the Revivals of various sects in
England and America, and the triumphs of the
Salvation Army, are all instances of the part
played by the contagion of emotion in the
religion of the community at large. I shall
speak hereafter of its share in personal religious
experience.
In much smaller matters than religion, and
where no explosion reveals the contagion of
sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the
spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one
42 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
individual of a family or village to all the other
members or inhabitants. It suffices for some
spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old
woman a witch, or to express hatred of some
foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat
prejudices which end in something approach-
ing to persecution of the victims, who may be
thankful they did not live two hundred years
ago, when, instead of being boycotted, they
would have been burned. A child in a school
or large household who has the misfortune to
be lame or ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity
physical or mental, may, without any fault on
its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike
of a stupid servant or jealous step-mother, and
then the contagion spreading and intensify-
ing as it extends to the common hatred of
the little community, a hatred justifying itself
by the sullenness or deceptions to which the
poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic
animals suffer from this kind of contagious
dislike, and benefit on the other hand by con-
tagious admiration and fondness.* " Give a
*I have heard a pitiful example of this kind of prejudice. An
orphan boy and his ugly mongrel dog were the objects of universal
dislike and ridicule in the house of his uncle, a Scotch farmer. The
lad always sat of an evening far back from the circle by the fireside,
with his crouching dog under his stool lest it should be kicked. One
day the little son of the house, of whom the farmer and his wife were
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 43
dog a bad name and hang him " is true in
more senses than one.
We need not pursue this part of the subject
further. Every day's experience may supply
fresh illustrations of the immense influence of
contagion in the development of all human
emotions. Nor is it by any means to be set
down as a weakness peculiar to or characteris-
tic of a feeble mind to be blindly susceptible
of such contagion. Even the strongest wills
are bent and warped by the winds of other
men's passions, persistently blowing in given
directions. Original minds, gifted with what
the French call r esprit primesautier, are per-
haps, indeed, affected rather more than less
than commonplace people by the emotions of
those around them, because their larger natures
are more open to the sympathetic shock. Like
ships with all sails set, they are caught by every
breeze. It is a question of degree how much
each man receives of influence from his neigh-
dotingly fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm com-
ing on, they were all lost on the hills. Next morning the dog returned
to the farm, making wild signs that the farmer should follow him,
which he and his wife did at once, in great anxiety. At last, the
dog brought them to a spot where they found the boy stiff and
cold, but their child still alive. The boy had taken off his own coat
and wrapped it round the child, whom he laid on his breast, and
then, lying under him on the snow, had died. Let us hope that at
least the dog reaped some tardy fruits of the farmer's repentance.
44 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
bors; but (to use the new medical barbarism)
we are never " immune " altogether from the
contagion.
We may now approach our proper subject of
the Education of the Emotions, carrying with
us the important fact that no means are so
efficacious in promoting good ones as the wise
employment of the great agency of Contagion;
and, further, that this contagion works only by
exhibiting the genuine emotion to the person
we desire to influence. Only by being brave
can we inspire courage. Only by reverencing
holy things can we communicate veneration.
Only by being tender and loving can we move
other hearts to pity and affection.
Let us glance over the variety of circum-
stances wherein great good might be effected
by systematic attention to the natural laws of
the development of the emotions. We may
begin by considering those connected with the
education of the young.
In the first place, parents duly impressed
with the importance of the subject would care-
fully suppress, or at least conceal, such of their
own emotions as they would regret to see
caught up by their children. At present, num-
berless sufficiently conscientious fathers and
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 45
mothers, who would be horrified at the sugges-
tion of placing books teaching bad lessons in
the hands of their sons and daughters, yet care-
lessly allow them to witness (and of course to
receive the contagion of) all manner of angry,
envious, cowardly, and scornful emotions, just
as they chance to be called out in themselves.
It would be to revolutionize many homes to
induce parents to revise their own sentiments,
with a view to deciding which they should com-
municate to their children. In one way in
particular, the result of such self-questioning
might be startling. Every good father desires
his son to respect his mother, and would be
sorry to teach him only the half of the Fifth
Commandment in words. Yet how do scores
of such well-meaning men set about conveying
the sentiment of reverence which they recog-
nize will be invaluable to their sons ? They
treat those same mothers, in the presence of
those same sons, with such rudeness, dismiss
their opinions with such levity, and perhaps
exhibit such actual contempt for their wishes
that it is not in nature but that the boy will
receive a lesson of disrespect. His father's
feelings, backed up as they are by the disa-
bilities under which the Constitution places
women, can scarcely fail to impress the young
46 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
mind with that contempt for women in general,
and for his mother in particular, which is pre-
cisely the reverse of chivalry and filial piety.
Almost as important as the contagion of
parental emotion is that of the sentiments of
Teachers; yet on this subject nobody seems to
think it needful even to institute inquiries. So
far as I can learn, the sole question asked now-
adays when a professor is to be appointed
to a Chair at the Universities is, "Whether
he be the man among the candidates who
knows most [or rather who has the reputation
of knowing most] of the subject which he pro-
poses to teach ? " This point being ascertained,
and nothing serious alleged against his moral
conduct, the fortunate gentleman receives his
appointment as a matter of course. Even
electors who personally detest the notorious
opinions of the professor on religion or politics
acquiesce cheerfully in the choice ; apparently
satisfied that he will carve out to his students
the particular pound of knowledge he is bound
to give them, and not a drop of blood besides.
The same principle, I presume (I have little
information on the subject), prevails in schools
generally, as it does in private education. A
professor or governess is engaged to instruct
boys or girls, let us say in Latin, History, or
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 47
Physiology, and it is assumed that he or she
will act precisely like a teaching machine for
that particular subject, and never step beyond
its borders. A little common sense would dis-
sipate this idle presumption, supposing it to
be really entertained, and that the mania for
cramming sheer knowledge down the throats
of the young does not make their elders wil-
fully disregardful of the moral poison which
may filter along with it. Every human being,
as I have said, exercises some influence over
the emotions of his neighbor; but that of a
Teacher, especially if he be a brilliant one,
over his students, often amounts to a conta-
gion of enthusiasm throughout the class. His
admirations are adored, the objects of his sneers
despised, and every opinion he enunciates is an
oracle. And it is these professors and teach-
ers, forsooth, whose opinions on ethics, theology,
and politics it is not thought worth while to
ascertain before installing them in their Chairs
to become the guides of the young men and
women who are the hope of the nation !
It does not require any direct, or even in-
direct, inculcation of opinion on the teacher's
part to do mischief. It is the contagion of his
emotions which is to be feared, if those emo-
tions be base or bad. Let him teach History
48 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
and betray his enthusiasm for selfish and san-
guinary conquerors, or justify assassins and
anarchists, or jest Gibbon fashion at mar-
tyrs and heroes, will he not communicate those
base sentiments to his young audience ? Or
let him teach Science, and convey to every
student's mind that deification of mere knowl-
edge, that insolent sense of superiority in the
possession of it, that remorseless determination
to pursue it regardless of every moral restraint,
which is too often the " note " of modern sci-
entism, will the instruction he affords to his
students' brains counterbalance the harm he
will do to their hearts ?
And, on the other hand, what a splendid
vantage-ground for the dissemination not merely
of knowledge, but of elevated feelings, is that
of a Teacher ! Merely in teaching a dead or
modern language, a fine-natured man communi-
cates his own glowing feelings respecting the
masterpieces of national literature which it is
his duty to expound.
The last point we need notice as regards the
contagion of emotions among the young is the
subject of Companions. Here again, as in
the case of respect for mothers, there is great
unanimity in theory. Every one admits that
bad companions are ruinous for boys or girls.
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 49
But, when it comes to taking precautions
against the herding of innocent and well-
nurtured children with others who have been
familiar with vice, I see little trace of the
anxious care and discrimination which ought
to prevail. Nay, in the case of the children
of the poor, it seems to me the law is often
wickedly applied to compel good parents to
send them, against their own will and convic-
tions, to sit beside companions who have come
straight to school out of slums of filth, moral
and physical. I have known Americans argue
that it is right for children of all classes to
associate together, so that the well-trained may
communicate good ideas to the ill-trained. The
reasoning appears to be on a par with a pro-
posal to send healthy people to sleep in a
cholera hospital. But, while we allow our-
selves to be terrified beyond bounds by alarms
about the infection of bodily disease, we take
hardly any precautions against the more dread-
ful, and quite as real, infection of moral cor-
ruption.*
* I will cite an example from my own experience, which may help
to make parents realize the subtle peril of which I speak. Twenty-
five years ago I was engaged in an effort to help Mary Carpenter in
the care of the Red Lodge Reformatory for girl-thieves at Bristol. Our
poor little charges had all been convicted of larceny, or some kindred
offence, but they were not technically "fallen " girls : another establish-
5O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
The general sentiment of boys and youths
in the great public schools and colleges of
England thanks to the high-minded Masters
who have been at their head is, on the whole,
good and honorable. It may be taken for
granted that a boy from Harrow, Eton, Rugby,
Winchester, Westminster, or Uppingham, and
a fortiori a man from Oxford or Cambridge,
will despise lying and cowardice and admire
fair play and justice. How grand a founda-
tion for national character has thus been laid !
What a debt do we owe alike to the Masters
and the " Tom Browns " who have communi-
cated the contagion of such noble emotions!
In Continental lycees and academies, public
opinion among the boys is, by all accounts,
wofully inferior to that which is current in
our great schools. There has never been an
Arnold in a French Rugby.
ment received young women of this " unfortunate " class. Twice,
however, it happened, during my residence with Miss Carpenter, that
girls who had been on the streets were by mistake sent to us when
convicted of theft, and were of course received and placed with the
others, all being under the most careful surveillance both in the
school-rooms, playgrounds, and dormitory. Nevertheless, in each
case, before the " unfortunate " had been three days in the Lodge,
by some inexplicable contagion the whole school of fifty girls were
demoralized so completely that the aspect of the children and change
in their behavior gave warning to their experienced janitress to trace
the history of the new-comer more exactly, and, as the result
proved, to detect where the infection had come in.
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 51
As regards girls, their doubly emotional nat-
ures make it a matter of moral life and death
that their companions (of whose emotions they
are perfectly certain to experience the conta-
gion) should be pure and honorable-minded.
It is most encouraging to every woman who
reads Mrs. Pfeiffer's masterly new book, " Wo-
men and Work," to see the rising generation of
girls displaying such splendid abilities and zeal
for instruction, and as Mrs. Pfeiffer amply
proves without paying for it in loss of bodily
vigor. Fain would I see the " blessed Damo-
zels," who are still standing behind the golden
bars of noble homes, all flocking to the new
colleges for women, as their brothers do to
Christchurch and Trinity, there to imbibe
parallel sentiments of truthfulness and pluck,
more precious than Greek, Latin, or mathe-
matics !
Leaving now the subject of the Education of
the Emotions of the Young, by parents, teach-
ers, and companions, I proceed to speak of the
general education of the emotions of the com-
munity by public and private instrumentality,
a wide field, over which we can only glance.
What machinery is disposable to cultivate the
better and discourage the lower emotions,
52 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
either by the exhibition of the direct natural
stimulus to the former and withdrawal of it in
the latter cases, or by the aid of contagion?
In the grand matter of Legislation I do not
know that there is much more to be done than
has already been achieved by the abolition of
those public punishments of criminals hang-
ing, drawing and quartering, flogging at the
cart's tail, and the pillory which must have
been frightfully prolific of cruel passions in the
spectators. To have taken part in such execu-
tions, e.g. in the old stonings to death, in the
burning of witches and heretics, or in the
minor but yet barbarous and cowardly pelting
of the helpless wretches in the pillory, must
have been an apprenticeship worthy of a Red
Indian. Even to have been a passive spectator
of a Newgate execution in later years, amid the
yelling crowd, must have been excessively de-
moralizing, and in fact was at last recognized
by the Legislature to be so, instead of a whole-
some warning. It is a cause for rejoicing that
there is an end of this kind of contagious emo-
tion in England, except in the case of experi-
ments on animals, of which the Act of 1876
sanctions the exhibition to classes under spe-
cial certificates which require the subjects to
be fully anaesthetized. On this point the warn-
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 53
ing of the late lamented Professor Rolleston
ought, I think, to have sufficed. He told the
Royal Commission : " The sight of a living,
bleeding, and quivering organism most un-
doubtedly does act in a particular way upon
what Dr. Carpenter calls the emotiono-motor
nature in us. ... When men are massed
together, the emotiono-motor nature is more
responsive, it becomes more sensitive to im-
pression than it does at other times, and that
of course bears very greatly on the question of
interference with vivisections before masses "
(Minutes, 1287*). The time will come when it
will be looked upon as a monstrous inconsist-
*In Dr. Ingleby's just published Essays there is a very pertinent
story from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion
of cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of
the Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting
that he would not look at the show : " So soon as he saw the blood,"
says Saint Augustine, " he therewith drank down savageness ; nor
turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and
was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody
pastime ; nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he
came into." Saint Augustine's Confessions, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar per-
versions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the fol-
lowing instance from his own knowledge. "A party of English
people went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first
horse was ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young
lady of the party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her
brothers compelled her to remain ; and a number of horses were
then mutilated and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of
the spectacle the girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in
the assembly."
54 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
ency that the spectacle of the execution of
murderers should be shut off from the adult
population on account of its recognized ill effects
in fostering contagious cruelty, and, at the same
time, as many as nineteen certificates should
be issued in one year by the Home Office, spe-
cially authorizing the mutilation of harmless
animals before classes of young men and women.
Majestic public functions, coronations, thanks-
givings, state entries into great cities, and fu-
nerals of distinguished men afford admirable
machinery for the communication of noble emo-
tions through the masses. It was worth the
cost and trouble of last year's Jubilee ten times
over to have sent through so many brains and
hearts the thrill of sympathy which followed
the Queen to the old throne of her fathers,
while the kings of the earth stood around her
as witnesses that she had kept the oath to her
people, sworn there fifty years before. For one
day England and all her vast colonies beat with
one heart, and the contagion of loyal emotion,
love, reverence, pride, and pity, for woman,
empress, mother, widow, ran round the globe.
Sad was it (as many must have remembered)
that he who would have found the true words to
give utterance to the sentiment in the heaving
breast of the nation, he whose proud duty it
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 55
would have been to welcome the Queen to his
own Abbey, was lying on that day silent be-
neath its pavement.
Beyond Legislation and Public Functions,
the largest influence which sways the emotions
of all educated people is undoubtedly Litera-
ture. The power of Books to awaken the most
vivid feelings is a phenomenon at which sav-
ages may well wonder. The magic which
enables both the living and the long departed
to move us to the depths of our being by the
aid only of a few marks on sheets of paper is a
never-ending miracle. It were vain to attempt
to do any justice to the subject, or show how
the contagion of piety, patriotism, enthusiasm
for justice and truth, and sympathy with other
nations and other classes than our own, is
borne to us in the pages of the poets and his-
torians and novelists of the world. Pitiful it is
to think how narrow must ,be the scope of the
emotions of any man whose breast has never
dilated nor his eyes flashed over the grandeur
of the Book of Job, over Dante or Shakspere,
and whose heart has never been warmed and
his sympathies extended, backwards through
time and around him in space, by Walter Scott,
and Defoe, and Dickens, and George Eliot.
Alas that we must add that Literature can
56 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
not only kindle the noblest emotions, but also
light up baleful fires, of the basest and most
sensual, to look for which we have not now
even to cross the Channel ! M. Zola has been
translated into English.
After Literature I presume that the Stage is
the greatest public agency for the promotion of
fine emotions, and it is to the honor of human
nature that it is found (at least in our country)
to be most popular when it fulfils its office best,
and calls out sympathy for generous and heroic
actions. When the Roman audience rose en
masse to applaud the line of Terence which first
proclaimed the brotherhood of man, " Homo
sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,"-
the highest mission of the Drama was fulfilled.
Of course no one desires the string of high
emotion to be exclusively or perpetually harped
upon ; and for my own part I think that the
mere production of the emotion of harmless
merriment is one of the greatest boons of the
stage. The contagion of laughter, in a theatre
or out of it, is an altogether wholesome and
beneficent thing. How it unseats black Care
from our backs ! How it carries away, as on a
fresh spring breeze, a whole swarm of buzzing
worries and grievances ! How it warms our
hearts for ever after to the people with whom
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 57
we have once shared a good honest fou rire!
" Behold how good and how pleasant a thing
it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,"
and (with all respect let us add) in hilarity ! A
good joke partaken with a man is like the
Arab's salt. Our common emotion of humor-
ous pleasure is a bond between us which we
would not thereafter lightly break.
The education of the emotions of actors and
actresses, apart from that which they afford to
the emotions of the public, is a very curious
subject of consideration. Great part of the
training of an actor consists in learning to give
the uttermost possible external expression to
those emotions which it is the task of other
people to reduce to a vanishing point. Un-
doubtedly (as one of the most gifted of the pro-
fession has remarked), the " habit of represent-
ing fictitious feeling tends to produce a super-
ficial sensibility, and an exaggerated mode of
expressing the same." But it may be ques-
tioned whether this extreme be worse than the
opposite, wherein the expression of the emo-
tions is so effectually repressed that the feel-
ings themselves die out for want of air and
exercise, a consummation not unknown in
the reposeful " caste of Vere de Vere."
Besides Literature and the Stage, Music no
58 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
doubt is a most marvellous agency for calling
out Emotion. It is, in fact, the Art of Emotion.
The musician plays with the strings of the
human heart while he touches those of his in-
strument. Since Collins wrote his " Ode to the
Passions" and Pope his " Ode on Saint Cecilia's
Day," there is no need to describe how every
emotion known to man may be brought out by
music. Something may well be hoped for a
generation which, rejecting the more trivial
and sensuous music of Italy, finds delight in
the exalted play of the emotions which follows
the wands of Bach and Beethoven and Wag-
ner. The efforts now made to offer music at
once cheap and good to as many of the work-
ing classes as can be found to enjoy it is
perhaps the most direct way conceivable of fos-
tering their best emotions.
The Beauty of Nature and of Art are also
powerful levers of the higher emotions, which
it becomes us to use for the benefit of our
fellows whenever it is practicable to do so.
But, while these varied engines are at work
to stir beneficently the emotions of the masses,
there are on the other hand certain agencies in
full play amongst us which have, I fear, a totally
different effect ; which, in fact, can only tend to
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 59
deaden, if not destroy, the most precious of emo-
tions, those of family affection. I do not know
that the question has ever been faced : What
are the moral effects of our enormous Hos-
pitals ? From the side of the bodily interests of
the patients, they may be wholly advantageous.*
But as regards the sacred institutions of the
Family, on which society itself is based, I ask
what, except evil, can result from the habitual
separation of relatives the moment that illness
makes a claim for tenderness and care ?
It is the law of human nature that the senti-
ment of sympathy should be drawn forth by
personal service to the suffering ; and feelings
of gratitude and affection by the receipt of
such personal service. In comparison of these
sources of emotion, those which act in times of
prosperity are weak and poor. If we subtract
in imagination from our own affections those
which have come to us either through nursing
or being nursed in sickness and danger, the
residue will represent all which we leave within
reach of the million. Many of us can remem-
ber quarrels which have been reconciled, un-
kindnesses atoned for, and bonds of sacred
* Readers of that singular book, " St. Bernard's " (Swan, Sonnen-
schein & Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, "Dying
Scientifically," may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.
6O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
union in faith and eternal hope linked beside
beds of pain when death seemed standing at
the door. These things form some of the
highest educational influences which Provi-
dence brings to bear on the human spirit, and
out of them arise the sweetest affections, the
warmest gratitude, the most vivid sense of a
common nearness to God and the Immortal
Life.
And of all this the entire working class of
the nation is systematically deprived ! Formerly
it was only in cases of extreme poverty, where
the crowded lodging was an altogether unfit
place to nurse the sufferer, that recourse was had
to the public Hospitals. Now it has become
the invariable practice the moment that illness,
even of non-infectious kind, declares itself, to
send straight away to the hospital artisans,
small tradesmen, and farmers from their own
comfortable abodes, servants from the large
and airy houses where they have labored faith-
fully, and even children from their mothers'
arms. It is not a mere matter of conjecture
that such a custom must do harm and weaken
the sense of family obligation. It is a fact that
it has done so already, and is doing so more
every day. Sons and daughters place their
blind and palsied parents in asylums; wives
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 6 1
send their husbands in a decline to Brompton
Hospital; and it has become a surprising piece
of filial devotion if a daughter remain at home
to take care of a bed-ridden mother, even when
her means fully permit of such sacrifice of time.
What deadly injury is all this to the hearts of
men, women, and children !
Of course Hospitals have their important
uses. No one denies it. Some cases of dis-
ease and some degrees of poverty require such
institutions. But this does not justify the
monstrous over-use of them now in vogue.
Even for the class whose homes are too
crowded to admit of nursing being properly
or safely done in them, I cannot but think
that small Cottage Hospitals, where the wife
or mother or daughter would be free to per-
form her natural duties by the bedside, and
where she would be shown how best to per-
form them, would be infinitely preferable for
every reason, moral and physical, to our pres-
ent Palaces of Pain. Excellent also in all
ways will be the plan of Nurses provided for
the poor in their own homes by the Queen's
wise gift of the balance of her Women's Jubi-
lee Fund. The secret of the excessive resort
to Hospitals is of course the encouragement
to patients given by the medical schools at-
62 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
tached to them, for the sake of obtaining a
large supply of " clinical material."
Lastly, we come to speak of the Education
of the Religious Emotions. We have already
referred to the outbursts of contagious enthu-
siasm in the Crusades and Revivals. It re-
mains to say a few words respecting the
various sources of religious emotion, at first
and second hand.
A fundamental difference between the Cath-
olic and Puritan mind seems to be that the
former seizes on every available means for pro-
ducing religious emotion through the senses;
the latter turns away from such means with
intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals
through the mind. Dark and solemn churches
like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto (which
the friar who showed it told me was the " best
place in the whole world for prayer "), gorgeous
altars, splendid functions, pictures, music, in-
cense, all these are to the Catholic and High
Churchman veritable "means of grace"; i.e.,
they call out in them emotions which either
are religious or they think lead to religion.
Long Prayers, Hymns, Bible-readings, and
preachings, these, on the other hand, are the
Evangelicals' means of grace, and they pro-
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 63
duce in them emotions distinctly religious.
We must, I think, treat these differences as
matters of spiritual taste, concerning which it
is proverbially idle to dispute. Both have
their advantages, and both their great perils:
the Catholic method has the peril of lapping
the soul in a fool's paradise of fancied piety,
which is only sensuous excitement; the Puri-
tan method has that of creating the hysteria
of a Revival. In each case it is the contagion
of the emotion of a multitude which creates the
danger. Solitary religious emotion, either pro-
duced by the glory and majesty of Nature or
by lonely prayer and communings with God,
can lead to no evil ; nay, is the climax of
purest joy vouchsafed to man. Not misguided
are those who enter into their chambers and
shut the door "to pray to Him who sees in
secret," or who go up into the hills and woods
" To seek
That Being in whose honor shrines are weak,
Upreared by human hands."
The converse of the emotions of Awe and
Reverence namely, the tendency to jest and
ridicule are supposed by some to be danger-
ous enemies to religion. I do not believe they
are so. I think a genuine sense of humor and
a keen eye for the ludicrous is a most precious
64 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
protection against absurdities and excesses.
Like Tenderness and Strength, the sense of
the Sublime and of the Ridiculous are com-
plementary to each other, and exist only in
perfection together in the same character. It
is the man who cannot laugh who never
weeps.
Finally, we reach the point where the relig-
ious emotions, produced either alone or by
contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual mira-
cles : that " conversion " or revulsion of the
soul which ancient India, no less than Chris-
tendom, likened to a New or Second Birth.
It would appear that, when this mysterious
change does not take place by the solitary work
of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so
by the attractive power of another human soul,
which has itself already undergone the great
transformation. It is the living Saint who
conveys spiritual life. He need not be a very
great or far advanced soul in the spiritual
realm. Many a simple person with no excep-
tional gifts has " turned to the wisdom of the
just " the hearts of strong men, whom the most
eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have
failed to move by a hair. But the greater the
saint, the greater naturally must be his power.
It was the contagion of Divine Love, caught
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 65
from him who felt it most of all the sons of
men, which moved the little band in the
upper chamber of Jerusalem who moved the
world.
It is worthy of notice that when a man so
powerfully influences another as to "convert"
him in the true sense, i.e. to bring him to the
higher spiritual life, it very often happens that
at the same time he " converts " him in the
lower sense, to the doctrines of the special
Church to which he himself belongs. The
man has received the impulse of religion from
that particular direction. It has come to him
colored by the hues of his friend's piety, and
he accepts it, doctrines and all, as he finds it.
The matter has been one of emotional con-
tagion, not of critical argument on either side.
It is impossible to form the faintest estimate
of the good the highest kind of good
which a single devout soul may accomplish in
a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of
the Love of God in widening circles around it.
But just as far as the influence of such men is
a cause for thankfulness, so great would be the
calamity of a time, if such should ever arrive,
when there should be a dearth of saints in the
world, and the fire on the altar should die
down. A Glacial Period of Religion would
66 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS
kill many of the sweetest flowers in human
nature ; and woe to the land where (as it would
seem is almost the present case in France at
this moment) the priceless tradition of Prayer
is being lost, or only maintained in fatal con-
nection with outworn superstitions.
To resume the subject of this paper. We
have seen that the Emotions, which are the
chief springs of human conduct, may either be
produced by their natural stimuli or conveyed
by contagion from other minds, but that they
can neither be commanded nor taught. If we
desire to convey good and noble emotions to
our fellow-creatures, the only means whereby
we can effect that end is by filling our own
hearts with them till they overflow into the
hearts of others. Here lies the great truth
which the preachers of Altruism persistently
overlook. It is better to be good than to do
good. We can benefit our kind in no way so
much as by being ourselves pure and upright
and noble-minded. We can never teach Relig-
ion to such purpose as we can live it.
It was my privilege to know a woman who
for more than twenty years was chained by a
cruel malady to what Heine called a " mattress
grave." Little or nothing was it possible for
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 67
her to do for any one in the way of ordinary
service. Her many schemes of usefulness and
beneficence were all stopped. Yet, merely by
attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual life
and knowledge, that suffering woman helped
and lifted up the hearts of all who came around
her, and did more real good, and of the highest
kind, than half the preachers and philanthro-
pists in the land. Even now, when her beauti-
ful soul has been released at last from its
earthly cage, it still lifts many who knew her to
the love of God and Duty to remember what
she was, and to the faith in immortality to
think what now she must be, within the golden
gates.
ESSAY III.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM.
WHEN the new " Science of Religions " has
been further developed, it will probably be rec-
ognized that the character of each is deter-
mined, not only by its own proper dogmas, but
by those of the religion which it has super-
seded. Men do not, as they often imagine,
tear up an old faith by the roots and plant a
new one on the same ground. They only cut
across the old and graft the new on its stem.
Thus it comes to pass, for example, that much
of the sap of Roman Paganism runs through
the pores of Latin Christianity, and much of
that of Odin worship through those of Teuton
and Scandinavian Protestantism. Still more
certainly does the faith held by an individual
man in his earlier years dye his mind with its
peculiar color, so that no subsequent conver-
sion ever wholly obliterates it, but makes him
like a frescoed wall on which yellow has been
painted over blue, leaving as the result green.
72 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
The tint of Anglican piety may be discerned
even beneath a pervert Cardinal's scarlet robe.
A Romish acolyte, transformed into the most
brilliant of sceptical essayists, still boasts that
the ecclesiastical set of his brain enables him
"alone in his century" to understand Christ
and Saint Francis.* A Jew, baptized and be-
come Prime Minister of England, wrote novels
and made history altogether in the vein of the
author of the Book of Esther. Beneath the
wolf's clothing of the whole pack of modern
Secularists, Agnostics, and Atheists, friction
reveals (for the present generation, at all
events) a flock of harmless Christian sheep.
For this reason hasty efforts to fuse relig-
ious bodies which happen to manifest tenden-
cies to doctrinal agreement seem predestined
to failure. Much else besides mere readiness
to pronounce similar symbols of faith is needed
to gather men permanently into one temple.
Amalgamation attempted prematurely can only
result in accentuating those diversities of senti-
ment which have stronger power to dissever
than any intellectual affinities have charms
to unite. Ecclesiastical schisms are infinitely
easier to effect than ecclesiastical coalitions.
*"C'est pourquoi, seul dans mon siecle, j'ai su comprendre Jesus
Christ et St. Frai^ois d'Assise." M. Renan.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 73
Nevertheless, the levelling of the fences
which have for ages kept men of different
religions apart is, per se, a matter for such
earnest rejoicing that we may well exult at any
instance of it, independently of ulterior hopes
or projects. Especially must our sympathies
with those who are thus clearing the ground
be quickened when the faith to be dis-itnmured
is an old and venerable one, the nearest of all
to our own, a faith whereof any important
modification must be fraught with incalculable
consequences to the civilized world. The new
Reform among the Jews is emphatically such
a movement, an effort to throw down the
high and jealous walls behind which Judaism
has kept itself in seclusion. The gates of the
Ghettos, which for a thousand years shut in
the Jews at night in every city in Europe, were
not more rigid obstacles to social sympathy
and intercourse than have been the nation's
own iron-bound prejudices and customs. But
just as these Ghettos themselves, so long " lit-
tle provinces of Asia dropped into the map
of Europe," have been thrown open at last by
the growing enlightenment of Christian States,
so the Jewish moral walls of prejudice are
being cast down by the advanced sentiment of
cultured Jews.
74 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
It is the specialty of the higher religions to
unfold continually new germs of truth, while
the lower ones remain barren and become over-
grown with the rank fungi of myth and fable.
I do not speak now of the results of external
influences bearing on every creed, and tending
to vivify and fructify it. Such influences have
done much, undoubtedly, even for Christianity
itself, which has been stirred by all the agencies
of the Saracen conquests, the classic Renais-
sance, modern ethics and metaphysics, modern
critical science, and at last in our time by the
extension of the theological horizon over the
broad plains of Eastern sacred literature. I
am speaking specially of the prolific power of
the richer creeds to go on, generation after
generation, bringing forth fresh, golden har-
vests, like the valleys of California. If we look
for an instance of the opposite barrenness, we
shall find it in the worn-out religions of China,
ice-bound and arid as the desolate plains and
craters of the moon; the Tae-ping rebellion
having been perhaps a solitary development of
heat caused by the impingement on them of
the orb of Christianity. If, on the other hand,
we seek for a supreme instance of fertility, we
find it in the religion of Nazareth, which seems
to enjoy perpetual seed-time and perpetual
harvest.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 75
The question is one of more than historical
interest: Is Judaism likewise a religion capable
of bearing fresh corn and wine and oil for the
nations ? We know that both Christianity and
Islam are developments of the Jewish idea,
the Semitic development (Islam) carrying out
its monotheistic doctrine in all its rigidity, but
losing somewhat on the moral and spiritual
side; the Aryan development (Christianity)
abandoning the strictly monotheistic doctrine,
but carrying far forward the moral and the
spiritual part. But both these Banyan-like
branches have struck root for themselves, and
their growth can no longer be treated as de-
rived from the trunk of Judaism. Our prob-
lem is, Can Judaism further develop itself along
its own lines ? Or is it (as generally believed)
destined to permanent immobility, with no pos-
sible future before it save gradual dismember-
ment and decay? Shall we best liken it to
Abraham's oak at Mam re, whose leaf has not
failed after three thousand years of sun and
storm, and when the very levin-bolt of heaven
has blasted its crown, or to the hewn and
painted mast of some laden argosy wherein float
the fortunes of Israel ?
There are, it would appear, three parties now
existing among modern Jews. There is, first,
76 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
the large Orthodox party, which holds by the
verbal inspiration of the Old Testament and
the authority of the Talmud.*
Secondly, there is the party commonly called
that of Reformed Jews, which separated about
forty years ago from the Orthodox by a schism
analogous to that which cut off the Free Kirk
from the Kirk of Scotland. The raisons d'etre
of this reform were certain questions of ritual
(the older ritual having fallen into neglect) and
the relinquishment by the reforming party of
the authority of the Talmud. The progress so
effected occasioned great heart-burnings, now
happily extinguished, and proceeded no fur-
ther than these very moderate reforms.!
*The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi
Nathan Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who
hold a kind of Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The
principal synagogue of this party (to which the Rothschild family
hereditarily belongs, also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great
Portland Street. The Eglise mtre is in the City, and there are many
other synagogues belonging to it scattered over London and England.
The Portuguese branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Or-
thodox of all), to which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief
synagogue in Bevis Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom,
brother of Cavour's private secretary, was minister of this synagogue.
t The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr.
F. D. Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in
London, that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and
important congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, dif-
fering chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages,
is in use in this synagogue.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 77
Lastly, there is a third Jewish party, existing
chiefly in Germany and America, and number-
ing a few members among the younger genera-
tions in England. For convenience' sake, I
shall distinguish it from the older Reformed
party by calling it the party of the New
Reform, or of Broad Church Jews, the analogy
between its attitude towards Orthodox Judaism
and that of the late lamented Dean Stanley
and his friends to the Church of England being
singularly close.
The attitude even of the Orthodox and older
Reformed Jews (alike for our present purpose)
is, theoretically, not wholly unprogressive, not
necessarily purely tribal. They have admitted
principles inconsistent with stagnant tribalism.
They believe that, though the ceremonialism of
Judaism is for Jews alone, yet the mission of
Judaism is to spread through all the nations
its great central doctrine of the Unity of God.
As Philipsohn (who, it is said, has since some-
what receded from his position) observed in his
Lectures so far back as 1847 :
Judaism has never declared itself to be in its specific
form the religion of all mankind, but has asserted itself
to be the religion of all mankind in and by the religious
idea. . . . Talmudism itself admits that he even who no
longer observes the law, but who utters as his confession
78 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
of faith the words, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God
the Eternal is One," may be considered still to be a Jew.
Development of the Religious Idea, p. 256.
The saying of the Talmud, " The pious
among all nations shall have a place in the
world to come," has become a stock quotation,
and has been of the utmost value to modern
Jewish orthodoxy. Thus even this most con-
servative party among the Jews is not without
a certain expansive principle. It must be ad-
mitted, however, that it does little or nothing
to make that principle practically efficacious,
and is content to wait for the advent of Mes-
siah to convert the nations by miracle without
any trouble to Jews to strive to enlighten them
beforehand. Considering what the Jews for
ages have had to bear from those who vouch-
safed to try to convert them, we may pardon
this lack of zeal for proselytism as far from
unnatural; yet the consequences have been de-
plorable. He who holds a precious truth con-
cerning eternal things, and fails to feel it to be
(as Mrs. Browning says) " like bread at sacra-
ment," to be passed on to those beside him,
loses his right to it, and much of his profit in
it. It is " treasure hid in a field." The atti-
tude is anti-social and misanthropic of a people
who practically say to their neighbors: "We
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 79
possess the most precious of all truths, of
which we are the divinely commissioned guar-
dians and witnesses. But we do not intend to
make the smallest effort to share that truth
with you, and generations of you may go to
the grave without it for all we care. We are
passive witnesses, not active apostles. By and
by, the Messiah will appear, and convert all
who are alive in his time, whether they will or
not; but, for the present, Christendom is joined
to idols, and we shall let it alone." The faith
which speaks thus stands self-condemned. If
a creed be not aggressive and proselytizing,
like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, it con-
fesses either mistrust of itself or else misan-
thropic indifference to the welfare of mankind.
Thus the Orthodox and the elder Reformed
Jews have tacitly pronounced their own sen-
tence.
Turn we now from these to the new Refor-
mation. This last is a development of Juda-
ism, truly on its own lines, but yet extending
far beyond anything contemplated by the elder
bodies. To measure it aright, we must cast
back a glance over the path which Judaism
traversed in earlier times, and note how com-
pletely this new and vast stride is a continu-
ance of that march towards higher and wider
religious truth.
80 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
From the earliest conception of Jahveh as
the Tribal God, a conception which even
Kuenen admits to be native to the race of
Israel, and tmtraceable to any other people,
from this conception, which plainly assumed
the existence of other and rival gods of neigh-
boring nations, it was an enormous step in
advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord
of all the earth, whose House should be a
" House of prayer for all nations."
Still vaster was the progress from anthropo-
morphic and morally imperfect ideas of the
character of the tribal God to the adoration of
Isaiah's " High and Holy One, who inhabiteth
eternity," who dwells in the high and holy
place with the pure in heart and the contrite.
Again, there was made a bound forward by
Judaism when the earlier simple secularism and
disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world
vanished before the belief in Immortality which
grew up in spite of the teachings of Antigonus
and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never
faded out again altogether.
And finally, with the development of the
Prophetic spirit, Worship assumed more its true
forms of praise, confession of sin, and thanks-
giving ; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody
sacrifices (long limited to the sacred enclosure)
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 8 1
came to an end forever amid the smoking
ruins.
These were truly great steps of progress
made by Israel of old; but the last of them
left the nation to carry into its sorrowful exile
an intolerable burden of ceremonialism and
dusty superstitions, whereof the Talmud is
now the lumber-room, and possessed also by
an unhappy demon of anti-social pride, which
forbade it to extend to or accept from other
nations the right hand of human brotherhood.
The Jews did not go out from Jerusalem as
the little band of Christian missionaries had
gone, eager to scatter their new wealth of truth
among the nations, and, though stoned and
crucified by those whom they sought to bless,
yet ever after by their children's children to be
revered and canonized. The Jews went out as
misers of truth, holding their full bags of treas-
ure hid in their breasts. Nor in the ages fol-
lowing the Dispersion, while Christianity di-
verged further and further from pure Theism,
and through Mariolatry and Hagiolatry sank
well-nigh to polytheism and idolatry, do we
ever once hear of an attempt by any Jewish
teacher, even by such a man as Maimonides,
to call back the wandering nations by pro-
claiming in their ears the " schema Israel "
82 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
" THE LORD YOUR GOD THE ETERNAL is ONE."
Before the expulsion from Palestine, for a brief
period, Judaism (as one of its bitterest enemies
has remarked) showed promise of becoming a
proselytizing creed, " when, under the influence
of Greek philosophy and other liberalizing in-
fluences, it was tending from the condition of
a tribal to that of a universal creed. But Plato
succumbed to the Rabbins. Judaism fell back
for eighteen centuries into rigid tribalism, and,
as Lord Beaconsfield cynically said of it, has
ever since ' no more sought to make converts
than the House of Lords.'"*
At last the long pause in the progress of
Judaism, considered as a religion, seems draw-
ing to an end; and we may hail its present
advance as the continuance of that noble march
which the Jewish race began to the music of
Miriam's timbrel.
This last step forward of Reformed Judaism
consists, according to its latest interpreter, in
" the struggle now consciously and now uncon-
sciously maintained to emancipate the Jewish
faith from every vestige of tribalism, and to
enshrine its wholly catholic doctrines in a
wholly catholic form." This end is to be
pursued through the " DENATIONALIZATION of
* Professor Goldwin Smith, in the Nineteenth Century.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 83
the Jewish religion, by setting aside all the
rules and ceremonies which do not possess an
essentially religious character or are maintained
merely for the sake of the national, as distinct
from the religious, unity."
The following are the modes in which this
programme may be followed out :
i. Reformed Judaism abandons the Messi-
anic hope. It neither desires nor expects the
coming of Messiah, and the resettlement of
the Jews in Palestine as a nation it regards as
retrogression toward tribalism.* 2. It rejects
the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Old
Testament, nor does it recognize the perfection
and immutability of the law contained within
the Pentateuch. 3. It rejects the theory of a
Divine tradition recorded in the Mischna, and
does not admit the authority of the Talmudic
laws. 4. It puts aside, as no longer binding,
all the legal, hygienic, and agrarian ordinances
of the Pentateuch, together with the laws re-
lating to marriages and to the Levites. 5. It
* It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these
ideas of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George
Eliot in " Daniel Deronda." Equally remote are they from the
crude endeavor to return to a supposed primitive Judaism through
the "worship of the letter" of the Old Testament, which was hailed
some years ago with premature satisfaction by a certain school of
Protestant Christians. See the interesting " History of the Karaite
Jews," by the Rev. W. H. Rule, D.D., 1870.
84 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
cuts down the feasts and fasts to the Sabbath,
the Passover, and four others. 6. It adopts
the vernacular of each country for a larger or
smaller part of the service of the synagogue,
instead of retaining the whole in Hebrew.
Besides these six great changes, there are
two others looming in the distance. Reformed
Judaism still regards the rite of circumcision
as binding, though several distinguished re-
formers (notably Geiger) have recommended
that proselytes should not be required to adopt
it. Of the change of the Sabbath day from
Saturday to Sunday, I am informed that the
transference of the holy day has already been
made by one synagogue in Berlin, which holds
its services on the Sunday, and by many
independent Jewish men of business ; and that
it is very much desired in some other quarters.
The difficulty attendant on this change obvi-
ously is: that it would prove so favorable to
the interests of Jews in a secular sense that,
if adopted, the charge of worldly motives
is certain to be brought against those who
advocate it.
These, then, in brief, are the negations of
Reformed Judaism. On the positive side, it
reaffirms those dogmas which are the kernel
of Judaism, "the Unity of God; His just
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 85
judgment of the world; the free relation of
every man to God ; the continual progress of
humanity ; the immortality of the soul ; and
the Divine election of Israel " (understood to
signify that the Jews, under the will of God,
possess a specific religious mission not yet
entirely fulfilled). As to the observances of
Reformed Judaism, the framework of life and
habit under which it proposes to exist, " they
will remain distinctively Jewish, and must not
bear the mere stamp of nineteenth century
religious opinion." The Jewish Reformer
thus, like many another Radical, is an aristo-
crat at heart, and shrinks from descending to
the level of a parvenue faith. In my humble
judgment, he is entirely right in his decision.
So long as he places the interests of truth and
honesty above all, he cannot do better than
hold fast by everything which reminds himself
and the world of his pedigree through a hun-
dred generations of worshippers of Jehovah.
The extent to which such reformation as
that now sketched prevails at this hour among
Jews is difficult to ascertain. The movement
has been going on for some time, and yet
counts but a moderate number of adherents,
chiefly, as I have said, German and American
Jews. Nay, what is most unhopeful, the
86 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
disease of religious indifference, that moral
phylloxera which infests the choicest spiritual
vineyards, is working its evil way among the
broader-minded Jews, as it works (we know
too well) among the broader-minded Christians.
To unite depth of conviction with width of
sympathy has ever been a rare achievement.
" Tout comprendre sera tout pardonner," may
be rendered, in intellectual matters, " To find
truth everywhere is to contend for it nowhere."
There is good room to hope, however, that
if some fall out of the ranks, the Reformed
party will yet possess enough energy, vigor,
and cohesion to make its influence erelong
extensively felt.
It is a startling prospect which has been thus
opened before us. If anything seemed fixed in
the endless flux of nations and religions, it was
the half-petrified religion of the Jew. That
the stern figure which we have beheld walking
alone through the long procession of history
should come at last and take a place beside his
brothers is hard to picture. We live in a time
when,
" Faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."
Every solid body is threatened with disintegra-
tion ; and the new powers of cohesion, if such
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 87
there be, have scarcely come into play. But,
of all changes fraught with momentous conse-
quences, none could well be more important
than that of a stripping off of its tribal gaber-
dine by Judaism, and the adoption of " a law
fit for law universal." The old fable is real-
ized. The wind and hail of persecution ulew
and pelted the Jew for a thousand years, and
he only drew his cloak closer around him.
The sunshine of prosperity and sympathy has
shone upon him, and, lo ! his mantle is already
dropping from his shoulders.
For the present we can only treat the matter
as a grand project, but we may endeavor to esti-
mate the value of a Reformation of J udaism
such as Luther accomplished for Christianity.
In the first place, it is, I conceive, the sole
chance for the permanent continuance of the
Jewish religion that it should undergo some
such regeneration. If the proposed Reform
perish in the bud, Orthodox Judaism will
doubtless survive for some generations, but,
according to the laws which govern human
institutions, its days must be numbered* In
former times, when every nation in Europe
held aloof from its neighbors in fear and jeal-
ousy, it was possible for alien tribes, like the
Jews and gypsies, to move among all, holding
88 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
rigidly to their own tribal alliances and ob-
servances ; hated and mistrusted, indeed, but
scarcely more so than their Christian next-door
neighbors. But now that Christian nations
are all blending together under the influence
of perpetual intercourse, and their differences
of belief, governments, costumes, habits, and
ideas are effacing themselves year by year, the
presence of a non-fusing, non-intermarrying,
separatist race a race brought by commerce
into perpetual friction with all the rest
becomes an intolerable anomaly.
For once Mr. Goldwin Smith was in the
right in this controversy, when he remarked
that " the least sacred of all races would be that
which should persistently refuse to come into
the allegiance of humanity."
The Jews have shown themselves the stur-
diest of mankind, but the influences brought
to bear on them now are wholly different
from those which they met with such stub-
born courage of old. Political ambition, so
long utterly closed to them, but to which
Lord Beaconsfield's career must evermore
prove a spur ; pleasure and self-indulgence, to
which their wealth is an ever ready key; the
scepticism and materialism of the time, to which
their acute and positive minds seem to render
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 89
them even more liable than their contempo-
raries, these are not the elements out of
which martyrs and confessors are made. A re-
formed, enlightened, world-wide creed, which a
cultivated gentleman may frankly avow and
defend in the salons of London, Paris, Berlin, or
New York, and in the progress of which he may
feel some enthusiasm, a creed which will make
him free to adopt from Christianity all that he
recognizes in it of spiritually lofty and morally
beautiful, such a creed may have a future
before it of which no end need be foreseen.
But for unreformed Judaism there can be
nothing in store but the gradual dropping
away of the ablest, the most cultured, the
wealthiest, the men of the world and the men
of the study, the Spinozas, the Heines, the
Disraelis and the persistence only for a few
generations of the more ignorant, fanatical,
obscure, and poor.
Again, besides giving to Judaism a new lease
of life, the Reform projected would undoubtedly
do much to extinguish that passion vijuden-
hasse which is the disgrace of Eastern Chris-
tendom, and the source of such manifold woes
to both races. The root of that passion is the
newly awakened sense (to which I have just
referred) of impatience at the existence of a
9O PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
nation within every nation, having separate
interests of its own and a solidarity between
its members, ramifying into every trade,
profession, and concern of civil life. Were
this solidarity to be relinquished, and the
mutual secret co-operation of Jews* reduced
to such natural and fitting friendliness as
exists between Scotchmen in England, and
were it to become common for Jews to marry
Christians and discuss freely with Christians
their respective views, were this to happen,
mutual respect and sympathy would very
quickly supersede mutual prejudice and mis-
trust. After two generations of such Reformed
Judaism, the memory of the difference of race
would, I am persuaded, be reduced to that
pleasant interest wherewith we trace the
ancestry of some of our eminent statesmen
to " fine old Quaker families," or remark that
*As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All
the Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all
the newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And
why ? It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance,
nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest
from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or
eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This " clandestine manip-
ulation of the press," and tribe-union for purposes disconnected with
tribal interests, constitutes a cabal, and necessarily creates antagonism
and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door of English
Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would expostulate with
their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 9!
some of our most brilliant men of letters have
in their veins the marvellous Huguenot blood.*
It is superfluous to add that the Jewish
people, thus thoroughly adopted into the com-
ity of European nations, and Judaism recog-
nized as the great and enlightened religion of
that powerful and ubiquitous race, the true
mission of Judaism, as taught by Bible and
Talmud that of holding up the torch of
monotheistic truth to the world would begin
its practical accomplishment. The Latin
nations in particular, to whom religion has
presented itself hitherto in the guise of eccle-
siasticism and hagiolatry, and who are fast
* I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly
under the influence of the modern mania for "heredity," of the
exceptional character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are
a most remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to
colonize either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of
Ghetto existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-
mongers) the healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their
multifarious gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admi-
rable. But their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched.
Not to speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more
singular spectacle; for their members have always been a handful
compared to the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during
the ten ages of their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession
towards the customs of their neighbors which has left the actual
dogmas of their religion the sole bond of their national integrity.
They worshipped the One good God under the law of Zoroaster
three, perhaps four, millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully
still, though a mere remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of
idolaters, and with no distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty
92 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
verging into blank materialism as the sole
alternative they know, would behold at last,
with inevitable respect, a simple and noble
worship, at once historical and philosophic,
without priestly claims, and utterly at war
with every form of monasticism and super-
stition. The impression on these, and even
on the Northern nations, of such a spectacle
could not be otherwise than elevating, and
possibly, in the Divine order of the world,
might be the means whereby the tide of faith,
so long ebbing out in dismal scepticism, should
flow once more up the rejoicing shores.
Even if this be too much to hope, I cannot
doubt that many Christian Churches would
disdain of " Gentile " nations, no hope of a restoration to their own
land. Their priests have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and
honored rabbis. Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in
language, and incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their
Prophet has faded into an abstraction. But their faith in Ahura-
Mazda, the " Wise Creator," the " Rich in Love," remains as clear
to-day among them as when it first rose upon the Bactrian plains in
the morning of the world. The virtues of truth, chastity, industry,
and beneficence inculcated by the Zend-Avesta, and attributed by
the Greek historians to their ancestors of the age of Cyrus, are still
noticeable among them in marked contrast to their Hindu neigh-
bors ; as are likewise their muscular strength and hardy frames.
Even as regards their commercial aptitudes, the Parsees offer a
singular parallel to the Jews. The Times remarked some years ago
that out of the 150,000 Parsees there were an incredible number of
very wealthy men, and six were actual millionaires. One of the last,
Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, gave away in his lifetime the sum of
.700,000 sterling in charities to men of every religion.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 93
draw valuable lessons from the presence
among them of a truly reformed Judaism,
Especially in these days of irreverence, of
finikin Ritualism on one side and Salvation
Army rowdyism on the other, it would be a
measureless advantage to be summoned to
revert in thought to the solemn and awe-
inspired tone of Hebrew devotion which still
breathes in the services of the synagogue. It
has been a loss to Christians as well as to
Jews that these services have hitherto been
conducted in Hebrew.* Had the synagogue
services in London been conducted in the
English language, I believe that many of the
popular misapprehensions concerning Judaism
would never have existed, while the impres-
sion of profound reverence which the prayers
convey would have reacted advantageously
on Christian worship, too liable to oscillate
between formalism and familiarity.!
I am bound to add, on the other side, that
it appears to me there are some very great
*The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in
parallel columns.
I 1 refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of
Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also
many noble prayers hi the collection of Sabbath and other services
for various festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though some-
what deficient as regards the expression of spiritual aspiration.
94 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
advantages on the side of Christianity of which
it behooves reforming Jews to take account.
These are not matters of dogma, but of senti-
ment ; and not only may they be appropriated
by Jews without departing by a hair's breadth
from their own religious platform, but they
may every one be sanctioned (if any sanction
be needed for them) by citations from the
Hebrew Scriptures themselves. The great
difference between Judaism and Christianity
on their moral and spiritual sides, in my
humble judgment, lies in this : that the piety
and charity, scattered like grains of gold
through the rock of Judaism, were by Christ's
burning spirit fused together, and cast into
golden coin to pass from hand to hand. Jews
have continually challenged Christians to point
to a single precept in the Gospel which has
not its counterpart in the Old Testament.
They are perhaps in the right, and possibly
no such isolated precept can be found differ-
entiating the two creeds ; but, both by that
which is left aside and by that which it chose
out and emphasized, Christianity is, practically,
a new system of ethics and religion.
To these three things in Christianity I would
direct the attention of Jewish reformers:
The Christian idea of love to God.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 95
The Christian idea of love to Man.
The Christian sentiment concerning Immor-
tality.
For the first, far be it from me to wrong the
martyr race by a doubt that thousands of Jews
have nobly obeyed the First Great Command-
ment of the Law (given in Deuteronomy vi. 4,
as well as repeated by Christ) and "loved the
Lord their God with all their heart and soul
and strength," even to the willing sacrifice
of their lives through fidelity to Him. The
feelings of loyalty entertained by a Jew in
the old days of persecution to the " God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob " must have been
often a master-passion as fervid as it was
deep-rooted. But alongside of this hereditary
loyalty to the God and King of Israel there
might well grow somewhat of that tender per-
sonal piety which springs from the Evangelical
idea of God as holding personal relations with
each devout and forgiven soul.
Of the two theories of religion, that which
starts with the idea of a Tribe or Church, and
that which starts with the unit of the individual
soul, Judaism has hitherto held the former.
It has been essentially a corporate religion;
and to be "cut off from the congregation,"
like Spinoza, has been deemed tantamount to
96 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
spiritual destruction. It is surely time that
Reformed Judaism should now adopt the far
higher theory of religious individualism, and
teach men to seek those sacred private and
personal relations with the Lord of Spirits
which, when once enjoyed, cause the notions
of any mere corporate privileges to appear
childish. Had the deep experiences which
belong to such personal piety been often felt
by modern Jews (as they certainly were by
many of the old Psalmists), it could not have
happened that modern Jewish literature should
have been so barren as it is of devotional
works and of spiritual poetry. To a serious
reverential spirit (a sentiment far above the
level of that of the majority of Christians),
Jews too rarely join those more ardent relig-
ious affections and aspirations which it is the
glory of Christianity to inspire in the hearts
of her saints. Had they known these feelings
vividly and often, we must have had a Jewish
Thomas a Kempis, a Jewish Saint Theresa,
a Jewish Tauler, Fenelon, Taylor, Wesley. It
will not suffice to say in answer that Jews
did not need such treatises of devotion and
such hymns of ecstatic piety, having always
possessed the noblest of the world in their
own Scriptures. Feelings which really rise to
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 97
the flood do not keep in the river-bed for a
thousand years.
Again, the Christian idea of Love to Man
possesses an element of tenderness not per-
ceptible in Jewish philanthropy. Jews are
splendidly charitable not alone to their own
poor, but also to Christians. Their manage-
ment of their public and private charities has
long been recognized as wiser and more liberal
than that of Christians at home or abroad.
They are faithful and affectionate husbands
and wives ; peculiarly tender parents ; pious
children ; kindly neighbors. The cruel wrongs
of eighteen centuries have neither brutalized
nor imbittered them. Well would it be if
whole classes of drunken, wife-beating English-
men would take example in these respects from
them! But of certain claims beyond these,
claims always recognized by Christian teachers,
and not seldom practically fulfilled by Christian
men and women, the claims of the erring to
be forgiven, of the fallen to be lifted out of the
mire, Jews have hitherto taken little account.
The parable of the Lost Sheep is emphati-
cally Christian; and among Christians only, till
quite recently, have there been active agencies
at work to seek and save ruined women, drunk-
ards, criminals, the " perishing and dangerous
98 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
classes." * Mary Magdalene did well to weep
over the feet of Jesus Christ. It was Christ
who brought into the world compassion for
her and for those like her. And for the for-
giveness of enemies, also, the Christian spirit,
if not absolutely unique, is yet supreme. The
very core of the Christian idea fitly found
its expression on the Cross, " Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do." That
divinest kind of charity, which renounces all
contests for rights, and asks not what it is
bound to do, but what it may be permitted to
do, to bless and serve a child of God, that
charity may, I think, justly be historically
named Christian. Of course, every pure The-
ism is called on to teach it likewise.
*So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first
published, a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Chris-
tian character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in
London. I have before me the " Report of the Jewish Ladies' Asso-
ciation for Prevention and Rescue Work" for 1886-87, printed for
private circulation. The president of the association is Lady Roth-
schild ; the honorable secretaries, Mrs. Cyril Flower and Mrs. J. L.
Jacobs. Nothing can seem more wisely kind and merciful than the
whole scheme as here detailed. We are told that the poor Jewish
girls reclaimed from a life of vice (into which only of late years
have many been known to fall) " are taught not only to follow the
observances of their faith, but also to lead pure and useful lives;
and no pains will be spared to make them better women as well as
capable earners of their own livelihood. . . . The committee feel con-
vinced they will not be allowed to fail in their strenuous endeavor
to bring back those who are, as it were, sunk in moral death, to a
new life."
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 99
With regard to women, the attitude of Juda-
ism is peculiar. It has always recognized some
" Rights of Women," and has never fallen into
the absurdity of cherishing mental or physical
weakness in them as honorable or attractive.
As Mrs. Cyril Flower (then Miss Constance
de Rothschild) showed in an interesting arti-
cle published some years ago, the " Hebrew
Woman," so magnificently described in the
last chapter of Proverbs, has always been the
Jewish ideal : " Strength and honor are her
clothing. She openeth her mouth with wis-
dom." No jealousy, but, on the contrary, joyful
recognition, awaited in each age the vigorous
actions of Miriam and Deborah, of Judith and
Esther, and of the mother of the seven martyrs
in the Book of Maccabees. Jewish marriages
(till quite recently formed always on the East-
ern rather than on the Western system) are
proverbially faithful and affectionate ; and the
resolution of Jews never to permit their wives
to undertake labor outside their homes (such
as factory work and the like) has undoubtedly
vastly contributed to the health and welfare
of the nation. Yet, notwithstanding all this,
something appears to be lacking in Jewish
feeling concerning women. Too much of
Oriental materialism still lingers. Too little
IOO PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
of Occidental chivalry and romance has yet
arisen. In this respect, strange to say, the
East is prose, the West poetry. The relations
of men and women, above all of husband and
wife, cannot be ranked as perfect till some
halo of tender reverence be added to sturdy
good will and fidelity.*
And, beyond their human brethren and
sisters, Christians have found (it is one of
those late developments of the fertile Chris-
tian idea of which I have spoken) that the
humbler races of living creatures have also
claims upon us, moral claims founded on the
broad basis of the right of simple sentiency
to be spared needless pain; religious claims
founded on the touching relation which we,
the often forgiven children of God, bear to
"the unoffending creatures which he loves."
This tender development of Christianity, and
the discovery consequent on it, that " he pray-
eth well who loveth well both man and bird
and beast," is assuredly worthy of the regard
of those Reformers who would make Judaism
a universal religion. Semitic literature has
hitherto betrayed a hardness and poverty on
this side which it is needful should now be
*See this affectingly brought out in that charming book,
"The Jews of Barnow."
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM IOI
remedied, if Judaism is to ride on the full
tide of Aryan sympathies.
And, lastly, the Christian sentiment concern-
ing Immortality deserves special attention from
Reforming Jews. The adoption of the dogma
of a Future Life has scarcely even yet, after
some fifty generations, imprinted on the Jewish
mind the full consciousness of
" That great world of light which lies
Behind all human destinies."
Jews have, it would appear, essentially the
esprit positif. They are content to let the
impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and
the future world, that veil which the Aryan
soul strives impatiently, age after age, to tear
away, or on which it throws a thousand
phantasms from the magic-lanthorn of fancy.
Millions of Christians have lived with their
" treasures " truly placed in that world where
moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves
break through and steal. Especially have the
bereaved among us dwelt on earth with their
hearts already in heaven where their beloved
ones await them. To too great an extent, no
doubt, has this "other-worldliness" been carried,
especially among ascetics ; but, on the whole,
the firm anchorage of Christian souls beyond
IO2 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
the tomb has been the source of infinite
comfort and infinite elevation. Of this sort
of projection of the spirit into the darkness,
this rocket-throwing of ropes of faith over the
deeps of destruction, whereby the mourner's
shipwrecked soul is saved and reinstated, the
Jewish consciousness seems yet scarcely cog-
nizant. Perhaps these days of pessimism and
mental fog are not those wherein any one is
likely to find his faith in immortality quickened.
As Dr. Johnson complained that he was " in-
jured " by every man who did not believe all
that he believed, so each of us finds his hope
of another life chilled by the doubts which,
like icebergs, float in the sea of thought we are
traversing. But, for those Jews who thoroughly
accept the dogma of immortality, it would surely
be both a happiness and a source of moral ele-
vation to give to such a stupendous fact its
place in the perspective of existence. There
is infinite difference between the molelike
vision which sees nothing beyond the grass-
roots and the worms of earth, though dimly
aware of a world of sunlight above, and the
eagle glance which can measure alike things
near and afar; between the man who counts
his beloved dead as lost to him because he
beholds and hears and touches them no more,
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 1 03
and the man who can say calmly amid his
sorrow,
" Take them, thou great Eternity !
Our little life is but a gust,
Which bends the branches of thy tree,
And trails its blossoms in the dust."
Turning now from the results on Judaism
itself and on Christianity at large of a great
Jewish Reformation, we may indulge in some
reflections on the possible bearings of such an
event on that not inconsiderable number of
persons who, all over Europe, are hanging
loosely upon or dropping silently away from
the Christian Churches. I am not speaking
of those who become Atheists or Agnostics
and renounce all interest in religion, but of
those who, like Robert Elsmere, pass into
phases of belief which may be broadly classed
under the head of Theism. These persons
believe still in God and in the life to come,
and hold tenaciously by the moral and spiritual
part of Christianity, perhaps sometimes feeling
its beauty and truth more vividly than some
orthodox Christians who deem the startling,
miraculous, and " apocalyptic " part to consti-
tute the essence of their faith. But this
"apocalyptic part," and all which Dr. Mar-
tineau has called the " Messianic mythology,"
IO4 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
they have abandoned. Of the number of these
persons, it is hard to form an estimate. Some
believe that the Churches are all honeycombed
by them, and that a panic would follow could
a census of England be taken in a Palace of
Truth. Not a few in the beginning and
middle of this century quitted their old folds,
and under the names of " Unitarians,"' " Free
Christians," and " Theists " have thenceforth
stood confessedly apart.* But of late years
the disposition to make any external schism
has apparently died away. The instinct, once
universal, to build a new nest for each brood
of faith seems perishing among us. The
Church-forming spirit, so vigorous of old in
Christianity and in Buddhism, is visibly fail-
ing, and making way for new phases of
development, of which the Salvation Army
*A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current
phases of opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title
some promise of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of
whom I am speaking. The author proposes to discuss " Natural
Religion," but he shortly proceeds to describe a great many things
which, in the common language of mankind, are not religious at all,
scientific ardor, artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical
order of the universe, and to urge that these, or nothing, must con-
stitute the religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up
in awe and wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came
the thunders and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were
immediately afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image
of a calf, and told, "These be Thy Gods, O Israel!" might, one
would think, have felt the same sense of bathos which we experience
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 105
may possibly afford us a sample. Among
cultivated people subtle discrimination of dif-
ferences and fastidiousness as regards ques-
tions of taste are indefinitely stronger than
that desire for a common worship which, in
the breasts of our forefathers, who " rolled the
psalm to wintry skies," and dared death merely
to pray together, must have mounted to a pas-
sion. Englishmen generally still cling to public
worship, but it is chiefly where an ancient lit-
urgy supplies by old and holy words a dreamy
music of devotion, into which each feels at
liberty to weave his own thoughts. Wherever
the demand is made for prayers which shall
definitely express the faith and aspirations
of the modern-minded worshipper, there the
subtleties and the fastidiousness come into
play, and, instead of being drawn together,
men sorrowfully discover that they are made
when we are solemnly assured that these sciences and arts are
henceforth our " Religion. " A drowning man proverbially catches
at straws, and people who feel themselves sinking in the ocean of
Atheism seize on every spar which comes under their hands, and cry,
"We may float yet awhile by this." No one can blame them for
trying to do so; but it is rather hard to expect all the world to
recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which they sit astride.
Among the "Natural Religions," as he is pleased to call them,
of which he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not
natural, and none of which are properly Religions), the author of this
book has disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of
opinion which in former days went by the name of Natural Religion.
The words were not happily selected, and belong indeed to an
IO6 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
conscious by common worship of a hundred
discrepancies of opinion, a thousand disharmo-
nies of taste and feeling. In all things, we
men and women of the modern Athens are
not "too superstitious," but too critical; and
in religion, which necessarily touches us most
vitally, our critical spirit threatens to paralyze
us with shyness. The typical English gentle-
man and lady of to-day are at the opposite pole
of sentiment in this respect from the Arab
who kneels on his carpet on the crowded deck
for his evening orison, or from the Italian con-
tadina who tells her beads before the way-
side Madonna. Doubtless, here is one reason
among many why such multitudes remain with-
out any definite place in the religions of the
land. They hang languidly about the old hive,
feebly humming now and then, but feeling no
impulse to swarm, and finding no queen-spirit
archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by every-
body to mean, not the recognition of the virtues of physical science,
nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recogni-
tion of natural laws ; for all these things had names of their own.
But it was understood to mean the recognition and worship of a
super-mundane, intelligent, and righteous Person, in other words,
of GOD. It contemplated God "mainly above Nature," not, as the
author of this book says must henceforward be done, " mainly in
Nature" ("Natural Religion," p. 160). For admirable pictures, how-
ever, of the modern Artist, who would rather have painted a good
picture than have done his duty, and of the modern Man of Science
who, " consumed by the passion of research," finds " right and wrong
become meaningless words," see p. 120.
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 107
to lead them to another home where they might
build their proper cells and make their own
honey.
But, whether embodied in any religious sect
or Church, or hanging loosely upon one, the
persons of whom we have been speaking, as
believers in God and in the spiritual, but not
the apocalyptic side of Christianity, Chris-
tian Theists, as we may best call them, are
of course nearer in a theological point of view
than any others to those Reformed Jews whom
we may call Jewish Theists. The intellectual
creeds of each, in fact, might, without much
concession on either side, be reduced to iden-
tical formulas. Now, Christian Theists have
hitherto wanted a rallying point, and have
been taunted with the lack of any historic
basis for their religion. Why (it will be asked
by many) should not this Reformed Judaism
afford such a rallying point, and the old rocky
foundations laid by Moses support a common
temple of Christian and Jewish Theism ?
It may prove that such a consummation may
be among the happy reunitings and reconstruc-
tions of the far future. But for the present
hour, and for the reasons I have given in the
beginning of this paper, I do not believe it
can be near at hand. I am also quite sure
I08 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
that it would be the extreme of unwisdom to
hamper and disturb the progress of Reformed
Judaism along its own lines by any hasty
efforts at amalgamation with outsiders, who
would bring with them another order of relig-
ious habits and endless divergencies of opinion.
Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden
candlestick, and set it aloft, and it will give
light unto all which are in the house, not
only the House of Israel, but in the House
of Humanity. A glorious future may in God's
Providence await such purified, emancipated
Judaism. It is true, it may not exhibit the
special form of religion which one party or
another among us altogether desires to see ex-
extended in the world. Some radical reformers
who sympathize in its general scope would
wish to find it stripping off altogether its Jew-
ish character, and torn up from the root of
Mosaism. Many more orthodox Christians
will undervalue it because it shows no indica-
tion of a tendency to adopt from Christianity
such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation,
or the Atonement, even while, on the spirit-
ual side, it is imbued with the essential ideas
of him whom it will doubtless recognize as
the great Jewish Rabbi and Prophet, Jesus of
Nazareth. But it is not for us to seek to
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM
modify, scarcely even to criticise, such a move-
ment as this. A respectful interest and a
hopeful sympathy seem to me the only sen-
timents wherewith Christians and Christian
Theists should stand aside and watch this last
march forward of that wondrous patriarchal
faith, whereof Christianity itself is the first-
born son, and Islam the younger ; and which
now in the end of the ages prepares to cross
a new Jordan, and take possession of a new
Holy Land.
*** NOTE. It is proper to mention, in republishing this essay at
the desire of Jewish friends, that it was received on its first appear-
ance with the utmost possible disfavor by the Jewish press.
ESSAY IV.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING.
ENDLESS books have been written about the
Laws of Thought, the Nature of Thought, and
the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and
metaphysicians have vied with one another to
tell us in twenty different ways how we think
and why we think and what good our thinking
may be supposed to be as affording us any real
acquaintance with things in general outside our
thinking-machine. One school of philosophers
tells us that Thought is a secretion of the brain
(i.e., that Thought is a form of Matter), and
another that it is purely immaterial, and the
only reality in the universe, i.e., that Matter
is a form of Thought. The meekest of men
"presume to think" this, that, and the other;
and the proudest distinction of the modern
sage is to be a "Thinker," especially a "free"
one. But with all this much ado about
Thought, it has not occurred to any one, so
far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of
114 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
what any one of us thinks in the course of
the twenty-four hours; what are the number
of separable thoughts which, on an average,
pass through a human brain in a day; and
what may be their nature and proportions in
the shape of Recollections, Reflections, Hopes,
Contrivances, Fancies, and Reasonings. We
are all aware that when we are awake a
perpetual stream of thoughts goes on in
"what we are pleased to call our minds,"
sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in
a ditch ; sometimes bright, rapid, and sparkling,
like a mountain brook; and now and then
making some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise,
over an obstacle. We are also accustomed to
speak as if the sum and substance of all this
thinking were very respectable, as might be-
come "beings endowed with the lofty faculty
of thought " ; and we always tacitly assume
that our thoughts have logical beginnings,
middles, and endings commence with prob-
lems and terminate in solutions or that we
evolve out of our consciousness ingenious
schemes of action or elaborate pictures of
Hope or Memory. If our books of mental
philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circu-
lating Libraries of another planet, the "general
reader" of that distant world will inevitably
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 115
suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thou-
sand millions of men, women, and children, who
spend their existence as the interlocutors in
Plato's Dialogues passed their hours under the
grip of the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing,
sifting, balancing, recollecting, hard at work as
if under the ferule of a schoolmaster.
The real truth about the matter seems to
be that, instead of taking this kind of mental
exercise all day long, and every day, there are
very few of us who ever do anything of the
kind for more than a few minutes at a time ;
and that the great bulk of our thoughts pro-
ceed in quite a different way, and are occupied
by altogether less exalted matters than our
vanity has induced us to imagine. The
normal mental locomotion of even well-edu-
cated men and women, save under the spur
of exceptional stimulus, is neither the flight
of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a horse
upon the road, but may better be compared
to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady
lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a
hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick black-
berries, and now turning to right or left to
catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick-
duck-and-drake on a pond ; going nowhere in
particular, and only once in a mile or so pro-
Il6 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
ceeding six steps in succession in an orderly
and philosophical manner.
It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to
supply this large lacune in mental science, and
to set forth the truth of the matter about the
actual Thoughts which practically, not theo-
retically, are wont to pass through human
brains. Some few observations on the subject,
however, may perhaps be found entertaining,
and ought certainly to serve to mitigate our
self-exaltation on account of our grand mental
endowments, by showing how rarely and under
what curious variety of pressure we employ
them.
The first and familiar remark is that every
kind of thought is liable to be colored and
modified in all manner of ways by our physi-
cal conditions and surroundings. We are not
steam thinking-machines, working evenly at
all times at the same rate, and turning out the
same sort and quantity of work in the same
given period, but rather more like windmills,
subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails
at one time with great impetus and velocity,
and at another standing still, becalmed and
ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer condi-
tions which affect us, sometimes it is our own
inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING I I 7
rotate ; but, from whatever cause it arises, the
modification of our thoughts is often so great
as to make us arrive at diametrically opposite
conclusions on the same subject and with the
same data of thought, within an incredibly
brief interval of time. Some years ago, the
President of the British Association frankly
answered objections to the consistency of his
inaugural address by referring to the different
aspects of the ultimate problems of theology
in different " moods " of mind. When men
of such eminence confess to "moods," lesser
mortals may avow their own mental oscilla-
tions without painful humiliation, and even
put forward some claim to consistency if the
vibrating needle of their convictions do not
swing quite round the whole compass, and
point at two o'clock to the existence of a
Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a
nebula for the origin, and a "streak of morning
cloud " for the consummation of things. Pos-
sibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim
some praise on the score of modesty if it delay
for the moment to instruct mankind in either
its two o'clock or its six o'clock creed, and
wait till it has settled down for some few
hours, weeks, or months, to any one definite
opinion.
Il8 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
Not to dwell for the present on these serious
topics, it is only necessary to carry with us
through our future investigations that every
man's thoughts are continually fluctuating and
vibrating, from inward as well as outward
causes. Let us glance for a moment at some
of these. First, there are the well-known con-
ditions of health and high animal spirits, in
which every thought is rose-colored ; and cor-
responding conditions, of disease and depres-
sion, in which everything we think of seems to
pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green,
blue, and purple to black. A liver complaint
causes the universe to be enshrouded in gray;
and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and
makes us think our best friends little better
than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole
treatise would be needed to expound how our
thoughts are further distempered by food, bev-
erages of various kinds, and narcotics of great
variety. When our meals have been too long
postponed, it would appear as if that Evil
Personage who proverbially finds mischief for
idle hands to do were similarly engaged with
an idle digestive apparatus, and the result is
that, if there be the smallest and most remote
cloud to be seen in the whole horizon of our
thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just in pro-
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING I 19
portion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till
at last it overwhelms us in depression and
despair. "Why?" we ask ourselves, "why has
not A. written to us for so long? What will
B. think of such and such a transaction ? How
is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled?
What is the meaning of that odd little twitch
we have felt so often here or there about
our persons?" The answer to our thoughts,
prompted by the evil genius of famine, is
always lugubrious in the extreme. "A. has
not written because he is dead. B. will quar-
rel with us forever because of that transaction.
C. will never pay us our money, or we shall
never be able to pay C. That twitch which
we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is the
premonitory symptom of the most horrible of
all human maladies, of which we shall die in
agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends
before the close of the ensuing year." Such
are the id'ees noires which present themselves
when we want our dinner ; and the best-inten-
tioned people in the world, forsooth ! recom-
mend us to summon them round us by fasting,
as if they were a company of cherubim instead
of imps of quite another character ! But the
scene undergoes a transformation bordering on
the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of
I2O THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
mutton and drunk half a glass of sherry. If
we revert now to our recent meditations, we
are quite innocently astonished to think what
could possibly have made us so anxious with-
out any reasonable ground. Of course, A.
has not written to us because he always goes
grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never
take the trouble to think about our little trans-
action. C. is certain to pay us, or we can
readily raise money to pay him ; and our
twitch means nothing worse than a touch of
rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment.
Beyond the alternations of fasting and feast-
ing, still more amazing are the results of nar-
cotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and
coffee. Every species of wine exercises a
perceptibly different influence of its own,
from the cheery and social "sparkling grape
of Eastern France " to the solemn black wine
of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly
dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentle-
men of orthodox sentiments. A cup of strong
coffee clears the brain and makes the thoughts
transparent, while one of green tea drives them
fluttering like dead leaves before the wind.
Time and learning would fail to describe the
yet more marvellous effects of opium, hem-
lock, henbane, haschish, bromide, and chloral.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 121
Every one of these narcotics produces a differ-
ent hue of the mental window through which
we look out on the world; sometimes distorting
all objects in the wildest manner (like opium),
sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly
by removing the sense of disquiet and restoring
our thoughts to the white light of common-
sense cheerfulness ; and again acting quite dif-
ferently on the thoughts of different persons,
and of the same persons at different times.
Only secondary to the effects of inwardly
imbibed stimulants or narcotics are those of
the outward atmosphere, which in bracing
weather makes our thoughts crisp like the
frosted grass, and in heavy November causes
them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the
moisture from the mossy eaves of the Moated
Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine
dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a
London fog obfuscates them, so that a man
might honestly plead that he could no more
argue clearly in the fog than the Irishman
could spell correctly with a bad pen and
muddy ink.
Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any
means the only organs through which influ-
ences arrive at our brain, modifying the
thoughts which proceed from them. The
122 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors
of woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even
of delicately perfumed rooms, lifts all our
thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful,
the Tender, and the Sublime may impress us
freely; while the same sense, offended by dis-
gusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cook-
ery, open sewers, or close chambers inhabited
by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an
opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry
entereth not, and our very thoughts smell of
garlic. Needless to add that in a still more
transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts
of the musically-minded, and bears them off in
its talons over sea and land, and up to Olym-
pus like Ganymede. Two easily distinguish-
able mental influences seem to belong to
music, according as it is heard by those who
really appreciate it or by others who are
unable to do so. To the former it opens a
book of poetry, which they follow word for
word after the performer, as if he read it to
them, thinking the thoughts of the composer
in succession with scarcely greater uncertainty
or vagueness than if they were expressed in
verbal language of a slightly mystical descrip-
tion. To the latter the book is closed; but
though the listener's own thoughts unroll
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 123
themselves uninterrupted by the composer's
ideas, they are very considerably colored
thereby. " I delight in music," said once Sir
Charles Lyell to me : " I am always able to
think out my work better while it is going
on ! " As a matter of fact, he resumed at the
moment a disquisition concerning the date of
the Glacial Period at the precise point at
which it had been interrupted by the per-
formance of a symphony of Beethoven, having
evidently mastered in the interval an intricate
astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with
similar deficiency of musical sense, harmonious
sound seems to spread a halo like that of light,
causing every subject of contemplation to seem
glorified, as a landscape appears in a dewy sun-
rise. Memories rise to the mind and seem in-
finitely more affecting than at other times,
affections still living grow doubly tender, new
beauties appear in the picture or the landscape
before our eyes, and passages of remembered
prose or poetry float through our brains in
majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the
Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly
aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and
commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and
sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted
for the hour. As in a camera-obscura or
124 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
mirror, the very trees and grass which we had
looked on a thousand times are seen to possess
unexpected loveliness. But all this can only
happen to the non-musical soul when the har-
mony to which it listens is really harmonious,
and when it comes at an appropriate time,
when the surrounding conditions permit and
incline the man to surrender himself to its
influences; in a word, when there is nothing
else demanding his attention. The most bar-
barous of the practices of royalty and civic
magnificence is that of employing music as an
accompaniment to feasts. It involves a con-
fusion of the realm of the real and ideal, and
of one sense with another, as childish as that
of the little girl who took out a peach to eat
while bathing in the sea. Next to music
during the dinner-time comes music in the
midst of a cheerful evening party, where, when
every intellect present is strung up to the note
of animated conversation and brilliant repartee,
there is a sudden douche of solemn chords from
the region of the pianoforte, and presently some
well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all
the lazy people, who are lounging in easy-chairs
after a good dinner, into the empyrean of emo-
tion " sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy "
of Beethoven or Mozart ; or some meek damsel,
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 125
with plaintive note, calls on them, in Schubert's
Addio, to break their hearts at the memory or
anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are
either behind or before every one of us, and
which it is either agony or profanation to
think of at such a moment. All this is as-
suredly intensely barbarous. The same people
who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music
with incongruous enjoyments of another kind
would be guilty of giving a kiss with their
mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what
we may term extra-mural music, the hideous
noises made by the aid 'of vile machinery in
the street, it is hard to find words of con-
demnation strong enough for it. Probably
the organ-grinders of London have done more
in the last twenty years to detract from the
quality and quantity of the highest kind of
mental work done by the nation than any two
or three colleges of Oxford or Cambridge have
effected to increase it. One mathematician
alone, as he informed the writer, estimated the
cost of the increased mental labor they have
imposed upon him and his clerks at several
thousand pounds' worth of first-class work, for
which the State practically paid in the added
length of time needed for his calculations.
Not much better are those church bells which
126 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
now sound a trumpet before the good people
who attend " matins " and other daily services
at hours when their profane neighbors are
wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their
appointed tasks.
Next to our bodily Sensations come in order
of influence on our thoughts the Places in
which we happen to do our thinking. Medi-
tating like the pious Harvey " Among the
Tombs" is one thing; doing the same on a
breezy mountain side among the gorse and the
heather, quite another. Jostling our way in a
crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood,
rattling in an English express train or floating
by moonlight in a Venetian gondola or an Egyp-
tian dahabieh, though each and all favorable
conditions for thinking, create altogether dis-
tinct classes of lucubrations. If we endeavor
to define what are the surroundings among
which Thought is best sustained and most
vigorous, we shall probably find good reason
to reverse not a few of our accepted and famil-
iar judgments. The common idea, for example,
that we ponder very profoundly by the sea-
shore, is, I am persuaded, a baseless delusion.
We think indeed that we are thinking, but for
the most part our minds merely lie open, like
so many oysters, to the incoming waves, and
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 127
with scarcely greater intellectual activity. The
very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in
the fact that it reduces us to a state of mental
emptiness and vacuity, while our vanity is
soothed by the notion that we are thinking
with unwonted emphasis and perseverance.
Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us
with the monotonous passes of her billowy
hands, and lulls us into a slumberous hypno-
tism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix
our eyes and thoughts, like biologized men, on
the rising and falling of every wave. If it be
tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed
till the beautiful white crests topple over and
dash in storm and thunder up the beach ;
and, if it be a summer evening's calm, we note
with placid, never-ending contentment how the
wavelets, like little children, run up softly and
swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their
gifts of shells and seaweed, and then retreat,
shy and ashamed of their boldness, to hide
themselves once again under the flowing skirts
of Mother Ocean.
Again, divines and poets have united to
bolster up our convictions that we do a great
deal of important thinking at night when we
lie awake in bed. Every preacher points to
the hours of the " silent midnight," when his
128 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
warnings will surely come home, and sit like
incubi on the breast of sinners who, too often
perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they
flew, bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit.
Shelley, in " Queen Mab," affords us a terrible
night scene of a king who, after his dinner of
"silence, grandeur, and excess," finds sleep
abdicate his pillow (probably in favor of indi-
gestion); and Tennyson, in " Locksley Hall,"
threatens torments of memory still keener to
the "shallow-hearted cousin Amy" whenever
she may happen to lie meditating
" In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof."
Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty-
four hours when we might carry on consecu-
tive chains of thought, it would be when we
lie still for hours undisturbed by sight or sound,
having nothing to do, and with our bodies so
far comfortable and quiescent as to give the
minimum of interruption to our mental proceed-
ings. Far be it from me to deny that under
such favorable auspices some people may think
to good purpose. But, if I do not greatly err,
they form the exception rather than the rule
among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old
remarked, it is generally " mischief " which a
man wicked or otherwise "devises upon
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 129
his bed " ; and the truth of the observation in
our day is proved from the harsh Ukases for
domestic government which are commonly pro-
mulgated by Paterfamilias at the breakfast
table, and by the sullenness de parti pris which
testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or
maiden aunt has made up his or her mind dur-
ing the night to " have it out " with So-and-so
next morning. People are a little faint and
feverish when they lie awake, and nothing
occurs to divert their minds and restore them
to equanimity, and so they go on chewing the
bitter cud of any little grudge. Thus it comes
to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness,
Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.*
Finally, among popular delusions concerning
propitious conditions of Thoughts, must be
reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits
and philosophers crazy) that thinking is better
done in abnormal isolation than in the natural
social state of man. Of course there is benefit
quite incalculable in the reservation of some
portion of our days for solitude. How much
excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the
ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor people
*A Chief of the Police Force has informed me that arrests of
desperadoes are always made, if practicable, at about four A.M.;
that hour being found by experience to be the one when animal
courage is at its lowest ebb and resistance to be least apprehended.
130 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
who are scarcely alone for half an hour be-
tween the cradle and the grave, God alone can
tell. But, with such reasonable reservation of
our hours and the occasional precious enjoy-
ment of lonely country walks or rides, the
benefits of solitude, even on Zimmermann's
showing, come nearly to an end; and there is
little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the
more hours of loneliness we devote to doing it,
the less we shall really think at all, or even
retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate
into cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus
of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to
perform their functions. After all, if we analyze
the exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant
and suggestive conversation, one of its largest
elements will be found to be that it has quick-
ened our thoughts from a heavy amble into a
gallop. A really fine talk between half a dozen
well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people,
who discuss an interesting subject with their
manifold wealth of allusions, arguments, and
illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derby-
day, wherein our brains are excited to their
utmost speed, and we get over more ground
than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation.
It is superfluous to add that if our constitu-
tional mental tendency be that of the gentle-
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
man who naively expressed his feelings by
saying impressively to a friend, " I take great
interest in my own concerns, I assure you I
do," it seems doubly desirable that we should
overstep our petty ring-fence of personal hopes,
fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam with
our neighbors over their dominions, and into
further outlying regions of public and universal
interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions for
making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is
difficult to imagine a better than the orthodox
plan of the " Selig-gemachende Kirche " for
making a Saint. Take your man or woman,
with a morbidly tender conscience and a perni-
cious habit of self-introspection. If he or she
have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or
sorrow overshadowing the whole of life, so
much the better. Then shut the individual up
in a cell like a toad in a stone, to feed on his
or her own thoughts, till death or madness puts
an end to the experiment.
But if the seaside and solitude and the mid-
night couch have been much overrated as pro-
pitious conditions of thought, there are, per
contra, certain other conditions of it the value
of which has been too much ignored. The
law of the matter seems to be that real hard
Thought, like Happiness, rarely comes when
132 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
we have made elaborate preparation for it;
and that the higher part of the mind which is
to be exercised works much more freely when
a certain lower part (concerned with " uncon-
scious cerebration ") is busy about some little
affairs of its own department and its restless
activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in
fifty does his best thinking quite motionless,
but instinctively employs his limbs in some
way when his brain is in full swing of argu-
ment and reflection. Even a trifling fidget of
the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a piece
of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our
plate at dinner, supplies in a degree this desid-
eratum, and the majority of people never carry
on an animated conversation involving rapid
thought without indulging in some such habit.
But the more complete employment of our un-
conscious cerebration in walking up or down
a level terrace or quarter-deck, where there are
no passing objects to distract our attention and
no need to mark where we plant our feet,
seems to provide even better for smooth-flow-
ing thought. The perfection of such condi-
tions is attained when the walk in question is
taken of a still, soft November evening, when
the light has faded so far as to blur the sur-
rounding withered 'trees and flowers, but the
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
133
gentle gray sky yet affords enough vision to
prevent embarrassment. There are a few such
hours in every year which appear absolutely
invaluable for calm reflection, and which are
grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors
at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet
unneeded fire.
There is also another specially favorable
opportunity for abstruse meditation, which I
trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name.
It is the grand occasion afforded by the laud-
able custom of patiently listening to dull speak-
ers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit.
A moment's reflection will surely enable the
reader to corroborate the remark that we sel-
dom think out the subject of a new book or
article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic
scheme, a family compact, or the menu of a
large dinner, with so much precision and lucid-
ity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness
at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stu-
pidity on theology or science. The voice of
the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as
soothing as the sound of the waves on the
shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the
attention ; while the repose of all around gently
inclines the languid mind to alight like a but-
terfly on any little flower it may find in the
134 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
arid waste, and suck it to the bottom. This
beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing
is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by
the stuffiness of the room, the hardness and
shallowness of the seats (as in that place of
severe mortification of the flesh, the Royal
Institution in Albemarle Street), and lastly by
the unpardonable habit of many orators of lift-
ing their voices in an animated way, as if they
really had something to say, and then solemnly
announcing a platitude, a process which acts
on the nerves of a listener as it must act on
those of a flounder to be carried up into the
air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron
and then dropped flat on the mud. Under
trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the
sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt
to assume quite unaccountable and morbid
shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational
kind, as in a dream. The present writer and
some sober-minded acquaintances have, for
example, all felt themselves impelled at such
hours to perform aerial flights of fancy about
the church or lecture-room in the character
of stray robins or bats. " Here," they think
gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of
the absurdity of their reflection), " here, on this
edge of a monument, I might stand and take
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
135
flight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I
might run along to the top of that pillar ; and
from thence, by merely touching the bald tip of
the preacher's head, I might alight on the back
of that plump little angel on the tomb opposite,
while a final spring would take me through
the open pane of window and perch me on the
yew-tree outside." The whole may perhaps be
reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-represen-
tation of the Psalmist's cry : " Oh that I had
wings like a dove, for then would I flee away
and be at rest."
Another kind of meditation under the same
aggravated affliction is afforded by making
fantastic pictures out of the stains of damp
and tracks of snails on the wall, which often (in
village churches especially) supply the young
with a permanent subject of contemplation in
"the doctor with his boots," the "old lady and
her cap," and the huge face which would be
quite perfect if the spectator might only draw
an eye where one is missing, as in the fresco of
Dante in the Bargello. Occasionally, the sun-
shine kindly comes in and makes a little lively
entertainment on his own account by throwing
the shadow of the preacher's head ten feet long
on the wall behind him, causing the action of
his jaws to resemble the vast gape of a croco-
136 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
dile. All these, however, ought perhaps to be
counted as things of the past ; or, at least, as
very " Rural Recreations of a Country Parish-
ioner,'' as A. K. H. B. might describe them.
It is not objects to distract and divert the
attention which anybody can complain of want-
ing in the larger number of modern churches
in London.
But, if our thoughts are wont to wander off
into fantastic dreams when we are bored, they
have likewise a most unfortunate propensity to
swerve into byways of triviality no less mis-
placed when, on the contrary, we are interested
to excess, and our attention has been fixed
beyond the point wherein the tension can be
sustained.
Every one has recognized the truth of Dick-
ens's description of Fagin, on his trial, thinking
of the pattern of the carpet ; and few of us can
recall hours of anguish and anxiety without
carrying along with their tragic memories
certain objects on which the eye fastened with
inexplicable tenacity. In lesser cases, and when
we have been listening to an intensely interest-
ing political speech, or to a profoundly thought-
ful sermon (for even Habitans in Sicco may
sometimes meet such cases), the mind seems
to "shy" suddenly, like a restive horse, from
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 137
the whole topic under consideration, and we
find ourselves, intellectually speaking, landed
in a ditch.
Another singular phenomenon under such
circumstances is that, on returning, perhaps
after the interval of years, to a spot wherein
such excessive mental tension has been ex-
perienced, some of us are suddenly vividly
impressed with the idea that we have been
sitting there during all the intervening time,
gazing fixedly on the same pillars and cornices,
the same trees projected against the evening
sky, or whatever other objects happen to be
before our eyes. It would appear that the
impression of such objects made on the retina,
while the mind was wholly and vehemently
absorbed in other things, must be somehow
photographed on the brain in a different way
from the ordinary pictures to which we have
given their fair share of notice as they passed
before us, and that we are dimly aware they
have been taken so long. The sight of them
once again bringing out this abnormal con-
sciousness is intensely painful, as if the real
self had been chained for years to the spot,
and only a phantom " I '' had ever gone away
and lived a natural human existence elsewhere.
Passing, now, from the external conditions
138 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
of our Thinking, if we attempt to classify the
Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at
the painful discovery that the majority of us
think most about the least things, and least
about the greatest ; and that, in short, the mass
of our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of
their value. For example, a share of our
thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is oc-
cupied by petty and trivial Arrangements.
Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of
thought which all (save the most care-engrossed
statesmen or absorbed philosophers) give to
these wretched little concerns. The wealthy
gentleman thinks of how and where and when
he will send his servants and horses here
and there, of what company he shall entertain,
of the clearing of his woods, the preservation
of his game, and twenty matters of similar
import; while his wife is pondering equally
profoundly on the furniture and ornaments of
her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or
her worsted-work, the menu of her dinner,
and the frocks of her little girls. Poor people
need to think much more anxiously of the
perpetual problem, " How to make both ends
meet," by pinching in this direction and earn-
ing something in that, and by all the thousand
shifts and devices by which life can be carried
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 139
on at the smallest possible expenditure. One
of the very worst evils of limited means con-
sists in the amount of thinking about sordid
little economies which becomes imperative
when every meal, every toilet, and every at-
tempt at locomotion is a battle-field of ingenu-
ity and self-denial against ever-impending debt
and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most
commonly combated by energetic efforts to
earn rather than to save ; but among women, to
whom so few fields of honest industry are open,
the necessity for a perpetual guard against the
smallest freedom of expense falls , with all its
cruel and soul-crushing weight, and on the
faces of thousands of them may be read the
sad story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by
pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, per-
haps the most foreign of all sentiments to
their naturally liberal and generous hearts.
Next to actual arrangements which have
some practical use, however small, an inordi-
nate quantity of thought is wasted by most of
us on wholly unreal plans and hypotheses
which the thinker never even supposes to bear
any relation with the living world. Such are
the endless moony speculations, " if such a
thing had not happened " which did happen, or
"if So-and-so had gone hither" instead of
I4O THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
thither, or " if I had only said or done " what
I did not say or do, " there would have fol-
lowed" heaven knows what. Sometimes we
pursue such endless and aimless guessings
with a companion, and then we generally stop
short pretty soon with the vivid sense of the
absurdity of our behavior; unless in such a
case as that of the celebrated old childless
couple, who, looking back over their fireside on
forty years of unbroken union, proceeded to
speculate on what they should have done if
they had had children, and finally quarrelled
and separated for ever on a divergence of
opinion respecting the best profession for their
(imaginary) second son. But, when alone, we
go on weaving interminable cobwebs out of
such gossamer threads of thought, like poor
Perrette with her pot of milk, a tale the
ubiquity of which among all branches of the
Aryan race sufficiently proves the universality
of the practice of building chateaux en Es-
pagne.
Of course, with every one who has a profes-
sion or business of any kind, a vast quantity
of thought is expended necessarily upon its
details, insomuch that to prevent themselves,
when in company from " talking shop " is
somewhat difficult. The tradesman, medical
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 141
man, lawyer, soldier, landholder, have each
plenty to think of in his own way; and in
the case of any originality of work such as
belongs to the higher class of literature and
art the necessity for arduous and sustained
thought in composition is so great that (on the
testimony of a great many wives) I have come
to the conclusion that a fine statue, picture, or
book is rarely planned without at least a week
of domestic irritation and discomfort, and the
summary infliction of little deserved chastise-
ment on the junior branches of the distin-
guished author or artist's family.
Mechanical contrivances obviously give im-
mense occupation to those singular persons
who can love Machines, and do not regard
them (as I must confess is my case) with min-
gled mistrust, suspicion, and abhorrence, as
small models of the Universe on the Atheistic
Projection. Again, for the discovery of any
chemical desideratum, ceaseless industry and
years of thought are expended ; and a Palissy
deems a quarter of a lifetime properly given
to pondering upon the best glaze for crockery.
Only by such sacrifices, indeed, have both the
fine and the industrial arts attained success;
and happy must the man be counted whose
millions of thoughts expended on such topics
142 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
have at the end attained any practical conclu-
sion to be added to the store of human knowl-
edge. Not so (albeit the thoughts are much
after the same working character) are the end-
less meditations of the idle on things wholly
personal and ephemeral, such as the inordi-
nate care about the details of furniture and
equipage now prevalent among the rich in
England, and the lavish waste of feminine
minds on double acrostics, art, embroidery,
and, above all, Dress ! A young lady once
informed me that, after having for some hours
retired to repose, her sister, who slept in the
same room, had disturbed her in the middle
of the night : " Eugenie, waken up ! I have
thought of a trimming for our new gowns ! "
Till larger and nobler interests are opened to
women, I fear there must be a good many
whose " dream by night and thought by day "
is of trimmings.
When we have deducted all these silly and
trivial and useless thoughts from the sum of
human thinking, and evil and malicious
thoughts, still worse by far, what small re-
siduum of room is there, alas, for anything
like real serious reflection! How seldom do
the larger topics presented by history, science,
or philosophy engage us! How yet more
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 143
rarely do we face the great questions of the
whence, the why, and the whither of all this
hurrying life of ours, pouring out its tiny
sands so rapidly ! To some, indeed, a noble
philanthropic purpose or profound religious
faith gives not only consistency and mean-
ing to life, but supplies a background to all
thoughts, an object high above them, to
which the mental eye turns at every moment.
But this is, alas ! the exception far more than
the rule; and, where there is no absorbing
human affection, it is on trifles light as air
and interests transitory as a passing cloud
that are usually fixed those minds whose boast
it is that their thoughts "travel through
eternity."
Alone among Thoughts of joy or sorrow,
hope or fear, stands the grim, soul-chilling
thought of Death. It is a strange fact that,
face it and attempt to familiarize ourselves
with it as we may, this one thought ever pre-
sents itself as something fresh, something we
had never really thought before, " / shall
die ! " There is a shock in the simple words
ever repeated each time we speak them in
the depths of our souls.
There are few instances of the great change
which has passed over the spirit of the mod-
144 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
ern world more striking than the revolution
which has taken place in our judgment re-
specting the moral expediency of perpetually
thinking about Death. Was it that the whole
Classic world was so intensely entrancing and
delightful that, to wean themselves from its
fascinations and reduce their minds to com-
posure, the Saints found it beneficial to live
continually with a skull at their side ? For
something like sixteen centuries Christian
teachers seem all to have taken it for granted
that merely to write up " Memento mori " was
to give to mankind the most salutary and
edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in the
same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint
Francis or Saint Theresa who keeps his or her
pet skull alongside of his Bible and Prayer-
book ?
A parallel might also be drawn between the
medical and spiritual treatment in vogue in
former times and in our own. Up to our
generation, when a man was ill, the first idea
of the physician was to bleed him and reduce
him in every way by " dephlogistic " treatment,
after which it was supposed the disease was
" drawn off " ; and, if the patient expired, the
survivors were consoled by the reflection that
Dr. Sangrado had done all which science and
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 145
skill could effect to preserve so valuable a life.
In the memory of some now living, the pres-
ence of a medical man with a lancet in his
pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a
fall from horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epi-
lepsy, or intoxication), was felt by alarmed re-
lations to be quite providential. Only some-
where about the period of the first visitation of
cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing dropped
out of fashion ; and, when the doctors had
pretty nearly abandoned it, a theory was
broached that it was the human constitution,
not medical science, which had undergone a
change, and that men and women were so
much weaker than heretofore that, even in
fever, they now needed to be supported by
stimulants. Very much in the same way it
would appear that in former days our spiritual
advisers imagined they could cure moral dis-
ease by reducing the vital action of all the
faculties and passions, and bringing a man
to feel himself a " dying creature " by way of
training him to live. Nowadays our divines
endeavor to fill us with warmer feelings and
more vigorous will, and tell us that
" 'Tis life of which our veins are scant ;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant ;
More life, and fuller, that we want."
146 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING
Is it possible that human nature is really a
little less vigorous and passionate than it was
when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the
earth, or when the genius of Shakspere made
them live on the stage ?
ESSAY V.
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW.
THE father of Grecian philosophy held that
" Man was created to know and to contem-
plate." The father of Hebrew philosophy
whose " Song," if not his " Wisdom," is canon-
ical, and whose judgment, if not his life, is sup-
posed to have been divinely guided taught
the somewhat different lesson : " He that in-
creased! knowledge increaseth sorrow."
We have been more or less steadily trying
the validity of Solomon's dictum for about
three thousand years. Would it be premature
to take stock of the results, and weigh
whether it be really for human well-being or
the reverse that Knowledge is "increasing,"
not only at the inevitable rate of the accumu-
lating experience of generations, but also at
the highly accelerated pace attained by our
educational machinery ? It is at least slightly
paradoxical that the same State should call on
its clergy to teach as an infallible truth that
I5O TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
" he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sor-
row," and at the same time decree for all its
subjects, as if it were a highly benevolent
measure, universal compulsory education.
I fear that the prejudice in favor of Knowl-
edge is so potent that no reader will give me
credit for entering on this inquiry in any other
spirit than one of banter. Nevertheless, I pro-
pose in the present paper to examine, to the
best of my ability, the general bearings of
book-knowledge upon human happiness and
virtue, and so attain to some conclusion on the
matter, and decide whether Solomon did or
did not give proof of profound sagacity in
originating the axiom that " Ignorance is
bliss " in the usual negative form of Hebrew
verities ; and also in foretelling (nearly thirty
centuries before the present London publish-
ing season) that "of the making of books
there is no end." Knowledge, like other evils,
it seems, is infinitely reproductive.
The larger and simpler objections to book-
lore lie on the surface of the case. First.
Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength
are almost inevitably exchanged in a certain
measure for learning. Ardent students are
rarely vigorous or agile ; and, in the humbler
ranks, the loss of ruddy cheeks and stalwart
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 151
limbs among the children of the peasantry,
after schools have been established in a vil-
lage, has been constantly observed. The
close and heated class-rooms in which the
poor urchins sit (often in winter with clothes
and shoes drenched through with rain or
snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical
point of view, for the scamper across the com-
mon, and the herding of sheep on the moun-
tain. Let us put the case at its lowest. Sup-
pose that, out of three persons who receive an
ordinary book-education, one always loses a
certain share of health; that he is never so
vigorous as he would have been, and is more
liable to consumption, dyspepsia, and other
woes incident to sedentary humanity, of which
again he bequeaths a tendency to his off-
spring. Here is surely some deduction from
the supposed sum of happiness derivable from
knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric
of all the poets make atonement for the loss
of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the
cool brain of perfect health ?
Secondly. It is not only the health of life's
noon and evening which is more or less com-
promised by study, but the morning hours of
life's glorious prime, hours such as never can
come again on this side heaven, which are
152 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
given to dull, dog's-eared books and dreary
"copies," and sordid slates, instead of to cow-
slips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field,
and the flying of the white kite, which soars up
into the deep dark blue and carries the young
eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing
and the child-angels are playing among the
rolling clouds of summer. There was once
a child called from such dreams to her lesson,
the dreary lesson of learning to spell possi-
bly those very words which her pen is now
tracing on this page. The little girl looked
at her peacock, sitting in his glory on the bal-
ustrade of the old granite steps, with nothing
earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat
nice brown bread and call " Pea-ho ! " every
morning, and the poor child burst into a
storm of weeping, and sobbed, " I wish I were
a peacock ! I wish I were a peacock ! " Truly
Learning ought to have something to show
to compensate for the thousand tears shed in
similar anguish ! School-rooms are usually the
ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms
in the houses where they exist; and yet in
these dens we ruthlessly imprison children day
after day, year after year, till childhood itself
is over, never, never to return. And then the
young man or woman may go forth freely
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 153
among the fields and woods, and find them
fair and sweet, but never so fair or so sweet
as they were in the wasted years of infancy.
Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say
that a cowslip or a daffodil smells now as it
used to smell when it was so very much easier
to pluck it, quite on our own level ? Do straw-
berries taste as they did, and is there the same
drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the
red clover? Are modern kittens and puppies
half so soft and so funny as they were in
former days when we were young? No one
will dare affirm any of these things who has
reached years of discretion. Is it not then a
most short-sighted policy giving away of a
bird in hand for a bird in the bush to sacri-
fice the joyous hours of young existence for
the value of advantages ( if advantages indeed
they be) to be reaped in later and duller years?
Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have
forgotten your own feelings. Let it be Col-
eridge's
" Little singing, dancing elf,
Singing, dancing by itself."
Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough,
those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into
yours, and hear the laugh which only means
the best of all possible jokes, " I am so happy!"
154 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate
algebraically what amount of classics and
mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of
young existence, wherein
" Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live,
Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give."
The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for
the virtuous dead, and called it " Innis-na-
n'Oge," the " Island of the Young." We all
live there the first dozen years of mortality;
and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear
it may be long before we arrive at a better
place.
But hitherto we have taken for granted that
the little prisoners of the school-room are all
sure to live and come into their fortunes of
erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on
their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is
far from being the true state of the case.
The poor little child, whose happiness inno-
cent, certain, and immediate happiness is
bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and con-
tingent benefit of his later years, may very
probably never see those years at all ; nay, in
a fixed average number of cases, it is abso-
lutely certain that he will not grow into a
man. Can anything be much more sad than
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 155
such an abortive sacrifice ? Who does not
remember Walter Scott's " Pet Marjory," with
her infantine delight in her visits to the coun-
try, and the calves and the geese, and the
" bubbly-jocks " ; and how she wrote down in
her private journal that she was learning the
multiplication table, and that seven times seven
was a " divlish thing," and quite impossible
to acquire ; and how, when somehow at last
even the still more dreadful "eight times eight"
had been lodged in her poor little brains, there
came a day when she cried suddenly to her
mother, " Oh, my head ! my head ! " and then
in a few brief hours there was an end of les-
sons and their advantages for Marjory for-
ever ?
And yet again, when some ardent lad has
passed through school and college, foregoing
all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes
and honors, till he stands a first-class man of
Oxford or Cambridge, and his father's sacri-
fices and his mother's yearnings and all his
own gallant and self-denying labors seem on
the point of reaping their reward, how often
does it come to pass that with the close of
the struggle come the reaction, the decline,
the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against
hope, and then death !
156 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in
education. It is understood, when we see a
young man with the "light of the body"
dimmed behind glass spectacles, that he has
hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer,
a sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty-
five or thirty, is a rare thing to see. It is the
scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the
penalty of seeing God's beautiful world ever-
more through those abominable bits of glass.
And for what mighty advantage? Again I
say, it ought to be something excessively val-
uable for which a man will exchange the apple
of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a
blind gentleman a fee of a thousand pounds to
give him his sight as he has given it to more
than one born blind. The blind man, if he
possessed the money, would doubtless pour it
out like water to obtain the priceless boon of
vision. And this is the gift which our boys
exchange for a moderate acquaintance with
the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few
years after they leave school !
Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the
universe from behind spectacles; owing, no
doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education,
aided by their truculent black types. And we
open-eyed Britons are exhorted, forsooth, to
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 157
admire and follow in the steps of those bar-
nacled Prussians !
Such are three of the most obvious losses
to be placed in the scale against the gains
of Knowledge, the loss to many of bodily
health; to all of the unshackled freedom of
childhood ; and to not a few of perfect eye-
sight.
But we cannot suppose it was' to any of
these things Solomon alluded when he linked
Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is
not likely that those studies of his, about the
hyssop and the cedar, injured his health; nor
that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory
throne to receive the Queen of Sheba in a
pair of spectacles. As to the loss of the pleas-
ures of childhood, his well-known opinion of
the value of the Rod (to the wisdom of which
the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam
afforded an illustration) makes it probable
that he would have approved of the torture of
infants through the instrumentality of lessons.
Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some
other connection in his mind ; and that con-
nection we have still to mark.
It is a paradox only too readily verified that
the mind as well as the body suffers in more
ways than one from the acquirement of book
158 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
knowledge. In the first place, the Memory,
laden with an enormous mass of facts, and
accustomed to shift the burden of carrying
them to written notes and similar devices,
loses much of its natural tenacity. The igno-
rant clodhopper always remembers the parish
chronicles better than the scholarly parson.
The old family servant, who is strongly sus-
pected of not knowing how to write and whose
spectacles are never forthcoming when there
is any necessity to read, is the living annalist
of the house, and was never yet known to for-
get an order, except now and then on purpose.
Not only are the interests, and consequently
the attention and retentive powers, of illiterate
persons monopolized by the practical concerns
of life and the tales of the past which may
have reached their ears, but they have actually
clearer heads, less encumbered by a multi-
tude of irrelevant ideas, and can recall what-
ever they need, at a moment's notice, without
tumbling over a whole lumber-room full of
rubbish to get at it. The old Rabbinical sys-
tem of schooling, which mainly consisted in
the committal to memory of innumerable
aphorisms and dicta of sages and prophets,
possessed this enormous advantage over mod-
ern instruction, that whatever a man had so
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 159
learned he possessed at his fingers' ends, ready
for instant use in every argument. But, as
half the value of knowledge in practical life
depends on the rapidity with which it can be
brought to bear at a given moment on the
point of issue, and as a ready-witted man will
not merely outshine in discussion his slow-
brained antagonist, but forestall and outrun
him in every way, save in the labors of the
library, it follows that to sacrifice the ready
money of the mind for paper hard to negotiate
is extremely bad economy. iMere book-learn-
ing, instead of rendering the memory more
strong and agile, accustoms it to hobble on
crutches.
Other mental powers suffer even more than
the memory by the introduction of books.
That method which we familiarly call the
"Rule of Thumb" that is, the method of
the Artist is soon lost when there come to
be treatises and tables of calculation to form,
instead, the Method of the Mechanic. The
boats of Greece are to this day sculptured
rather than wrought by the shipwrights, even
as the old architects cut their marble archi-
traves by the eye of genius trained to beauty
and symmetry, not by the foot-rule of prece-
dent and book-lore. The wondrous richness
160 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
and harmony of coloring of Chinese and In-
dian and Turkish stuffs and carpets and por-
celain are similarly the result, not of any rules
to be reduced to formulae, but of taste unfet-
tered by pattern-books, unwarped by Schools
of Art Manufacture, bequeathed through long
generations, each acquainted intimately with
the aforesaid "rule of thumb."
For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in
the scale of human faculties, it may be fairly
doubted whether the modern increase of
Knowledge has done much to strengthen them,
when we find ourselves still unprotected by
common sense against such absurdities as those
which find currency amongst us. Men are
treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the
crop with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion
of them is impaired.
As to the Imagination, books are like the
stepping-stones whereon fancy trips across an
otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on
the further bank. But it may be questioned
whether the reading eye ever really does the
same work as the hearing ear. The voice of
tradition bears, as no book can do, the burden
of the feelings of generations. A ballad
learned orally from our mother's lips seems to
have far other meaning when we recall it, per-
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW l6l
chance long years after that sweet voice has
been silent, than the stanzas we perused yes-
terday through our spectacles in a volume
freshly reviewed in the Times.
Such are the somewhat dubious results of
book-lore on the faculties exercised in its ac-
quisition. It is almost needless to remark
that there are also certain positive vices fre-
quently engendered by the same pursuit.
Bacon's noble apophthegm, that "a little
knowledge leads to atheism, but a great deal
brings us back to God," needs for commentary
that "a little "must be taken to signify what
many people think " much." Read in such a
sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but
to faith in everything, and most particularly to
faith in Knowledge itself. Nobody despises
books so much as those who have read many
of them, except those still more hopeless infi-
dels who have written them. Watch the very
treatment given to his library by a bookworm.
Note how the volumes are knocked about, and
left on chairs, and scribbled over with ill-penned
notes, and ruthlessly dog's-eared and turned
down on their faces on inky tables, and sat
upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast
this behavior towards them with the respect-
ful demeanor of unlettered mortals, who range
1 62 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
the precious and well-dusted tomes like sol-
diers on drill on their spruce shelves; nobody
pushed back out of the line, nobody tumbling
sideways against his neighbor, nobody stand-
ing on his head! History is not jumbled
ignominiously with romance ; moral treatises
are not made sandwiches of (as we have be-
held) between the yellow covers of Zola ; and
" Sunday books " have a prominent pew all to
themselves, where they are not rubbed against
by either profane wit or worldly wisdom.
Such is the different appreciation of literature
by those to whom it is very familiar and by
those to whom it preserves still a little of the
proverbial magnificence of all unknown things.
We used to hear, some years ago, so much
about the Pride of Learning that it would be
a commonplace to allude to that fault among
the contingent disadvantages of study. One
of the Fathers describes how he was flogged
by an angel for his predilection for Cicero,
an anecdote which must have made many a
school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel that
life was only a dilemma between the rods of
terrestrial and celestial pedagogues. But it is
obvious that the saint had in his mind a sense
that the reading of "Tusculan Disputations"
had set him up saint though he was above
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 163
the proper spirit of implicit docility and unqual-
ified admiration for more sacred instructions.
The critical spirit, which is the inevitable
accompaniment of high erudition, is obviously
a good way off from that ovine frame of mind
which divines, in all ages, have extolled as the
proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in a
truer and better sense than that of the open-
mouthed credulity so idly inculcated, it must
be owned that, short of that really great knowl-
edge of which Bacon spoke and which allies
itself with the infinite wisdom of love and
faith, there are few things more hurtful to a
man than to be aware that he knows a great
deal more than those about him. The main
difference between what are called self-made
men and those who have been educated in
the upper grades is that the former, from their
isolation, have a constant sense of their own
knowledge, as if it were a Sunday coat, while
the others wear it easily as their natural attire.
The best thing which could happen to a
village Crichton would be to be mercilessly
snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when
women were " Precieuses " and " Blue Stock-
ings " were those in which it was a species of
miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they
were lifted into the heaven of Latin Grammar.
164 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
But, passing over the injury to healthy eye-
sight and mental vigor contingent on learning,
and the moral faults sometimes engendered
thereby, I proceed to ask another question.
What is the ethical value of the Knowledge
bought at such a price, and heaped together
by mankind during the thirty centuries since
Solomon uttered his warning? How has it
contributed to their moral welfare ?
Surely it is true that even as Art too often
gilds sensuality, and renders it attractive to
souls otherwise above its influence, so Knowl-
edge must open new roads to temptation, and
take off from sin that strangeness and horror
which is one of the best safeguards of the
soul. The old jest of the confessor, who
asked the penitent whether he did such and
such dishonest tricks, and received the reply,
" No, Father ; but I will do them next time,"
was only a fable of one form of the mischief
of knowledge; and that not the most fatal
form either. To know how to do wrong is
one small step towards doing it. To know
that scores and hundreds and thousands of
people, in all lands and ages, have done the
same wrong, is a far larger encouragement
to the timidity of guilt. Not only is it dan-
gerous to know that there is a descent to
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 165
Avernus, but specially dangerous to know
that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts
was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray
to children that the way to perdition is a
" Broad road, where thousands go,"
which, moreover,
" Lies near, and opens fair."
Better let people suppose that it has become
quite grass-grown and impassable.
Many offences, such as drunkenness, de-
bauchery, swindling, adulteration, and false
weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if
not solely, like small-pox by direct infection
conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C, and
D do the same things. David was not so
far wrong to be angry; and divines need not
be so anxious to excuse him for being so,
when he saw the " wicked " flourishing " like
green bay-trees." Such sights are, to the last
degree, trying and demoralizing.
In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowl-
edge of the evil of the world, of the baseness,
pollution, cruelty, which have stained the
earth from the earliest age till this hour, is
truly a knowledge fraught with dread and woe.
He who can walk over the carnage field of
history and behold the agonies of the wounded
1 66 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
and the fallen, the mutilations and hideous
ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful
humanity, he who can see all this, ay, or but
a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet
retain his unwavering faith in the final issue
of the strife, and his satisfaction that it has
been permitted to human free will, must be
a man of far other strength than he who
judges of the universe from the peaceful pros-
perity of his parish, and believes that the
worst of ills is symbolized by the stones under
which " the rude forefathers of the hamlet
sleep." Almost every form of knowledge is
some such trial of faith. Look at zoology
and palaeontology. What revelations of pain
and death in each hideous artifice of jagged
tooth, and ravening beak, and cruel claw!
What mysterious laws of insect and fungus
life developed within higher organisms, to
whom their presence is torture ! What savage
scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast strug-
gle for existence of every beast and bird, every
fish and reptile ! Turn to ethnology, and
gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian
tribes of Africa and Polynesia; of the count-
less myriads of their progenitors; and of those
who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone aeons
of prehistoric time. Is not the story of these
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 167
squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full
of woe? Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise
and of a primeval couple dwelling there in
perfect peace and innocence. We have at
last so eaten of the Tree of Knowledge that
we have been driven out of even the ideal
Eden ; and instead thereof we behold the
earliest parents of our race, dwarf and hirsute,
shivering and famished, contending with mam-
moths in a desert world, and stung and goaded
by want and pain along every step in the first
advance from the bestiality of the baboon into
the civilization of a man.
Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and
sick, into the abysses of time and space opened
beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plum-
met can sound, and all our toylike measures
of thousands of ages and millions of miles drop
useless from our hands. Can any thought be
more tremendous than the question, What
are we in this immensity? We had fondly
fancied we were Creation's last and greatest
work, the crown and glory of the universe, and
that our world was the central stage for the
drama of God. Where are we now? When
the "stars fall from heaven," will they "fall
on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her
untimely figs " ? Nay, rather will one of the
1 68 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
heavenly host so much as notice when our
little world, charged with all the hopes of
man, bursts like a bubble, and falls in the
foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a
single night some planet calmly rolling on its
way?
Let us pass from the outer into the inner
realm, and glance at the developments of
human thought. The knowledge of Philoso-
phy, properly so called, from Pythagoras and
Plato to Kant and Spencer, is it a Knowl-
edge the increase of which is wholly without
"sorrow"? Not the most pathetic poem in
literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes's
History of Philosophy. Those endless wan-
derings amid the labyrinths of Being and
Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nomi-
nalism and Realism, which, to most men, seem
like a troubled "dream within a dream," to
him who has taken the pains to understand
them rather appear like the wanderings of the
wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams
hither and thither, and feels feebly along the
walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding him-
self in a passage which has no outlet, and
turns back to seek another way of escape, and
grasps at something he deems may contain a
clew to the far distant daylight, and, lo ! it is
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 169
but an urn filled with dust and dead men's
bones.
Faust is the true type of the student of
metaphysics when he marks the skull's " spec-
tral smile " :
" Saith it not that thy brain, like mine,
Still loved and sought the beautiful,
Loved truth for its own sake, and sought,
Regardless of aught else the while,
Like mine the light of cloudless day,
And in unsatisfying thought
By twilight glimmers led astray,
Like mine, at length, sank overwrought ? "
There may be truth within our reach. Some
of us deem we have found it in youth, and,
passing out of the metaphysic stage of thought,
use our philosophy as a scaffolding wherewith
to build the solid edifice of life, gradually heed-
ing less and less how that scaffolding may
prove rotten or ill-jointed. But, even in such
a case, the knowledge of all that has been, and
is not, in the world of man's highest thought
is a sorrowful one. As we wander on from
one system to another, we feel as if we were
but numbering the gallant ships with keels
intended to cut such deep waters, and top-
masts made to bear flags so brave, which lie
wrecked and broken into drift-wood along the
shore of the enchanted Loadstone Isle.
I7O TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
What is, then, the conclusion of our long
pleading ? Knowledge is acquired at the cost
of a certain measure of health, and eyesight,
and youthful joy. Knowledge involves the
deterioration of some faculties as well as the
strengthening of others. Knowledge engen-
ders sundry moral faults. In the realms of
history, of physical and of mental science, the
survey of things obtained through knowledge
is full of sadness and solemnity. The tele-
scope which has revealed to us a thousand
galaxies of suns has failed to show us the
Heaven which we once believed was close
overhead.
Is then the pursuit of Knowledge, after all,
truly a delusion, the worst and weariest of
human mistakes, a thing to which we are
driven by our necessities on one hand and
lured by our thirst for it on the other, but
which, nevertheless, like the martyrs' cup of
salt water, only burns our lips with its bitter
brine ?
Not so! a thousand times, no! Knowledge,
like Virtue, is not good because it is useful, but
useful because it is good. It is useful contin-
gently, and good essentially. The joy of it is
simple, and not only needs not to be supple-
mented by accessory advantages, but is well
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW
worth the forfeit of many advantages to
obtain. The most miserable wretch we can
imagine is the ignorant convict locked up in
a solitary cell, with nothing to employ his
thoughts but unattainable vice and frustrated
crime, whereon his stupid judges leave him to
ruminate as if such poison were moral medi-
cine to heal the diseases of his soul. And,
on the other hand, one of the happiest beings
we can imagine is the man at the opposite end
of the intellectual scale, who lives in the free
acquirement of noble knowledge. What is
any "increase of sorrow" incurred thereby,
compared to the joy of it ? To build Memory
like a gallery hung round with all the loveliest
scenes of nature and all the masterpieces of
art ; to make the divine chorus of the poets
sing for us their choicest strains whenever we
beckon them from their cells; to talk famil-
iarly, as if they were our living friends, with
the best and wisest men who have ever lived
on earth, and link our arms in theirs in the
never-withering groves of an eternal Academe,
this is to burst the bounds of space and
bring the ages together, and lift ourselves out
of the sordid dust to sit at the banquet of
heroes and of gods.
ESSAY VI.
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE
COUNTRY MOUSE.
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE
COUNTRY MOUSE.
WHETHER it is best to live rapidly or slowly;
whether the " twenty years of Europe " be pref-
erable to the " cycle of Cathay " ; and what
is to be said on behalf of each of the two
modes of existence, supposing that we have
the choice between them, seem to be ques-
tions not unworthy of a little consideration.
It is quite possible that the common impulse
to be " in among the throngs of men," and to
cram a month's ideas and sensations into a
day, may be the truest guide to happiness;
indeed, it is rather sorrowful to doubt that it
should be so, considering how every successive
census shows the growth of the urban over the
rural populations, and how strongly the mag-
nets of the great cities seem destined in future
years to draw into them all the loose attract-
able human matter in each country. Never,
theless, it must be admitted to be also possible
1 76 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or
opium, the taste for town life may be an
appetite the indulgence of which is deleteri-
ous, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby
obtained may be practically outbalanced by
the loss of pleasures which slip away mean-
while unperceived. It would be satisfactory,
once for all, to feel assured that in choosing
either town or country life (when we have the
choice), we not only follow immediate inclina-
tion, but make deliberate selection of that
which must necessarily be the higher and
happier kind of life, on which, when the time
comes for saying good-night, we shall look
back without the miserable regret that we
have permitted the nobler duties and the
sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent
our years in grasping at shadows and vanities.
The dog with the bone in his mouth, who
drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a
terrible warning to all mankind. But which
is the real bone, and which is only the
reflection ? The question is not easily an-
swered.
Let us premise that it is of English country
life and town life alone I mean to speak.
Foreigners Frenchmen, for example who
live in the country seem always to do so
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 177
under protest, and to wish to convey to the
traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only
strangers and sojourners in the rural districts,
seeking a better country, even a Parisian.
Moliere's Comtesse d'Escarbagnas, who has
been six weeks in the capital once in her life,
and who indignantly asks her visitor, " Me
prenez-vous pour une provinciate, Madame ? "
is the type of them all. Of course, country
life taken thus as a temporary and rather dis-
graceful banishment can never display its true
features or produce its proper quantum of
enjoyment.
And again, among English forms of coun-
try life, it is life in bona fide rural districts
which we must take for our type. All round
London there now exists a sort of intellectual
cordon, extending from twenty to thirty miles
into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles
into Herts and Essex. Professor Nichols
might have mapped it as he did our starry
cluster, by jotting down every house on the
boundary inhabited by politicians, literary men,
and artists, and then running a line all round
from one to another. Within this circumfer-
ence (of course, extending year by year), the
ideas, habits, and conversation of the inhabi-
tants are purely Londonesque. The habitue
178 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
of London dinner-parties finds himself per-
fectly at home at every table where he sits
down, and may take it for granted that his
hosts and their guests will all know the same
familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the
season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions ;
and, much more than all this, will possess the
indescribable easy London manner of lightly
tripping over commonplace subjects, and seri-
ously discussing only really interesting ones,
which is the art of conversational perspective.
Beyond the invisible mental London Wall
which we have described, the wanderer seems
suddenly to behold another intellectual realm.
As the author of the " Night Thoughts " de-
scribes a rather more startling experience, he
stands on the last battlement, which
" Looks o'er the vale of non-existence,"
at the end of all things wherewith he is famil-
iar. He has, in short, penetrated into the
Rural Districts of the Mind, where men's
ideas have hedges and ditches no less than
their fields.
And once again we must take English coun-
try life in its most elevated and perfect form,
that of the hereditary landed gentry, to
contrast it most advantageously with the life
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 179
of towns. To understand and enjoy country
life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not
only live in one of those " Stately Homes of
England," of which Mrs. Hemans was so
enamoured, but be born and have spent his
youth in such a house, built by his fathers in
long past generations. A wealthy merchant or
a great lawyer who buys in his declining years
the country seat of some fallen family, to
enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors
may probably be a much more intelligent per-
son than the neighboring squire, whose acres
have descended to him depuis que le monde est
monde. But he can no more make himself
into a country gentleman, and acquire the
tastes and ideas of one, or learn to understand
from the inside the loves and hates, pleasures
and prejudices of squiredom, than he can ac-
quire the dolce favella Toscana by buying him-
self a Florentine barony.
And, lastly, our typical country life must
neither be that of people so great and wealthy
as to be called frequently by political interests
up to Parliament, and who possess two or
more great estates (a man can no more have
two homes than he can have two heads), nor
yet that of people in embarrassed and narrow
circumstances. The genuine squire is never
l8o TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
rich in the sense in which great merchants
and manufacturers are rich ; for, however many
acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain
that the claims on them will be quite in pro-
portion to their extent. There is, in fact, a
kind of money which never comes out of land ;
a certain freedom in the disposal of large sums
quite unknown among the landed gentry, at
least in these days. But, if not possessed of
a heavy balance at their bankers, the country
family must have the wherewithal for the
young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and
for the girls to ride or amuse themselves
with garden and pleasure-grounds according to
taste. All these things, being elements of the
typical English country life, must be assumed
as at least attainable at will by our " Coun-
try Mouse" if he is not to be put altogether
out of countenance by his brother of the
town.
As for the Town Mouse, he need not be rich,
nor is it more than a trifling advantage to him
(felt chiefly at the outset of his career) that his
father or grandfather should have occupied the
same social position as himself. All that is
needed is that, in the case of a man, he should
belong to a good club, and go out often to din-
ner ; and, in the case of a lady, that she should
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE l8l
have from one hundred to five hundred people
on her visiting list. Either of these fortunate
persons may, without let or hindrance, experi-
ence pretty nearly all the intellectual and
moral advantages and disadvantages of living
in a town, provided their place of abode be
London. Over every other city in the empire
there steals some breath of country air, if it
be small ; or, if it be large, its social character
is so far modified by special commercial, indus-
trial, or ecclesiastical conditions that its influ-
ence cannot be held to be merely that of a
town pur et simple ; nor are the people who
come out of it properly typically towny, but
rather commercial-towny, manufacturing-towny,
or cathedral-towny, as the case may be.
Turn we now from these preliminaries to
the characteristics of the Town life and the
Country life, each in its own most perfect
English form. Let us see first what is to be
said for each, and then strike our balance.
Very briefly we may dismiss the commonly
recognized external features of both, and pass
as rapidly as possible to the more subtle ones,
which have scarcely perhaps been noted as
carefully as their importance as items in the
sum of happiness will warrant.
1 82 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
TOWN MOUSE loquitur.
"I confess I love London. It is a confes-
sion, of course, for everybody who lives in the
country seems to think there is a particular
virtue in doing so, resembling the cognate
merit of early rising. Even that charming
town poet, Mr. Locker, practically admits the
same when he says,
* I hope I'm fond of much that's good,
As well as much that's gay ;
I'd like the country if I could,
I like the Park in May.'
" The truth is that one wants to live, not to
vegetate ; to do as much good, either to our-
selves or other people, as time permits ; to
receive and give impressions ; to feel, to act,
to be as much as possible in the few brief years
of mortal existence ; and this concentrated
Life can be lived in London as nowhere else.
If a man have any ambition, here it may best
be pursued. If he desire to contend for any
truth or any justice, here is his proper battle-
field. If he love pleasure, here are fifty enjoy-
ments at his disposal for one which he can
obtain in the country. The mere sense of
forming part of this grand and complicated
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 183
machine, whereof four millions of men and
women work the wheels, makes my pulse beat
faster, and gives me a sense as if I were
marching to the sound of trumpets. Then the
finish and completeness of London life is
delightful to the thoroughly civilized mind.
It is only the half-reclaimed savage who is
content with unpaved and unlighted roads, ill-
trained servants, slovenly equipages, and badly
cooked, badly attended dinners. Like my lit-
tle nibbling prototype who served his feast
* sur un tapis de Turquiel I like everything,
down to the little card on which my menu is
written, to be perfect about me. The less I
am reminded by disagreeable sensations of my
animal part, the more room is left for the
exercise of my higher intellectual functions.
The ascetic who lives on locusts and wild
honey, and catches the locusts, has far less
leisure to think about better things than the
alderman who sits down every day to ten
courses, served by a well-trained staff of Lon-
don servants. The sense of order, of ease, of
dignity and courtesy, is continually fostered
and flattered in the great Imperial City, which,
notwithstanding its petty faults of local govern-
ment, is still the freest and noblest town the
globe has ever borne. People talk of the
184 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
' freedom ' of the country, and my quondam
host, the Country Mouse, is perpetually boast-
ing of his 'crust of bread and liberty.' But,
except the not very valuable license to wear
shabby old clothes, I am at a loss to discover
wherein the special freedom of rural life con-
sists. You are certainly watched, and your
actions, looks, and behavior commented on
fifty times more by your idle neighbors in the
country, gasping for gossip, than by your busy
neighbors in town, who never trouble them-
selves to turn their heads when you pass them
in the street, or even to find out your name
if you live next door. In the country, you
have generally the option of going on either
of three or four roads. In London, you have
the choice of as many thousand streets. In
the country, you may ' kill something ' when-
ever you take your walks abroad, if that special
privilege of the British gentleman be dear to
your soul, and you care to shoot, hunt, or
fish. Or, if you belong to the softer sex or
sort, you may amuse yourself in your garden
or shrubbery, play tennis, teach in the village
school, or pay a visit to some country neighbor
who will bore you to extinction. In London,
you have ten times as large a choice of occu-
pations, and five hundred times as pleasant
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 185
people to visit; seeing that in the country
even clever men and women grow dull, and
in town the most stupid get frotte with other
people's ideas and humor.
"Again, and this is a most important con-
sideration in favor of London, when a man
has no particular bodily pain or mental afflic-
tion, and is not in want of money, the worst
evil which he has to dread is ennui. To be
bored is the ' one great grief of life ' to people
who have no other grief. But can there be
any question whether ennui is better avoided
in London or in the country? Even in the
month of August, as somebody has remarked,
4 when London is " empty," there are always
more people in it than anywhere else'; and
where there are people there must be the end-
less play of human interests and sympathies.
Nay, for my part, I find a special gratification
in the cordiality wherewith my acquaintances,
left stranded like myself by chance in the dead
season, hail me when we meet in Pall Mall
like shipwrecked mariners on a rock ; and in
the respectful enthusiasm wherewith I am
greeted in the half-deserted shops, where in
July I made my modest purchases, unnoticed
and unknown. In the country, on the con-
trary, Ennui stalks abroad all the year round ;
1 86 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
and the puerile ceremonies wherewith the
ignorant natives strive to conjure away the
demon the dismal tea and tennis parties,
the deplorable archery meetings, and, above all,
the really frightful antediluvian institution,
called * Spending a Day ' only place us
more helplessly at his mercy, We conjugate
the reflective verb * to be Bored,' in all moods
and tenses; not in the light and airy way of
townsfolk, when they trivially observe they
were * bored at such a party last night/ or
decline to be ' bored by going to hear such
a preacher on Sunday morning,' but sadly and
in sober earnest, as men who recognize that
boredom is a chronic disease from which they
have no hope of permanent relief. There is,
in short, the same difference between ennui in
the country and ennui in town as between
thirst in the midst of Sahara and thirst in
one's home, where one may ring the bell at
any moment and call for soda water."
So speaks the modern Town Mouse, describ-
ing the more superficial and obvious advan-
tages of his abode over those of his friend in
the country. And (equally on the surface of
things) straightway replies
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 187
COUNTRY MOUSE.
" There is some sense in these boasts of my
illustrious friend and guest, but against them
I think I can produce equivalent reasons for
preferring the country. In the first place, if
he lives faster, I live longer ; and I have better
health than he all the time. My lungs are not
clogged with smoke, my brain not addled by
eternal hurry and interruption, my eyes not
dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature
blindness. While his limbs are stiffening year
by year till he can only pace along his monoto-
nous pavement, I retain till the verge of old
age much of the agility and vigor wherewith
I walked the moors and climbed the mountains
in my youth. He is pleased at having twenty
times as many sensations in a day as I ; but,
if nineteen out of the twenty be jarring noises,
noxious smells, plague, worry, and annoyance,
I am quite content with my humbler share of
experience. Even if his thick-coming sensa-
tions and ideas be all pleasant, I doubt if he
ever have the leisure necessary to enjoy them.
Very little would be gained by the most ex-
quisite dinner ever cooked, and the finest
wines ever bottled, if a man should be obliged
to gobble them standing up, while his train,
1 88 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
just ready to start, is whistling behind him.
Londoners gulp their pleasures, we country
folk sip such as come in our way ; think of
them a long time in advance with pleasant
anticipation, and ruminate on them and talk
them over for months afterwards. I submit
that even a few choice gratifications thus care-
fully prized add to a man's sense of happiness
as much as double the number which are
received when he is too weary to enjoy or too
hurried to recall them.
"Again, the permanent and indefeasible
delights of the country seem somehow to be
more indispensable to human beings than the
high-strung gratifications of the town. The
proof of this fact is that, while we can live at
home all the year round, Town Mice, after
eight or nine months' residence at longest,
begin to hate their beloved city, and pine for
the country. Even when they are in the full
fling of the London season, it is instructive to
notice the enthusiasm and sparkle wherewith
they discuss their projected tours a few
weeks later among Swiss mountains or up
Norwegian fiords. Also it may be observed
how of all the entertainments of the year the
most popular are the Flower-shows, and the
afternoon Garden-parties in certain private
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 189
grounds. Even the wretched, unmanly sport
of Hurlingham has become fashionable, chiefly
because it has brought men and women out of
London for a day into the semblance of a
country place. Had the gentlemen shot the
poor pigeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields or
Bloomsbury, the admiring spectators of their
prowess would have been exceedingly few.
Nay, it is enough to watch in any London
drawing-room wherein may stand on one table
a bouquet of the costliest hot-house flowers,
and on the other a bowl of primroses in March,
of hawthorn in May, and of purple heather in
July, and see how every guest will sooner or
later pay some little affectionate attention to
the vase which brings the reminiscence of the
fields, woods, and mountains, taking no notice
at all of the gorgeous azaleas and pelargoni-
ums, gardenias, and camellias, in the rival nose-
gay. It is very well to boast of the 'perfec-
tion ' and * finish ' of London life, but the
* perfection ' fails to supply the first want of
nature, fresh air; and the 'finish' yet waits
for a commencement in cheerful sunlight un-
obscured by smoke and fog, and a silence
which shall not be marred all day and night
by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds.
What man is there who would prefer to live
I9O TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
in one of the Venetian palace chambers, gor-
geously decorated and adorned with frescos
and marbles, and gilding and mirrors, but with
a huge high wall, black, damp, and slimy,
within two feet of the windows, shutting out
the light of day and the air of heaven, rather
than in a homely English drawing-room, fur-
nished with nothing better than a few passable
water-color sketches and some chintz-covered
chairs and sofas, but opening down wide on
a sunny garden, with an acacia waving its
blossoms over the emerald sward, and the chil-
dren weaving daisy chains round the neck of
the old collie who lies beside them, panting
with the warmth of the weather and his own
benevolence ?
" Then as to the dulness of our country con-
versation, wherewith my distinguished friend
the Town Mouse has rather impolitely taunted
us. Is it because we take no particular inter-
est in his gossip of the clubs that he thinks
himself justified in pronouncing us stupid?
Perhaps we also think him a trifle local (if we
may not say provincial) in his choice of topics,
and are of opinion that the harvest prospects
of our country, and the relations of agricultural
labor to capital, are subjects quite as worthy of
attention as his petty and transitory cancans
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 1 91
about articles in reviews, quarrels, scandals, and
jests. East Indians returning to Europe after
long absence are often amazed that nobody at
home cares much to hear why Colonel Chutnee
was sent from Curriepoor to Liverabad, or how
it happened that Mrs. Cayenne broke off her
engagement with old General Temperatesty.
And in like manner perhaps a Londoner may
be surprised without much reason that his in-
tensely interesting 'latest intelligence' is rather
thrown away upon us down in the shires."
These, as we premised, are the obvious and
salient advantages and disadvantages of Town
and Country life respectively observed and
recognized by everybody who thinks on the
subject. It is the purport of the present paper
to pass beyond them to some of the more
subtle and less noticed features of either mode
of existence, and to attempt to strike some
kind of balance of the results as regards indi-
viduals of different character and the same
individual in youth and old age.
When we ask seriously the question which,
of any two ways of spending our years, is the
most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to
overlook the fact that it is not the one which
supplies us with the most numerous isolated
I Q2 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
items of pleasure, but the one of which the
whole current tends to maintain in us the
capacity for enjoyment at the highest pitch and
for as long a time as possible. There is some-
thing exceedingly stupid in our common prac-
tice of paying superabundant attention to all
the external factors of happiness down to the
minutest rose-leaf which can be smoothed out for
our ease, and all the time forgetting that there
must always be an internal factor of delight-
ability to produce the desired result, just as
there must be an eye wherewith to see as well
as candles to give light. The faculty of taking
enjoyment, of finding sweetness in the rose,
grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food
and rest, interest in books, and happiness in
loving and being loved, is as we must per-
ceive the moment we consider it indefinitely
more precious than any gratification which can
be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the
affections, just as eyesight is more valuable
than the finest landscape, and the power of
loving better than the homage of a world.
Yet, as Shelley lamented,
" Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight " ;
and we allow it to remain absent from our souls,
and grow accustomed to living without it, while
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 193
all the time we are plodding on, multiplying
gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate
and evanescent sense they are meant to please
is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed,
make religio-philosophical remarks on the beau-
tiful patience and cheerfulness of sufferers
from agonizing disease, and we smile at the un-
failing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys
of our acquaintance sustain the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote,
with high approval, the poet who sings that
" Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evi-
dent, unmistakable Happiness enjoyed, in de-
spite of circa nstances, never seems to teach
us how entirely secondary all objective circum-
stances needs must be to the subjective side of
the question, and how much more rational it
would be on our part to look first to securing
for ourselves the longest and completest tenure
of the internal elements of enjoyment before we
turn our attention to the attainment of those
which are external.
The bearing of this remark on the present
subject is, of course, obvious. Is it Life in
Town or Life in the Country wherein the
194 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
springs of happiness flow with perennial fresh-
ness, and wherein the Spirit of Delight will
burn brightest and longest? To solve this
problem, we must turn over in our minds the
various conditions of such a state of mind and
spirits, the most generally recognized of which
is bodily Health.
There is not the smallest danger in these
days that any inquirer, however careless, should
overlook the vast importance of physical sound-
ness to every desirable mental result. Indeed,
on the contrary, we may rather expect shortly
to find our teachers treating Disease as the
only real delinquency in the world, and all
crimes and vices as mere symptoms of dis-
ordered nerves or overloaded stomach, klepto-
mania, dipsomania, homicidal mania, or some-
thing equally pardonable on the part of autom-
ata like ourselves. Seriously speaking, a high
state of health, such as the " Original " described
himself as having attained, or even something
a few degrees less perfect, is, undoubtedly, a
potent factor in the sum of happiness, causing
every separate sensation sleeping, waking,
eating, drinking, exercise, and rest to be de-
lightful ; and the folly of people who seek for
Happiness, and yet barter away Health for
Wealth or Fame, or any other element thereof,
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 195
is like that of a man who should sell gold for
dross. Admitting this, it would seem to fol-
low that Life in the Country, generally under-
stood to be the most wholesome, must be the
most conducive to the state of enjoyment.
But there are two points not quite cleared up
on the way to this conclusion. First, bodily
health seems to be, to some people, anything
but the blessing it ought to be, rendering them
merely coarse and callous, untouched by those
finer impulses and sentiments which pain has
taught their feebler companions, and so shut-
ting them out from many of the purest and most
spiritual joys of humanity. Paley questioned
whether the sum of happiness would not be in-
creased to most of us by one hour of moderate
pain in every twenty-four; and, though few
would directly ask for the increment of enjoy-
ment so attained, there are perhaps still fewer
who would desire to unlearn all the lessons
taught in the school of suffering, or find them-
selves with the gross, oxlike nature of many a
farmer or publican, whose rubicund visage bears
testimony to his vigorous appetite and to the
small amount of pain, sorrow, or anxiety which
his own or anybody else's troubles have ever
caused him. Taking it all in all, it seems
doubtful, then, whether the most invariably
196 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
robust people are really much higher than
those with more fluctuating health who have
taken from the bitter cup the sweet drop which
is always to be found at the bottom by those
who seek it. For those, unhappiest of all,
whom disease has only rendered more selfish
and self-centred and rebellious, there is, of
course, no comparison possible.
And, secondly, Is it thoroughly proved that
country life is invariably healthier than the life
of towns ? The maladies arising from bad air,
late hours, and that overwork and overstrain
which is the modern Black Death, are of course
unknown in the calm-flowing existence of a
rural squire and his family. But there are other
diseases which come of monotonous repose, un-
varying meals, and general tedium vitae, quite as
bad as the scourges of the town. Of all sources
of ill health, I am inclined to think lack of
interest in life, and the constant society of dull
and disheartening people, the very worst and
most prolific. Undoubtedly, it is so among
the upper class of women ; and the warnings of
certain American physicians against the adop-
tion by girls of any serious or earnest pursuit
seems painfully suggestive of a well-founded
alarm lest their own lists of hysterical and
dyspeptic patients should show a falling off
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 1 97
under the new impetus given to women's work
and study. In London, people have very much
less leisure to think about their ailments, or
allow the doctor's visit to become a permanent
institution, as is so often the case in country
houses. The result is that (whether or not
statistics prove the existence of more sickness
in town than in the country) at least we do not
hear of eternally ailing people in London
nearly so often as we do in country neighbor-
hoods, where there are always to be found as
stock subjects of local interest and sympathy
old Mr. A.'s gout, and Lady B.'s liver com-
plaint; and those sad headaches which yet
fortunately enable poor Mrs. C. to spend at
least one day in the week in her darkened bed-
room out of the reach of her lord's intolerable
temper.* Be it also that the maladies which
townsfolk mostly escape namely, dyspepsia,
hysteria, and neuralgia are precisely those
which exercise the most direct and fatal influ-
ence on human powers of enjoyment, whereas
the ills to which flesh is heir in great cities,
among the upper and well-fed classes, are gen-
erally more remotely connected therewith.
But pace the doctors and all their material-
* I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine afflic-
tion classified as the " Bad Husband Headache."
198 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
istic followers I question very much whether
bodily health, the mere absence of physical
disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition
of happiness as certain peculiarities of the
mental and moral constitution. The disposi-
tion to Anxiety, for instance, which reduces
many lives to a purgatory of incessant care,
about money, about the opinion of society, or
about the health and well-being of children,
is certainly a worse drawback to peace and
happiness than half the diseases in the Regis-
trar-General's list. This anxious temperament
is commonly supposed to be fostered and
excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the
peaceful life of the country; and, if it were
certainly and invariably so, I think the balance
of happiness between the two would well-nigh
be settled by that fact alone. But again there
is something to be said on the side of the
town. An African traveller has described to
me how, after months exposed to the intermi-
nable perils from man and brute and climate, he
felt, after his first night on board a homeward-
bound English ship, a reaction from the terr
sion of anxiety which revealed to himself the
anguish he had been half-unconsciously endur-
ing for many months. In like manner the
city man or the statesman feels, when at last
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 199
he takes his summer holiday, under what tre-
mendous pressure of care he has been living
during the past year, or session, in London ;
and he compares it, naturally enough, with the
comparatively careless life of his friend, the
country squire. But every one in London
does not run a race for political victory or
social success, and there are yet some sober
old ways of business both legal and mercan-
tile which do not involve the alternative of
wealth or ruin every hour. For such people
I apprehend London life is actually rather a
cure for an anxious temperament than a provo-
cative of care. There is no time for dwelling
on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres
of possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures,
amusements and monetary worries, succeed
each other so rapidly that the more serious
anxieties receive less and less attention as the
plot of London life thickens year by year.
One nail drives out another, and we are now
and then startled to remember that there has
been really for days and months a reasonable
fear of disaster hanging over us to which we
have somehow scarcely given a thought, while
in the country it would have filled our whole
horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten
it day or night.
2OO TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
And, again, quite as important as bodily
health and freedom from anxiety is the posses-
sion of a certain childlike freshness of char-
acter; a simplicity which enables men and
women, even in old age, to enjoy such inno-
cent pleasures as come in their way without
rinding them pall, or despising them as not
worth their acceptance. Great minds and
men of genius seem generally specially gifted
with this invaluable attribute of perennial
youth; while little souls, full of their own
petty importance and vanities, lose it before
they are well out of the school-room. The
late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will
be, perhaps, appreciated when all the mon-
strosities of modern English statuary are con-
signed to the lime-kiln), used to say in his old
age that he wished he could live over again
every day and hour of his past life precisely as
he had spent it. Let the reader measure what
this means in the mouth of a man of trans-
parent veracity, and it will appear that the
speaker must needs have carried on through
his seventy years the freshness of heart of a
boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of
the Beautiful, and supported by the conscious-
ness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain.
People who are always " looking for the next
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2OI
thing," taking each phasure not as pleasure
per se, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to
something else which may possibly be pleasure,
or as a subject to be talked of; people who
are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the
slippery pole of ambition, cannot possibly
know the meaning of such genuine and ever
fresh enjoyment.
Is a man likely to grow more or less simple-
hearted and single-minded in Town or in the
Country? Alas! there can be little or no
doubt that London life is a sad trial to all such
simplicity; and that nothing is more difficult
than to preserve, in its hot, stifling atmosphere,
the freshness and coolness of any flower of
sentiment, or the glory of any noble, unselfish
enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the
tone of easy-letting-down commonly adopted
by men of the world towards any lofty aspira-
tion, compel those who would fain cherish
generous and conscientious motives to cloak
them under the guise of a hobby or a whim,
and, before many years are over, the glow and
bloom of almost every enthusiasm is rubbed off
and spoiled.
But it is time to pass from the general sub-
jective conditions of happiness common to us
all to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies
202 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
which are probably more often concerned in the
preference of town or country life. We are all
of us mingled of pretty nearly the same ingre-
dients of character ; but they are mixed in very
different proportions in each man's brewing,
and in determining the flavor of the compound
everything depends on the element which hap-
pens to prevail. By some odd chance, few of
us, notwithstanding all our egotism and self-
study, really know ourselves well enough to
recognize whether we are by nature gregarious
or solitary, acted upon most readily by meteoro-
logical or by psychological influences, capable
of living only on our affections or requiring the
exercise of our brains. We are always, for ex-
ample, talking about the gloom or brightness
of the weather, as if we were so many pimper-
nels, to whom the sun is everything and a
cloudy day or a sharp east wind the most piti-
able calamity. The real truth is that, to ninety-
nine healthy English men and women out of a
hundred, atmospheric conditions are insignifi-
cant compared to social ones; and the spectacle
of a single member of the family in the dumps,
or even the suspicion that the servants are
quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts more from
our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the
barometer from Very Dry to Stormy. In the
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 203
same way we talk about people "loving the
country" or "loving the town," just as if the
character which fitted in and found its natural
gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy
quite equally the other. Obviously, in some of
us the passion for Nature and natural beauty is
so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must
needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by
the sight of pictures reminding us of woods
and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled
and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington
House or the Grosvenor Gallery, we miss so
much out of life that nothing can make up for
it, and no pleasures of the intellect in the com-
pany of clever people, or gratification of taste
in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to
banish the regret. A young branch swaying in
the breeze of spring, and the song of the lark
rising out of the thyme and the clover, are
better than all the pictures, the concerts, the
conversation which the town can offer. And
just in the opposite way there are others
amongst us in whom the aesthetic element is
subordinate to the social, and who long to
take a part in the world's work rather than to
stand by and watch the grand panorama of
summer and winter move before them while
they remain passive. Is it not patently absurd
2O4 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
to talk as if persons so differently constituted as
these could find happiness, the one where his
ingrained passion for Nature is permanently
denied its innocent and easy gratification, the
other where his no less deeply rooted interest
in the concerns of his kind is narrowed within
the petty sphere of rural social life ?
But let us now pass on, hoping that we have
found the round man for the round hole, and
the square man for the square one. What are
the more hidden and recondite charms of the
two modes of life, of which the Town Mouse
and the Country Mouse have rehearsed the
superficial characters? What is the meaning
in the first place of that taste for " Life at
High Pressure," against which W. R. Greg
cautioned us, and Matthew Arnold inveighed?
How was it that the sage Dr. Johnson felt
undoubtedly a twinge of the same unholy pas-
sion when he remarked to the faithful Boswell
how delightful it was to drive fast in a post-
chaise, in such a post-chaise, and over such
roads as existed in his time? I apprehend
that the love for rapid movement comes from
the fact that it always conveys to us a sense
of vivid volition, and effectually stirs both our
pulses and our brains, causing us not only to
seem to ourselves, but actually to become,
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 205
more intelligent. At first the bustle and
hurry of London life bewilder the visitor; and,
finding it impossible to think, move, and
speak as fast as is needful, he feels as a feeble
old lady might do arm-in-arm with Jack in his
Seven-league boots. But after a little while
he learns to step out mentally as rapidly as
his neighbors, and thereby acquires the double
satisfaction of the intrinsic pleasure of think-
ing quickly and not dwelling on ideas till they
become tedious, and the further sense of grati-
fied vanity in being as clever as other people.
This last is again a curious source of metro-
politan satisfaction. It is all very well to boast
of having "also dwelt in Arcadia." Such
pastoral pride is humility beside the conceit
of being a thorough-bred Londoner. There
may live many men with souls so dead as
never to themselves to have said anything
signifying peculiar appropriation of the soil of
Scotland, or of any other " native land." But
who has ever yet met a Cockney who was not
from the bottom to the top of his soul proud
of being a Londoner, and deeply convinced
that he and his fellows can alone be counted
as standing " in the foremost files of time " ?
Of course, whilst he is actually in London, he
has no provocation to betray his self-satisfac-
2O6 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
tion among people who can all make the same
boast. But watch him the moment he passes
into the country. Observe the pains he takes
that the natives shall fully understand what
manner of man, even a Londoner, they have
the privilege of entertaining, and no doubt will
remain as to how immensely superior he feels
himself to those who habitually dwell "far from
the madding crowd." If he wander into the
remoter provinces, say of Scotland, Wales, or
Ireland, there is always in his recognition of
the hospitality shown to him a tone like that
of the shipwrecked apostle in Malta : " The Bar-
barous people there showed us no small kind-
ness." He manages to convey by looks, words,
and manners his astonishment at any vestiges
of civilization which he may meet on those
distant shores, and exhibits graceful forbear-
ance in putting up with the delicious fresh
fruit, cream, vegetables, and home-fed beef
and mutton of his entertainers in lieu of
the stale produce of the London shops. One
such stranded Cockney I have known to
remark that he " observed " that the eggs at
N , and at another country house where
he occasionally visited, had in them a "pecul-
iar milky substance," about whose merits he
seemed doubtful ; and another I have heard,
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2O7
after landing at Holyhead on his return from
Ireland, complacently comparing his watch
(which had, like himself, faithfully kept Lon-
don time during all his tour) with the clock
in the station, and observing to his fellow-pas-
sengers "that there was not a single clock
right in Dublin, they were all twenty minutes
too slow, and, when he went to Galway, he
found them still worse."
Even if a man sincerely prefer country life,
and transfer his abode from London to the
rural districts, he still retains a latent satis-
faction at having lived once in the very centre
of human interests, close to the throbbing heart
of the world. The old squire, who has been
too gouty and too indolent to run up to town
for twenty years, will still brighten up at the
names of the familiar streets and play-houses,
and will tell anecdotes, the chief interest of
which seems to lie in the fact that he formerly
lodged in Jermyn Street, or bought his seals at
the corner of Waterloo Place, or had his hair
cut in Bond Street, preparatory to going to the
play in Drury Lane.
As volunteers enjoy a field day with the
manoeuvres and marches, so a Londoner expe-
riences a dim sense of pleasure in forming part
of the huge army of four millions of human be-
2O8 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
ings who are for ever moving hither and thither,
and yet strangely bringing about, not confusion,
but order. The Greek philosophers and states-
men, who thought such a little tiny " Polis " as
Athens or Sparta (not an eighth part of one
postal district of London) almost a miracle of
divine order, would have fallen down and wor-
shipped at the shrine of Gog and Magog for
having provided that a whole nation should be
fed, housed, clothed, washed, lighted, warmed,
taught, and amused for years and generations
in a single city eight miles long. It is impos-
sible not to feel an ever fresh interest and even
surprise in the solution of so marvellous a
problem as this human ant-hill presents, and
Londoners themselves, perhaps even more than
their visitors, are wont to watch with pleasant
wonder each occurrence which brings its mag-
nitude to mind: the long quadruple train of
splendid equipages filing through Hyde Park of
a summer afternoon ; the scene presented by
the river at the Oxford and Cambridge boat-
race ; or the overwhelming spectacle of such
crowds as greeted the Queen on her Jubilee.
The facility wherewith a busy-minded person,
possessed of moderate pecuniary resources, can
carry out almost any project in London, is
another great source of the pleasure of town
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 209
life. At every corner a cab, a hansom, an
omnibus, an underground station, or a penny
steamboat, is ready to convey him rapidly and
securely to any part of the vast area; and a
post-pillar or post-office or telegraph office, to
forward his letter or card or telegram. He
has acquired the privilege of Briareus for do-
ing the work of a hundred hands, while the
scores of penny and half-penny newspapers
give him the benefit of the hundred eyes of
Argus to see how to do it.
Not many people seem to notice wherein the
last and greatest of London pleasures, that of
London society, has its special attraction. It
is contrasted with the very best society which
the Country can ever afford, by offering the
charm of the imprevu. There are always in-
definite possibilities of the most delightful and
interesting new acquaintances or of the re-
newal of old friendships in London: whereas
even in the most brilliant circles in the country
we are aware, before we enter a house, that our
host's choice of our fellow-guests must have lain
within a very narrow and restricted circle, and
that, if a stranger should happily have fallen
from the skies into the neighborhood, his ad-
vent would have been proclaimed in our note
of invitation. Now it is much more piquant to
2IO TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
meet an agreeable person unexpectedly than by
formal rendezvous ; and, for that large propor-
tion of mankind who are not particularly agree-
able, it is still more essential that they should
be presented freshly to our acquaintance.
Other things being equal, a Stranger Bore is
never half so great a bore as a Familiar Bore,
of whose boredom we have already had inti-
mate and painful experience. There yet hangs
about the Stranger Bore somewhat of the mists
of early day, and we are a little while in pierc-
ing them and thoroughly deciding that he is
a bore and nothing better. Often, indeed, for
the first hour or two of acquaintanceship, he
fails to reveal himself in his true colors, and
makes remarks and tells anecdotes the dulness
of which we shall only thoroughly recognize
when we have heard them repeated on twenty
other occasions. With our own Familiar Bore
no illusion is possible. The moment we see
him enter the room, we know everything that
is going to be said for the rest of the evening,
and Hope itself escapes out of Pandora's box.
Thus, even if there were proportionately as
many bores in London as in the provinces, we
should still, in town, enjoy a constant change
of them, which would considerably lighten the
burden. This, however, is very far from being
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 211
the case ; and the stupid wives of clever men
and the dull husbands of clever wives, who
alone smuggle into the inner coteries (few
people having the effrontery to omit them in
their invitations), are so far rubbed up and in-
structed in the best means of concealing their
ignorance, silliness, or stupidity, that they are
often quite harmless and inoffensive, and even
qualified to shine with a mild reflected lustre
in rural society in the autumn. Certain im-
mutable laws made and provided by society
against bores are brought sooner or later to
their knowledge. They do not tell stories more
than five minutes long in the narration, nor
rehearse jokes till they fancy they can recall
the point, nor entertain their friends by an
abridgment of their own pedigree, or by a cata-
logue of the ages, names, heights, and attain-
ments in the Latin grammar of their hopeful
offspring. To all this sort of thing the miser-
able visitor in the country is liable to be sub-
jected in every house the threshold of which he
may venture to cross ; for, even if his host and
hostess be the most delightful people, they
generally have some old uncle or aunt, or priv-
ileged and pompous neighbor, with whom no-
body has ever dared to interfere in his ruthless
exercise of the power to bore, and who will
212 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
fasten on a new comer just as mosquitoes do on
fresh arrivals at a seaport after having tor-
mented all the old inhabitants.
And if London Bores are as lions with drawn
teeth and clipped claws, London pleasant
people on the other hand are beyond any
doubt the pleasantest in the world ; more true
and kind and less eaten up by vanity and
egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile-
minded as the very cleverest German.
Again, a great charm of London is that
wealth is of so much less social weight there
than anywhere else. It is singular what mis-
apprehensions are current on this subject, and
how apt are country people to say that money
is everything in town, whereas the exact con-
verse of the proposition is nearer the truth. In
a country neighborhood, the man who lives in
the largest house, drives the handsomest horses,
and gives the most luxurious entertainments is
allowed with little question to assume a prom-
inent position, be he never so dull and never so
vulgar ; and, though respect will still be paid to
well-born and well-bred people of diminished
or narrow fortune, their position as regards
their nouveau riche neighbors is every year less
dignified or agreeable. Quite on the contrary
in town: with no income beyond what is need-
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 213
f ul to subscribe to a club and wear a good coat,
a man may take his place (hundreds do so take
a place) in the most delightful circles, welcomed
by all for his own worth or agreeability, for the
very simple and sufficient reason that people
like his society and want nothing more from
him. In a city where there are ten thousand
people ready to give expensive dinners, it is
not the possession of money enough to enter-
tain guests which can by itself make the owner
an important personage, or cause the world to
overlook the fact that he is a snob; nor will the
lack of wealth prevent those thousands who
are on the look-out only for a pleasant and
brilliant companion from cultivating one, be he
never so poor. The distinction between the
rural and the urban way of viewing a new
acquaintance as regards both birth and fortune
is very curiously betrayed by the habit of towns-
folk to ask simply "what a man may be"
(meaning, " Is he a lawyer, a litterateur, a poli-
tician, a clergyman, above all, is he a pleasant
fellow ? ") and that of country gentry invari-
ably to inquire, " Who is he ? " (meaning, Has
he an estate, and is he related to the So-and-so's
of such a place ? ) It is not a little amusing
sometimes to witness the discomfiture of both
parties when a bland old gentleman is intro-
214 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
duced in London to some man of world-wide
celebrity, whose antecedents none of the com-
pany ever dreamed of investigating, and the
squire courteously intimates, as the pleasantest
thing he can think of to say, that he " used to
meet often in the hunting field a gentleman of
that name who had a fine place in Cheshire,"
or that " he remembers a man who must surely
have been his father a gentleman-commoner
of Christchurch."
For those men and women numerous
enough in these days who hold rather pro-
nounced opinions of the sort not relished in
country circles, who are heretics regarding the
religious or political creed of their relatives
and neighbors, London offers the real Broad
Sanctuary, where they may rest in peace, and
be no more looked upon as black sheep, sus-
picious and uncomfortable characters, the "gen-
tleman who voted for Topsy Turvey at the
last election," or " the lady who doesn't go to
church on Sundays." In town, not only will
their errors be overlooked, but they will find
scores of pleasant and reputable persons who
share the worst of them and go a great deal
further, and in whose society they will soon
begin to feel themselves by comparison quite
orthodox, and perhaps rather conservative
characters.
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 215
And lastly, besides all the other advantages
of London which I have recapitulated, there
is one of which very little note is ever taken.
If many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost
by living there, many sharp and weary pains
also therein find a strange anodyne. There
is no time to be very unhappy in London.
Past griefs are buried away under the surface,
since we may not show them to the unsym-
pathizing eyes around ; and present cares and
sorrows are driven into dark corners of the
mind by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts
which inevitably take their place. A man
may feel the heart-ache in the country, and
wander mourning by the solitary shore or
amid the silent winter woods. But let him go,
after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into
the busy London streets, and be obliged to
pick his way amid the crowd ; to pass by a
score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over
by an omnibus, give a penny to a street-
sweeper, push through the children looking at
Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail
a hansom and drive to his office or his cham-
bers, and at the end of the hour how many
thoughts will he have given to his sorrow?
Before it has had time to sink into his mind,
many days of similar fuss and business will
2l6 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
have intervened; and by that time the edge
of the grief will be dulled, and he will never
experience it in its sharpness. Of the influ-
ence of this process, continually repeated, on
the character, a good deal might be said ; and
there may be certainly room to doubt whether
thus perpetually shirking all the more serious
and solemn passages of life is conducive to the
higher welfare. After we have suffered a good
deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter
every new experience and drink every cup to
the dregs has been exchanged for the dread
of strong emotions and the weariness of grief
which belong to later years, there is an im-
mense temptation to spare our own hearts as
much as we can ; and London offers the very
easiest way, without any failure of kindness,
duty, or decorum, to effect such an end.
Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy
and unselfish sorrow are not things to be
lightly tampered with; and it is to be feared
that the consequences of any conscious evasion
of their claims must always be followed by
that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our
hearts and the disbelief in the sympathy of
our neighbors. We have made love and
friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes
impossible to continue to believe they are real
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 21 /
to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter
be not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it
merely come in the natural course of things
that the business and variety of town life pre-
vent us from dwelling on sorrows which can-
not be lightened by our care, it seems a better
alternative than the almost infinite durability
and emphasis given to grief in the monotonous
life of the country.
If these be the advantages of Town life,
however, there are to be set against them many
and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country
Mouse justly urges, half those quickly following
sensations and ideas which constitute the highly-
prized rapidity of London life are essentially
disagreeable in themselves, and might be dis-
pensed with to our much greater comfort. In
the country, for example, out of fifty sights,
forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful
objects, even where there is no particularly fine
scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads,
cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and
over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed
sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and
moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days,
these are things on which everywhere (save in
the Black Country, which is not the country at all)
the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town,
2l8 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
out of the same number of glances of our tired
eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of
huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses
with a butcher's shop as the most prominent
object, an omnibus and a brewer's dray, a score
of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from
dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfort-
unate horses champing their gag-bits in agony
from their tight bearing-reins while the coach-
man flicks them with his whip. In the country,
again, out of fifty odors the great majority will
be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean
fields, or of newly ploughed ground, or burning
weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure the
sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat,
of carts laden with bones and offal, the insuffer-
able effluvium of the city cook-shops ; and last
not least pervading every street and shop
and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest
tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears
are no less soothed and flattered than our senses
of smelling and sight. The golden silence when
broken at all is disturbed only by the noise of
running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating,
thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks
cawing on the return home at evening, or the
exquisite " sough " of the night wind as it passes
over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 19
town, we have the relentless roar and rattle of a
thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the
perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies,
the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the
costermongers in the streets, and generally, to
complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte
heard through the thin walls of our house, as if
there were no partitions between us and the
detestable children who thump through their
scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty-
four. Such are the sufferings of the senses
in London, surely worth setting against the
luxuries it is supposed to comand, but which
it only commands for the rich, whereas neither
rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly
sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith
it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications
of the flesh, London entails on its thorough-
going votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner
or later on every one who really works in
London there comes a certain pain, half
physical, half mental, which seems to have its
bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm,
and its mental place between our feelings and
our intellect, a sense, not of being tired and
wanting rest, for that is the natural and whole-
some alternative of all strong and sustained
exercise of our faculties, but of being "like
22O TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
dumb driven cattle," and of having neither
power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be
under some slave-master who whips us here
and there, and forbids us to sit down and take
breath. We want fresh air, but our walks
through the crowded streets or parks only
add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and
excitement to our brains. We need food, but
it does us little good ; and sleep, but we
waken up before half the night is past with our
brains busy already with the anxieties of the
morrow. We are conscious we are using up
brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes
life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled
in such a mesh of engagements and duties that
we cannot break loose. We can only break
down; and that is what we pretty surely do
when this state of things has lasted a little too
long.
Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why
not try the golden mean, the compromise be-
tween town and country, to be found in some
rus in urbe in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa
a little way further, at Richmond or Norwood
or Wimbledon ? I beg leave humbly to con-
tend that the venerable Aristotelian " Meson "
is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics,
and that it will be generally found that people
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 221
adopting the Half-way House system of lodge-
ment will be disposed to repeat the celebrated
Scotch ode with slight variations. " Their
heart is " - in London ; " their heart is not,"
by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham.
Their days are spent either in waiting at rail-
way stations to go in or out of town, or in the
yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who
have promised to " give them a day," and for
whom they have provided the modern substi-
tute for the fatted calf, but who, on the par-
ticular morning of their engagement, are sure
to be swept off their consciences by an unex-
pected ticket for the opera, which they " could
not enjoy if they had gone so far in the morn-
ing as dear Mr. A.'s delightful villa." Of
course, it is possible to live in the outer circle
of real London, and have fresh air and compar-
ative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who
goes further afield, the ambitious soul who
dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars to a
paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion
and despair. He tries to " make the best of
both worlds," and he gets the worst of both.
The genuine Londoner considers his proffers
of hospitality as an imposition ; and the gen-
uine country cousin is indignant, on accepting
them, to find how far is his residence from the
222 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
exhibitions and the shops. His trees are black,
his roses cankered, and his soul imbittered by
the defalcations of friends, the blunders and
extortions of cabmen, and his own infructuous
effort to be always in two places at once.
Nor is the second and, apparently, more
facile resource of the tired Londoner that of
quartering himself on his kind country friends
for his holidays very much more successful.
The country would indeed be delightful for our
Christmas fortnight or our Easter or Whitsun-
tide week, if we were permitted to enjoy in it
that repose we so urgently need and so fondly
seek. We are quite enamoured, when we first
turn our steps from the smoky city, with the
trees and fields ; and we enjoy indescribably
our rides and drives and walks, the varied as-
pects of nature, and the beasts and birds where-
with we are surrounded. But one thing we
have not bargained for, and that is country
Society. Of course we love our friends and
relations in whose homes we are received with
kindness and affection, whom we know to be
the salt of the earth for goodness, and who love
us enough to feel an interest even in our towni-
est gossip. But their country friends, the neigh-
boring gentlefolk, the clergyman's wife, the
family doctor, the people who are invariably
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 223
invited to meet us at the long formal country
dinner ! This is the trial beneath which our
new-found love of rural life is apt to succumb.
Sir Cornewall Lewis's too famous dictum re-
turns, slightly modified, to our memories
As "life would be tolerable but for its pleas-
ures," so the country would be enchanting,
were it not for its society. Could we be
allowed to live in the country, and see only
our hosts, we should be as happy as kings and
queens. But to fly, for the sake of rest and
quiet, from the tables where we might have met
some of the most brilliant men and women of
the day, and then to find that we shall incur
the disgrace of being unsociable curmudgeons
if we object to spend the afternoon in playing
tennis with the rector's stupid daughters, and
to dine afterwards at the house of a particularly
dull and vulgar neighbor with whom we would
fain avoid such acquaintance as may justify
him in visiting us in town, this is surely an evil
destiny ! When, alas ! will all the good and
kind people who invite town friends to come
and rest with them in the country forbear to
make their acceptance the occasion for a round
of rural dissipation, and believe that their weary
brother would be only too glad, did civility per-
mit, to inscribe on the door of his bedroom
224 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
during his sojourn the affecting Italian epitaph,
Imp lor a pace !
The Country Mouse has naturally said as
little as possible of the drawbacks of his favorite
mode of existence, metaphorically speaking,
the dampness of his " Hollow Tree," and its
liability to be infested by Owls. It may be
well to jot off a few of the less recognized
offsets to the pleasures of rural life before lis-
tening to any eulogies thereof.
The real evil of country life I apprehend is
this: the whole happiness or misery of it is so
terribly dependent on the character of those
with whom we live that, if we are not so fort-
unate as to have for our companions the best
and dearest, wisest and pleasantest, of men and
women (in which case we may be far happier
than in any other life in the world), we are
infinitely worse off than we can ever be in
town. One, two, or perhaps three relatives and
friends, who form our permanent housemates,
make or mar all our days by their good or evil
tempers, their agreeability or stupidity, their
affection and confidence, or their dislike and
jealousy. Eire avec les gens quon aime, cela
suffit, says Rousseau ; and he speaks truth. But
etre avec les gens quon riaime pas, and buried
in a dull country house with them, without any
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 25
prospect of change, is as bad as having a mill-
stone tied round our necks and being drowned
in the depth of the sea. In a town house, if
the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters,
scold and wrangle, if the husband be a bear or
the wife a shrew, there is always the refuge of
the outer circle of acquaintances wherein cheer
and comfort, or, at least, variety and relief, may
be found. Reversing the pious Dr. Watts's
maxim, we cry,
" Whatever brawls disturb the home,
Let peace be in the street."
The Club is the shelter of henpecked man;
a friend's house, or Marshall and Snellgrove's,
the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the
stormiest domestic debate, the advent of a
visitor intervenes, throwing temporary oil on
the waters, and compelling the belligerents to
put off their quarrels and put on their smiles;
and, when the unconscious peacemaker has de-
parted, it is often found difficult, if not impos-
sible, to take up the squabble just where it was
left off. But there is no such luck for cross-
grained people in country houses. Humboldt's
"Cosmos " contains several references to cer-
tain observations made by two gentlemen who
passed a winter together on the inhospitable
226 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
northern shores of Asia, and one of whom bore
the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult
to imagine any trial more severe than that of
spending the six dark months of the year with
Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea.
But this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hun-
dreds of unlucky English men and women
spend their winters every year in country
houses, limited, practically, to the society of a
Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a burden
by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry,
suspicion, jar, and jolt. As regards children
or dependent people or the wives of despotic
husbands, the case is often worse than this.
By a terrible law of our nature, an unkindness,
harshness, or injustice done once to any one has
a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the
victim (I have elsewhere called the passion
heteropathy) and a restlessness to heap wrong
on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to
justify the first fault. Woe to the hapless step-
child or orphan nephew or penniless cousin, or
helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under
this terrible destiny in a country house where
there are few eyes to witness the cruelty and
no tongue bold enough to denounce it ! The
misery endured by such beings, the poor young
souls which wither under the blight of the per-
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 22 7
petual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers
mortified and humiliated in their age, must be
quite indescribable. Perhaps by no human act
can truer charity be done than by resolutely
affording moral support, if we can do no more,
to such butts and victims; and, if it be possible,
to take them altogether away out of their ill-
omened conditions, and "deliver him that is
oppressed from the hand of the adversary." It
is astonishing how much may be done by very
humble spectators to put a check to evils like
these, even by merely showing their own sur-
prise and distress in witnessing them ; and, on
the contrary, how deplorably ready are nine
people out of ten to fall in with the established
prejudices and unkindnesses of every house
they enter.
Very little of this kind of thing goes on in
towns. People are too busy about their own
affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all
kinds are too much diffused among the in-
numerable men and women with whom they
come in contact, to permit of concentrated
dislike settling down on any inmate of their
homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the
country.
Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret
of the difference of Town and Country life.
228 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are
more are less dissipated in town, and concen-
trated and deepened in the country. Even a
very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of
hours of meals too late or too early for our
health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a
door below stairs perpetually banged, assumes
a degree of importance when multiplied by the
infinite number of times we expect to endure
it in the limitless monotony of country life.
Our nerves become in advance irritated by all
we expect to go through in the future, and the
consequence is that a degree of heat enters
into family disputes about such matters which
greatly amazes the parties concerned to remem-
ber when the wear and tear of travel or of
town life have made the whole mode of exist-
ence in a country home seem a placid stream,
with scarcely a pebble to stir a ripple.
And now, at last, let us begin to seek out
wherein lie the more hidden delights of the
country life ; the violets under the hedge which
sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved
even by those who would fain gather up the
flowers. We return in thought to one of those
old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees and
with the work-day world far enough away be-
hind the park palings so that the sound of
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 29
wheels is never heard save when some friend
approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What
is the key-note of the life led by the men and
women who have grown from childhood to
manhood and womanhood in such a place, and
then drop slowly down the long years which
will lead them surely at last to that bed in the
green churchyard close by, where they shall
" sleep with their fathers " ? That " note " seems
to me to be a peculiar sense exceeding that
of mere calmness of stability, of a repose of
which neither beginning nor end is in sight.
Instead of a " changeful world," this is to them
a world where no change comes, or comes so
slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost every-
thing which the eye rests upon in such a home
is already old, and will endure for years to come,
probably long after its present occupants are
under the sod. The house itself was built
generations since, and its thick walls look as
if they would defy the inroads of time. The
rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the
father's marriage ; another, tradition tells us, by
a famous great-grandmother; the halls no
one remembers by whom or how long ago.
The old trees bear on their boles the initials of
many a name which has been inscribed long
years also on the churchyard stones. The gar-
230 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
den, with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers and
clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has
been a garden so long that the rich soil bears
blossoms with twice the perfume of other
flowers ; and, as we pace along the broad ter-
raced walks in the twilight, the odors of the
well-remembered bushes of lavender and jessa-
mine and cistus (each growing where it has
stood since we were born) fall on our senses
like the familiar note of some dear old tune.
The very sounds of the landrail in the grass,
the herons shrieking among their nests, the
rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle
driven in to milking and lowing as they go, all
in some way suggest the sense, not of restless-
ness and turmoil like the noises of the town,
but of calm and repose and the unchanging
order of an " abode of ancient Peace."
Then the habits of the owners of such old
seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhyme.
There are the lesser beats at intervals through
the long day, when the early laborer's bell, and
the gong at nine o'clock, and one o'clock, and
seven o'clock, sound the call to prayers and to
meals. And there are the weekly beats, when
Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the
psalm of life. And yet again there are the
half-yearly summer strophe and winter anti-
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 23!
strophe of habits of each season, taken up and
laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the
family life oscillates like a pendulum between
the first of May, which sees the domestic
exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room,
and the first of November, which brings the
return into the warm, oak-panelled library.
To violate or alter these long-established rules
and precedents scarcely enters into the head of
any one, and the child hears the old servants
(themselves the most dear and permanent insti-
tutions of all) speak of them almost as if they
were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds
life from the very beginning set for him to a
kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way;
and he learns to think that " Order is Heaven's
first law," and that change will never come over
the placid tenor of existence. The difficulty
to him is to realize in after years that any
vicissitudes have really taken place in the old
home, that it has changed owners, or that the
old order has given place to new. He almost
feels thinking perhaps of his mother in her
wonted seat that Shelley's dreamy philoso-
phy must be true
" That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all bright shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away :
'Tis we, 'tis ours, have changed, not they."
232 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
The anticipation of perpetual variety and
change which is the lesson commonly taught
to children by town-life, the Micawber-like
expectation of " something turning up," to
amuse or distract them, and for which they are
constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is pre-
cisely reversed for the little scion of the old
country family. For him nothing is ever
likely to turn up beyond the ordinary vicis-
situdes of fair weather and foul, the sickness of
his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival
of his new gun. All that is to be made out of
life he invents for himself in his sports and
in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is
sent to school. And when the epochs of school
and college are over, when he returns as heir
or master, life lays all spread out before him in
a long, straight, honorable road, all his duties
and his pleasures lying by the wayside, ready
for his acceptance. For the girl there is often
even longer and more unbroken monotony,
lasting (unless she marry) into early woman-
hood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the
eventlessness of many a young lady's life in such
a home. Her walks to her village school, or to
visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and
disasters ; her rides and drives along the famil-
iar roads which she has ridden and driven over
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 233
five hundred times already ; the arrival of a
new book, or of some old friend (more often her
parent's contemporary than her own), make
up the sum of her excitements, or even expec-
tations of excitement, perhaps, through all the
years when youth is most eager for novelty,
and the outer world seems an enchanted place.
The effects on the character of this extreme
regularity and monotony, this life at Low Press-
ure, vary, of course, in different individuals.
Upon a dull mind without motu proprio or
spring of original ideas, it is, naturally, depress-
ing enough ; but it is far from equally injurious
to those possessed of some force of character,
provided they meet the affection and reason-
able indulgence of liberty without which the
heart and intellect can no more develop health-
fully than a baby can thrive without milk, or a
child's limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes.
The young mind slowly working out its prob-
lems for itself, unwarped by the influence (so
enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions,
and devouring the great books of the world, fer-
reted out of a miscellaneous library by its own
eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps
ripening in a healthier way than the best
taught town child, with endless " classes " and
masters for every accomplishment under the
234 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
sun. Even the imagination is better cultivated
in loneliness, when the child, through its sol-
itary rambles by wood and shore, spins its
gossamer webs of fancy, and invents tales of
heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or
pantomime ever yet brought to the town child's
exhausted brain. Then the affections of the
country child are concentrated on their few
objects with a passionate warmth of which the
feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst
scores of friends and admirers, affords no
measure whatever. The admiration amounting
to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to
some older woman who represents to her all
of grace and goodness she has yet dreamed,
and who descends every now and then from
some far-off Elysium to be a guest in her home,
is one of the least read and yet surely one of
the prettiest chapters of innocent human senti-
ment. As to the graver and more durable
affections nourished in the old home, the fond
attachment of brothers and sisters, the rever-
ence for the father, the love, purest and
deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child
and child for mother, there can be little doubt
that their growth in the calm, sweet country life
must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can
well be elsewhere.
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 235
And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful
and solitary youth soon enters the deeper
waters of the moral and spiritual life, and
breathes religious aspirations which have in
them, in those early years, the freshness and
the holiness of the morning. Happy and good
must, indeed, be that later life from the heights
of which any man or woman can dare to look
back on one of these lonely childhoods without
a covering of the face. Talk of hermitages
or monasteries ! The real nursery of religion
is one of these old English homes, where every
duty is natural, easy, beautiful ; where the pleas-
ures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven
with the duties that the one need scarcely
be defined from the other; and where the
spectacle of Nature's loveliness is forever sug-
gesting the thought of Him who built the blue
dome of heaven, and scattered over all the
ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy
child dwelling in such a home, with a father and
mother who speak to it sometimes of God and
the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude
into that Holy of Holies, a young soul's love
and penitence and resolution, is the place on
earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame
of religion. Of the cruelty and wickedness
and meanness of the world the child hears only
236 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
as of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who
may roam or crawl in African deserts. They are
too far off to force themselves on the attention
as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved
on pain of moral death. Even sickness, poverty,
and death appear oftenest as occasions for the
kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and
guides.
To turn to lighter matters. Of course
among the first recognized pleasures of the
country is the constant intercourse with, or
rather bathing in, Nature. We are up to the
lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees.
It is not one beautiful object or another which
attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but,
without being interrupted by thinking of them
individually, they influence us en masse. Dame
Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us
with her own lullaby. Probably, on the whole,
country folks admire each separate view and
scrap of landscape less than their visitors from
the town, and criticise it as little as school-boys
do their mother's dress. But they love Nature
as a whole, and her real influence appears in
their genial characters, their healthy nervous
systems, and their optimistic opinions. Nor is
it by any means only inanimate nature where-
with they are concerned. Not to speak of
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 237
their poorer neighbors (of whom they know
much more, and with whom they usually live
in far more kindly relations than townsfolk with
theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes
and birds. How much, to some of us, the
leisurely watching of stately cattle, gentle
sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driv-
ing of generous, kindly-natured horses and the
companionship of loving dogs, add to the sum
of the day's pleasures and tune the mind to
its happiest keynote, it would be difficult to
define. For my own part, I have never ceased
to wonder how Christian divines have been able
to picture Heaven and leave it wholly un-
peopled by animals. Even for their own sakes
(not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated
brutes), would they not have desired to give
their humble companions some little corner in
their boundless sky ? A place with perpetual
music going on and not a single animal to
caress, even those which Mahomet promised
his followers, his own camel, Balaam's ass,
\nd Tobit's dog, would, I think, be a very
incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed !
It has often been said that the passion of
Englishmen for field sports is really due to this
love of Nature and of animals; that, like sheep-
dogs (who, when they are not trained to guard
238 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
sheep, will, by an irresistible impulse, follow
and harry them), they feel compelled to have
something to do with hares and foxes and par-
tridges and grouse, and salmon ; and they find
that the only thing to be done is to course and
hunt and shoot and angle for them. Into this
mystery I cannot dive. The propensity which
can make kind-hearted men (as many sports-
men unquestionably are) not merely endure to
kill, but actually take pleasure in killing, inno-
cent living things, and changing what is so
beautiful in life and joy into what is so ineffably
sad and piteous, wounded and dying, remains
always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it
is simply a fact that lads trained from boyhood
to take pleasure in such " sports," and having,
I doubt not, an " hereditary set of the brain "
towards them, like so many greyhounds or
pointers, never feel the ribrezzo, or the remorse,
of the bird or beast murderer, but, escaping all
reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at
the same time enjoy the woods and fields and
river-sides where their quarry leads them. To
do them justice, as against many efforts lately
made to confound them with torturers of a very
different class, they know little of the pain
they inflict, and they endeavor eagerly to make
that pain as brief as possible. Nevertheless,
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 239
Sport is an inexplicable passion to the non-
sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very
easy to contemplate with philosophical for-
bearance, much less with admiration.
A larger source of wonder is it to reflect
that this same unaccountable passion for kill-
ing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep
a root in English life that its arrest and dis-
appointment by such a change of the Game
laws as would lead to the abolition of game
would practically revolutionize all our man-
ners. The attraction of the towns already
preponderates over that of the country; but
till lately the grouse have had the honor of
proroguing annually the British Senate, and
the partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks,
and the foxes induce pretty nearly every man
who can afford to shoot or hunt them to
bring his family to the country during the
season wherein they are to be pursued. Of
course women, left to themselves, would
mostly choose to spend their winters in town,
and their summers from May till November
in the country. But Sport determines the
Session of Parliament, and the Session de-
termines the season; and, as women love the
London Season quite as much as men like fox-
hunting, both parties are equally bound to the
240 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
same unfortunate division of time, and year
after year passes, and the lilacs and labur-
nums and hawthorns and limes in the old
country homes waste their loveliness and their
sweetness unseen, while the little children pine
in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions
when they ought to be romping among their
father's hay-fields and galloping their ponies
about his park. All these arrangements, and,
further, the vast establishments of horses and
hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns
and game-keepers and beaters and game-pre-
serving, the sole business of thousands of
workingmen, and the principal occupation and
interest of half the gentlemen in the country,
would be swept away by a stroke.
By some such change as this, or, more prob-
ably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of
change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that
the old form of country life (which I have been
describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years
ago than it is now) will pass away and become
a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I
cannot but think that England and the world
will lose a phase of human existence which,
with all its lights and shadows, has been, per-
haps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized
on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 24!
happiness, pure, stable, dignified, and blame-
less, such as it will be hard to parallel in any
of the novel types of high pressure modern
life.
And, on the other hand, there is nothing so
mournful as the life of an old ancestral home
in the country ! Everything reminds us of the
lost, the dead who once called these stately
chambers their habitations, whose voices once
echoed through the halls, and for whose famil-
iar tread we seem yet to wait ; whose entrance,
as of yore, through one of the lofty doors would
scarcely surprise us ; whom we almost expect,
when we return after long absence, to see
rising from their accustomed seats with open
arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by.
The trees they planted, the walks and flower-
beds they designed ; the sword which the father
brought back from his early service; the tapes-
try the mother wrought through her long years
of declining health ; the dog grown blind and
old, the companion of walks which shall never
be taken again ; the instrument which once
answered to a sweet touch forever still, these
things make us feel Death and change as we
never feel them amid the instability and eager
interests of town existence. All things remain
as of old " since the fathers fell asleep." The
242 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE
leaves of the woods come afresh and then fade ;
the rooks come cawing home ; the church bells
ring, and the old clock strikes the hour. Only
there is one chair pushed a little aside from its
wonted place, an old horse turned out to graze
in peace for his latter days ; a bedroom up-
stairs into which no one goes, save in silent
hours, unwatched and furtively.
As time goes by, and one after another of
those who made youth blessed have dropped
away, and we begin to count the years of those
who remain, and watch gray hairs thickening
on heads we remember golden, and talk of the
hopes and ambitions of early days as things of
the past, things which might have been, but
now, we know, will never be on earth, when
all this comes to pass, then the sense of the
tragedy of life becomes too strong for us. The
dear home, loved so tenderly, is for us little
better than the cenotaph of the lost and dead ;
the warning to ourselves that over all our busy
schemes and hopes the pall will soon come
down, " the night cometh when no man can
work."
I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all
that is most sad and most awful in our mortal
lot, a sense which we escape amid the rush-
ing to and fro of London, but which settles
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 243
down on our souls in such a home as I have
pictured, which makes the country unendurable
to many,as the shadows of the evening lengthen.
To accept it, and look straight at the grave
towards which they are walking down the
shortened vista of their years, taxes men's
courage and faith beyond their strength, and
they fly back to the business and the pleasures
wherein such solemn thoughts are forgotten
and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice
there is the longing that our little race should
round itself once again to the old starting point;
that where we spent our blessed childhood, and
rested on our mother's breast, and lisped our
earliest prayers, there also we should lay down
the burden of life, and repent its sins, and
thank the Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,
to awaken, we hope, in the eternal Home.
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GENERAL LIBRARY - U.C. BERKELEY
