The reader will perhaps have learned by this time a thing which I had
myself suspected before I had been twenty-four hours in Mr. Nosnibor’s
house—I mean, that though the Nosnibors showed me every attention, I
could not cordially like them, with the exception of Arowhena who was
quite different from the rest. They were not fair samples of
Erewhonians. I saw many families with whom they were on visiting terms,
whose manners charmed me more than I know how to say, but I never could
get over my original prejudice against Mr. Nosnibor for having
embezzled the money. Mrs. Nosnibor, too, was a very worldly woman, yet
to hear her talk one would have thought that she was singularly the
reverse; neither could I endure Zulora; Arowhena however was
perfection.
She it was who ran all the little errands for her mother and Mr.
Nosnibor and Zulora, and gave those thousand proofs of sweetness and
unselfishness which some one member of a family is generally required
to give. All day long it was Arowhena this, and Arowhena that; but she
never seemed to know that she was being put upon, and was always bright
and willing from morning till evening. Zulora certainly was very
handsome, but Arowhena was infinitely the more graceful of the two and
was the very _ne plus ultra_ of youth and beauty. I will not attempt to
describe her, for anything that I could say would fall so far short of
the reality as only to mislead the reader. Let him think of the very
loveliest that he can imagine, and he will still be below the truth.
Having said this much, I need hardly say that I had fallen in love with
her.
She must have seen what I felt for her, but I tried my hardest not to
let it appear even by the slightest sign. I had many reasons for this.
I had no idea what Mr. and Mrs. Nosnibor would say to it; and I knew
that Arowhena would not look at me (at any rate not yet) if her father
and mother disapproved, which they probably would, considering that I
had nothing except the pension of about a pound a day of our money
which the King had granted me. I did not yet know of a more serious
obstacle.
In the meantime, I may say that I had been presented at court, and was
told that my reception had been considered as singularly gracious;
indeed, I had several interviews both with the King and Queen, at which
from time to time the Queen got everything from me that I had in the
world, clothes and all, except the two buttons I had given to Yram, the
loss of which seemed to annoy her a good deal. I was presented with a
court suit, and her Majesty had my old clothes put upon a wooden dummy,
on which they probably remain, unless they have been removed in
consequence of my subsequent downfall. His Majesty’s manners were those
of a cultivated English gentleman. He was much pleased at hearing that
our government was monarchical, and that the mass of the people were
resolute that it should not be changed; indeed, I was so much
encouraged by the evident pleasure with which he heard me, that I
ventured to quote to him those beautiful lines of Shakespeare’s—
“There’s a divinity doth hedge a king,
Rough hew him how we may;”
but I was sorry I had done so afterwards, for I do not think his
Majesty admired the lines as much as I could have wished.
There is no occasion for me to dwell further upon my experience of the
court, but I ought perhaps to allude to one of my conversations with
the King, inasmuch as it was pregnant with the most important
consequences.
He had been asking me about my watch, and enquiring whether such
dangerous inventions were tolerated in the country from which I came. I
owned with some confusion that watches were not uncommon; but observing
the gravity which came over his Majesty’s face I presumed to say that
they were fast dying out, and that we had few if any other mechanical
contrivances of which he was likely to disapprove. Upon his asking me
to name some of our most advanced machines, I did not dare to tell him
of our steam-engines and railroads and electric telegraphs, and was
puzzling my brains to think what I could say, when, of all things in
the world, balloons suggested themselves, and I gave him an account of
a very remarkable ascent which was made some years ago. The King was
too polite to contradict, but I felt sure that he did not believe me,
and from that day forward though he always showed me the attention
which was due to my genius (for in this light was my complexion
regarded), he never questioned me about the manners and customs of my
country.
To return, however, to Arowhena. I soon gathered that neither Mr. nor
Mrs. Nosnibor would have any objection to my marrying into the family;
a physical excellence is considered in Erewhon as a set off against
almost any other disqualification, and my light hair was sufficient to
make me an eligible match. But along with this welcome fact I gathered
another which filled me with dismay: I was expected to marry Zulora,
for whom I had already conceived a great aversion. At first I hardly
noticed the little hints and the artifices which were resorted to in
order to bring us together, but after a time they became too plain.
Zulora, whether she was in love with me or not, was bent on marrying
me, and I gathered in talking with a young gentleman of my acquaintance
who frequently visited the house and whom I greatly disliked, that it
was considered a sacred and inviolable rule that whoever married into a
family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried. The young
gentleman urged this upon me so frequently that I at last saw he was in
love with Arowhena himself, and wanted me to get Zulora out of the way;
but others told me the same story as to the custom of the country, and
I saw there was a serious difficulty. My only comfort was that Arowhena
snubbed my rival and would not look at him. Neither would she look at
me; nevertheless there was a difference in the manner of her disregard;
this was all I could get from her.
Not that she avoided me; on the contrary I had many a tête-à-tête with
her, for her mother and sister were anxious for me to deposit some part
of my pension in the Musical Banks, this being in accordance with the
dictates of their goddess Ydgrun, of whom both Mrs. Nosnibor and Zulora
were great devotees. I was not sure whether I had kept my secret from
being perceived by Arowhena herself, but none of the others suspected
me, so she was set upon me to get me to open an account, at any rate
_pro formâ_, with the Musical Banks; and I need hardly say that she
succeeded. But I did not yield at once; I enjoyed the process of being
argued with too keenly to lose it by a prompt concession; besides, a
little hesitation rendered the concession itself more valuable. It was
in the course of conversations on this subject that I learned the more
defined religious opinions of the Erewhonians, that coexist with the
Musical Bank system, but are not recognised by those curious
institutions. I will describe them as briefly as possible in the
following chapters before I return to the personal adventures of
Arowhena and myself.
They were idolaters, though of a comparatively enlightened kind; but
here, as in other things, there was a discrepancy between their
professed and actual belief, for they had a genuine and potent faith
which existed without recognition alongside of their idol worship.
The gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human
qualities, as justice, strength, hope, fear, love, &c., &c. The people
think that prototypes of these have a real objective existence in a
region far beyond the clouds, holding, as did the ancients, that they
are like men and women both in body and passion, except that they are
even comelier and more powerful, and also that they can render
themselves invisible to human eyesight. They are capable of being
propitiated by mankind and of coming to the assistance of those who ask
their aid. Their interest in human affairs is keen, and on the whole
beneficent; but they become very angry if neglected, and punish rather
the first they come upon, than the actual person who has offended them;
their fury being blind when it is raised, though never raised without
reason. They will not punish with any less severity when people sin
against them from ignorance, and without the chance of having had
knowledge; they will take no excuses of this kind, but are even as the
English law, which assumes itself to be known to every one.
Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the same
space at the same moment, which law is presided over and administered
by the gods of time and space jointly, so that if a flying stone and a
man’s head attempt to outrage these gods, by “arrogating a right which
they do not possess” (for so it is written in one of their books), and
to occupy the same space simultaneously, a severe punishment, sometimes
even death itself, is sure to follow, without any regard to whether the
stone knew that the man’s head was there, or the head the stone; this
at least is their view of the common accidents of life. Moreover, they
hold their deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is
the thing done which is everything, and the motive goes for nothing.
Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air
in his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any chance he
gets into the water, the air-god is very angry, and will not suffer it;
no matter whether the man got into the water by accident or on purpose,
whether through the attempt to save a child or through presumptuous
contempt of the air-god, the air-god will kill him, unless he keeps his
head high enough out of the water, and thus gives the air-god his due.
This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over and
above these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth, giving them
temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in stone, which
they verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who
are only not human in being more than human. If any one denies the
objective existence of these divinities, and says that there is really
no such being as a beautiful woman called Justice, with her eyes
blinded and a pair of scales, positively living and moving in a remote
and ethereal region, but that justice is only the personified
expression of certain modes of human thought and action—they say that
he denies the existence of justice in denying her personality, and that
he is a wanton disturber of men’s religious convictions. They detest
nothing so much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual
conceptions of the deities whom they profess to worship. Arowhena and I
had a pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more but
for my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me.
I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position for
she returned more than once to the subject. “Can you not see,” I had
exclaimed, “that the fact of justice being admirable will not be
affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living agent?
Can you really think that men will be one whit less hopeful, because
they no longer believe that hope is an actual person?” She shook her
head, and said that with men’s belief in the personality all incentive
to the reverence of the thing itself, as justice or hope, would cease;
men from that hour would never be either just or hopeful again.
I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish to do so. She
deferred to me in most things, but she never shrank from maintaining
her opinions if they were put in question; nor does she to this day
abate one jot of her belief in the religion of her childhood, though in
compliance with my repeated entreaties she has allowed herself to be
baptized into the English Church. She has, however, made a gloss upon
her original faith to the effect that her baby and I are the only human
beings exempt from the vengeance of the deities for not believing in
their personality. She is quite clear that we are exempted. She should
never have so strong a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come
about she does not know, neither does she wish to know; there are
things which it is better not to know and this is one of them; but when
I tell her that I believe in her deities as much as she does—and that
it is a difference about words, not things, she becomes silent with a
slight emphasis.
I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked me what I
should think if she were to tell me that my God, whose nature and
attributes I had been explaining to her, was but the expression for
man’s highest conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in order
to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought,
man had personified it and called it by a name; that it was an unworthy
conception of the Deity to hold Him personal, inasmuch as escape from
human contingencies became thus impossible; that the real thing men
should worship was the Divine, whereinsoever they could find it; that
“God” was but man’s way of expressing his sense of the Divine; that as
justice, hope, wisdom, &c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the
expression which embraced all goodness and all good power; that people
would no more cease to love God on ceasing to believe in His objective
personality, than they had ceased to love justice on discovering that
she was not really personal; nay, that they would never truly love Him
till they saw Him thus.
She said all this in her artless way, and with none of the coherence
with which I have here written it; her face kindled, and she felt sure
that she had convinced me that I was wrong, and that justice was a
living person. Indeed I did wince a little; but I recovered myself
immediately, and pointed out to her that we had books whose genuineness
was beyond all possibility of doubt, as they were certainly none of
them less than 1800 years old; that in these there were the most
authentic accounts of men who had been spoken to by the Deity Himself,
and of one prophet who had been allowed to see the back parts of God
through the hand that was laid over his face.
This was conclusive; and I spoke with such solemnity that she was a
little frightened, and only answered that they too had their books, in
which their ancestors had seen the gods; on which I saw that further
argument was not at all likely to convince her; and fearing that she
might tell her mother what I had been saying, and that I might lose the
hold upon her affections which I was beginning to feel pretty sure that
I was obtaining, I began to let her have her own way, and to convince
me; neither till after we were safely married did I show the cloven
hoof again.
Nevertheless, her remarks have haunted me, and I have since met with
many very godly people who have had a great knowledge of divinity, but
no sense of the divine: and again, I have seen a radiance upon the face
of those who were worshipping the divine either in art or nature—in
picture or statue—in field or cloud or sea—in man, woman, or
child—which I have never seen kindled by any talking about the nature
and attributes of God. Mention but the word divinity, and our sense of
the divine is clouded.