“SABINA GREEN.”
In the four-hundred-and-thirty-first number of the _Spectator_ is a
letter from Sabina Green, on the disordered appetite she had acquired by
eating improper and innutritious food at school. “I had not been there
above a Month, when being in the Kitchen, I saw some Oatmeal on the
Dresser; I put two or three Corns in my Mouth, liked it, stole a
Handful, went into my Chamber, chewed it, and for two Months after never
failed taking Toll of every Pennyworth of Oatmeal that came into the
House. But one Day playing with a Tobacco-pipe between my Teeth, it
happened to break in my Mouth, and the spitting out the Pieces left such
a delicious Roughness on my Tongue, that I could not be satisfied till I
had champed up the remaining Part of the Pipe. I forsook the Oatmeal,
and stuck to the Pipes three Months, in which time I had disposed of
thirty-seven foul Pipes, all to the Boles. I left off eating of Pipes
and fell to licking of Chalk. Two Months after this, I lived upon
Thunderbolts, a certain long, round, bluish Stone, which I found among
the Gravel in our Garden.”
Arminell’s mental appetite was as much disordered as the physical
appetite of Sabina Green. Whether Gaboriau’s novels bore any analogy to
the foul tobacco-pipes, we do not pretend to say, their record of vice
certainly left an agreeable roughness on her mental palate, but now
without any intermediate licking of chalk, she has clenched her teeth
upon a thunderbolt—a question hard, insoluble, beyond her powers of
mastication. Besides, she was wholly unaware that the thunderbolt had
been laid in her path expressly that she might exercise her teeth upon
it.
A hundred and fifty years ago, Sabina Green picked corns, licked chalk
and munched tobacco pipes, and the same thing goes on nowadays. There
are tens of thousands of Sabina Greens with their mouths full, and with
no appetite but for tobacco-pipes or thunderbolts. We have advanced—our
pipes are now meerschaum—foam of the sea.
We have known young ladies who would touch nothing but meringues, and
thereby seriously impair their constitutions and complexions. We have
known others who could touch nothing but literary meringues, novels, and
whose digestion revolted at solid food, but who crunched flummery
romance at all times of day and night, till the flummery invaded their
brains, filled their mouths, frothed in their hearts; and then tired of
sweets they look out for what is pungent or foul—like the old
tobacco-pipes.
An unwholesome trick into which German women fall is that of “naschen,”
of nibbling comfits and cakes all day long. They carry cornets of
bonbons in their pockets, and have recourse to them every minute. They
suffer much from disordered digestion, and fall into the green sickness,
because they lack iron in the blood. How can they have iron in the blood
when they eat only sugar? Our English girls have a similar infirmity,
they nibble at novels, pick at the unsubstantial, innutritious stuff
that constitutes fiction all day long. Do they lack iron in their moral
fibre? Are their souls bloodless and faint with the green sickness? How
can it be other on a diet of flummery?
The stomach of the nibbler never hungers, only craves; the appetite is
supplanted by nausea. The symptoms of disorder are permanent; languor of
interest, debility of principle, loss of energy in purpose, a disordered
vision, and creeping moral paralysis.
If Arminell had reached the condition of one of these novel-nibblers,
what she had heard would have produced no effect upon her heart or brain
because neither heart nor brain would have been left in her. But she had
not been a habitual novel-reader, she had read whatever came to hand,
indiscriminately; and the flummery of mere fiction would never have
satisfied her, because she possessed, what the novel-nibblers do not
possess, intelligence. No control had been exercised over her reading,
consequently she had read things that were unsuitable. She had a strong
character, without having found outlets for her energy. A wise governess
would have tested her, and then led her to pursuits which would have
exerted her ambition and occupied her interest; but her teachers had
been either wedded to routine or intellectually her inferiors.
Consequently she had no special interests, but that inner eagerness and
fire which would impel her to take up and follow with enthusiasm any
object which excited her interest. Her friends said of Arminell with
unanimity that she was a disagreeable girl, but none said she was an
empty-headed one.
On reaching the house, Arminell found that lunch was over, and that her
father had gone out. He had sauntered forth, as the day was fine, to
look at his cedars and pines in the plantations, and with his
pocket-knife remove the lateral shoots. Lady Lamerton was taking a nap
previous to the resumption of her self-imposed duties at Sunday-school.
Arminell was indisposed to go to school and afternoon service in the
church. After a solitary lunch she went upstairs to the part of the
house where was Giles’ school-room. She had not seen her brother that
day, and as the little fellow was unwell, she thought it incumbent on
her to visit him.
She found the tutor, Giles Inglett (_vulgo_, Jingles) Saltren, in the
room with the boy. Little Giles had a Noah’s Ark on the table, and was
trying to make the animals stand on their infirm legs, in procession,
headed by the dove which was as large as the dog, and half the size of
the elephant.
Mr. Saltren sat by the window looking forth disconsolately. The child
had a heavy cold, accompanied by some fever.
“If you wish to leave the school-room, Mr. Saltren,” said Arminell, “I
am prepared to occupy your place with the captive.”
“I thank you, Miss Inglett,” answered the tutor. “But I have strict
orders to go through the devotional exercises with Giles this afternoon,
the same as this morning.”
“I will take them for you.”
“You are most kind in offering, but having been set my tale of bricks to
make without straw, I am not justified in sending another into the
clayfield, in my room.”
“I see—this is a house of bondage to you, Mr. Saltren. You hinted this
morning that you meditated an _in exitu Israel de Egypto_.”
The young man coloured.
“You tread too sharply on the heels of the _pied de la lettre_, Miss
Inglett.”
“But you feel this, though you shrink from the expression of your
thoughts. You told me yourself this forenoon that you were not happy. If
you leave us, whither do you propose going?”
“A journey in the wilderness for forty years.”
“With what Land of Promise in view?”
“I have set none before me.”
“None? I cannot credit that. Every man has his Land of Promise towards
which he turns his face. Why leave the leeks and onions of Goshen, if
you have but a stony desert in view as your pasture? I suppose the heart
is a binnacle with its needle pointing to the pole—though each man may
have a different pole. South of the equator, the needle points
reversedly to what it pointed north of it. An anchor, an iron link, a
nail even may divert the needle, but to something it must turn.”
“Miss Inglett—had Moses any personal hope to reach and establish himself
in the land flowing with milk and honey, when he led Israel from the
brick-kilns? He was to die within sight of the land, and not to set foot
thereon.”
“But, Mr. Saltren; who are your Israel? Where are the brick-kilns? Who
are the oppressors?”
“Can you ask?” The tutor paused and looked at the girl. “But I suppose
you fail to see that the whole of the civilised world is an Egypt, in
which some are task-masters and others slaves; some enjoy and others
suffer. Miss Inglett—you have somehow invited my confidence, and I
cannot withhold it. It is quite impossible that the world can go on as
it has been, with one class drawing to itself all that life has to offer
of happiness, and another class doomed to toil and hunger and sweat, and
have nothing of the light and laughter of life.”
Arminell seated herself.
“Well,” she said, “as Giles is playing with his wooden animals, trotting
out the contents of his ark; let us turn out some of the strange
creatures that are stuffed in our skulls, and marshal them. I have been
opening the window of my ark to-day, and sending forth enquiries, but
not a blade of olive has been brought to me.”
“As for the ark of my head,” said the tutor with a bitter smile, “it is
the reverse of that of Noah. He sent forth raven and dove, and the dove
returned, but the raven remained abroad. With me, the dark thoughts fly
over the flood and come home to roost; the dove-like ones—never.”
“I am rather disposed,” said Arminell, laughing, “to liken my head to a
rookery in May. The matured thoughts are a-wing and wheeling, and the
just fledged ones stand cawing at the edge of their nests, with
fluttering wings, afraid to fly, and afraid to stay and be shot.”
“To be shot?—by whom?”
“Perhaps, by your wit. Perhaps by my lord’s blunderbuss.”
“I will not level any of my poor wit at them. Let your thoughts hop
forth boldly that I may have a sight of them.”
An exclamation of distress from Giles.
“What is the matter?” asked Arminell, turning to her brother.
“The giraffe has broken his leg, and I want him to stand because he has
such a long neck.”
“If you were manly, Giles, you would not say, the giraffe has broken his
leg, but—I have broken the giraffe’s leg.”
“But I did not, Armie. He had been packed too tightly with the other
beasts, and his leg was so bent that it broke.”
“Mend it with glue,” she advised.
“I can’t—it is wrong to melt glue on Sunday. Mamma would not like it.”
The conversation had been broken along with the giraffe’s leg, and
neither Arminell nor young Saltren resumed it for some time. Presently
the girl said, “Mr Saltren, do you know what sort of men Addison called
Fribblers? They are among men what flirts are among women, drawing girls
on and then disappointing them. There are plenty of flirts and fribblers
in other matters. There are flirts and fribblers with great social and
religious questions, who play with them, trifle with them, hover about
them, simulate a lively interest in them, and then—when you expect of
them a decision and action on that decision, away they fly in another
direction, and shake all interest and inquiry out of their thoughts. I
have no patience with such flirts or fribblers.” She spoke with a little
bitterness. She was thinking of her step-mother. The tutor knew it, but
did not allow her to see that he did.
“Do you not think,” he said, “that they fribble from a sense of
incompetence to grapple with these questions? The problems interest them
up to a certain point. Then they see that they are too large for them,
or they entail consequences they shrink from accepting, consequences
that will cost them too dear, and they withdraw.”
“Like the young man in the Gospel who went away sorrowful for he had
great possessions. He was a fribbler.”
“Exactly. He was a fribbler. He was insincere and unheroic.”
“I could not fribble,” said Arminell vehemently. “If I see that a cause
is right, I must pursue it at whatsoever consequence to myself. It is of
the essence of humdrum to fribble. Do you know, Mr. Saltren, I have had
a puzzling problem set before me to-day, and I shall have no rest till I
have worked it out? Why is there so much wretchedness, so much
inequality in the world?”
“Why was Giles’ giraffe’s leg broken?”
Arminell looked at him with surprise, suspecting that instead of
answering her, he was about to turn off the subject with a joke.
“The world,” said Saltren, “is like Giles’ Noah’s Ark, packed full—over
full—of creatures of all kinds, and packed so badly that they impinge
on, bruise, and break each other. Not only is the giraffe’s leg broken,
but so are the rim of Noah’s hat and the ear of the sheep, and the tusk
of the elephant. It is a congeries of cripples. We may change their
order, and we only make fresh abrasions. The proboscis of the elephant
runs into the side of the lamb, and Noah’s hat has been knocked of by
the tail of the raven. However you may assort the beasts, however
carefully you may pack them, you cannot prevent their doing each other
damage.”
Mr. Saltren turned to little Giles and said:—
“Bring us your box of bricks, my boy.”
“It is Sunday,” answered the child. “Mamma would not wish me to play
with them.”
“I do not wish to make a Sabbath-breaker of you,” answered the tutor,
“nor are your sister and I going to do other than build Babel with
them—which is permissible of a Sunday.”
The little boy slid off his seat, went to his cupboard, and speedily
produced the required box, which he gave to Mr. Saltren.
The tutor drew forth the lid. The bricks were all in place compacted in
perfect order.
Then he said, with half-sneer, half-laugh, “There are no gaps between
them. The whole assemblage firm as it were one block. Not a breakage
anywhere, not room for a breakage.”
“No,” said Arminell, “of course not. They all fit exactly because they
are all cubes. The bricks,” she laughed, “have no long necks like the
giraffe, or legs or horns, or proboscis, or broad-brimmed hats, liable
to be broken. Of course they fit together.”
“If you shake the ark—the least concussion produces a breakage, one or
two beasts suffer. You may toss the box of bricks about; and nothing is
hurt. Why?”
Arminell was impatient. “Of course the reason is plain.”
“The reason is plain. _The bricks are all equal._ If it were so in the
world of men, there would be no jars, no fractures, no abrasions, but
concord, compactness, peace.”
Arminell said nothing. She closed her eyes and sat looking at the
bricks, then at the animals Giles had arranged.
The tutor said no more, but his eyes, bright and eager, were on the
girl’s face.
Presently Arminell had gathered her thoughts together sufficiently to
speak.
“That, then, is the solution you offer to my problem. But to me it does
not seem solved. There the animals are. They are animals—and not
bricks.”
“They are animals, true, but they must be shaken and shaken together,
till all their excrescences are rubbed away, and then they will fit
together and find sufficiency of room. That is how marbles are made.
Shapeless masses of stone are put in a bag and rattled till all their
edges and angles are rattled off.”
“What an ark would remain! You complain of some animals crippling
others, this scheme of yours would involve a universal mutilation—the
animals resolved into undistinguishable, shapeless, uninteresting
trunks. The only creature that would come out scatheless would be the
slug. All the rest would be levelled down to the condition of that
creature—which is a digesting tube, and nothing more.” Then Arminell
stood up. “It is time for me to be off,” she said; “her ladyship will be
back from church, and oh! Mr. Saltren, I have interfered with the Psalms
and Lessons.”