the middle of the room and remains there until the abbot knocks with a
small hammer and thus liberates him. A graver punishment is inflicted
now and again at the conclusion of dinner. The culprit, so called, lies
flat on the stones across the doorway, and each brother and guest is
compelled to step over him as he makes his exit. I say guest advisedly,
for it is the privilege of all who receive hospitality at La Trappe to
dine once—not oftener—in the monks’ refectory. During meals one of
the Brotherhood reads aloud, in accordance with Cistercian practice.
The dinner at Le Port du Salut consists generally of vegetable soup,
salad without oil, whole-meal bread, cheese, and a modicum of light
beer. Though the cooking is of the plainest description the quality of
the vegetables is excellent, and the cheese has become quite famous.
The meal never lasts longer than twenty minutes, and when over, all
remaining scraps are distributed to the poor assembled at the gate.
Six hundred pounds weight of bread and several casks of soup are also
distributed weekly, besides what the abbot may send to any sick person
in the vicinity.
The ailing Trappist is allowed to indulge in what is called _Le
Soulagement_, viz. two eggs taken early in the morning. In cases of
very severe illness, and when under medical treatment in the hospital,
animal food may be used; but the attachment to rules is so great that
the authority of the Superiors has frequently to be exercised in order
to enforce the doctor’s prescription. In the words of Father Martin,
the attendant of the hospital, “When a Trappist consents to eat meat,
he is at death’s very door.”
The cemetery is surrounded on all sides by the buildings of the
_Communauté_, so that from every window the monks may see their last
resting place. The graves are indicated by a slight rising of the grass
and by a cross bearing the saint’s name assumed by the brother on his
_profession_. Nothing else is recorded save his age and the date of
his death. Threescore years and ten seem to be the minimum of life at
La Trappe, and astonishing as this longevity may appear _primâ facie_,
it is more so when one considers that the vocation of most postulants
has been determined by a desire to separate themselves from a world,
in which they had previously lost their peace of soul and their bodily
health.
Under the regularity of monastic life, its labor, its tranquillity,
and either despite the severity of the diet or in virtue of it, it is
wonderful how soon the dejected and feeble become restored to health.
Out of fifteen novices, statistics show that only one remains to be
what is called a _profès_, the other fourteen leaving the monastery
before the expiration of two years. A touching custom may be here
mentioned. Trappists are told in their Chapter meeting, “Brethren, one
of us has lost a father (or any other relation); let us pray for the
departed soul.” But none know the name of the bereft brother.
After having taken vows as a _profès_ the Trappist holds a
co-proprietorship in the buildings and lands of the association and
must live and die in the monastery. Death is his goal and best hope.
In order to remind him of it, a grave is always ready in the cemetery;
but the belief is altogether erroneous that each Trappist digs his own
grave. When the earth yawning for the dead has been filled, another pit
is opened _by any one ordered for the task_. Each Trappist then comes
and prays at the side of this grave which may be his own. Neither do
Trappists when they meet each other say, “Brother, we must die,” as is
also generally accredited to them. This is, we think, the salute of the
disciples of Bruno at La Grande Chartreuse.
The farm buildings of Le Port du Salut are many and various, including
sheds for cattle, a corn-mill, and looms for the manufacture of the
woollen and cotton clothing the monks wear. There is much land,
outside, as well as inside the walls of the precinct, which the monks
cultivate, and they may be often seen in their full robes, despite the
heat of the summer, working steadfastly in the fields, and the abbot
harder than any of them.
During the twenty-four hours of an ordinary working day the Trappist
is thus employed. He rises generally at two A.M., but on
feast days at midnight or at one o’clock in the morning according to
the importance of the festival. He immediately goes to church, which
is shrouded in darkness, except the light that glimmers from the small
lamps perpetually burning before the altar as in all Roman Catholic
churches. The first service continues until three o’clock; at that
hour and with the last words of the hymn all the monks prostrate
themselves on the stones and remain in silent meditation during thirty
minutes. The nave is then lighted, and the chants are resumed until
five A.M., when masses commence. The number of hours given to
liturgic offices is, on an average, seven per day. Singing, but in a
peculiar way, forms a part of the worship. All the musical notes are
long and of equal duration, and this because the Trappist must sing
hymns “for the love of God, and not for his own delectation.” Moreover,
he must exert his voice to its utmost, and this being prolonged at
intervals during seven hours per diem proves a greater fatigue than
even manual labor.
The distribution of the labor takes place every day under the
superintendence of the abbot, the prior, and the cellérier, the last
named official having the care of all the temporalities of the place,
and being permitted, like the Superior, to hold intercourse with the
outer world. The cellérier stands indeed in the same relation to the
monastery as does a supercargo to a ship.
Labor is regular or occasional. To the first the brethren are
definitely appointed, and their work is every day the same; the latter,
which is mainly agricultural, is alloted by the Superior according
to age, physical condition, and aptitude, but it is imperative that
every monk _must participate in manual labor_. Even a guest may, if he
pleases, claim, what is considered as _a privilege_, three hours of
work a day.
After dinner the Trappist gives one hour to rest, but the maximum never
exceeds seven hours, and on feast days is materially reduced by earlier
rising. The mid-day siesta over, labor continues until a quarter to
five o’clock, which is the hour of refection. Then comes the last
religious office of the day, the “Salve Regina,” at which guests as
well as brethren are expected to assist. The last word of the hymn at
this service is the last word of the day. It is called “The Time of the
Great Silence.” Monks and guests then leave the church, smothering the
sound of their footsteps as much as possible, and noiselessly retire
to their respective resting places; lights are put out, except in case
of special permission of the abbot, and a death-like quiet and gloom
reigns everywhere throughout the habitation.
The life of guests at Le Port du Salut differs from that of a Trappist.
There is a parlor common to all, with a fire burning in it during
winter, but each one sleeps in a separate cell, and has three meals
a day; he may eat eggs from Easter until September, and have his
vegetables cooked with butter. Last, though not least, his wants are
attended to, and his cell swept and cleaned by the father and the
brother of the hostelerie, who are also at liberty to hold conversation
with him.
A guest may stay in the monastery for three days without giving any
particulars of himself, for fourteen days if he chooses to disclose who
and what he is, and for as much as three months if his circumstances
seem to need it. After that time, if he be poor, he may be sent away to
another monastery at the cost of the senders; but the abbot is free to
extend a guest’s visit to any duration.
Trappists are most useful citizens. They perform, per head, more labor
than any farmer; they expend upon their own maintenance the very
minimum necessary to support existence; they undertake at the cost of
their lives works of great public utility, such as the draining of the
extensive marshes of Les Dombes, in the south of France, and of La
Metidja, at Staouëli, near Algiers, which they are converting into
fruitful fields. As horticulturists, agriculturists, dairymen, millers,
and breeders of cattle they are unrivalled; for men whose faith is
that to work is to pray, cannot fail to excel those with whom work
is, if even necessary, a tiresome obligation. Lastly, in all new
establishments, the Trappist only considers his monastery founded when
a dead brother has taken possession of the land and lies buried in the
first open grave.
Such is the real life of the Trappists. It is apparently a happy one;
and it is with feelings of deep regret and of friendly remembrance that
the departing guest, as he reaches a turning of the road, and sees the
steeple of the monastery of Le Port du Salut disappear, stands for a
moment to cast a last look upon that peaceful abode ere he wends his
way again into the wide, wide world.—_Good Words._
THUNDERBOLTS.
The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and all the
more so because there are no such things in existence at all as
thunderbolts of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole
history might, from the positive point of view at least, be summed up
in the simple statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away
in the least, I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and
importance? Not a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of
the whole subject. Does any one feel as keenly interested in any real
living cobra or anaconda as in the non-existent great sea-serpent?
Are ghosts and vampires less attractive objects of popular study than
cats and donkeys? Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed by
our own correspondent, equal the romantic charm of Prester John, or
the butcher in the next street rival the personality of Sir Roger
Charles Doughty Tichborne, Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if
there _were_ thunderbolts, the question of their nature and action
would be a wholly dull, scientific, and priggish one; it is their
unreality alone that invests them with all the mysterious weirdness
of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common thing that one reads
about wearily in the books on electricity, a mere ordinary matter of
positive and negative, density and potential, to be measured in ohms
(whatever they may be), and partially imitated with Leyden jars and
red sealing-wax apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin Franklin, a fat old
gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it down from the clouds
with a simple door-key, somewhere near Philadelphia? and does not Mr.
Robert Scott (of the Meteorological Office) calmly predict its probable
occurrence within the next twenty-four hours in his daily report, as
published regularly in the morning papers? This is lightning, mere
vulgar lightning, a simple result of electrical conditions in the upper
atmosphere, inconveniently connected with algebraical formulas in _x_,
_y_, _z_, with horrid symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But
the real thunderbolts of Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor,
or Indra hurls down upon the head of the trembling malefactor—how
infinitely grander, more fearsome, and more mysterious!
And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of
well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes
at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society
for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim
corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety
the simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts
are the mythical or fanciful or verbal representation. We all of us
know now that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat;
that it has no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it
is dynamical rather than material, a state or movement rather than a
body or thing. To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show
of learning about the “electric fluid” which did such remarkable damage
last week upon the slated steeple of Peddington Torpida church; but the
well-crammed schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that
the electric fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which
pulled the ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in
its real nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word
thunderbolt has survived to us from the days when people still believed
that the thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really
and truly a gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and as there is a natural
tendency in human nature to fit an existence to every word, people
even now continue to imagine that there must be actually something or
other somewhere called a thunderbolt. They don’t figure this thing to
themselves as being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they
seem to regard it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and
more mystic; but they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real
life, and even sometimes assert that they themselves have positively
seen them.
But if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked
into the phenomena of spiritualism and “psychical research” (modern
English for ghost-hunting), know too well that believing is seeing
also. The origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like
the origin of the faith in ghosts and “psychical phenomena”) far
back in the history of our race. The noble savage, at that early
period when wild in woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence
of thunder and lightning, because thunder and lightning are things
that forcibly obtrude themselves upon the attention of the observer,
however little he may by nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed,
the noble savage, sleeping naked on the bare ground, in tropical
countries where thunder occurs almost every night on an average, was
sure to be pretty often awaked from his peaceful slumbers by the
torrents of rain that habitually accompany thunderstorms in the happy
realms of everlasting dog-days. Primitive man was thereupon compelled
to do a little philosophising on his own account as to the cause and
origin of the rumbling and flashing which he saw so constantly around
him. Naturally enough, he concluded that the sound must be the voice
of somebody; and that the fiery shaft, whose effects he sometimes
noted upon trees, animals, and his fellow-man, must be the somebody’s
arrow. It is immaterial from this point of view whether, as the
scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his conception of these
supernatural personages from his prior belief in ghosts and spirits, or
whether, as Professor Max Müller will have it, he felt a deep yearning
in his primitive savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable
(which he would doubtless have spelt like the professor, with a capital
initial, had he been acquainted with the intricacies of the yet
uninvented alphabet); but this much at least is pretty certain, that he
looked upon the thunder and the lightning as in some sense the voice
and the arrows of an aërial god.
Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant of the
mental attitude of primitive man, and of the way that mental attitude
has colored all subsequent thinking and superstition upon this very
subject. Curiously enough, to the present day the conception of the
thunderbolt is essentially one of a _bolt_—that is to say, an arrow,
or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and there are
plenty of them lying about casually in country houses and local
museums) are more or less arrow-like in shape and appearance; some of
them, indeed, as we shall see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrow
heads of primitive man himself in person. Of course the noble savage
was himself in the constant habit of shooting at animals and enemies
with a bow and arrow. When, then, he tried to figure to himself the
angry god, seated in the stormclouds, who spoke with such a loud
rumbling voice, and killed those who displeased him, with his fiery
darts, he naturally thought of him as using in his cloudy home the
familiar bow and arrow of this nether planet. To us nowadays, if we
were to begin forming the idea for ourselves all over again _de novo_,
it would be far more natural to think of the thunder as the noise of
a big gun, of the lightning as the flash of the powder, and of the
supposed “bolt” as a shell or bullet. There is really a ridiculous
resemblance between a thunderstorm and a discharge of artillery. But
the old conception derived from so many generations of primitive men
has held its own against such mere modern devices as gunpowder and
rifle balls; and none of the objects commonly shown as thunderbolts
are ever round: they are distinguished, whatever their origin, by the
common peculiarity that they more or less closely resemble a dart or
arrowhead.
Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our minds of any
lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts. There are absolutely
no such things known to science. The two real phenomena that underlie
the fable are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is merely
a series of electrical discharges between one cloud and another, or
between clouds and the earth; and these discharges manifest themselves
to our senses under two forms—to the eye as lightning, to the ear as
thunder. All that passes in each case is a huge spark—a commotion,
not a material object. It is in principle just like the spark from
an electrical machine; but while the most powerful machine of human
construction will only send a spark for three feet, the enormous
electrical apparatus provided for us by nature will send one for
four, five, or even ten miles. Though lightning when it touches the
earth always seems to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is
by no means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally
be in the opposite direction. All we know is that sometimes there is an
instantaneous discharge between one cloud and another, and sometimes an
instantaneous discharge between a cloud and the earth.
But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated energy from
one point to another was far too abstract, of course, for primitive
man, and is far too abstract even now for nine out of ten of our
fellow-creatures. Those who don’t still believe in the bodily
thunderbolt, a fearsome aërial weapon which buries itself deep in the
bosom of the earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of
the electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which is
usually conceived of as striking the ground and then proceeding to
hide itself under the roots of a tree or beneath the foundations of a
tottering house. Primitive man naturally took to the grosser and more
material conception. He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed
arrowhead; and the forked zigzag character of the visible flash, as it
darts rapidly from point to point, seemed almost inevitably to suggest
to him the barbs, as one sees them represented on all the Greek and
Roman gems, in the red right hand of the angry Jupiter.
The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed naturally
that whenever any dart-like object of unknown origin was dug up out
of the ground, it was at once set down as being a thunderbolt; and,
on the other hand, the frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects,
precisely where one might expect to find them in accordance with
the theory, necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So commonly
are thunderbolts picked up to the present day that to disbelieve in
them seems to many country people a piece of ridiculous and stubborn
scepticism. Why, they’ve ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their
time, and just about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the
old elm-tree two years ago, too.
The most favorite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or
“celt” of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude
chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described
as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract
attention from any except professed archæologists. Indeed, the wicked
have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of
broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way
to deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would
regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the
shapely stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is
usually a beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone;
and its edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it
seems rather like a bit of nature’s exquisite workmanship than a simple
relic of prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about
the naïf belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated
thunderbolt. You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect
a thunderbolt (if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth,
well shaped, and neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend
in a red-hot state from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a
cannon-ball by some fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would
certainly prove a very formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily
imagine it scoring the bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles
from a projecting turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to
do in this prosaic workaday world of ours. In short, there is really
nothing on earth against the theory of the stone axe being a true
thunderbolt, except the fact that it unfortunately happens to be a
neolithic hatchet.
But the course of reasoning by which we discover the true nature of
the stone axe is not one that would in any case appeal strongly to
the fancy or the intelligence of the British farmer. It is no use
telling him that whenever one opens a barrow of the stone age one is
pretty sure to find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery
beside the mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief who lies
there buried. The British farmer will doubtless stolidly retort that
thunderbolts often strike the tops of hills, which are just the places
where barrows and tumuli (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate;
and that as to the skeleton, isn’t it just as likely that the man was
killed by the thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a man?
Ay, and a sight likelier, too.