TEA AND ANARCHY.
Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they
invariably descend into low ones.—_Lacon._
Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best,
Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest.—_Pope._
You share not with us, and exceed us so,
Perhaps, by what you’re mulcted in, your hearts
Being starved to make your heads.
—_Elizabeth B. Browning._
It was Elsworth’s third year at the hospital. He had taken several gold
medals and scholarships; and so, to outward appearance, had done well.
But he was not as he was when he entered. He was sowing what he called
his “wild oats,” forgetting the reaping of the crop that one day would
have to be considered. He had not abandoned his faith, but it had
ceased to influence his life. The thing he came for he had not won. He
defended Christianity still when he heard it attacked; but this was
because he thought it honourable to take the side of the weakest in
every argument, and partly because the set who were so severe upon it
were a perky, superficial, insincere lot of folk, that, above all
things, wanted taking down. Christianity might be false, he argued, but
it could not be such a tissue of absurdities as these people maintained.
One summer’s night, about this time, the society was assembled to hear
an address by a well known atheist propagandist, on marriage. Mr. Edgar
Adams he was called. He was a singular-looking man; he was tall, lean,
and hungry-looking, with long, dank, black hair, and a complexion such
as poor people get who work in lead factories, and let it impregnate
their systems. His dress was untidy, not to say greasy; his vast
display of shirt front looked as if it had done duty in gas-light more
than once before. Altogether, he was an unwholesome looking object,
and, as a seafaring youth present declared, “it seemed as if a good
holystoning down was what he wanted.” It did not surprise you the least
when he advocated the destruction of Czars and despots generally, and
talked with enthusiasm of the great French Revolution, with his
starting eye-balls, and his thin, claw-like hands nervously twitching,
expressing his eagerness to assist in the work of another Robespierre.
He declared he would “abolish all property, especially that in a wife.
The origin of the marriage superstition was pagan and suicidal, for
marriage is the suicide of love. When the law no longer supplies
husband or wife with a cage, each will take care of holding what has
been won. Chastity and modesty are merely conventional ideas, having
their origin in utility.” He declared that till Christianity was
finally abolished, the real progress of the world could not be
continued. “What is called the virtue of humility was never known—not
even the word for it—by the Greeks and Romans; that is the great
barrier in the path of modern man. Humility was invented by priests to
hold man in slavery.” He ended by reciting a poem of Shelley’s
denouncing tyrants and despots, and was much applauded.
The rooms of the society are well-filled to-night, and all the chief
attractions in force. The people who could lead conversation, and who
had strong opinions, and were able to put them cleverly, had assembled.
The _habitués_ had all some distinguishing trait, some particular
socialistic or anti-religious fad; no two exactly agreed on anything,
except that it was of the first importance to smash up existing
beliefs. Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, were all held to be
much better than Christianity as systems of religious thought, but that
was because they were all impossible for our age; the one thing that
was possible, that had established itself by renovating society and
redeeming the world, must be crushed and cast out, because it was not
the outcome of the age of steam and the electric light. There was
scarcely anybody in the room who did not owe his or her character and
virtuous environment entirely to a Christian training, which had made
them decent members of society, and which they were anxious to requite
by proving its incapacity to be any longer a suitable moral system for
our age. A curious and a priggish set of imperfectly educated and vain
people; mostly young, impracticable, and unversed in the wants and
remedies of a work-a-day world. It is worth while to be introduced to
these typical folk, who are bent on substituting some of their nostrums
to take the place of the old religion when it dies of age.
There was a tall, dark-eyed girl on the lounge in the corner—Miss
Mardall. She was a designer of high art tapestry; was lean, sallow,
handsome in the æsthetic sense, not more than twenty-five, and a
disciple of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. She grouped her wild flowers to
make the most delightfully artistic patterns for her fabrics; but in
their forms, their colours, their odours, she recognised nothing but
the grossest and most material adaptation to the necessities of their
existence and diffusion. Their colours meant nothing but distinguishing
characteristics to aid in their fertilisation; their odours served to
attract insects to brush so much pollen from their stamens and their
pistils; their exquisite forms and intricacies of structure meant so
many difficult passages the bees would have to knock against, and so
disseminate so much fructifying material. And thus all the floral gems
of the fields and woods were, in this nineteenth-century girl’s eyes,
so many machines for making so much vegetable material for the
furtherance of the animal world; and if they had any of the qualities
one chose to term beauty, it was simply the beauty of adaptation of
means to end. She was much too clever to be a poet, and was utilitarian
and material to the last degree. Adelaide Rowland, her friend, sitting
next to her, under the picture of the storming of the Bastille, went
even further. Her pessimism was so pronounced that she thought it a
mistake to continue to exist. She had no desire that the human or any
other race _should_ continue to exist; did not in the least see
anything in the world worth working for, except to get food, lodging,
and warmth; and declared that at the very first great reverse in her
life she would decline to exist any more. As she immediately, however,
demanded some tea, and took a wedge of very substantial cake, it was
evident the great reverse had not as yet overtaken her. She was but
nineteen, and was as proud of her pessimism (in an elegant robe just
from Paris) as she recently was of her last new doll, with practicable
eyes, and power to say “mamma.” Her talk of “declining to exist” was
only alarming to one at the first introduction to her; “when you came
to know her well, and love her,” you knew how to discount this sort of
talk, and you simply asked her to have a little more cake and another
cup of tea. That gentleman on her left in a brown velvet coat, with
long hair, is a poet. He admires Nihilism, and thinks all authority
wants dynamiting. Sounds dreadful to hear him, but he is really
extremely harmless. His father is high in the General Post Office, and
this young man is reading for the Bar. He will be all right when he is
called; at present he is a supporter of Mr. Parnell. By-and-bye he will
come into a row of little weekly properties in the suburb of
Stratford-by-Bow, and he will collect the rents and neglect the
sanitary arrangements with most landlord-like regularity. His sister is
that pretty little fair girl in the corner by the grand piano. She
writes stories about despotism and the dawn of freedom’s day. She looks
kind, but is a terror to her younger sisters and her sick brother, who
often wish that freedom’s day was really just going to begin, and who
know a great deal more about the practical working of despotism in an
eight-roomed villa than she does, despite the strongly flavoured
literature she devours.
That tall, grave, reverend-looking party who has just entered is the
socialist leader, James D’Arcy. Humanity in the abstract is all he
lives and works for. No concrete embodiment of the mammal, genus Homo,
was ever the better in the smallest degree for knowing him, many
specimens were very much the worse; but that is neither here nor there.
He never wrote “humanity” with a little h, and always spelled “man”
with a big M. What more could be expected of him? His was the work of a
reformer, a leader of progress; petty details were for petty men. James
D’Arcy had to live for the age, and live well too. It was such an
unworthy, priest-ridden age withal, and “so dressed up in the tattered
shreds of creeds outworn” (as he loved to express it at a Sunday
morning Progress Club Lecture to “boot finishers” down Hoxton way),
that the age ought to consider itself honoured by giving its best to
support him in his journey through it right comfortably, or it would
not even be worthy to be spelled by him with a capital A. And, as the
age did want to be so distinguished from still more besotted and
priest-ridden times, it rose to the occasion, and Mr. D’Arcy lived in
clover. He entered the room accompanied by a little, unwholesome,
saturnine, beetle-browed friend, Professor Melton. Tho professor looked
as if he agreed with Isabella the Catholic, who set a penalty on
bathing after the conquest of the Moors in Spain. Mr. Melton was
lecturer on physiology at the Institute of Natural Science, and his
laboratory was close by. It was seldom he permitted himself much
relaxation, but felt it incumbent on him to aid in every scheme for
liberating the minds of young people from reverence for the sacredness
of days or devotion to religious exercises. So he had consented to
promote the interests of this little society by his occasional
presence. He was soon the centre of a group of talkers, and his talk
was on the extinction of pauperism.
“In a renovated society,” he said, “it will be recognised that there is
no greater sin than almsgiving. By relieving distressed persons, by
giving bread to the hungry, you defeat Nature, thwart her efforts to
limit the too great increase of the race, and allow the recipient to
make the fatal error that he can live without work.”
“Would you deny assistance to the aged and the sick?” asked a lady.
“I would abolish the Poor Laws, which establish the right of an asylum
to old and infirm people, who actually often live for twenty years in
the union at an expense to the country of say £250.”
“Would you refuse to help them altogether?”
“I would. By that means people would be made more provident, and would
invest their savings when young to keep them when old.”
“Then you would leave them to starve?”
“Not at all. I would simply stimulate them to work; if they were unfit
to work, they must die. I would not prevent anybody giving them food
and shelter, though I would teach people that by so doing they were
hindering the great law of Nature—the survival of the fittest.”
“What about hospitals for consumptives, asylums for idiots and other
shelters for hopeless cases?”
“Oh! while there was a reasonable chance of restoring a consumptive
person to health, and enabling him to work, I would do what I could for
him. If his case became quite hopeless, I would have him mercifully
despatched, that he might not burden the State. As for idiots, the
subjects of incurable mental disease, cripples that could do nothing
useful, and all other maimed and useless people, I would get rid of
them in the same way—of course under the most careful restrictions
against abuse.”
“Don’t you think the State should refuse permission to marry to people
who cannot produce a certificate of perfect health from a physician
employed by the Government, with a view of checking the multiplication
of consumptive and ill-developed folk?”
“Certainly; that is in my scheme for an ideal republic.”
“I think I know,” said Elsworth, “many beautiful souls whose work in
the world is of the highest value to our day and generation, who would
not have been here had any such regulation been in force.”
“That may be,” replied the advanced one; “but there would be no room
for their energies in my ideal world. Where all were strong and
healthful, all mentally well developed, there would be no weakness,
disease, or sorrow to assist.”
“And the highest perfection of man would be extinct in a selfish,
unfeeling strength;” said Elsworth, turning to a pretty little girl at
a table, who was bending over a dish of wild flowers. “Are you
botanising, Miss Gordon?”
“No; I was listening to your conversation, and thinking how unlovely a
place all these new ideas will make the world when they come to
predominate. Beauty will be eliminated. Don’t you think flowers were
meant to delight us as well as the insects?”
“Of course; and I agree with Emerson that ‘flowers are a proud
assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the
world.’”
“This is such a dreadfully utilitarian age that one has almost to
apologise for holding such sentiments,” said she.
“Not at all, if we hold with Ruskin that the most perfectly useful is
always the most perfectly beautiful thing—there is direct relation
between the two. It is ever these half-statements which are the
greatest lies. Truth is full-orbed; it is the broken arcs that are half
in shadow.”
He is not very wise who has never erred; and, if the truth must be
told, our hero was, to say the least, wasting his time in a society
composed of vain and unreal people, who could teach him nothing but
that we are “only cunning casts in clay.”
As Arthur Devaux and Elsworth walked home with Linda, they discussed
the reasonableness of the old and new beliefs about God. Both the
doctor and his clever sister were declared atheists, and, as Bacon
says, proved the unsatisfying nature of their negation of God by trying
to make converts to their theory. The constant association with these
friends, and others of the same opinions, had, little by little, sapped
our hero’s faith.
“How do you like the tone of our meetings, Mr. Elsworth?” asked Linda.
“I was thinking,” said he,“how much they resemble the society of which
Lady Wortley Montague once spoke, established for taking the word ‘not’
out of the commandments and putting it into the Creed. She rather
approved of the idea, as she thought so many people loved to be
disobedient, it might bring about a reformation in morals.”
“Oh, but we are not immoral,” said her brother; “it is a higher
morality, a higher basis we wish to introduce. We want first to be rid
of the idea of God; the mechanic Thor with the hammer and workman’s
tools. The design argument is played out, don’t you think?”
“It is hard to have to believe, and still harder to maintain before
one’s unlearned friends, that this complicated machinery, so compact,
so admirably adapted to its purpose, had no designer,” said Elsworth,
with a sigh he could not repress.
“Oh, but it had!” said the young physician. “You must claim all for
development that the theist claims for God the mechanic; you must claim
that every articulation, every tendon and muscle assumed its form after
long ages of necessity for its appearance had gradually evolved it in
its present perfection.”
“In a measure I grant this. I know how faculties come to us by reaching
after them—know that the craftsman’s deftness is the result of long
practice and education of sense and muscle; but I cannot find in the
highest craftsman’s hand a single extra nerve or tendon, or a better
articulation, than I find in the clumsiest day-labourer’s fist which
never knew the use of a more delicate instrument than a spade.”
“Of course not,” said Devaux; “it is not the individual, it is the type
which is developed into a higher grade by slow stages, and so gradually
that it is usually impossible to mark the precise advent of a distinct
advance. Still, as Haeckel points out in the case of the axolotl in the
Jardin des Plantes, some few advanced beyond the grade of development
hitherto known in them; they lost their gills, changed the shape of
their bodies, and, from aquatic animals, became lung-breathers and
terrestrial animals. What do you say to that?”
“I would like to know more precise particulars than Haeckel gives of
the anatomical characteristics of the axolotl in its natural condition
in Mexico; whether it may or may not be the fact that all axolotls,
after having propagated themselves in their larval state, undergo the
metamorphosis into salamander like animals (_Amblystoma_).”[1]
“But surely you cannot be blind to the enormous number of facts adduced
by entomologists and botanists to show how the organs of insects and
plants have a direct correlation to each other; how each organ and the
whole form of the insect is the outcome of its effort to obtain food
from particular species of plants, and the form of the plant the
outcome of its resistance to giving food supply without payment in the
shape of pollen dissemination. The ingenuity of the insect in its
endeavour to get nectar easily, is met by the cleverness, so to speak,
of the plant in providing the food only in such situations where it
cannot be reached without efficient pollen dusting. Where is the room
for your heavenly Mechanic here?”
“I fail to see that you in the least disturb my theism. ‘These are only
parts of His ways.’ I expect that a Creator of all things would operate
by means, by just such natural laws and the power of such environment
as you have instanced, to modify and develop organs. All these things
serve but to make me admire the power of His inflexible laws, and the
infinite wisdom which set them going. I see nothing in these things to
make disbelieve in an almighty Creator. The creating influence is only
set a little farther back, not excluded. That these wonderful
adaptations exist potentially in the original protoplasm of the
creature, is to me quite as much a proof of an all-wise Creator as if I
believed in a separate interference for the production of each organ,
or adaptation as its necessity arose. It is the potentiality in the
cell and the atom that transcends all men’s materialist explanations,
that is so wonderful to me. This is where you see Force and Nature, and
the Christian sees God, as Browning says:—
“‘We find great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening, till at last
Comes God behind them.
The name comes close behind a stomach cyst,
The simplest of creations.’”
“Yes,” said Linda, who had not taken part in the argument till now,
“you set up your idea of God as a great First Cause to shield yourself
from awkward questions and the confession of your ignorance.”
“Questions that you, at least, cannot answer, and ignorance that none
of our materialist philosophers can enlighten,” replied Elsworth, with
a little warmth.
“Precisely; only we are honest enough to say we don’t know and cannot
explain; while you shelter yourself behind a mere idea, which is a
barrier to investigation and an obstacle to all freedom of research.”
“I protest. Nothing of the sort. Darwin was a theist; Newton was a
theist. Surely neither of these men found their conception of God an
obstacle to their freedom of research?”
“I don’t mean that,” rejoined the physician. “What I mean is, that to
the great mass of mankind the habit of attributing to a Creator, of
whom they know nothing, the formation of things they cannot understand,
prevents their desire to enlarge the boundaries of their knowledge. Dog
fanciers know perfectly well that the English bull-dog is the creation
of the breeders; they understand just how the bull dog has acquired his
peculiar characteristics. They attribute animals in general, perhaps,
to God; they take the credit of the bull-dog to themselves. The
gardener knows just how to develop the particular dahlia he wants; he
knows all the tricks and interferences of art required to produce the
flower of a certain form and colour. He attributes the creation of
plants in general to God; the dahlia you ask for, and which is in his
particular line, he places to his own account. As men enlarge the
bounds of their knowledge, there will become less and less room for
God. I know a man who has a brown mark on his arm, which he calls a
mushroom; he is particularly fond of ketchup; he attributes this taste
to the fact that he is marked with a mushroom. He declares that during
the mushroom season this brown mark (not a bit like a mushroom, by the
way) comes to greater perfection; as the season passes it diminishes,
till at last there is, he declares, very little to be seen.
“Now, at present, maternal impressions and birth marks are very little
understood by scientific men; the whole question is still under
investigation. By-and-bye the whole mystery will be solved, and we
shall have an answer to the difficulty. Meanwhile the common folk will
persist in their fanciful theories, while the more intelligent will
suspend their judgment till we can influence it by science. This is my
attitude about creation, as you call it. Yours is the attitude of Mrs.
Gamp towards the strawberry marks. She persists in explaining, _Voilà
tout!_”
“In this instance Mrs. Gamp has a good deal of reason on her side, and
it is not unlikely that her explanation may have its foundation in
fact. The uneducated mind has often made discoveries by observing and
comparing this sort of facts which scientific men have after much
scoffing been compelled to admit are correct statements of natural
phenomena.
“For instance, in the case of the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi,
all the scientific men for many years put the whole business down to
imposture, if they took the trouble to consider it seriously at all.
Now they are compelled to recognise that it is a fact that in highly
nervous temperaments the concentration of the mind for a length of time
on one engrossing idea, such as the wounds of Christ in the hands and
feet, will produce just such a condition of the parts in question on
the body of the absorbed individual, as is recorded of St. Francis. The
influence of the mind upon the body is even yet only very partially
understood. Mrs. Gamp, in the case you allude to, has my sympathy. Pray
remember that our great Paracelsus, the father of our modern scientific
medicine, derived much of his valuable information on treatment from
the unlettered peasantry of the countries in which he travelled, and of
whom he was not too proud to learn.”
“That is true, and I saw the other day that a layman of Vienna has
discovered a method of treatment for the cure of that puzzling and
intractable disease, writer’s cramp, which has been recognised by the
physicians of Vienna as affording the only really good results they
know of. But you are wandering rather wide of our argument. We started
from the evidences of design as shown in the human hand, and went on to
consider the question of a great First Cause. Paley’s argument from the
watch might have been all very well for his time, but is of little
force now, because you see where it lands you; it makes your
designer—your watchmaker—responsible for all the imperfections as
well as the excellencies. I see a watch lying by the road-side, and
at once say it must have had a maker. Very well; it is a bad
time-keeper—gains one day, loses the next, and is a generally shabby
bit of workmanship. So much the worse for the watchmaker. Now, take the
human eye. Helmholtz said, as an optical instrument it was so
defective, that had such a piece of workmanship been sent to him by any
optician, he should have forthwith forfeited his custom. If you persist
in using the design argument after Paley, you make your Omnipotent
Designer responsible for all the evil, the disease, the misery that is
in the world. Here is the hand with all its wonders. ‘Behold the
all-wise, all-powerful Creator,’ say you. Good. But there are scarlet
fever, lunacy, cancer. How about your all-wise, all-powerful Creator
now?
“Oh, if you would but read your Browning! Hear what he says:—
“‘I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
Devised,—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of man—how else?—
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually God-like,
* * * * *
Enable man to wring, from out all pain,
All pleasure, for a common heritage,
To all eternity.’[2]
“I am surprised you think the existence of evil militates against the
existence of a perfect Creator. A ribald controversialist was once
asked how he would have improved the world had he had the making of it.
He replied; ‘For one thing I would have made health catching instead of
disease. Yours is a similar _ad captandum_ style of argument. You must
know as well as I do that our fevers are the result of dirt and neglect
of the most elementary sanitary precautions; it is not nature that
afflicts us so much as our artificial living and our vicious habits. As
for lunacy, it is largely the product of vice, drink, and the race for
wealth. With regard to pain, it is frequently conservative. As Theodore
Parker points out, if we could put our fingers into the fire without
pain, they would soon be destroyed; if dust did not make our eyes
smart, their utility would soon be destroyed by rough usage; if we
could eat improper food without unpleasant consequences, our digestive
functions would soon be unfit for their work, and so forth.”
Linda laughed at the idea of health being catching, and thought the
advocate of design was cornered.
“For my part,” said Elsworth, “I think the man was a great fool. Love
is catching, as Coventry Patmore says, ‘love that grows from one to
all, and love is better than health, isn’t it?’”
“I don’t see,” said the doctor, “that you have in the least affected my
argument that evil could never have been permitted by an all-wise,
omnipotent, and good Creator. Its existence proves the Creator not to
have been all these, at any rate.”
“A great deal of man’s ill may be removed,” said Elsworth; “indeed,
amelioration is the dominant note of nature. If you will forgive me
quoting my favourite poet Browning again—
“‘Dragons were, and serpents are, and blindworms will be,
Ne’er emerged
And new created python for man’s plague
Since earth was purged,’
you will see what I mean. There is a general onward movement; the
prospect brightens for mankind. But there will always be evil, because
without it there can be no good. Where would be patience without
trials; where sympathy and charity without suffering? Do you think the
virtues and nobility of Gordon, of Sakya Muni, of St. Francis, would
have been evolved had there been no evil and suffering in the world?”
“In a perfect world there would have been no occasion for them,” said
Linda.
“I cannot conceive,” Elsworth replied,“ of a perfect world without love
for one’s neighbour, sacrifice of self, devotion to high and noble
efforts for the good of others. Fancy the hideous selfishness of a
world of wealthy, luxurious aristocrats, such as helped to precipitate
the French Revolution; the gratification of their own pleasures and
passions the sole object of their existence! Contrast this state of
things in your ideal perfect world—where every one would have all he
wanted, and would have no occasion to think of others,—no opportunity
to exercise charity, pity, long-suffering, or altruism in any
form—with the burning love of a St. Paul, who was willing himself to
be accursed if he could thereby save others; with Christian heroes who
have sold themselves into slavery; have entered lazar-houses from which
they could never return; have cheerfully embraced martyrdom, and
undertaken every form of danger and suffering, to help their brother
men. Or to come to every-day affairs, contrast the selfishness of the
rich, and those who are elevated above the grosser cares and
difficulties of life, with the charity and devotedness practised by the
poor of our great cities towards each other; and say if the existence
of pain, sorrow, and suffering is not actually necessary for the
evolution of the highest man? And so ‘upon men’s own account must evil
stay.’”
“But here we are at your diggings, Elsworth. You will get rid of these
cobwebs of the brain before you have done with St. Bernard’s,” laughed
Devaux.
And so the friends went home to bed, to dream of a regenerated world,
fit for an age of steam, telephones, and physiological research not
contemplated by the Apostles, and therefore requiring a new religion of
its own.
-----
Footnote 1:
“The Doctrine of Descent.” Oscar Schmidt.
Footnote 2:
Browning: “Ring and Book,” vol. iv. p. 60.