wife." Clean, cold, and correct this is, speaking of orderly affection,
settled and stereotyped long ago. In such letters is butcher's meat also
"very dear." Try now, "Migh verrie deare Wyfe." Is it not immediately
infinitely more soft and tender? Is there not something exquisitely
pleasant in lingering over those redundant letters, leaving each word,
as it were, with a reluctant caress? Such spelling is a soft, domestic,
lovingly wasteful use of material. Or, again, if you have no wife, or
object to an old-fashioned conjugal tenderness, try "Mye owne sweete
dearrest Marrie." There is the tremble of a tenderness no mere
arrangement of trim everyday letters can express in those double
_r's_. "Sweete" my ladie must be; sweet! why pump-water and inferior
champagne, spirits of nitrous ether and pancreatic juice are "sweet."
For my own part I always spell so, with lots of f's and g's and such
like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender
vein. And I hold that a man who will not do so, now he has been shown
how to do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig.
The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great.
Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have given not a little
time, and such minds as they have, to the discussion of the right
spelling of our great poet's name. But he himself never dreamt of tying
himself down to one presentation of himself, and was--we have his hand
for it--Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shakespear, Shakspeare, and so forth, as
the mood might be. It would be almost as reasonable to debate whether
Shakespeare smiled or frowned. My dear friend Simmongues is the same.
He is "Sims," a mere slash of the pen, to those he scorns, Simmonds or
Simmongs to his familiars, and Simmons, A.T. Simmons, Esq., to all
Europe.
From such mere introductory departures from precision, such petty
escapades as these, we would we might seduce the reader into an utter
debauch of spelling. But a sudden Mænad dance of the letters on the
page, gleeful and iridescent spelling, a wild rush and procession of
howling vowels and clattering consonants, might startle the half-won
reader back into orthodoxy. Besides, there is another reader--the
printer's reader--to consider. For if an author let his wit run to these
matters, he must write elaborate marginal exhortations to this
authority, begging his mercy, to let the little flowers of spelling
alone. Else the plough of that Philistine's uniformity will utterly root
them out.
Such high art of spelling as is thus hinted at is an art that has still
to gather confidence and brave the light of publicity. A few, indeed,
practise it secretly for love--in letters and on spare bits of paper.
But, for the most part, people do not know that there is so much as an
art of spelling possible; the tyranny of orthography lies so heavily on
the land. Your common editors and their printers are a mere orthodox
spelling police, and at the least they rigorously blot out all the
delightful frolics of your artist in spelling before his writings reach
the public eye. But commonly, as I have proved again and again, the
slightest lapse into rococo spelling is sufficient to secure the
rejection of a manuscript without further ado.
And to end,--a word about Phonographers. It may be that my title has led
the reader to anticipate some mention of these before. They are a kind
of religious sect, a heresy from the orthodox spelling. They bind one
another by their mysteries and a five-shilling subscription in a
"soseiti to introduis an impruvd method of spelinj." They come across
the artistic vision, they and their Soseiti, with an altogether
indefinable offence. Perhaps the essence of it is the indescribable
meanness of their motive. For this phonography really amounts to a
study of the cheapest way of spelling words. These phonographers are
sweaters of the Queen's English, living meanly on the selvage of honest
mental commerce by clipping the coin of thought. But enough of them.
They are mentioned here only to be disavowed. They would substitute one
narrow orthodoxy for another, and I would unfold the banner of freedom.
Spell, my brethren, as you will! Awake, arise, O language living in
chains; let Butter's spelling be our Bastille! So with a prophetic
vision of liberated words pouring out of the dungeons of a
spelling-book, this plea for freedom concludes. What trivial arguments
there are for a uniform spelling I must leave the reader to discover.
This is no place to carp against the liberation I foresee, with the glow
of the dawn in my eyes.
INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD
I was asked to go, quite suddenly, and found myself there before I had
time to think of what it might be. I understood her to say it was a
meeting of some "Sunday society," some society that tried to turn the
Sabbath from a day of woe to a day of rejoicing. "St. George's Hall,
Langham Place," a cab, and there we were. I thought they would be
picturesque Pagans. But the entertainment was the oddest it has ever
been my lot to see, a kind of mystery. The place was dark, except for a
big circle of light on a screen, and a dismal man with a long stick was
talking about the effects of alcohol on your muscles. He talked and
talked, and people went to sleep all about us. Euphemia's face looked so
very pretty in the dim light that I tried to talk to her and hold her
hand, but she only said "Ssh!" And then they began showing pictures on
the screen--the most shocking things!--stomachs, and all that kind of
thing. They went on like that for an hour, and then there was a lot of
thumping with umbrellas, and they turned the lights up and we went home.
Curious way of spending Sunday afternoon, is it not?
But you may imagine I had a dismal time all that hour. I understood the
people about me were Sceptics, the kind of people who don't believe
things--a singular class, and, I am told, a growing one. These excellent
people, it seems, have conscientious objections to going to chapel or
church, but at the same time the devotional habit of countless
generations of pious forerunners is strong in them. Consequently they
have invented things like these lectures to go to, with a professor
instead of a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of
altar-piece; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their god is
Hygiene--a curious and instructive case of mental inertia. I understand,
too, there are several other temples of this Cult in London--South Place
Chapel and Essex Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of
the Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was the number of
bald heads glimmering faintly in the reflected light from the lantern
circle. And that set me thinking upon a difficulty I have never been
able to surmount.
You see these people, and lots of other people, too, believe in a thing
they call Natural Selection. They think, as part of that belief, that
men are descended from hairy simian ancestors; assert that even a
hundred thousand years ago the ancestor was hairy--hairy, heavy, and
almost as much a brute as if he lived in Mr. Arthur Morrison's
Whitechapel. For my own part I think it a pretty theory, and would
certainly accept it were it not for one objection. The thing I cannot
understand is how our ancestor lost that hair. I see no reason why he
should not have kept his hair on. According to the theory of natural
selection, materially favourable variations survive, unfavourable
disappear; the only way in which the loss is to be accounted for is by
explaining it as advantageous; but where is the advantage of losing your
hair? The disadvantages appear to me to be innumerable. A thick covering
of hair, like that of a Capuchin monkey, would be an invaluable
protection against sudden changes of temperature, far better than any
clothing can be. Had I that, for instance, I should be rid of the
perpetual cold in the head that so disfigures my life; and the
multitudes who die annually of chills, bronchitis, and consumption, and
most of those who suffer from rheumatic pains, neuralgia, and so forth,
would not so die and suffer. And in the past, when clothing was less
perfect and firing a casual commodity, the disadvantages of losing hair
were all the greater. In very hot countries hair is perhaps even more
important in saving the possessor from the excessive glare of the sun.
Before the invention of the hat, thick hair on the head at least was
absolutely essential to save the owner of the skull from sunstroke.
That, perhaps, explains why the hair has been retained there, and why it
is going now that we have hats, but it certainly does not explain why it
has gone from the rest of the body.
One--remarkably weak--explanation has been propounded: an appeal to our
belief in human vanity. He picked it out by the roots, because he
thought he was prettier without. But that is no reason at all. Suppose
he did, it would not affect his children. Professor Weismann has at
least convinced scientific people of this: that the characters acquired
by a parent are rarely, if ever, transmitted to its offspring. An
individual given to such wanton denudation would simply be at a
disadvantage with his decently covered fellows, would fall behind in the
race of life, and perish with his kind. Besides, if man has been at such
pains to uncover his skin, why have quite a large number of the most
respected among us such a passionate desire to have it covered up again?
Yet that is the only attempted explanation I have ever come upon, and
the thing has often worried me. I think it is just as probably a change
in dietary. I have noticed that most of your vegetarians are
shock-headed, ample-bearded men, and I have heard the Ancestor was
vegetarian. Or it may be, I sometimes fancy, a kind of inherent
disposition on the part of your human animal to dwindle. That came back
in my memory vividly as I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical
Advanced people, and marked their glistening crania. I recalled other
losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing hairless, growing bald,
growing toothless, unemotional, irreligious, losing the end joint of the
little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow
ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial beauty.
It seems almost like what the scientific people call a Law. And by
strenuous efforts the creature just keeps pace with his losses--devises
clothes, wigs, artificial teeth, paddings, shoes--what civilised being
could use his bare feet for his ordinary locomotion? Imagine him on a
furze-sprinkled golf links. Then stays, an efficient substitute for the
effete feminine backbone. So the thing goes on. Long ago his superficies
became artificial, and now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar,
and the figure he has abandoned remains distended with artificial ashes,
dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears.
Will he go on shrinking, I wonder?--become at last a mere lurking atomy
in his own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a complex
mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and papier-maché, stolen from the
earth and the plant-world and his fellow beasts? And at last may he not
disappear altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest
machinery, neatly clad and loaded up with sound principles of action,
walk to and fro in a regenerate world? Thus it was my mind went dreaming
in St. George's Hall. But presently, as I say, came the last word about
stomachs, and the bald men woke up, rattled their umbrellas, said it was
vastly interesting, and went toddling off home in an ecstasy of advanced
Liberalism. And we two returned to the place whence we came.
OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN
Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much
more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not
been written. These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to
turn over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a
candle. Turning to another topic, primitive man in the works of the
descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very entertaining and quaint
person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would
appeal to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As Ruskin has said
somewhere, _à propos_ of Darwin, it is not what man has been, but what
he will be, that should interest us.
The contemplative man in his easy-chair, pondering this saying, suddenly
beholds in the fire, through the blue haze of his pipe, one of these
great unwritten volumes. It is large in size, heavy in lettering,
seemingly by one Professor Holzkopf, presumably Professor at
Weissnichtwo. "The Necessary Characters of the Man of the Remote Future
deduced from the Existing Stream of Tendency" is the title. The worthy
Professor is severely scientific in his method, and deliberate and
cautious in his deductions, the contemplative man discovers as he
pursues his theme, and yet the conclusions are, to say the least,
remarkable. We must figure the excellent Professor expanding the matter
at great length, voluminously technical, but the contemplative
man--since he has access to the only copy--is clearly at liberty to make
such extracts and abstracts as he chooses for the unscientific reader.
Here, for instance, is something of practicable lucidity that he
considers admits of quotation. "The theory of evolution," writes the
Professor, "is now universally accepted by zoologists and botanists, and
it is applied unreservedly to man. Some question, indeed, whether it
fits his soul, but all agree it accounts for his body. Man, we are
assured, is descended from ape-like ancestors, moulded by circumstances
into men, and these apes again were derived from ancestral forms of a
lower order, and so up from the primordial protoplasmic jelly. Clearly
then, man, unless the order of the universe has come to an end, will
undergo further modification in the future, and at last cease to be man,
giving rise to some other type of animated being. At once the
fascinating question arises, What will this being be? Let us consider
for a little the plastic influences at work upon our species.
"Just as the bird is the creature of the wing, and is all moulded and
modified to flying, and just as the fish is the creature that swims, and
has had to meet the inflexible conditions of a problem in hydrodynamics,
so man is the creature of the brain; he will live by intelligence, and
not by physical strength, if he live at all. So that much that is purely
'animal' about him is being, and must be, beyond all question,
suppressed in his ultimate development. Evolution is no mechanical
tendency making for perfection, according to the ideas current in the
year of grace 1897; it is simply the continual adaptation of plastic
life, for good or evil, to the circumstances that surround it.... We
notice this decay of the animal part around us now, in the loss of teeth
and hair, in the dwindling hands and feet of men, in their smaller jaws,
and slighter mouths and ears. Man now does by wit and machinery and
verbal agreement what he once did by bodily toil; for once he had to
catch his dinner, capture his wife, run away from his enemies, and
continually exercise himself, for love of himself, to perform these
duties well. But now all this is changed. Cabs, trains, trams, render
speed unnecessary, the pursuit of food becomes easier; his wife is no
longer hunted, but rather, in view of the crowded matrimonial market,
seeks him out. One needs wits now to live, and physical activity is a
drug, a snare even; it seeks artificial outlets, and overflows in
games. Athleticism takes up time and cripples a man in his competitive
examinations, and in business. So is your fleshly man handicapped
against his subtler brother. He is unsuccessful in life, does not marry.
The better adapted survive."
The coming man, then, will clearly have a larger brain, and a slighter
body than the present. But the Professor makes one exception to this.
"The human hand, since it is the teacher and interpreter of the brain,
will become constantly more powerful and subtle as the rest of the
musculature dwindles."
Then in the physiology of these children of men, with their expanding
brains, their great sensitive hands and diminishing bodies, great
changes were necessarily worked. "We see now," says the Professor, "in
the more intellectual sections of humanity an increasing sensitiveness
to stimulants, a growing inability to grapple with such a matter as
alcohol, for instance. No longer can men drink a bottleful of port; some
cannot drink tea; it is too exciting for their highly-wrought nervous
systems. The process will go on, and the Sir Wilfrid Lawson of some near
generation may find it his duty and pleasure to make the silvery spray
of his wisdom tintinnabulate against the tea-tray. These facts lead
naturally to the comprehension of others. Fresh raw meat was once a dish
for a king. Now refined persons scarcely touch meat unless it is
cunningly disguised. Again, consider the case of turnips; the raw root
is now a thing almost uneatable, but once upon a time a turnip must have
been a rare and fortunate find, to be torn up with delirious eagerness
and devoured in ecstasy. The time will come when the change will affect
all the other fruits of the earth. Even now, only the young of mankind
eat apples raw--the young always preserving ancestral characteristics
after their disappearance in the adult. Some day even boys will regard
apples without emotion. The boy of the future, one must believe, will
gaze on an apple with the same unspeculative languor with which he now
regards a flint"--in the absence of a cat.
"Furthermore, fresh chemical discoveries came into action as modifying
influences upon men. In the prehistoric period even, man's mouth had
ceased to be an instrument for grasping food; it is still growing
continually less prehensile, his front teeth are smaller, his lips
thinner and less muscular; he has a new organ, a mandible not of
irreparable tissue, but of bone and steel--a knife and fork. There is no
reason why things should stop at partial artificial division thus
afforded; there is every reason, on the contrary, to believe my
statement that some cunning exterior mechanism will presently masticate
and insalivate his dinner, relieve his diminishing salivary glands and
teeth, and at last altogether abolish them."
Then what is not needed disappears. What use is there for external ears,
nose, and brow ridges now? The two latter once protected the eye from
injury in conflict and in falls, but in these days we keep on our legs,
and at peace. Directing his thoughts in this way, the reader may
presently conjure up a dim, strange vision of the latter-day face: "Eyes
large, lustrous, beautiful, soulful; above them, no longer separated by
rugged brow ridges, is the top of the head, a glistening, hairless dome,
terete and beautiful; no craggy nose rises to disturb by its unmeaning
shadows the symmetry of that calm face, no vestigial ears project; the
mouth is a small, perfectly round aperture, toothless and gumless,
jawless, unanimal, no futile emotions disturbing its roundness as it
lies, like the harvest moon or the evening star, in the wide firmament
of face." Such is the face the Professor beholds in the future.
Of course parallel modifications will also affect the body and limbs.
"Every day so many hours and so much energy are required for digestion;
a gross torpidity, a carnal lethargy, seizes on mortal men after dinner.
This may and can be avoided. Man's knowledge of organic chemistry widens
daily. Already he can supplement the gastric glands by artificial
devices. Every doctor who administers physic implies that the bodily
functions may be artificially superseded. We have pepsine, pancreatine,
artificial gastric acid--I know not what like mixtures. Why, then,
should not the stomach be ultimately superannuated altogether? A man
who could not only leave his dinner to be cooked, but also leave it to
be masticated and digested, would have vast social advantages over his
food-digesting fellow. This is, let me remind you here, the calmest,
most passionless, and scientific working out of the future forms of
things from the data of the present. At this stage the following facts
may perhaps stimulate your imagination. There can be no doubt that many
of the Arthropods, a division of animals more ancient and even now more
prevalent than the Vertebrata, have undergone more phylogenetic
modification"--a beautiful phrase--"than even the most modified of
vertebrated animals. Simple forms like the lobsters display a primitive
structure parallel with that of the fishes. However, in such a form as
the degraded 'Chondracanthus,' the structure has diverged far more
widely from its original type than in man. Among some of these most
highly modified crustaceans the whole of the alimentary canal--that is,
all the food-digesting and food-absorbing parts--form a useless solid
cord: the animal is nourished--it is a parasite--by absorption of the
nutritive fluid in which it swims. Is there any absolute impossibility
in supposing man to be destined for a similar change; to imagine him no
longer dining, with unwieldy paraphernalia of servants and plates, upon
food queerly dyed and distorted, but nourishing himself in elegant
simplicity by immersion in a tub of nutritive fluid?
"There grows upon the impatient imagination a building, a dome of
crystal, across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most
glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the
centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular white
marble basin filled with some clear, mobile, amber liquid, and in this
plunge and float strange beings. Are they birds?
"They are the descendants of man--at dinner. Watch them as they hop on
their hands--a method of progression advocated already by
Bjornsen--about the pure white marble floor. Great hands they have,
enormous brains, soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular
system, their legs, their abdomens, are shrivelled to nothing, a
dangling, degraded pendant to their minds."
The further visions of the Professor are less alluring.
"The animals and plants die away before men, except such as he preserves
for his food or delight, or such as maintain a precarious footing about
him as commensals and parasites. These vermin and pests must succumb
sooner or later to his untiring inventiveness and incessantly growing
discipline. When he learns (the chemists are doubtless getting towards
the secret now) to do the work of chlorophyll without the plant, then
his necessity for other animals and plants upon the earth will
disappear. Sooner or later, where there is no power of resistance and no
necessity, there comes extinction. In the last days man will be alone on
the earth, and his food will be won by the chemist from the dead rocks
and the sunlight.
"And--one may learn the full reason in that explicit and painfully right
book, the _Data of Ethics_--the irrational fellowship of man will give
place to an intellectual co-operation, and emotion fall within the
scheme of reason. Undoubtedly it is a long time yet, but a long time is
nothing in the face of eternity, and every man who dares think of these
things must look eternity in the face."
Then the earth is ever radiating away heat into space, the Professor
reminds us. And so at last comes a vision of earthly cherubim, hopping
heads, great unemotional intelligences, and little hearts, fighting
together perforce and fiercely against the cold that grips them tighter
and tighter. For the world is cooling--slowly and inevitably it grows
colder as the years roll by. "We must imagine these creatures," says the
Professor, "in galleries and laboratories deep down in the bowels of the
earth. The whole world will be snow-covered and piled with ice; all
animals, all vegetation vanished, except this last branch of the tree of
life. The last men have gone even deeper, following the diminishing heat
of the planet, and vast metallic shafts and ventilators make way for the
air they need."
So with a glimpse of these human tadpoles, in their deep close gallery,
with their boring machinery ringing away, and artificial lights glaring
and casting black shadows, the Professor's horoscope concludes. Humanity
in dismal retreat before the cold, changed beyond recognition. Yet the
Professor is reasonable enough, his facts are current science, his
methods orderly. The contemplative man shivers at the prospect, starts
up to poke the fire, and the whole of this remarkable book that is not
written vanishes straightway in the smoke of his pipe. This is the great
advantage of this unwritten literature: there is no bother in changing
the books. The contemplative man consoles himself for the destiny of the
species with the lost portion of Kubla Khan.
THE EXTINCTION OF MAN