is really due to this love of Nature and of animals; that, like
sheepdogs (who, when they are not trained to guard sheep, will, by an
irresistible impulse, follow and harry them), they feel compelled to
have _something to do_ with hares and foxes and partridges and grouse,
and salmon; and they find that the only thing to be done is to course
and hunt and shoot and angle for them. Into this mystery I cannot dive.
The propensity which can make kind-hearted men (as many sportsmen
unquestionably are) not merely endure to kill, but actually take
pleasure in killing, innocent living things, and changing what is so
beautiful in life and joy into what is so ineffably sad and piteous,
wounded and dying, remains always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it
is simply a fact that lads trained from boyhood to take pleasure in such
“sports,” and having, I doubt not, an “hereditary set of the brain”
towards them, like so many greyhounds or pointers, never feel the
_ribrezzo_, or the remorse, of the bird or beast murderer, but, escaping
all reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at the same time enjoy
the woods and fields and river-sides where their quarry leads them. To
do them justice,—as against many efforts lately made to confound them
with torturers of a very different class,—they know little of the pain
they inflict, and they endeavor eagerly to make that pain as brief as
possible. Nevertheless, Sport is an inexplicable passion to the
non-sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very easy to contemplate with
philosophical forbearance, much less with admiration.
A larger source of wonder is it to reflect that this same unaccountable
passion for killing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep a root in
English life that its arrest and disappointment by such a change of the
Game laws as would lead to the abolition of game would practically
revolutionize all our manners. The attraction of the towns already
preponderates over that of the country; but till lately the grouse have
had the honor of proroguing annually the British Senate, and the
partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks, and the foxes induce pretty
nearly every man who can afford to shoot or hunt them to bring his
family to the country during the season wherein they are to be pursued.
Of course women, left to themselves, would mostly choose to spend their
winters in town, and their summers from May till November in the
country. But Sport determines the Session of Parliament, and the Session
determines the season; and, as women love the London Season quite as
much as men like foxhunting, both parties are equally bound to the same
unfortunate division of time, and year after year passes, and the lilacs
and laburnums and hawthorns and limes in the old country homes waste
their loveliness and their sweetness unseen, while the little children
pine in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions when they ought to be
romping among their father’s hay-fields and galloping their ponies about
his park. All these arrangements, and, further, the vast establishments
of horses and hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns and game-keepers
and beaters and game-preserving,—the sole business of thousands of
workingmen, and the principal occupation and interest of half the
gentlemen in the country,—would be swept away by a stroke.
By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a
hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the
old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather
as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a
thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England
and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its
lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect
yet realized on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a happiness,
pure, stable, dignified, and blameless, such as it will be hard to
parallel in any of the novel types of high pressure modern life.
And, on the other hand, there is nothing so mournful as the life of an
old ancestral home in the country! Everything reminds us of the lost,
the dead who once called these stately chambers their habitations, whose
voices once echoed through the halls, and for whose familiar tread we
seem yet to wait; whose entrance, as of yore, through one of the lofty
doors would scarcely surprise us; whom we almost expect, when we return
after long absence, to see rising from their accustomed seats with open
arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by. The trees they planted, the
walks and flower-beds they designed; the sword which the father brought
back from his early service; the tapestry the mother wrought through her
long years of declining health; the dog grown blind and old, the
companion of walks which shall never be taken again; the instrument
which once answered to a sweet touch forever still,—these things make us
feel Death and change as we never feel them amid the instability and
eager interests of town existence. All things remain as of old “since
the fathers fell asleep.” The leaves of the woods come afresh and then
fade; the rooks come cawing home; the church bells ring, and the old
clock strikes the hour. Only there is one chair pushed a little aside
from its wonted place, an old horse turned out to graze in peace for his
latter days; a bedroom upstairs into which no one goes, save in silent
hours, unwatched and furtively.
As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed
have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain,
and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of
the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things
which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when
all this comes to pass, then the sense of the _tragedy_ of life becomes
too strong for us. The dear home, loved so tenderly, is for us little
better than the cenotaph of the lost and dead; the warning to ourselves
that over all our busy schemes and hopes the pall will soon come
down,—“the night cometh when no man can work.”
I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all that is most sad and
most awful in our mortal lot, a sense which we escape amid the rushing
to and fro of London, but which settles down on our souls in such a home
as I have pictured, which makes the country unendurable to many, as the
shadows of the evening lengthen. To accept it, and look straight at the
grave towards which they are walking down the shortened vista of their
years, taxes men’s courage and faith beyond their strength, and they fly
back to the business and the pleasures wherein such solemn thoughts are
forgotten and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice there is the
longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old
starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on
our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we
should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the
Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal
Home.
-----
Footnote 1:
Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the
“Scientific Spirit of the Age” when it appeared in the _Contemporary
Review_ for July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to
Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp. 6, 7,
34) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the
glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed
multitude of her followers.
Footnote 2:
“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as
the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave
me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in
Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me
considerable, and music very great delight. But now, for many years, I
cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my
taste for pictures or music.”—Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101.
Footnote 3:
Darwin’s _Life_, vol. i. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin.
Footnote 4:
That organ of the Scientific party, the _British Medical Journal_,
eulogizing this address, remarked that “Sir James is a master of
English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language.” To
the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to leave
something to be desired on the score of “elegance.”
Footnote 5:
Speaking of this latter book, the Manchester _Guardian_ (March 17)
remarked that “the charges in ‘St Bernard’s’ were supported by details
of cases reported in medical journals and by statements made by
lecturers of distinction. The quotations are precise and easily
verified. The hospitals will do well to take some notice of a medical
man who avers that the healing of patients is subordinated to the
professional advantages of the staff and the students, that cures are
retarded for clinical study, that new drugs are tried upon hospital
patients, who are needlessly examined and made to undergo unnecessary
operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement that the
dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blunders of
students are covered by their teachers for the credit of the
hospital.” Every one of these offences against justice and humanity is
directly due to the inspiration of the Scientific Spirit.
Footnote 6:
It was long before Science acquired her natural voice. For more than a
thousand years she submitted servilely to Aristotle and his
interpreters. But the Science of the Dark Ages was only a branch of
learning of which a Picus of Mirandola or an Admirable Crichton could
master the whole, along with the classics and mathematics of the
period. The genuine Scientific Spirit was not yet born; and when it
woke at last in Galileo and Kepler, and down to our own day, the
Religious spirit was still paramount over the Scientific. It is only
in the present generation that we witness at once the evolution of the
true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance.
Footnote 7:
While I am writing these pages, the _Globe_ informs us that there
reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and
surgical operations. “It has become the right thing to get up early
and hurry off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the
scalpel. The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger
realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the
air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if
they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a
thoroughly realistic manner on the stage.”
Footnote 8:
In the very noteworthy paper by Mr. Myers in the _Nineteenth Century_
for May on the “Disenchantment of France,” there occurs this remark:
“In that country where the pure dicta of Science reign in the
intellectual classes with less interference from custom, sentiment, or
tradition, than even in Germany itself, we should find that Science,
at her present point, is a depressing disintegrating energy” (p. 663).
Elsewhere he says that France “makes M. Pasteur her national _hero_”!
Footnote 9:
I have heard a pitiful example of this kind of prejudice. An orphan
boy and his ugly mongrel dog were the objects of universal dislike and
ridicule in the house of his uncle, a Scotch farmer. The lad always
sat of an evening far back from the circle by the fireside, with his
crouching dog under his stool lest it should be kicked. One day the
little son of the house, of whom the farmer and his wife were dotingly
fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm coming on, they
were all lost on the hills. Next morning the dog returned to the farm,
making wild signs that the farmer should follow him, which he and his
wife did at once, in great anxiety. At last, the dog brought them to a
spot where they found the boy stiff and cold, but their child still
alive. The boy had taken off his own coat and wrapped it round the
child, whom he laid on his breast, and then, lying under him on the
snow, had died. Let us hope that at least the dog reaped some tardy
fruits of the farmer’s repentance.
Footnote 10:
I will cite an example from my own experience, which may help to make
parents realize the subtle peril of which I speak. Twenty-five years
ago I was engaged in an effort to help Mary Carpenter in the care of
the Red Lodge Reformatory for girl-thieves at Bristol. Our poor little
charges had all been convicted of larceny, or some kindred offence,
but they were not technically “fallen” girls: another establishment
received young women of this “unfortunate” class. Twice, however, it
happened, during my residence with Miss Carpenter, that girls who had
been on the streets were by mistake sent to us when convicted of
theft, and were of course received and placed with the others, all
being under the most careful surveillance both in the school-rooms,
playgrounds, and dormitory. Nevertheless, in each case, before the
“unfortunate” had been three days in the Lodge, by some inexplicable
contagion the whole school of fifty girls were demoralized so
completely that the aspect of the children and change in their
behavior gave warning to their experienced janitress to trace the
history of the new-comer more exactly, and, as the result proved, to
detect where the infection had come in.
Footnote 11:
In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story
from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of
cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the
Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that
he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says
Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away,
but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted
with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor
was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came
into.”—_Saint Augustine’s Confessions_, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar
perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the
following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people
went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was
ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the
party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers
compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated
and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the
girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”
Footnote 12:
Readers of that singular book, “St. Bernard’s” (Swan, Sonnenschein &
Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, “Dying Scientifically,”
may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.
Footnote 13:
“C’est pourquoi, seul dans mon siècle, j’ai sû comprendre Jésus Christ
et St. François d’Assise.”—_M. Renan._
Footnote 14:
The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi Nathan
Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who hold a kind of
Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The principal synagogue
of this party (to which the Rothschild family hereditarily belongs,
also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great Portland Street. The
_Eglise mère_ is in the City, and there are many other synagogues
belonging to it scattered over London and England. The Portuguese
branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Orthodox of all), to
which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief synagogue in Bevis
Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom, brother of Cavour’s private
secretary, was minister of this synagogue.
Footnote 15:
The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr. F. D.
Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in London,
that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and important
congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, differing
chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, is in use
in this synagogue.
Footnote 16:
Professor Goldwin Smith, in the _Nineteenth Century_.
Footnote 17:
It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these ideas
of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George Eliot in
“Daniel Deronda.” Equally remote are they from the crude endeavor to
return to a supposed primitive Judaism through the “worship of the
letter” of the Old Testament, which was hailed some years ago with
premature satisfaction by a certain school of Protestant Christians.
See the interesting “History of the Karaite Jews,” by the Rev. W. H.
Rule, D.D., 1870.
Footnote 18:
As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All the
Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all the
newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And why?
It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance,
nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest
from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or
eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This “clandestine
manipulation of the press,” and tribe-union for purposes disconnected
with tribal interests, constitutes a _cabal_, and necessarily creates
antagonism and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door
of English Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would
expostulate with their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad.
Footnote 19:
I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly under the
influence of the modern mania for “heredity,” of the exceptional
character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are a most
remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to colonize
either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of Ghetto
existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-mongers) the
healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their multifarious
gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admirable. But
their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched. Not to
speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more singular
spectacle; for their members have always been a handful compared to
the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during the ten ages of
their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession towards the
customs of their neighbors which has left the actual dogmas of their
religion the sole bond of their national integrity. They worshipped
the One good God under the law of Zoroaster three, perhaps four,
millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully still, though a mere
remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of idolaters, and with no
distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty disdain of “Gentile”
nations, no hope of a restoration to their own land. Their priests
have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and honored rabbis.
Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in language, and
incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their Prophet has faded
into an abstraction. But their faith in Ahura-Mazda, the “Wise
Creator,” the “Rich in Love,” remains as clear to-day among them as
when it first rose upon the Bactrian plains in the morning of the
world. The virtues of truth, chastity, industry, and beneficence
inculcated by the Zend-Avesta, and attributed by the Greek historians
to their ancestors of the age of Cyrus, are still noticeable among
them in marked contrast to their Hindu neighbors; as are likewise
their muscular strength and hardy frames. Even as regards their
commercial aptitudes, the Parsees offer a singular parallel to the
Jews. The _Times_ remarked some years ago that out of the 150,000
Parsees there were an incredible number of very wealthy men, and six
were actual millionaires. One of the last, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy,
gave away in his lifetime the sum of £700,000 sterling in charities to
men of every religion.
Footnote 20:
The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in parallel
columns.
Footnote 21:
I refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of
Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also many noble
prayers in the collection of Sabbath and other services for various
festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though somewhat deficient as
regards the expression of spiritual aspiration.
Footnote 22:
So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first published,
a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Christian
character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in London.
I have before me the “Report of the Jewish Ladies’ Association for
Prevention and Rescue Work” for 1886–87, printed for private
circulation. The president of the association is Lady Rothschild; the
honorable secretaries, Mrs. Cyril Flower and Mrs. J. L. Jacobs.
Nothing can seem more wisely kind and merciful than the whole scheme
as here detailed. We are told that the poor Jewish girls reclaimed
from a life of vice (into which only of late years have many been
known to fall) “are taught not only to follow the observances of their
faith, but also to lead pure and useful lives; and no pains will be
spared to make them better women as well as capable earners of their
own livelihood.... The committee feel convinced they will not be
allowed to fail in their strenuous endeavor to bring back those who
are, as it were, sunk in moral death, to a _new life_.”
Footnote 23:
See this affectingly brought out in that charming book, “The Jews of
Barnow.”
Footnote 24:
A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current phases of
opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title some promise
of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of whom I am
speaking. The author proposes to discuss “Natural Religion,” but he
shortly proceeds to describe a great many things which, in the common
language of mankind, are not _religious_ at all,—scientific ardor,
artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical order of the
universe,—and to urge that these, or nothing, must constitute the
religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up in awe and
wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came the thunders
and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were immediately
afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image of a calf,
and told, “These be Thy Gods, O Israel!” might, one would think, have
felt the same sense of bathos which we experience when we are solemnly
assured that these sciences and arts _are_ henceforth our “Religion.”
A drowning man proverbially catches at straws, and people who feel
themselves sinking in the ocean of Atheism seize on every spar which
comes under their hands, and cry, “We may float yet awhile by this.”
No one can blame them for trying to do so; but it is rather hard to
expect all the world to recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which
they sit astride.
Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which
he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and
none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has
disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which
in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were
not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological
terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean, _not_ the
recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine
scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for
all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean
the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and
righteous _Person_,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God
“mainly above Nature,” _not_, as the author of this book says must
henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160).
For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would
rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the
modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,”
finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.
Footnote 25:
A Chief of the Police Force has informed me that arrests of
desperadoes are always made, if practicable, at about four A.M.; that
hour being found by experience to be the one when animal courage is at
its lowest ebb and resistance to be least apprehended.
Footnote 26:
I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine affliction
classified as the “Bad Husband Headache.”
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