FIRE AND FOOD
+Part I.+
I think that the reader will perhaps agree with me that the experiment
tried in the last chapter has proved worth while. By approaching
the myth of Prometheus with sufficient reverence to regard at least
its main features as true, I believe we have arrived at very much
more useful results than if we had adopted the time-honoured plan of
doubting the whole story from the start, and then had proceeded to
interpret its more pleasant and “innocent” incidents on the lines
laid down by a false and utterly unfounded conception of the child
mind, and the “poetic” pretensions of the nineteenth century. At all
events we may consider ourselves on safer ground in departing from
nineteenth-century principles than in abiding by them--whatever our
ultimate goal may be; because if ever there was an epoch which deserved
to be thoroughly denounced, even at the risk of reviling, rejecting,
and cursing our fathers and grandfathers, our uncles and great-uncles,
it is surely the Nineteenth Century, the true Dark Age of History,
the genuine ugly duckling among the centuries, the Alexandrian Age of
Stupidity.
Not only did those most sacred institutions of man, Property, Leisure,
and Power, become utterly discredited in the nineteenth century,
owing to the abuse to which they were subjected by the wretches
who held them, but Thought itself--the most fastidious among human
gifts--actually stooped so low as to include a Tennyson, a Carlyle,
and a John Stuart Mill among its aspirants to laurels, and to brand
with the fraudulent signature of “progress” every kind of blackguardism
and abuse which the mechanical minds of the worst and most successful
Englishmen, Germans and Frenchmen were able to contrive.
This being so it is almost a necessity, not to say an honour, to depart
in every possible way from the methods, the beliefs and the practices
of the nineteenth century, and if Euhemerism seemed ludicrous to our
fathers and grandfathers, that is all the more reason why we should
treat it seriously here.
The conclusions we have arrived at by our method are the following:--
1. That at some time or other in the dim past, the remote ancestors of
the Greeks encountered a people so very much superior to themselves
that they deified this strange race though they mingled with them.
2. That two factions--the ruling faction and the subject faction--among
their ancestors, were led by two men, who though they may have borne
different names from those that have come down to us by tradition, were
probably related to each other very much as the myth describes.
3. That the man whom tradition calls Zeus was a wise and superior
person, bearing a close resemblance to his superior forebears, and that
the other, whom tradition calls Prometheus, was a depraved, foolish
and ambitious man, with just that amount of gutter smartness which the
nineteenth century regarded and crowned as superiority.
4. That Zeus wished to impose certain wise restrictions upon the
common and ignorant people (the inferior of the two races) under
his rule--particularly in regard to the use of fire--and that these
restrictions probably appeared onerous to them.
5. That Prometheus, championing the cause of the inferior people,
attempted by means of a ruse to circumvent the power of Zeus to impose
the aforementioned restrictions, but failed.
6. That finally Prometheus gave the secret of producing fire to the
inferior people, unconditionally, and that this gift far from proving a
benefit, turned out to be a calamity, the appalling nature of which can
still be read from the internal evidence of the myth itself.
It will now be my concern to discover what historical or
anthropological confirmation can be found for the above contentions.
Or, seeing that these conclusions themselves must be regarded as but
clumsy gropings into the pitch darkness of prehistoric mankind, I shall
be content if the records of neolithic and palæolithic man offer no
insuperable objections to the interpretation of the Prometheus legend
on these euhemeristic lines.
As our principal objective in this enquiry is to investigate the act of
giving the secret of fire-production to a people who, owing to the lack
of previous experience, must be supposed to have been ignorant of its
legitimate use, and to determine in what respect the myth is correct
in regarding this act as a most terrible calamity, we shall perforce
have to concentrate upon the question of fire and its relation to the
civilisation and daily life of human beings.
Now the first prejudice to be abandoned on the threshold of this
enquiry is the foolish nineteenth-century belief that all discoveries,
all new appliances and contrivances, which issue from the unscrupulous
Promethean mind of the Chemist or the Engineer, necessarily constitute
an improvement, a degree of “Progress,” an advance in the assumed
upward march of mankind.
The amazing fact is that, despite the obvious crudeness of this
belief, and the total absence of any foundation for it, the majority
not only held it,[76] but still hold it. It is one of the many
nineteenth-century absurdities that have been transferred bodily to
this century.
For, despite its appalling cruelties and all its inhuman exploitation
of the economically inferior, the nineteenth century was a very
Christian century. In many respects it was perhaps the most Christian
century that has ever existed. The resolute optimism with which it
accepted every innovation, every new complication of life, as a sign
of progress, was therefore religious optimism--the most stubborn and
ineradicable of its kind.
With the masses groaning under an exploitation more cruel than has
ever been seen in the world before; with the oppressors of these
masses growing every day more vulgar, more luxurious, more dishonest,
more pleasure-loving and more convinced that they were the chosen of
God; with distrust increasing so rapidly on either side that, at the
end of the century a war to the death was secretly declared by each
side against its opponent; with ill-health, degeneration, insanity,
and the multiplication of undesirables increasing by leaps and bounds
(by “undesirables” are meant people who had been made undesirable
by the system); with the character and the mind of the masses being
deliberately deteriorated by besotting labours;--that typical
Christian, Browning, was still able to lisp: “God’s in His Heaven,
all’s right with the world.” All’s right with the world! when Browning
and his class, a small minority in the land, were the only people who
were “all right.” If it were not possible to suspect our bard of the
grossest latter-day religiosity, we should be compelled to charge him
with indifference more refined than any of which human beings have been
capable before.[77]
A few voices, those of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold (and of Cobbett and
Byron at the beginning of the century), were raised in protest against
the deafening cheers of the nineteenth-century Christian optimists,
over all the fast accumulating complexities of life; but they were
of no avail. The ruling minority were “all right,” consequently
the Christian God _must_ be supposed to be behind the forces of
“progress.”[78]
Now, is it possible that the Greeks were wiser than ourselves? Is
it possible that they did not accept so unquestioningly the alleged
benefits of their civilisation? Is it possible that with a deeper
humanity even the happiest among them were unable to believe that
their “Zeus” could possibly be behind a system that made the majority
miserable; and preferred to regard him as actively hostile to the
founder or founders of their culture? It is certainly possible, if
not probable; but is the fact demonstrated? Can we believe that, as
conditions became worse for them, as the result of a civilisation based
upon the unlimited use of fire, they grew more and more convinced that
their good god “Zeus” must be opposed to the arrangement? Far from
believing that all was “right” with their world because their Zeus
happened to be in “His Heaven” did they imagine him even as tolerating
the creators and founders of their civilisation?[79]
Truth to tell the Greeks would most probably have been more staggered
by the heartlessness of the modern age in supposing that its good god
was on the side of its complex and pointless civilisation, than by any
other aspect of life at the present day. They would have inspected our
sweated industries, our coal-mines, our tube railway attendants, our
stokers on large liners, our besotted factory hands, our steelworkers
whose lives are seriously curtailed by their work, our drain
inspectors--in fact, all those who really bear the brunt of modern
“Progress,” and when they heard that the orthodox belief was that a
good god was behind it all, would have cried “Blasphemy!”[80]
Believing, as most fairly sane people do, that the god they love means
well by them, the Greeks could not conceive of their Zeus being on the
side of the creators of even their own civilisation and its miseries.
On the contrary, they conceived him as being so actively hostile to
both as to keep the chief originator of all their culture in eternal
and most humiliating agony.
This is at least an interesting reminder that although in many respects
we are the direct outcome of Greek errors, they, our predecessors in
stupidity, were a little bit wiser than ourselves in one material
respect.
Commenting on the consequences of Prometheus’s gift of fire to men,
Hesiod says:--
“For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from
ills and hard toil and heavy sickness, which brings the Fates upon men;
for in misery men grow old quickly.... Of themselves diseases came
upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals
silently.”[81]
Describing the last age, moreover, or the Iron Age of mankind, with
which he happened to be fatally contemporaneous, Hesiod says:--
“For now in truth is the iron race, neither will they ever cease by
day, nor at all by night, from toil and wretchedness, corrupt as they
are.”[82]
The reader will not be surprised to hear that these passages have
from time to time caused some consternation in the minds of those
moderns who take for granted the desirability of all innovations. It
has even been suggested that the first passage, at least, must be
an interpolation;[83] while Clericus, among others, has pointed to
the inveterate human weakness of regarding past ages as superior to
any present age, and has thus tried to account for Hesiod’s gloom by
charging him with romantic illusions about the times that had preceded
him. Romanticism is, however, in any case, the very last charge
that could justly be brought against our shepherd poet, and Völcker
vigorously defends the passages in question against the suspicion of
having been interpolated.[84]
But Völcker goes further, and in my opinion his analysis of Hesiod’s
pessimism is perhaps the most penetrating that has been attempted
hitherto. He very reasonably calls attention to the fact that, in all
cases where life’s activities are extended or multiplied, there is a
corresponding increase in life’s needs, and that this condition in its
turn leads to a softening and an enervation of man as man. Complexity
supersedes simplicity, morals become corrupted, and ostentation and
display, luxury and debauchery quickly follow.[85] Hence the odious
comparison with a former and simpler age!
Now although I do not believe that this analysis goes quite deep
enough, it is excellent. It does at least attempt to discover a little
of the “forgotten” meaning in the Prometheus myth, and to explain the
odium tradition appears to have heaped on a supposed benefactor to
mankind.
C. O. Müller is also helpful. He says:--
“Now anyone who perceived that all human industry depends on the
possession of fire, but who was, at the same time, often faint and
weary with the curse of labour, and who, moreover, dreamt, like all
antiquity, of a lost paradise, a golden age of rest and peace, must
have readily ascribed the gift of fire to the hero of skilful industry,
and easily imagined, too, the indignation it excited in the gods who
punished the restless and presumptuous strivings of man with the loss
of pristine happiness, and even laid in bonds and fetters his daring
intellect, which is ever apt to soar beyond its boundaries.”[86]
In both Völcker and Müller, but particularly in the former, we are
therefore led to suspect that all was not well with mankind after the
stealing of fire; and that is why Völcker deliberately compares the
Greek myth of Prometheus with the Semitic story of the fall of man. In
each case a golden age, a paradisaical existence, preceded the anger
of the gods; in both cases woman plays an important part in bringing
the mischief upon man, and in both stories there appears to be a fear
on the part of the gods that man may seize the secret of eternal life
unless he is severely chastised.
In Genesis, after the stealing of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge,
we read: “And the Lord God said, Behold the man [Adam] is become as one
of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and
take also of the Tree of Life, and eat and live for ever, therefore the
Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden.”[87]
While Hesiod says: “For the gods keep hidden from men the means of
life.”[88]
Nietzsche[89] and Byron[90] are among the more famous of the poet
thinkers who have also seen the similarity between the two myths.
I think, however, that I have drawn a more interesting parallel in
comparing certain aspects of the Prometheus myth with the circumstances
which, in the Old Testament, precede the flood, and since both the
story of Adam and Eve and the account of the events immediately
preceding the flood are, according to such eminent scholars as
Schrader, Dillmann, Wellhausen and Schultz, to be regarded simply as
alternative solutions of the same problem--the origin of evil,[91] I
think, in selecting the account from Genesis vi. 1-4, I have seized
upon a legend more historically possible than that of the Garden of
Eden.
Be all this as it may, Völcker and Müller evidently appear to agree in
this, that the stealing of fire, with all its consequences, was by no
means an unmixed blessing to those for whom it was stolen. And, indeed,
we have only to think a moment in order to realise how stupendous the
innovation was.
With the means to produce fire, _pottery_ became possible, the working
of metals was made easy, more time was obtained for industries tending
to complicate life, because less time was occupied for meals,[92] and
finally the nomad life, which must to some extent have followed the
seasons, could be changed for a life that was not only more stable,
but actually stationary. As the rigours of winter, even close to the
coldest zone, could now be faced and endured, _life could be continued
during the cold months in the same locality where the spring and summer
had been enjoyed_. The pastoral life, agriculture and industry followed
as a matter of course, and in their train, commerce.
These are certainly changes sufficiently far-reaching to justify
Völcker in assuming that innumerable ills must have attended those who
originally attempted to adapt their lives to them, and to explain the
powerful hostility to Prometheus that is still to be read from the
internal evidence of the myth. Even illness and disease are not hard
to trace to the changes arising from the abandonment of the nomadic
in favour of the stationary mode of existence. A moment’s reflection
suffices to show how inevitably such consequences would come about.
To take the most obvious first, it is clear that a nomadic people can
leave a place, or a district, they have befouled. A stationary people,
however, have to remain in the midst of their befoulment. While still
new to the life, therefore, they must have suffered a good deal as
the result of unhygienic surroundings, and bitter experience alone
could have taught them the urgent need of even the most elementary
sanitation. Again, as Völcker points out, agriculture and the pastoral
life lead to a softening and a debilitation of the body (as compared
with a life of hunting, for instance). But a change such as this is not
effected without serious results. Mysterious ailments, particularly of
the alimentary canal, must have begun to appear; women must have found
that the stationary life modified the former ease and regularity of
their functions (child-birth in particular) and violent deaths and
probably manias and madnesses may have been the result.
Apart from the further, and I believe most important, consequences
which I shall now proceed to consider, surely those I have just
outlined must have proved sufficiently alarming to stamp themselves
indelibly on the memories of those who suffered from them. It will
be urged, perhaps, that none of these consequences could have been
immediate, that they would have been a matter of gradual growth,
passing in their development over innumerable generations, so that the
ultimate sufferers would have consisted of people totally unacquainted
with the conditions prevailing previous to the introduction of fire.
This objection is a very sound one. But those who wish to make it may
be reminded of two considerations:--
1. That tradition would, in any case, account for the keeping of the
memory of former times green in the minds of later generations.
2. That since primitive medicine and surgery (including, of course,
midwifery) and primitive drugs, must also have been handed down by
oral tradition, their sudden collapse in the presence of the novel and
obscure complications and difficulties would surely in itself have
sufficed to indicate a development in a bad direction, as compared with
former times, though these might never have been known by the actual
sufferers themselves.
But I must leave it to the reader to imagine the further obvious and
manifold evil consequences that may strike him as having arisen from
the unlimited use of fire. Unfortunately I cannot join him in these
interesting speculations, for I must now confine myself only to those
evil results of Prometheus’s theft which constitute an essential step
in the discussion of my main theme.
I can sympathise with any reader who, though he may not wish to advance
the objection dealt with above, yet experiences some difficulty in
admitting that the evil results already referred to should have been
directly connected by the ancient Greeks with the discovery of fire
production. I feel also that while these evil results might have
been ascribed by the ancient Greek to the conditions of an elaborate
civilisation, their immediate connection with fire is not so obvious as
to be able to account for the very definite association of Prometheus’s
theft with a calamity which we find unmistakably revealed by the myth.
And here, I think, Völcker’s reasoning breaks down, as of course does
also Müller’s rather far-fetched image of an old Greek in the act of
deliberately fancying the connection between civilisation and fire. It
seems to me that in order to account for so positive an association
between Prometheus’s theft and a calamity compatible with such a
tremendous outbreak of wrath on the part of Zeus, a closer connection
must be found between fire and disaster than that which is traced
through an intermediate phenomenon as complex and as multifarious
as civilisation. For a complicated civilisation may be traced to
_knowledge_, as in the case of the Garden of Eden myth, or to the
desire for _immortality_, as in the myth of Osiris and his sister Isis;
it does not necessarily occur to one immediately that it must be due to
the unlimited use of fire.
I think, therefore, that in order to account for so emphatic a
connection between fire and disaster more immediate results of the
unlimited use of fire must be sought.[93]
I have said that Prometheus was nowhere worshipped in Greece; there
was, however, a sort of altar[94] consecrated to him at Athens by the
ancient guild of potters (κεραμεῖς) as patron of their craft. It is
said to have been located in the sanctuary of Athena and Hephæstus,
between the Academy and the Colonus Hippius.[95]
Now this is a definite proof of the connection by the ancient Greeks of
the three ideas--Prometheus, Fire, Pottery--and constitutes the most
convincing evidence we have of a certain aspect of civilisation being
traced directly by tradition to fire. It is interesting, moreover,
from this point of view, that it forms the one connecting link I most
require in order to take the next step, which is the association of
fire and food; for it is this association which I claim to be the _most
important feature of the forgotten meaning of the myth_.
I propose to substantiate this view by calling attention to the
effects, some of them as tragic and disastrous as they are mysterious,
which result from the cooking of food.
It is only quite recently, within the last decade, that certain facts
have become known about food, in regard to which man’s ignorance
hitherto is as inexplicable as his escape from the full consequences
of that ignorance has been miraculous. Looking back, as we can now,
upon the thousands of years of error that have culminated in the
present Age, we are, to our astonishment, compelled to acknowledge
that it can have been only by the chance efficacy of rule-of-thumb
wisdom, that the races of the northern temperate zone have been able
to survive at all (if those who originally used fire illegitimately
in northern regions actually did escape, which is very doubtful), and
that before the rule-of-thumb wisdom established something approaching
sanity in the kitchens of primeval man, the most appalling suffering
and probably madness must have raged--not to mention the agonies of
mystification in the presence of a curse which, owing to the standard
of knowledge of the time, could not have been traced to food. It was
therefore most probably only the juxtaposition in time of the unlimited
use of fire and the terrible physical scourges and apparent “plagues”
which followed upon it, that caused the ancient Greeks to associate the
two. I do not mean to suggest here that because, in the light of recent
research, their treatment of their food appears to have been the cause
of the chief of the great disasters that followed on the unlimited use
of fire, that the ancestors of the ancient Greeks were therefore aware
of this. Disaster and the unlimited use of fire were simply connected
distinctly as apparent cause and effect, because they followed upon
each other closely in the order of time.
It is not generally known, even to-day, how much harm is done to food
by exposing it to heat. As I shall show later on, apparent “plagues”
have been caused even as recently as during the last great war, by
the ignorance which prevails in regard to this question, and the
very people who are likely to feel most sceptical about the suggested
appalling consequences of such ignorance are themselves most probably
half-witted, foul of breath, debilitated, and even disfigured,
precisely owing to this very ignorance.
It must have occurred to many, however, that man is the only animal
that eats most of his food in a cooked condition, and that, therefore,
the procedure is by no means dictated by nature. It must also have been
observed by some, that such articles of diet as oysters, apples, milk,
lettuce, are so different to the palate when cooked, that they are
scarcely recognisable. Is this alteration merely an illusion, and is
the palate possibly mistaken in noticing so great a difference? Or have
some essential properties, constituting the identity of these articles
of diet, actually been changed or lost in the process of cooking? And
if these articles of diet have not escaped unscathed from the fire, why
should we suppose that others enjoy an exceptional immunity? Maybe that
some very valuable properties of the food have been lost--properties
without which life cannot be maintained at a healthy or even a happy
standard--or cannot be maintained at all. Is this possible?
It is not merely possible, it is abundantly proved. It is now
demonstrated beyond doubt that not only characteristics of mere
identity, such as colour, shape and smell, are altered in the cooking
process, but also that properties of the extremest value to the
consuming animal--properties, too, that are strangely susceptible to
heat--are partially or wholly destroyed by fire, so that unless by some
accident (an accident which happens frequently enough to be regarded
as a rule, where the diet is extremely varied, as in the case of the
modern European) compensation is obtained through other articles of
food, life either cannot continue, or else disease quickly sets in. And
since the diseases of faulty diet are as obscure as they are terrible,
they are usually the last to be traced to their proper cause. Even in
the case of the modern European, however, who can frequently obtain
compensating diet without knowing that he is doing so, the evil effects
of an injudicious treatment of food give rise to all manner of vague
disorders which greatly impair his enjoyment of life.
For some considerable time in modern Europe, doubts have been
entertained and expressed about the advisability of cooking certain
foods. The Holy Catholic Church, in its incomparable wisdom respecting
all the material side of human life, was probably the first institution
to point to the necessity of a partially raw food diet at specified
moments in the year; and, with all the pomp and mystery of a religious
rite, to encourage its adherents to adopt such a diet at certain stated
periods. As late as the sixteenth century, for instance, the Italians
are said to have observed the rules of their faith so strictly that,
during the forty days of Lent, they went without any cooked food on
three days in the week, and lived on fruit and vegetables.[96] The
beneficial results of this periodical abstinence from cooked food were
doubtless ascribed to the circumstance that religious obedience is
providentially rewarded; but whatever may have been the suspected cause
of the good effects in the minds of the ignorant faithful, the problem
could certainly not have been obscure to those responsible for the
discipline.
In later years, of course, with the decline of faith, and the advent of
Protestantism, the Catholic Church, which is the storehouse of mediæval
and ancient wisdom in all important matters connected with human life,
began to exercise less sway, and therefore found itself constrained,
even in the countries that were not lost to it, to relax the rigour
of its control; while in Protestant countries, the reformers, not
satisfied with renouncing the Pope, unfortunately for posterity were
foolish enough to divorce themselves for all time from those very
religious observances and exercises for which their new revolutionary
programme offered them no adequate substitute. Indeed, the observance
of fasts, and the practice of differentiating between certain
foodstuffs, was regarded by the majority of the ignorant reformers as
“pure superstition” and “idolatry.”
Problems of human importance, however, are not to be set aside with
impunity in this cavalier fashion. Hostile as you may be to the
Catholic Church, this does not render you immune from the consequences
of your own stupidity, and Catholic solutions of certain problems are
either to be accepted, or fresh solutions supplied in their place.
But no such obligation was ever recognised by the reformers and their
followers. No such obligation has even been felt by any Protestant
people until quite recently. And even now it is not humanity or
brotherly piety that is directing the methods of the modern dietetic
movement, but sheer panic in the face of all the appalling consequences
of centuries of neglect.
Thus it will surprise no one to find that the science of dietetics is
essentially the creation of Protestant countries and that England,
Germany and America, while producing the worst cooks, both male
and female, from Alfred the Great downwards, are the peoples who
have contributed most towards this new department of knowledge. Run
your eye down a list of the names of men prominently connected with
dietetics, and you will find that the natives of Protestant countries
far outnumber those of any other part of the world. This is not a
curious coincidence, but just exactly what one would expect. When
muddle, suffering and grave physical degeneration arise through
neglect of the Art of Life, it is the scientist who is called upon to
advise, and to advise quickly nowadays. In all States with a purely
mechanical and Promethean civilisation, complicated by the absurdity
of Protestantism and its monster offspring Puritanism, it is the poor,
clumsy, heavy-footed scientist who has to take the place of the artist,
of the man who knows. Unfortunately, however, the scientist’s ways are
so devious, so uncertain, and he takes such an amazingly long time to
arrive at even approximately correct results, that humanity almost
perishes on his doorstep before he rushes out from his laboratory,
grizzled by age, with a phial in his hand containing the necessary
restorative.
The science of dietetics, in spite of the urgency with which its
results have been needed for scores of years in England, is a young
science, a recent science. All its most important conclusions are
scarcely a decade old!
FOOTNOTES:
[76] There can be no doubt that the majority of those who, like
Byron, Shelley and the scholars, start examining the Prometheus myth
with a prepossession in favour of the Titan, are influenced by this
nineteenth-century assumption.
[77] Lovers of Browning may object that it is unfair to hold him
responsible for an expression of opinion which he was careful to place
in the mouth of a thoroughly irresponsible person. This objection would
be valid if the general spirit of his writings did not lead one to
believe that, on the whole, Browning would have been prepared heartily
to endorse Pippa’s optimism. Browning, however, was not so bad as
Tennyson in this respect. See, for instance, the very foolish lines
composing the 59th to the 62nd couplets of _Locksley Hall_. See also
the conclusion of _The Princess_. In fact, Tennyson’s works abound in
optimistic sentiments about the nineteenth century and its “progress.”
[78] It is always a matter of wonder to me that the nineteenth century
was not sufficient to make the whole of the working-classes of this
country atheists for all time. I suppose that the sixth and seventh
verses of the twelfth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews did
good service in preventing this. Nevertheless, it is gratifying to
see that more and more of the proletariat are growing indifferent to
Christianity every day. An intelligent alternative would have been
for the working-classes to disbelieve, as the Greeks did, that their
god could have anything to do with their civilisation, or to believe
that he was actively opposed to it. In this way they might reasonably
have remained believers as the Greeks did, while abhorring their
civilisation.
[79] In this respect it is interesting to note that there are windows
in Westminster Abbey dedicated to the civil engineers, Stephenson,
Locke, Brunel, and Trevithick. There is also a statue to James Watt,
and the graves of Telford, the builder of the Menai Bridge, and of
Robert Stephenson (the same as the above), the designer of the tubular
bridge across the Menai Straits, are in the nave. There are also
statues to Francis Horner! and Richard Cobden! Cromwell, thanks to
the efforts of Charles II., is only honoured outside the Abbey. St.
Paul’s holds the remains of two engineers, John Rennie, the designer
of Waterloo Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, and Plymouth
Breakwater, and Robert Mylne, designer of Blackfriars Bridge, the
Gloucester and Berkeley Canal, etc. These men were characteristic of
the type responsible for our modern civilisation, and the fact that
they receive due honour in the two leading temples of the Christian god
in England, shows, I think, at least that the Established Church and
the governing classes of England are, or were, satisfied that their god
approved of modern civilisation.
[80] For an illuminating but exceedingly depressing account of the
ill-health brought about by modern employments alone, not to mention
modern conditions, reference should be made to Dr. Thomas Oliver’s
_Diseases of Occupation_ (Methuen and Co., 1908). Thus we read (p. 37)
that in the latter part of the nineteenth century there were 105 cases
of phosphorus necrosis of the jaw caused in match factories by the
handling of industrial phosphorus, 20 per cent. of which ended fatally.
And this industry is by no means an important one. In 1907 the match
industry employed only 4,000 people. I imagine that even these figures
for phosphorus necrosis in England must be slightly underestimated, or
else the period which they cover must be very small, as we find (p. 39)
that between the years 1866 and 1875, 126 cases of phosphorus necrosis
occurred in Vienna. Again, in the French match works near Paris, in
1894, 32 cases of phosphorus poisoning were reported; in 1895, 125;
in 1896, 223, or one-third of the effective force of the factory. In
1896 the French State paid out 400,000 francs in compensation for this
evil. In the bridge-building branch of engineering the death-rate
is heavy from “compressed air illness.” At the St. Louis Bridge, on
the Mississippi, 600 men were employed in sinking the foundations;
119 suffered from caisson disease, 14 of whom died. At the Brooklyn
Bridge 110 cases were reported, 3 of which died (p. 94). Chemical
workers appear to withstand the bad conditions of their work until
thirty-five years of age, but after this the death-rate rises so much
that by the time they have reached the age of forty-five to fifty-five
the death-rate is double that of men who follow an outdoor occupation
(pp. 123-124). During the ten years ending 1899, 263 workpeople were
killed in explosive factories alone, and 1,064 injured (p. 132). During
the year 1906, 632 cases of lead-poisoning occurred in various works
connected with the working of lead (p. 149). In 1902 the figure was
629. The death-rate among diamond-cutters through lead-poisoning is
also very heavy. Still-births and abortion are very high among women
who work in lead. The statistics on p. 232 about the steel-workers
are appalling. See also figures given for deaths due to occupations
involving the breathing of dust (p. 247). The deaths from phthisis
among pottery-workers and cutlers are three times those occurring from
the same cause among agriculturalists. The file-makers’ death-rate from
phthisis is almost four times that of the agriculturalist from the same
cause. The death-rate among miners from all causes, including phthisis,
is, of course, exceedingly high--from accident alone in 1907 it was
1,216. The deaths among workers with rock drills are much higher,
particularly among the gold-miners in Africa. They scarcely last five
years (see pp. 284, 285). It is impossible to enter into all the
particulars of death and disease due to modern occupations; I can but
recommend the reader to study Dr. Oliver’s able treatise on the subject.
[81] _Works and Days_, 90-93, 102-104.
[82] _Ibid._, 177-178.
[83] Goettling thinks that the second passage is also an interpolation.
[84] _Op. cit._, pp. 11-14.
[85] _Op. cit._, p. 23. “Mit der fortgeschrittenen Ausbildung
des Lebens aber, mit Erweiterung der Lebensbedürfnisse kommt
Verweichlichung und Erschlaffung, Mannigfaltigkeit für die
Einfachheit, Verderbniss der Sitten, Aufwand und Pracht, Üppigkeit und
Ausschweifung.”
[86] _Op. cit._, p. 62. It is interesting to see how Müller, towards
the end of the passage quoted, cannot help implying that it is the
gods’ jealousy of man’s intellect that brings down the curse on
mankind, and not the hero of civilisation himself by his innovations.
This shows how even an enlightened scholar, hot as he is upon the
scent, is blinded by the nineteenth-century prepossession in favour of
modern civilisation.
[87] Gen. iii. 22 and 23.
[88] _Works and Days_, 44 _et seq._
[89] See _The Birth of Tragedy_, pp. 77-78: “Indeed, it is not
impossible that this myth [Prometheus] has the same significance for
the Aryan race that the myth of the fall of man has for the Semitic,
and that there is a relationship between the two like that of brother
and sister.”
[90] _Don Juan_, Canto I., cxxvii.
[91] Dr. Skinner is of opinion that there is little plausibility in
the view that the story of Adam and Eve and the account of the events
immediately preceding the flood are solutions of the same problem. He
is, however, careful to add: “It would be equally rash to affirm that
it [the story in Gen. vi. 1-4] presupposes such an account [the story
of Adam and Eve]” (_op. cit._, p. 141).
[92] Owing, of course, to the fact that complete mastication is more
easily shirked when food is cooked.
[93] It would appear as if the negroes had also suffered some terrible
disaster in connection with their early use of fire; for, according to
a negro tradition, their beatific state was ended by Til (God) sending
them fire in his anger for some crime they had committed. The fire
destroyed all except one named Musikdegen. See Rev. S. Baring-Gould,
_Legends of the Old Testament Characters_, p. 36.
[94] C. O. Müller seems to doubt that it really was an altar, _op.
cit._, p. 60.
[95] See F. G. Welcker, _Die Aeschylische Trilogie, “Prometheus_,” pp.
120-121.
[96] Dr. med., H. Moeser (Frankfurter Zeitgemässe Broschüren),
Bd. xxvi., 1907, _Das Kirchliche Fasten und Abstinenzgebot in
gesundheitlicher Beleuchtung_, p. 164.