THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 OF THE AGE 
 
 AND OTHER PLEAS AND DISCUSSIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCES POWER COBBE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "AN ESSAY ON INTUITIVE MORALS," "RELIGIOUS 
 
 'THE HOPES OF THE HUMAN 
 ARIEN," "THE DUTI] 
 WOMEN," "A FAITHLESS WORLD," ETC. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET 
 1888 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ESSAY 
 
 PREFACE ............. v 
 
 I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE ... 3 
 
 II. THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS ... 37 
 
 III. PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM ........ 71 
 
 IV. THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING ...... 113 
 
 V. To KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW ..... 149 
 
 VI. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE 175 
 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 WE are all possessed of friends who, when any 
 serious belief or matter of practical conduct is in 
 question, take up at the outset a thesis of their 
 own which they press on our acceptance with the 
 best arguments at their disposal. It is a rarer priv- 
 ilege to enjoy the intercourse of one who does not 
 invariably start with a ready-made opinion of what 
 may be true, right, or expedient in the doubtful case 
 on which we wish to consult him, but who will 
 patiently turn over the matter with us, suggest 
 and register the various "pros and cons," refer to 
 admitted principles and facts, and thus aid us to 
 form a comprehensive judgment for ourselves rather 
 than induce us to accept his own. The discourse of 
 the first order of friends is an Argument, a Plea, a 
 Contention ; that of the second, a Discussion. 
 
 In the same way, of course, an Essay may be 
 either a Plea or a Discussion. The author may take 
 the position of Counsel for one side or other of the 
 case before the reader, or else he may charge as 
 Judge, and sum up the substance of such arguments 
 as might have been used by two advocates on the 
 opposite sides. Either style of writing is perfectly 
 legitimate ; and each has its particular fitness and 
 
Vi PREFACE 
 
 utility. Misunderstanding and perplexity only occur 
 when the hasty reader (newspaper critics being sig- 
 nally guilty in this matter) chooses to assume that 
 an avowedly one-sided Plea is intended for a Judicial 
 Discussion,* or treats a Discussion as a Plea for the 
 side which the critic dislikes. 
 
 In the present little collection of Essays, written 
 at various times and for various objects, it will be 
 found that the first three belong to the class which 
 I have described as Pleas, and the last three more 
 or less to that of Discussions. 
 
 I plead that the Scientific Spirit of the Age, while 
 it has given us many precious things, is, in its pres- 
 ent exorbitant development, depriving us of things 
 more precious still. 
 
 I plead that the Education of the Emotions (to 
 be carried on chiefly through the contagion of good 
 and noble sentiments) is an object of paramount 
 importance, albeit nearly totally ignored in ordinary 
 systems of education. 
 
 I plead that, in the present disintegration of all 
 religious opinion, Judaism may yet become a pro- 
 gressive, and cease to be merely a tribal, faith ; and 
 that, if it absorb the moral and spiritual essence of 
 Christianity, it may solve the great problem of com- 
 
 * 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. 
 
PREFACE Vll 
 
 bining a theology consonant to modern philosophy 
 with a worship hallowed by the sacred associations 
 of the remotest past. 
 
 In the last three Essays, I discuss the relation of 
 Knowledge to Happiness ; I discuss the real as 
 distinguished from the conventional character of 
 our common processes of Thought ; and, finally, I 
 discuss the respective claims of Town and Country 
 Life to be esteemed most healthy and felicitous for 
 body and mind. 
 
 I shall much rejoice if I win my readers to adopt 
 the opinions which I have advocated in the first half 
 of the book. 
 
 I shall remain altogether indifferent as to which 
 of the alternative views put forth in the concluding 
 Essays may seem to them most impressive, and 
 only congratulate myself if I shall have succeeded 
 in setting forth in due light and order the multitu- 
 dinous points which together constitute the materials 
 for forming a sound judgment upon them. 
 
 FRANCES POWER COBBE. 
 
 HENGWRT, DOLGELLY, 
 1888. 
 
ESSAY I. 
 
 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF 
 THE AGE. 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 
 
 THAT the present is pre-eminently the Age 
 of Science is a fact equally recognized by the 
 majority who hail it with triumph and by the 
 minority who regard it with feelings wherein 
 regret and apprehension have their place. As 
 in Literature an age of production is ever 
 followed by an age of criticism, so in the 
 general history of human interests War, Relig- 
 ion, Art, start in early days and run their 
 swift course, while Science creeps slowly after 
 them, till at last she passes them on the way 
 and comes foremost in the race. We still in 
 our time have War ; but it is no longer the 
 conflict of valiant soldiers, but the game of 
 scientific strategists. We still have Religion; 
 but she no longer claims earth and heaven as 
 her domain, but meekly goes to church by a 
 path over which Science has notified, " On 
 Sufferance Only." We still have Art ; but it 
 is no longer the Art of Fancy, but the Art of 
 
4 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 the Intellect, wherein the Beautiful is indefi- 
 nitely postponed to the technically True, as 
 Truth is discerned by men who think quit riy 
 a rien de vrai excepte le laid. All our multi- 
 form activities, from agriculture down to dress- 
 making, are in these days nothing if not 
 " scientific," and to thousands of worthy people 
 it is enough to say that Science teaches this or 
 that, or that the interests of Science require 
 such and such a sacrifice, to cause them to bow 
 their heads, as pious men of old did at the 
 message of a Prophet. " It is SCIENCE ! Let it 
 do what seemeth it good." The claims of the 
 aesthetic faculty, and even of the moral sense, 
 to speak in arrest of judgment on matters en- 
 tirely within their own spheres, are ruled out of 
 court. 
 
 By a paradoxical fatality, however, it would 
 appear as if the obsession of the Scientific 
 Spirit is likely to be a little lightened for us by 
 an event which might have been expected to 
 rivet the yoke on our necks. The recently 
 published Life of the most illustrious and most 
 amiable man of Science of this scientific age 
 has suggested to many readers doubts of the all- 
 sufficiency of Science to build up not theo- 
 ries, but men. Mr. Darwin's admirably candid 
 avowal of the gradual extinction in his mind of 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 5 
 
 the aesthetic * and religious elements has proved 
 startling to a generation which, even when it is 
 ready to abandon Religion, would be direfully 
 distressed to lose the pleasures afforded by Art 
 and Nature, Poetry and Music. Instead of 
 lifting the scientific vocation to the skies (as 
 was probably anticipated), this epoch-making 
 Biography seems to have gone far to throw a 
 sort of dam across the stream, and to have 
 arrested not a few Science-worshippers with 
 the query : " What shall it profit a man if he 
 discover the origin of species and know exactly 
 how earth-worms and sun-dews conduct them- 
 selves, if all the while he grow blind to the 
 loveliness of nature, deaf to music, insensible 
 to poetry, and as unable to lift his soul to the 
 Divine and Eternal as was the primeval Ape 
 from whom he has descended ? Is this all that 
 Science can do for her devotee ? Must he be 
 shorn of the glory of humanity when he is 
 ordained her Priest ? Does he find his loftiest 
 faculties atrophied when he has become a 
 
 * " 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. 
 
6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 " machine for grinding general laws out of 
 large collections of facts"?* 
 
 While these reflections are passing through 
 many minds, it may be permitted to me to re- 
 view some features of the Scientific Spirit of 
 the Age. Frankly, I shall do it from an adverse 
 point of view. There were many years of my 
 life during which I regarded it with profound, 
 though always distant, admiration. Grown old, 
 I have come to think that many spirits in the 
 hierarchy are loftier and purer ; that the noblest 
 study of mankind is Man, rather than rock or 
 insect; and that, even at its best, Knowledge is 
 immeasurably less precious than Goodness and 
 Love. Whether in these estimates I err or am 
 justified, it would, in any case, be superfluous for 
 me to add my feeble voice to the glorification 
 of the Scientific Spirit. Diana of the Ephe- 
 sians was never proclaimed so vociferously 
 " Great " ; and perhaps, like the worshippers of 
 the elder goddess, it may be said of those of 
 Science, " The most part know not wherefore 
 they have come together." It will suffice if 
 I succeed in partially exhibiting how much 
 we are in danger of losing by the Scientific 
 Spirit, while others show us, more or less truly, 
 what we gain thereby. 
 
 * Darwin's Life, vol. \. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin. 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 7 
 
 In speaking of " Science " in this paper, I must 
 be understood to refer only to the Physical 
 Sciences, not to the mathematical or metaphysi- 
 cal. The former (especially the Biological 
 group) have of late years come so much to the 
 front that the old application of the word to the 
 exact sciences and to metaphysics and ethics 
 has almost dropped out of popular use. I also 
 desire to explain at starting that I am not so 
 blind as to ignore the splendid achievements of 
 modern physical science in its own realm, nor 
 the benefits which many applications of the 
 Scientific Spirit have brought in various other 
 directions. It is the intrusiveness and oppres- 
 sion of the Scientific Spirit in regions where it 
 has no proper work, and (still more often) its 
 predominance in others where its place should 
 be wholly subordinate, against which a protest 
 appears to be needed. A score of causes have 
 contributed in our generation to set Science up 
 and to pull other things down. The levels need 
 to be redressed. Time will not permit me to 
 exhibit the results of the excessive share taken 
 of late years by the Scientific Spirit in many 
 practical matters wherein experience and com- 
 mon sense were safer guides, e.g., in Agriculture. 
 This side of the question I must leave un- 
 touched, and limit myself to the discussion of 
 
8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 the general influence of the Scientific Spirit in 
 Education, in Art, in Morals, and in Religion. 
 
 Professor Tyndall, in the Preface to his great 
 work on " Heat as a mode of Motion," calls 
 Science "the noblest growth of modern times," 
 and adds that " as a means of intellectual educa- 
 tion its claims are still disputed, though, once 
 properly organized, greater and more benefi- 
 cent revolutions wait its employment here than 
 those which have marked its application in 
 the material world " (2d ed., p. x). Since the 
 publication of this book, and indeed since the 
 opening of the Age of Science, the relative 
 claims of Science and Literature to form the 
 basis of intellectual instruction have been inces- 
 santly debated by men qualified by experience 
 in tuition (which I cannot claim to be) to form 
 a judgment on the subject. There has been, 
 however, I think, too little attention given on 
 either side to the relative moral influences of 
 the two studies. 
 
 In addressing the London Society for the 
 Extension of University Teaching on March 3 
 last, Sir James Paget expressed his dissent from 
 Professor Morley's opinion (given on a similar 
 occasion last year) that " Literature was an ex- 
 cellent, if not a better study than Science." Sir 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 9 
 
 James maintained, on the contrary, that "noth- 
 ing could better advance human prosperity than 
 Science" and he elaborately set forth the specific 
 benefits of a scientific education as he conceived 
 them, as follows : 
 
 There was first the teaching of the power of observing, 
 then the teaching of accuracy, then of the difficulty of 
 attaining to a real knowledge of the truth, and, lastly, the 
 teaching of the methods by which they could pass from 
 that which was proved to the thinking of what was prob- 
 able.* 
 
 It would, of course, be unjust to hold Science 
 to these definitions, as if they exhausted her 
 claims as our instructress. It may, however, 
 fairly be assumed that, in the view of one of the 
 leading men of science of the day, they are 
 paramount. If any much higher results than 
 they were to be expected from scientific teach- 
 ing, Sir James would scarcely have omitted to 
 present them first or last. To what, then, do 
 these four great lessons of Science amount ? 
 They teach and, I think, teach only Obser- 
 vation, Accuracy, Intellectual Caution, and the 
 acquirement of a Method of advancing to the 
 
 * 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." 
 
IO THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 thinking of what was probable, possibly the 
 method commonly known as Induction. 
 
 I must confess that these " great truths " (as 
 Sir James oddly calls them) represent to my 
 mind only the culmination of the lower range 
 of human faculties; or, more strictly speak- 
 ing, the perfect application to human concerns 
 of those faculties which are common to man 
 and the lower animals. A fox may be an " ob- 
 server" and an exceedingly accurate one of 
 hen-roosts. He may be deeply sensible of "the 
 difficulty of attaining to a real knowledge " of 
 traps. Further than this, he may even "pass 
 from the proved" existence of a pack of 
 hounds in his cover to " thinking that it was 
 probable" he would shortly be chased. To 
 train a MAN, it is surely indispensable to develop 
 in him a superior order of powers from these. 
 His mind must be enriched with the culture of 
 his own age and country, and of other lands 
 and ages, and fortified by familiarity with the 
 thoughts of great souls on the topics of loftiest 
 interest. He must be accustomed to think on 
 subjects above those to which his observation, 
 or accuracy of description, or caution in accept- 
 ing evidence can apply, and on which (it is to 
 be hoped) he will reach some anchorage of faith 
 more firm than Sir James Paget's climax of 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE II 
 
 scientific culture, " the passing from that which 
 was proved to the thinking of what was prob- 
 able" He ought to handle the method of de- 
 ductive reasoning at least as well as that of 
 induction, and beyond these (purely intellect- 
 ual) attainments a human education making 
 claim to completeness should cultivate the im- 
 agination and poetic sentiment; should " soften 
 manners," as the liter ae humaniores proverbially 
 did of old; should widen the sympathies, dig- 
 nify the character, inspire enthusiasm for noble 
 actions, and chivalrous tenderness towards 
 women and all who need defence ; and thus 
 send forth the accomplished student a gentle- 
 man in the true sense of the word. The benefits 
 attributed by Sir James Paget to Scientific 
 education, and even those with which, in can- 
 dor, we may credit it beyond his four "great 
 truths," fall, I venture to think, deplorably 
 short of such a standard of culture as this. 
 
 The deficiencies of Scientific education do 
 not exhaust the objections against it. There 
 seem to be positive evils almost inseparable 
 from such training when carried far with the 
 young. One of the worst is the danger of the 
 adoption by the student of materialistic views 
 on all subjects. He need not become a theo- 
 retic or speculative Materialist : that is another 
 
12 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 risk, which may or may not be successfully 
 eliminated. But he will almost inevitably fall 
 into practical materialism. Of the two sides of 
 human life, his scientific training will compel 
 him to think always in the first place of the 
 lower. The material (or, as our fathers would 
 have called it, the carnal) fact will be upper- 
 most in his mind, and the spiritual meaning 
 thereof more or less out of sight. He will 
 view his mother's tears not as expressions of 
 her sorrow, but as solutions of muriates and 
 carbonates of soda, and of phosphates of lime ; 
 and he will reflect that they were caused not 
 by his heartlessness, but by cerebral pressure 
 on her lachrymal glands. When she dies, he 
 will "peep and botanize" on her grave, not 
 with the poet's sense of the sacrilegiousness of 
 such ill-placed curiosity, but with the serene 
 conviction of the meritoriousness of accurate 
 observation among the scientifically interesting 
 " Flora " of a cemetery. 
 
 To this class of mind, thoroughly imbued 
 with the Scientific Spirit, Disease is the most 
 important of facts and the greatest of evils 
 Sin, on the other hand, is a thing on which 
 neither microscope nor telescope nor spectro- 
 scope, nor even stethoscope, can afford instruc- 
 tion. Possibly the student will think it only a 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 13 
 
 spectral illusion ; or he will foresee that it may 
 be explained by and by scientifically, as a form 
 of disease. There may be discovered bacilli of 
 Hatred, Covetousness, and Lust, respectively 
 responsible for Murder, Theft, and Adultery. 
 Already hypocrisy is a recognized form of 
 Hysteria. The state of opinion in " Erewhon " 
 may be hopefully looked for in England, when 
 the Scientific Spirit altogether prevails. 
 
 Besides its materializing tendency, a Scien- 
 tific Education involves other evils, among 
 which may be counted the fostering of a callous 
 and irreverent spirit. To this I shall return 
 presently. Of course every tendency of a pur- 
 suit, good or bad, affects the young who are 
 engaged in it much more than the old, whose 
 characters may have been moulded under quite 
 opposite influences. We must wait for a gen- 
 eration to see the Scientific Spirit in its full 
 development. 
 
 As to the instruction of young men and 
 women in Physiological Science in particular, 
 I am exonerated from treating the subject by 
 being privileged to cite the opinions of two of 
 the most eminent and experienced members 
 of the scholastic profession. I do so with 
 great thankfulness, believing that it will be 
 a revelation to many parents, blindly caught 
 
14 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 by scientific claptrap, to learn that such are 
 the views of men among the best qualified 
 in England to pronounce judgment on the 
 subject. 
 
 The late lamented Mr. Thring, of Upping- 
 ham, wrote to me, Sept. 6, 1886: 
 
 My writings on Education sufficiently show how strongly 
 I feel on the subject of a literary education, or rather how 
 confident I am in the judgment that there can be no worthy 
 education which is not based on the study of the highest 
 thoughts of the highest men in the best shape. As for 
 Science (most of it falsely so called), if a few leading 
 minds are excepted, it simply amounts, to the average dull 
 worker, to no more than a kind of upper shop work, 
 weighing out and labelling and learning alphabetical for- 
 mulae, a superior grocer assistant's work, and has not 
 a single element of higher mental training in it. Not 
 to mention that it leaves out all knowledge of men and 
 life, and therefore is eminently fitted for life and its 
 struggle ! Physiology in its worse sense adds to this a 
 brutalizing of the average practitioner, or rather a dev- 
 ilish combination of intellect worship and cruelty at the 
 expense of feeling and character. For my part, if it 
 were true that Vivisection had wonderfully relieved bodily 
 disease for men, if it was at the cost of lost spirits, then 
 let the body perish. And it is at the cost of lost spirits. 
 I do not say that under no circumstances should an 
 experiment take place, but I do say that under no circum- 
 stances should an experiment take place for teaching 
 purposes. You will see how decided my judgments are 
 on this matter. 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 15 
 
 The Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Head Master of 
 Harrow, has been good enough to write to me 
 as follows : 
 
 I am most willing to let you quote my words, whether 
 what I said before or what I say now. You command my 
 full sympathy in the crusade which you have so nobly 
 declared against cruelty. I say this frankly, although I 
 know that there is some difference between us in regard 
 to the practice of Vivisection. But even if it be neces- 
 sary that in some cases, and under strict conditions, 
 vivisectional experiments should be made upon animals, I 
 cannot doubt that the use of such experiments tends to 
 exercise a demoralizing influence upon any person who 
 may be called to make them. I hold, therefore, that 
 the educational effect of Vivisection is always injurious. 
 Knowledge is dearly purchased at the cost of tenderness, 
 and I cannot believe that any morally-minded person 
 could desire to familiarize the young with the sight of 
 animal suffering. For my part, I look upon the hardness 
 of heart with which some distinguished physiologists have 
 met the protest raised against Vivisection as one of many 
 signs that materialism means at the last an inversion of 
 the ethical law ; *>., a preference of knowledge to good- 
 ness, of mind to spirit, or, in a word, of human things to 
 divine. Surely it is a paradox that they who minimize the 
 specific distinction between man and the animals should 
 be the least tender in their views of animal sufferings, and 
 that Christians who accentuate that distinction should be 
 willing to spare animals pain at the cost of enhancing 
 their own. I conceive it then to be a primary duty of a 
 modern educator, at School or at College, to cultivate in 
 his pupils, by all the means in his power, the sympathetic 
 sentiment towards the animal world. 
 
1 6 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 To turn to a less painful part of our subject. 
 
 Science and Art are constantly coupled to- 
 gether in common parlance and in grants of 
 public money ; but, if ever incompatibility of 
 temper formed a just ground of divorce, it is 
 surely in their case. When Science like Pov- 
 erty comes in at the door, Art like Love 
 flies out at the window. They move in differ- 
 ent planes, and touch different parts of human 
 nature. Science appeals to the Intellect, Art 
 to the Emotions; and we are so constituted that 
 our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in 
 a well. When our Intellects are in the ascend- 
 ant, our Emotions sink out of sight ; when our 
 Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects 
 subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry 
 of Science which could make intelligent men 
 overlook the fact that she and Art resemble 
 two leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways, 
 and never running together unless there be 
 some game (shall we surmise an endowment of 
 public money?) in view. The synthetic, rever- 
 ential, sympathizing spirit of Art is opposed, 
 as the different poles of the magnet, to the 
 analytic, self-asserting, critical spirit of Science. 
 The artist seeks Beauty ; finds likenesses ; dis- 
 cerns the Ideal through the Real. The man 
 of Science seeks Facts; draws distinctions; 
 strips the Real to the skin and the bones. 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 17 
 
 A great light of the Scientific Age has been 
 heard to say that when he first visited the Vat- 
 ican he " sat down before Raphael's Transfigu- 
 ration and filled three pages of his note-book 
 with its faults." It was the most natural thing 
 in the world for him to do! How should a 
 Physicist approve of three figures suspended 
 in the air in. defiance of the laws of gravita- 
 tion? Or what could a Zoologist say to an 
 angel outrageously combining in his person 
 the wings exclusively belonging to the Order 
 Aves with the arms and legs of Bimana? 
 Worst of all, what must be the feelings of a 
 Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a 
 Centaur with two stomachs, or of a Cherub 
 with none ? 
 
 Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to 
 see what Science can do for it, let us take a 
 typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays 
 like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes, 
 say Shelley's " Sensitive Plant," for example. 
 We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly 
 unscientific statements; e.g., that the lily of the 
 valley grows pale with passion, that the hya- 
 cinth rings peals of music from its bells, and 
 that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. 
 Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe 
 how the garden has been thoroughly drained 
 
1 8 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 and scientifically manured with guano and sew- 
 age. After this the flowers may be mentioned 
 under their proper classes, as monandria and 
 polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such 
 would be the result of bringing the Scientific 
 Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the 
 border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring 
 with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artis- 
 tic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it 
 furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the 
 leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his 
 aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute 
 realism of " A Mummer's Wife " and " La Joie 
 de Vivre." The distance between Walter Scott 
 and Zola measures that between Art and Sci- 
 ence in Fiction. 
 
 To many readers it may appear that the 
 antagonism of Science to Art may be con- 
 doned in favor of her high claim to be the 
 guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it 
 indeed Truth, in the sense which we have hith- 
 erto given to that great and sacred word, at 
 which Physical Science is now aiming? Can 
 we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of 
 Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a 
 Science, like one of Timur's heaps of skulls? 
 To collect a million facts, test them, classify 
 them, raise by induction generalizations con- 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 19 
 
 earning them, and hand them down to the next 
 generation to add a few thousand more facts 
 and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a 
 different basis and another plan, if this be 
 indeed to arrive at " Truth," modern Science 
 may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in 
 other days Truth was deemed something no- 
 bler than this. It was the interests which lay 
 behind and beyond the facts, their possible 
 bearing on man's deepest yearnings and sub- 
 limest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning 
 to the humblest researches into rock and plant, 
 and which glorified such discoveries as Kep- 
 ler's till he cried in rapture, "O God, I think 
 thy thoughts after thee ! " and Newton's, till he 
 closed the " Principia " (as Parker said of him) 
 by "bursting into the Infinite and kneeling 
 there." In our time, however, Science has 
 repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw 
 light in any direction beyond the sequence of 
 physical causes and effects ; and by doing so 
 she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be 
 man's guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller 
 who engages his guides to scale the summit of 
 the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in 
 the Wirthschaft at the bottom, would have no 
 better right to complain than those who fondly 
 expected Science to bring them to God, and 
 
2O THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 are informed that she now never proceeds 
 above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivu- 
 lets of laws traced by Science flowed freshly 
 onward towards the sea, our souls drank of 
 them with thankfulness. Now that they lose 
 themselves in the sands, they have become 
 mere stagnant pools of knowledge. 
 
 We now turn to the influence of the Scien- 
 tific Spirit on Morals. 
 
 Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico- 
 Scientific Spirit has almost necessarily been 
 from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental. 
 To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed 
 the suggestion that moral intuitions are only 
 results of hereditary experiences. " I believe," 
 he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, "that the experi- 
 ences of utility, organized and consolidated 
 through all past generations of the human 
 race, have been producing corresponding mod- 
 ifications which, by continued transmission and 
 accumulation, have become in us certain facul- 
 ties of moral intuition, certain emotions re- 
 sponding to right and wrong conduct which 
 have no apparent basis in the individual expe- 
 riences of utility." Mr. Darwin took up the 
 doctrine at this stage, and in his " Descent of 
 Man" linked on the human conscience to the 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 21 
 
 instincts of the lower animals, from whence he 
 held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he 
 taught, would have grown up in any other ani- 
 mal as well endowed as we are, but those other 
 animals would not necessarily attach their 
 ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct. 
 " If, for instance, men were reared under pre- 
 cisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there 
 can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried 
 females would, like the worker-bees, think it a 
 sacred duty to kill their brothers." (Descent of 
 Man, vol. i. p. 73.) 
 
 These two doctrines that Conscience is 
 only the " capitalized experience of the human 
 tribe " (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr. 
 Spencer) and that there is no such thing as 
 absolute or immutable Morality, but only a 
 convenient Rule for each particular class of in- 
 telligent animals have between them revo- 
 lutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imper- 
 illed, so far as they are accepted, the existence 
 of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is 
 often entered on the side of faith that, after 
 'all, Darwin only showed how Conscience has 
 been evolved, perhaps by Divine prearrange- 
 ment, and that we may allow its old authority 
 all the same. He has done much more than 
 this. He has destroyed the possibility of re- 
 
22 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 taining the same reverence for the dictates of 
 conscience. As he himself asks, " Would any 
 of us trust in the convictions of a monkey s 
 mind? . . . The doubt always arises whether 
 the convictions of man's mind, which has been 
 developed from the mind of the lower animals, 
 are of any value" (Life, vol. i. p. 316.) Who, 
 indeed, can attach the same solemn authority 
 to the monitions of the 
 
 " Stern daughter of the Voice of God " 
 
 and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerg- 
 ing from apehood ? It was hard enough here- 
 tofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, 
 honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring 
 for indulgence or want pining for relief. The 
 basis on which their moral efforts rested needed 
 to be in their minds as firm as the law of the 
 universe itself. What fulcrum will they find 
 henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary ex- 
 periences of utility? 
 
 Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine 
 under the deepest foundations of Morality. It 
 may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I be- 
 lieve that it will be so, and that it will be de- 
 monstrated that many of our broadest and 
 deepest moral intuitions can have had no 
 such origin. The universal human expecta- 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 23 
 
 tion of Justice, to which all literature bears 
 testimony, can never have arisen from such 
 infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or 
 rather such large experience of prevailing in- 
 justice, as our ancestors in any period of 
 history can have known. Nor can "the set 
 of our (modern) brains " against the destruc- 
 tion of sickly and deformed infants have come 
 to us from the consolidated experience of past 
 generations, since the " utility " is all on the 
 side of Spartan infanticide. But for the pres- 
 ent, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant 
 the influence of the doctrine of Hereditary 
 Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more 
 possible for a man who holds such a theory 
 to cherish a great moral ambition than for a 
 stream to rise above its source. The lofty 
 ideal of Goodness, the hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, which have been the main- 
 spring of heroic and saintly lives, must be ex- 
 changed at best for a kindly good nature and 
 a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of 
 science may be anxious to abolish vice and 
 crime. They offend his tastes, and distract 
 him from his pursuits ; but he has no long- 
 ing to enthrone in their place a positive 
 virtue, demanding his heart and life's devotion. 
 He is almost as much disturbed by extreme 
 
24 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been 
 remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer, 
 that the companionship of a really great and 
 entirely blameless man of science invariably 
 proved a "torpedo touch to aspiration." 
 
 An obvious practical result of the present 
 influence of Science on Morals has been the 
 elevation of Bodily Health into the summum 
 bomim, and the consequent accommodation of 
 the standard of right and wrong to that new 
 aim. An immense proportion of the argu- 
 ments employed in Parliament and elsewhere, 
 when any question touching public health is 
 under discussion, rest on the unexpressed major 
 premise " that any action which in the opinion 
 of experts conduces to the bodily health of 
 the individual or of the community is ipso 
 facto lawful and right." I cannot here indicate 
 the conclusions to which this principle leads. 
 Much that the Christian conscience now holds 
 to be Vice must be transferred to the category 
 of Virtue ; while the medical profession will 
 acquire a Power of the Keys which it is per- 
 haps even less qualified to use than the Suc- 
 cessors of St. Peter. 
 
 Another threatening evil from the side of 
 Science is the growth of a hard and pitiless 
 temper. From whatsoever cause it arise, it 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 25 
 
 seems certain that, with some noteworthy ex- 
 ceptions, the Scientific Spirit is callous. In 
 the mass of its literature, the expressions of 
 sympathy with civilized or savage, healthy or 
 diseased mankind, or with the races below us, 
 are few and far between. Men and beasts 
 are, in scientific language, alike " specimens " 
 (wretched word!); and, if the men be ill or 
 dying, they become " clinical material." The 
 light of Science is a "dry "one. She leaves 
 no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere. 
 Nor has she more pity than Nature for the 
 weak who fall in the struggle for existence. 
 There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite 
 sui generis for the "poor in spirit," the simple, 
 the devoutly believing, in short, for all the 
 humble and the weak, which constitutes of 
 the Scientific Spirit of the Age a kind of Neo- 
 Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity. 
 I may add that it is no less the antithesis of 
 Theism, which, while abandoning the Apoca- 
 lyptic side of Christianity, holds (perhaps with 
 added consciousness of its supreme value) to 
 the spiritual part of the old faith, and would 
 build the Religion of the future on Christ's 
 lessons of love to God and Man, of self-sacri- 
 fice and self-consecration. 
 
 Prior to experience it might have been con- 
 
26 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 fidently expected that the Darwinian doctrine 
 of the descent of Man would have called forth 
 a fresh burst of sympathy towards all races of 
 men and towards the lower animals. Every 
 biologist now knows tenfold better reasons 
 than Saint Francis for calling the birds and 
 beasts "little brothers and sisters." But, in- 
 stead of instilling the tenderness of the Saint 
 of Assisi, Science has taught her devotees to 
 regard the world as a scene of universal strug- 
 gle, wherein the rule must be, " Every one for 
 himself, and no God for any one." 
 
 Ten years ago an eminent American phy- 
 sician remarked to me : " In my country the 
 ardor of scientific research is rapidly overrid- 
 ing the proper benevolent objects of my pro- 
 fession. The cure of disease is becoming quite 
 a secondary consideration to the achievement 
 of a correct diagnosis, to be verified by a suc- 
 cessful /<w/ mortem? How true this now holds 
 of the state of things in English hospitals, that 
 remarkable book, "St. Bernard's," and its still 
 more important key, "Dying Scientifically," 
 have just come in time to testify.* No one 
 
 * 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 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 27 
 
 who has read these books will deny that the 
 purely Scientific Spirit is (at all events some- 
 times) a merciless spirit ; and that Dr. Draper's 
 famous boast, so often repeated, that "Science 
 has never subjected any one to physical tort- 
 ure " (Preface to " Conflict," p. xi), is untrue. 
 
 Irreverence appears to be another " note " of 
 the Scientific Spirit. Literature always holds 
 a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings 
 will never be dethroned. But Science is essen- 
 tially Jacobin. The one thing certain about a 
 great man of science is that in a few years his 
 theories and books, like French Constitutions, 
 will be laid on the shelf. Like coral insects, 
 the scientists of yesterday, who built the foun- 
 dations of the science of to-day, are all dead 
 from the moment that their successors have 
 raised over them another inch of the inter- 
 minable reef. The student of Literature, deal- 
 ing with human life, cannot forget for a mo- 
 ment the existence of such things as goodness 
 which he must honor, and wickedness which 
 he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing 
 
 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 unnec- 
 essary operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement 
 that the dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blun- 
 ders 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. 
 
28 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons 
 to her votaries. There is nothing to revere 
 even in a well-balanced solar system, and noth- 
 ing to despise in a microbe. Taking this into 
 consideration, it might have been foreseen that 
 the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have 
 been deficient in reverence ; and, as a matter 
 of fact, I think it will be conceded that so 
 it is. It is a spirit to which the terms "im- 
 perious" and "arrogant" may not unfitly be 
 applied, and sometimes we may add " over- 
 bearing," when a man of science thinks fit to 
 rebuke a theologian for trespassing on his 
 ground after he has been trampling all over 
 the ground of theology. Perhaps the differ- 
 ence between the new " bumptious '' Spirit of 
 Science and the old exquisitely modest and 
 reverent tone of Newton and Herschel, Fara- 
 day and Lyell, is only due to the causes which 
 distinguish everywhere a Church Triumphant 
 from a Church Militant. But, whatever they 
 may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be 
 in an age of Science that the prophecy will 
 be fulfilled that "the meek shall inherit the 
 earth."* 
 
 * 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 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 2Q 
 
 Among the delicate and beautiful things 
 which Science brushes away from life, I cannot 
 omit to number a certain modesty which has 
 hitherto prevailed among educated people. 
 The decline of decency in England, apparent 
 to every one old enough to recall earlier man- 
 ners and topics of conversation, is due in great 
 measure, I think, to the scientific (medical) 
 spirit. Who would have thought thirty years 
 ago of seeing young men in public reading- 
 rooms snatching at the Lancet and the British 
 Medical Journal from layers of what ought to 
 be more attractive literature, and poring over 
 hideous diagrams and revolting details of dis- 
 ease and monstrosity ? It is perfectly right, no 
 doubt, for these professional journals to deal 
 plainly with these horrors, and with the thrice 
 abominable records of "gynaecology." But, 
 being so, it follows that it is not proper that 
 they should form the furniture of a reading- 
 table at which young men and young women 
 sit for general not medical instruction. 
 Nor is it only in the medical journals that 
 
 Crichton could master the whole, along with the classics and mathe- 
 matics 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 Scien- 
 tific. It is only in the present generation that w~ witness at once the 
 evolution of the true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance. 
 
30 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 disease-mongering now obtains. The political 
 press has adopted the practice of reporting the 
 details of illness of every eminent man who 
 falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords 
 those gentlemen an opportunity of advertising 
 themselves as his advisers. The last recollec- 
 tion which the present generation will retain 
 of many an illustrious statesman, poet, and sol- 
 dier, will not be that he died like a hero or a 
 saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed 
 such and such a medicine, and, perhaps, was 
 sick in his stomach. Death-beds are desecrated 
 that doctors may be puffed and public inquisi- 
 tiveness assuaged. 
 
 So far does the materialist spirit penetrate 
 into literature that in criticising books and men 
 the most exaggerated importance is attached 
 by numberless writers to the physical condi- 
 tions and " environments " of the personages 
 with whom they are concerned, till we could 
 almost suppose that given his ancestry and 
 circumstances we could scientifically con- 
 struct the Man, with all his gifts and passions. 
 As if, forsooth, a dozen brothers were alike in 
 character, or even all the kittens in a litter! 
 It is refreshing to read the brisk persiflage 
 on this kind of thing in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes for March i. The writer, reviewing 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 31 
 
 Mr. Lecky's books, states that but little of 
 that splendid historian's private life has been 
 published, and adds: 
 
 " Je ne me plains pas de cette secheresse, je la be'nis. 
 C'est un plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd'hui, de pouvoir lire 
 un livre sans en connaitre Tauteur : de juger une oeuvre 
 directement et en elle-meme, sans avoir a etudier ce com- 
 pose* d'organes et de tissus, de nerfs et de muscles, d'ou 
 elle est sortie : sans la comrnenter a 1'aide de la physiolo- 
 gic, de 1'ethnographie, et de la climatologie : sans mettre 
 en jeu Tatavisme et les diatheses hereditaires ! " * 
 
 Turn we lastly to the influences of the 
 Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too 
 much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit 
 has been to individuals and classes the signal 
 for a subsidence of religious faith and religious 
 emotion.! Judging from Darwin's experience, 
 as that of a typical man of science, just as such 
 a one becomes an embodiment of the Sci- 
 
 * 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 medi- 
 cal 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 man- 
 ner on the stage." 
 
 t 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 
 
32 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 entific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers 
 and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. 
 Speaking of his old feelings of "wonder, admi- 
 ration, and devotion" experienced while stand- 
 ing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he 
 wrote in later years, when Science had made 
 him all her own: "Now the grandest scenes 
 would not cause any such convictions and feel- 
 ings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said 
 that I am like a man who has become color- 
 blind" (Life, vol. i. p. 31 1). Nor did the dead- 
 ening influences stop at his own soul. As one 
 able reviewer of his " Life " in the Spectator 
 wrote: "No sane man can deny Darwin's influ- 
 ence to have been at least contemporaneous 
 with a general decay of belief in the unseen. 
 Darwin's Theism faded from his mind without 
 disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. 
 These words describe his influence as well as 
 his experience." 
 
 The causes of the anti-religious tendency of 
 modern science may be found, I believe: ist, in 
 the closing up of that " Gate called Beautiful," 
 through which many souls have been wont to 
 
 in the intellectual classes with less interference from custom, senti- 
 ment, 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 " / 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 33 
 
 enter the Temple ; 2d, in the diametric oppo- 
 sition of its method to the method of spiritual 
 inquiry ; and, 3d, to the hardness of character 
 frequently produced (as we have already noted) 
 by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I 
 think, sufficiently account for the antagonism 
 between the modern Scientific and the Relig- 
 ious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings 
 of critical or philosophical researches on the 
 doctrines of either natural or traditional relig- 
 ion. Had Science inspired her votaries with 
 religious sentiment, they would have broken 
 their way through the tangle of theological 
 difficulties, and have opened for us a highway 
 of Faith at once devout and rational. But of 
 all improbable things to anticipate now in the 
 world is a Scientific Religious Reformation. 
 Lamennais said there was one thing worse 
 than Atheism ; namely, indifference whether 
 Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of the 
 Age has reached this point. It is contented to 
 be Agnostic, not Atheistic. It says aloud, " I 
 don't know." It mutters to those who listen, 
 " I don't care." 
 
 The Scientific Spirit has undoubtedly per- 
 formed prodigies in the realms of physical 
 discovery. Its inventions have brought enor- 
 mous contributions to the material well-being 
 
34 THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 of man, and it has widened to a magnificent 
 horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet 
 notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, 
 if it only foster our lower mental faculties 
 while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher ; if 
 Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle 
 in its shadow; if Art and Poetry shrink at its 
 touch; if Morality be undermined and per- 
 verted by it ; and if Religion perish at its ap- 
 proach as a flower vanishes before the frost, 
 then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir 
 James Paget's assertion, that " nothing can ad- 
 vance human prosperity so much as science'.' 
 She has given us many precious things; but 
 she takes away things more precious still. 
 
ESSAY II. 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF THE 
 EMOTIONS. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS. 
 
 HUMAN Emotions the most largely effec- 
 tive springs of human conduct arise either 
 at first hand on the pressure of their natural 
 stimuli, or at second hand by the contagion of 
 sympathy with the emotions of other men. 
 This last source of emotion has not, I conceive, 
 received sufficient attention in practical systems 
 of education, and to the consideration of ,it the 
 present paper will be chiefly devoted. 
 
 Every human emotion appears to be trans- 
 missible by contagion, and to be also more 
 often so developed than it is solitarily evolved. 
 For once that Courage or Terror, Admiration 
 or Contempt, or even Good-will and Ill-will, 
 spring of themselves in the breast of man, 
 woman, or child, each is many times caught 
 from another mind possessed of the same feel- 
 ing. By a subtle sympathy, not unshared by 
 the lower animals, a sympathy which sometimes 
 works slowly and imperceptibly and is some- 
 
38 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 times communicated with electric velocity, one 
 man conveys to another, as if it were a flame, 
 the emotion which burns in his own soul. 
 Thenceforth the recipient becomes a fresh 
 propagator of the emotion to those with whom 
 he in his turn comes into physical contact. A 
 few instances may be named to make clear my 
 meaning. 
 
 The most familiar example of the contagious- 
 ness of the emotions, as the reader will in- 
 stantly recall, is that of Fear, which has often 
 spread through whole armies with such inex- 
 plicable celerity and fatal results that the an- 
 cients were fain to attribute the frenzy to the 
 malevolence of a god, and called such terrors 
 " Panic." The disasters which have occurred 
 during the last few years in so many European 
 and American theatres and churches afford sad 
 evidence that, though " great Pan is dead," our 
 liability to succumb to such waves of fear has 
 not been diminished by modern civilization. 
 The proof of the special power of the con- 
 tagion lies in this : that there is every reason 
 to believe that the majority of the persons con- 
 stituting the terror-stricken crowd would, if 
 alone, have met the danger with reasonable 
 composure. There is also happily, we may 
 remember, such a thing as the contagion of 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 39 
 
 Courage as well as that of Terror. And many 
 a time and oft in our history the captain of a 
 sinking ship, the commander of a retreating 
 regiment, has, by his individual intrepidity, re- 
 stored the morale of his men. Again, a remark- 
 able instance of the contagiousness of emotion 
 is afforded by the Popularity of the men who 
 become in any country the idols of the hour. 
 The fact is very well known to the organizers 
 of claques and reclames in theatres, and of ova- 
 tions in political life, that it is enough for a 
 small band of friends in an assembly to cheer 
 and clap hands, to induce hundreds, who had 
 previously little interest in the work or person 
 praised, to join the hosannas. When a states- 
 man has succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for 
 himself (possibly by persuading scores of people 
 and associations that " all his sympathies are 
 with their" totally opposite aims), he may 
 then safely disappoint each in turn and veer 
 round to the opposite point of the political and 
 theological compass from which he sailed with 
 flowing canvas. His popularity will not be 
 forfeited or even lessened ; for it is a mere con- 
 tagion of sentiment, not a rational or critical 
 judgment. Herein lies the special peril of 
 democracies, that this kind of contagion of 
 personal enthusiasm rapidly becomes the larg- 
 
4O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 est factor in their politics. From the nature 
 of things, the masses cannot form judgments 
 on questions of state, referring, perhaps, to 
 countries of which the very names are un- 
 known to them ; and, therefore, they must of 
 necessity choose Men, not Measures. When 
 we further examine who are the Men so chosen 
 and why, we arrive at the startling discovery 
 that it is exclusively by rhetoric that the con- 
 tagious admiration and sympathy of the masses 
 can be roused. Not sound statesmanship, not 
 wise patriotism, not incorruptible fidelity, not 
 dignified consistency, not, in short, any one 
 quality fitting a man to be a safe or able min- 
 ister, attracts the enthusiasm of the multitude, 
 or is even estimated at all by them. The only 
 gift they can appreciate is that which they 
 themselves would designate " the Gift of the 
 Gabr The lesson is a grave one for all free 
 countries. By such popular idolatry of great 
 talkers were all the old republics of Greece 
 and Magna Graecia brought to destruction; 
 and the men who by such means acquired a 
 bastard royalty over them so exercised it as to 
 make the name of " Tyrant " for ever abomi- 
 nable. 
 
 As concerns emotions connected with Relig- 
 ion, the contagion of them has been notorious 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 4! 
 
 in all ages, for good or evil, according to the 
 character of the religion in question. The 
 intoxication of the dances of old Maenads and 
 the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self- 
 woundings of the priests of Baal and Cybele, 
 the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch and 
 the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples 
 will occur to every reader. Probably those on 
 the largest scale of all recorded in history were 
 the first Crusades, when " Europe precipitated 
 itself on Asia " in a delirium of religious en- 
 thusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and 
 Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the 
 Anabaptists, the Flagellants and Prophets of 
 the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem 
 fanatics under Prophets and Mahdis (of which 
 we have probably by no means heard the last), 
 and finally the Revivals of various sects in 
 England and America, and the triumphs of the 
 Salvation Army, are all instances of the part 
 played by the contagion of emotion in the 
 religion of the community at large. I shall 
 speak hereafter of its share in personal religious 
 experience. 
 
 In much smaller matters than religion, and 
 where no explosion reveals the contagion of 
 sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the 
 spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one 
 
42 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 individual of a family or village to all the other 
 members or inhabitants. It suffices for some 
 spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old 
 woman a witch, or to express hatred of some 
 foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat 
 prejudices which end in something approach- 
 ing to persecution of the victims, who may be 
 thankful they did not live two hundred years 
 ago, when, instead of being boycotted, they 
 would have been burned. A child in a school 
 or large household who has the misfortune to 
 be lame or ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity 
 physical or mental, may, without any fault on 
 its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike 
 of a stupid servant or jealous step-mother, and 
 then the contagion spreading and intensify- 
 ing as it extends to the common hatred of 
 the little community, a hatred justifying itself 
 by the sullenness or deceptions to which the 
 poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic 
 animals suffer from this kind of contagious 
 dislike, and benefit on the other hand by con- 
 tagious admiration and fondness.* " Give a 
 
 *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 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 43 
 
 dog a bad name and hang him " is true in 
 more senses than one. 
 
 We need not pursue this part of the subject 
 further. Every day's experience may supply 
 fresh illustrations of the immense influence of 
 contagion in the development of all human 
 emotions. Nor is it by any means to be set 
 down as a weakness peculiar to or characteris- 
 tic of a feeble mind to be blindly susceptible 
 of such contagion. Even the strongest wills 
 are bent and warped by the winds of other 
 men's passions, persistently blowing in given 
 directions. Original minds, gifted with what 
 the French call r esprit primesautier, are per- 
 haps, indeed, affected rather more than less 
 than commonplace people by the emotions of 
 those around them, because their larger natures 
 are more open to the sympathetic shock. Like 
 ships with all sails set, they are caught by every 
 breeze. It is a question of degree how much 
 each man receives of influence from his neigh- 
 
 dotingly fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm com- 
 ing 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. 
 
44 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 bors; but (to use the new medical barbarism) 
 we are never " immune " altogether from the 
 contagion. 
 
 We may now approach our proper subject of 
 the Education of the Emotions, carrying with 
 us the important fact that no means are so 
 efficacious in promoting good ones as the wise 
 employment of the great agency of Contagion; 
 and, further, that this contagion works only by 
 exhibiting the genuine emotion to the person 
 we desire to influence. Only by being brave 
 can we inspire courage. Only by reverencing 
 holy things can we communicate veneration. 
 Only by being tender and loving can we move 
 other hearts to pity and affection. 
 
 Let us glance over the variety of circum- 
 stances wherein great good might be effected 
 by systematic attention to the natural laws of 
 the development of the emotions. We may 
 begin by considering those connected with the 
 education of the young. 
 
 In the first place, parents duly impressed 
 with the importance of the subject would care- 
 fully suppress, or at least conceal, such of their 
 own emotions as they would regret to see 
 caught up by their children. At present, num- 
 berless sufficiently conscientious fathers and 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 45 
 
 mothers, who would be horrified at the sugges- 
 tion of placing books teaching bad lessons in 
 the hands of their sons and daughters, yet care- 
 lessly allow them to witness (and of course to 
 receive the contagion of) all manner of angry, 
 envious, cowardly, and scornful emotions, just 
 as they chance to be called out in themselves. 
 It would be to revolutionize many homes to 
 induce parents to revise their own sentiments, 
 with a view to deciding which they should com- 
 municate to their children. In one way in 
 particular, the result of such self-questioning 
 might be startling. Every good father desires 
 his son to respect his mother, and would be 
 sorry to teach him only the half of the Fifth 
 Commandment in words. Yet how do scores 
 of such well-meaning men set about conveying 
 the sentiment of reverence which they recog- 
 nize will be invaluable to their sons ? They 
 treat those same mothers, in the presence of 
 those same sons, with such rudeness, dismiss 
 their opinions with such levity, and perhaps 
 exhibit such actual contempt for their wishes 
 that it is not in nature but that the boy will 
 receive a lesson of disrespect. His father's 
 feelings, backed up as they are by the disa- 
 bilities under which the Constitution places 
 women, can scarcely fail to impress the young 
 
46 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 mind with that contempt for women in general, 
 and for his mother in particular, which is pre- 
 cisely the reverse of chivalry and filial piety. 
 Almost as important as the contagion of 
 parental emotion is that of the sentiments of 
 Teachers; yet on this subject nobody seems to 
 think it needful even to institute inquiries. So 
 far as I can learn, the sole question asked now- 
 adays when a professor is to be appointed 
 to a Chair at the Universities is, "Whether 
 he be the man among the candidates who 
 knows most [or rather who has the reputation 
 of knowing most] of the subject which he pro- 
 poses to teach ? " This point being ascertained, 
 and nothing serious alleged against his moral 
 conduct, the fortunate gentleman receives his 
 appointment as a matter of course. Even 
 electors who personally detest the notorious 
 opinions of the professor on religion or politics 
 acquiesce cheerfully in the choice ; apparently 
 satisfied that he will carve out to his students 
 the particular pound of knowledge he is bound 
 to give them, and not a drop of blood besides. 
 The same principle, I presume (I have little 
 information on the subject), prevails in schools 
 generally, as it does in private education. A 
 professor or governess is engaged to instruct 
 boys or girls, let us say in Latin, History, or 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 47 
 
 Physiology, and it is assumed that he or she 
 will act precisely like a teaching machine for 
 that particular subject, and never step beyond 
 its borders. A little common sense would dis- 
 sipate this idle presumption, supposing it to 
 be really entertained, and that the mania for 
 cramming sheer knowledge down the throats 
 of the young does not make their elders wil- 
 fully disregardful of the moral poison which 
 may filter along with it. Every human being, 
 as I have said, exercises some influence over 
 the emotions of his neighbor; but that of a 
 Teacher, especially if he be a brilliant one, 
 over his students, often amounts to a conta- 
 gion of enthusiasm throughout the class. His 
 admirations are adored, the objects of his sneers 
 despised, and every opinion he enunciates is an 
 oracle. And it is these professors and teach- 
 ers, forsooth, whose opinions on ethics, theology, 
 and politics it is not thought worth while to 
 ascertain before installing them in their Chairs 
 to become the guides of the young men and 
 women who are the hope of the nation ! 
 
 It does not require any direct, or even in- 
 direct, inculcation of opinion on the teacher's 
 part to do mischief. It is the contagion of his 
 emotions which is to be feared, if those emo- 
 tions be base or bad. Let him teach History 
 
48 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 and betray his enthusiasm for selfish and san- 
 guinary conquerors, or justify assassins and 
 anarchists, or jest Gibbon fashion at mar- 
 tyrs and heroes, will he not communicate those 
 base sentiments to his young audience ? Or 
 let him teach Science, and convey to every 
 student's mind that deification of mere knowl- 
 edge, that insolent sense of superiority in the 
 possession of it, that remorseless determination 
 to pursue it regardless of every moral restraint, 
 which is too often the " note " of modern sci- 
 entism, will the instruction he affords to his 
 students' brains counterbalance the harm he 
 will do to their hearts ? 
 
 And, on the other hand, what a splendid 
 vantage-ground for the dissemination not merely 
 of knowledge, but of elevated feelings, is that 
 of a Teacher ! Merely in teaching a dead or 
 modern language, a fine-natured man communi- 
 cates his own glowing feelings respecting the 
 masterpieces of national literature which it is 
 his duty to expound. 
 
 The last point we need notice as regards the 
 contagion of emotions among the young is the 
 subject of Companions. Here again, as in 
 the case of respect for mothers, there is great 
 unanimity in theory. Every one admits that 
 bad companions are ruinous for boys or girls. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 49 
 
 But, when it comes to taking precautions 
 against the herding of innocent and well- 
 nurtured children with others who have been 
 familiar with vice, I see little trace of the 
 anxious care and discrimination which ought 
 to prevail. Nay, in the case of the children 
 of the poor, it seems to me the law is often 
 wickedly applied to compel good parents to 
 send them, against their own will and convic- 
 tions, to sit beside companions who have come 
 straight to school out of slums of filth, moral 
 and physical. I have known Americans argue 
 that it is right for children of all classes to 
 associate together, so that the well-trained may 
 communicate good ideas to the ill-trained. The 
 reasoning appears to be on a par with a pro- 
 posal to send healthy people to sleep in a 
 cholera hospital. But, while we allow our- 
 selves to be terrified beyond bounds by alarms 
 about the infection of bodily disease, we take 
 hardly any precautions against the more dread- 
 ful, and quite as real, infection of moral cor- 
 ruption.* 
 
 * 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 establish- 
 
5O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 The general sentiment of boys and youths 
 in the great public schools and colleges of 
 England thanks to the high-minded Masters 
 who have been at their head is, on the whole, 
 good and honorable. It may be taken for 
 granted that a boy from Harrow, Eton, Rugby, 
 Winchester, Westminster, or Uppingham, and 
 a fortiori a man from Oxford or Cambridge, 
 will despise lying and cowardice and admire 
 fair play and justice. How grand a founda- 
 tion for national character has thus been laid ! 
 What a debt do we owe alike to the Masters 
 and the " Tom Browns " who have communi- 
 cated the contagion of such noble emotions! 
 In Continental lycees and academies, public 
 opinion among the boys is, by all accounts, 
 wofully inferior to that which is current in 
 our great schools. There has never been an 
 Arnold in a French Rugby. 
 
 ment 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. 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 51 
 
 As regards girls, their doubly emotional nat- 
 ures make it a matter of moral life and death 
 that their companions (of whose emotions they 
 are perfectly certain to experience the conta- 
 gion) should be pure and honorable-minded. 
 It is most encouraging to every woman who 
 reads Mrs. Pfeiffer's masterly new book, " Wo- 
 men and Work," to see the rising generation of 
 girls displaying such splendid abilities and zeal 
 for instruction, and as Mrs. Pfeiffer amply 
 proves without paying for it in loss of bodily 
 vigor. Fain would I see the " blessed Damo- 
 zels," who are still standing behind the golden 
 bars of noble homes, all flocking to the new 
 colleges for women, as their brothers do to 
 Christchurch and Trinity, there to imbibe 
 parallel sentiments of truthfulness and pluck, 
 more precious than Greek, Latin, or mathe- 
 matics ! 
 
 Leaving now the subject of the Education of 
 the Emotions of the Young, by parents, teach- 
 ers, and companions, I proceed to speak of the 
 general education of the emotions of the com- 
 munity by public and private instrumentality, 
 a wide field, over which we can only glance. 
 What machinery is disposable to cultivate the 
 better and discourage the lower emotions, 
 
52 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 either by the exhibition of the direct natural 
 stimulus to the former and withdrawal of it in 
 the latter cases, or by the aid of contagion? 
 
 In the grand matter of Legislation I do not 
 know that there is much more to be done than 
 has already been achieved by the abolition of 
 those public punishments of criminals hang- 
 ing, drawing and quartering, flogging at the 
 cart's tail, and the pillory which must have 
 been frightfully prolific of cruel passions in the 
 spectators. To have taken part in such execu- 
 tions, e.g. in the old stonings to death, in the 
 burning of witches and heretics, or in the 
 minor but yet barbarous and cowardly pelting 
 of the helpless wretches in the pillory, must 
 have been an apprenticeship worthy of a Red 
 Indian. Even to have been a passive spectator 
 of a Newgate execution in later years, amid the 
 yelling crowd, must have been excessively de- 
 moralizing, and in fact was at last recognized 
 by the Legislature to be so, instead of a whole- 
 some warning. It is a cause for rejoicing that 
 there is an end of this kind of contagious emo- 
 tion in England, except in the case of experi- 
 ments on animals, of which the Act of 1876 
 sanctions the exhibition to classes under spe- 
 cial certificates which require the subjects to 
 be fully anaesthetized. On this point the warn- 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 53 
 
 ing of the late lamented Professor Rolleston 
 ought, I think, to have sufficed. He told the 
 Royal Commission : " The sight of a living, 
 bleeding, and quivering organism most un- 
 doubtedly does act in a particular way upon 
 what Dr. Carpenter calls the emotiono-motor 
 nature in us. ... When men are massed 
 together, the emotiono-motor nature is more 
 responsive, it becomes more sensitive to im- 
 pression than it does at other times, and that 
 of course bears very greatly on the question of 
 interference with vivisections before masses " 
 (Minutes, 1287*). The time will come when it 
 will be looked upon as a monstrous inconsist- 
 
 *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 per- 
 versions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the fol- 
 lowing 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." 
 
54 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 ency that the spectacle of the execution of 
 murderers should be shut off from the adult 
 population on account of its recognized ill effects 
 in fostering contagious cruelty, and, at the same 
 time, as many as nineteen certificates should 
 be issued in one year by the Home Office, spe- 
 cially authorizing the mutilation of harmless 
 animals before classes of young men and women. 
 Majestic public functions, coronations, thanks- 
 givings, state entries into great cities, and fu- 
 nerals of distinguished men afford admirable 
 machinery for the communication of noble emo- 
 tions through the masses. It was worth the 
 cost and trouble of last year's Jubilee ten times 
 over to have sent through so many brains and 
 hearts the thrill of sympathy which followed 
 the Queen to the old throne of her fathers, 
 while the kings of the earth stood around her 
 as witnesses that she had kept the oath to her 
 people, sworn there fifty years before. For one 
 day England and all her vast colonies beat with 
 one heart, and the contagion of loyal emotion, 
 love, reverence, pride, and pity, for woman, 
 empress, mother, widow, ran round the globe. 
 Sad was it (as many must have remembered) 
 that he who would have found the true words to 
 give utterance to the sentiment in the heaving 
 breast of the nation, he whose proud duty it 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 55 
 
 would have been to welcome the Queen to his 
 own Abbey, was lying on that day silent be- 
 neath its pavement. 
 
 Beyond Legislation and Public Functions, 
 the largest influence which sways the emotions 
 of all educated people is undoubtedly Litera- 
 ture. The power of Books to awaken the most 
 vivid feelings is a phenomenon at which sav- 
 ages may well wonder. The magic which 
 enables both the living and the long departed 
 to move us to the depths of our being by the 
 aid only of a few marks on sheets of paper is a 
 never-ending miracle. It were vain to attempt 
 to do any justice to the subject, or show how 
 the contagion of piety, patriotism, enthusiasm 
 for justice and truth, and sympathy with other 
 nations and other classes than our own, is 
 borne to us in the pages of the poets and his- 
 torians and novelists of the world. Pitiful it is 
 to think how narrow must ,be the scope of the 
 emotions of any man whose breast has never 
 dilated nor his eyes flashed over the grandeur 
 of the Book of Job, over Dante or Shakspere, 
 and whose heart has never been warmed and 
 his sympathies extended, backwards through 
 time and around him in space, by Walter Scott, 
 and Defoe, and Dickens, and George Eliot. 
 Alas that we must add that Literature can 
 
56 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 not only kindle the noblest emotions, but also 
 light up baleful fires, of the basest and most 
 sensual, to look for which we have not now 
 even to cross the Channel ! M. Zola has been 
 translated into English. 
 
 After Literature I presume that the Stage is 
 the greatest public agency for the promotion of 
 fine emotions, and it is to the honor of human 
 nature that it is found (at least in our country) 
 to be most popular when it fulfils its office best, 
 and calls out sympathy for generous and heroic 
 actions. When the Roman audience rose en 
 masse to applaud the line of Terence which first 
 proclaimed the brotherhood of man, " Homo 
 sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,"- 
 the highest mission of the Drama was fulfilled. 
 Of course no one desires the string of high 
 emotion to be exclusively or perpetually harped 
 upon ; and for my own part I think that the 
 mere production of the emotion of harmless 
 merriment is one of the greatest boons of the 
 stage. The contagion of laughter, in a theatre 
 or out of it, is an altogether wholesome and 
 beneficent thing. How it unseats black Care 
 from our backs ! How it carries away, as on a 
 fresh spring breeze, a whole swarm of buzzing 
 worries and grievances ! How it warms our 
 hearts for ever after to the people with whom 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 57 
 
 we have once shared a good honest fou rire! 
 " Behold how good and how pleasant a thing 
 it is for brethren to dwell together in unity," 
 and (with all respect let us add) in hilarity ! A 
 good joke partaken with a man is like the 
 Arab's salt. Our common emotion of humor- 
 ous pleasure is a bond between us which we 
 would not thereafter lightly break. 
 
 The education of the emotions of actors and 
 actresses, apart from that which they afford to 
 the emotions of the public, is a very curious 
 subject of consideration. Great part of the 
 training of an actor consists in learning to give 
 the uttermost possible external expression to 
 those emotions which it is the task of other 
 people to reduce to a vanishing point. Un- 
 doubtedly (as one of the most gifted of the pro- 
 fession has remarked), the " habit of represent- 
 ing fictitious feeling tends to produce a super- 
 ficial sensibility, and an exaggerated mode of 
 expressing the same." But it may be ques- 
 tioned whether this extreme be worse than the 
 opposite, wherein the expression of the emo- 
 tions is so effectually repressed that the feel- 
 ings themselves die out for want of air and 
 exercise, a consummation not unknown in 
 the reposeful " caste of Vere de Vere." 
 
 Besides Literature and the Stage, Music no 
 
58 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 doubt is a most marvellous agency for calling 
 out Emotion. It is, in fact, the Art of Emotion. 
 The musician plays with the strings of the 
 human heart while he touches those of his in- 
 strument. Since Collins wrote his " Ode to the 
 Passions" and Pope his " Ode on Saint Cecilia's 
 Day," there is no need to describe how every 
 emotion known to man may be brought out by 
 music. Something may well be hoped for a 
 generation which, rejecting the more trivial 
 and sensuous music of Italy, finds delight in 
 the exalted play of the emotions which follows 
 the wands of Bach and Beethoven and Wag- 
 ner. The efforts now made to offer music at 
 once cheap and good to as many of the work- 
 ing classes as can be found to enjoy it is 
 perhaps the most direct way conceivable of fos- 
 tering their best emotions. 
 
 The Beauty of Nature and of Art are also 
 powerful levers of the higher emotions, which 
 it becomes us to use for the benefit of our 
 fellows whenever it is practicable to do so. 
 
 But, while these varied engines are at work 
 to stir beneficently the emotions of the masses, 
 there are on the other hand certain agencies in 
 full play amongst us which have, I fear, a totally 
 different effect ; which, in fact, can only tend to 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 59 
 
 deaden, if not destroy, the most precious of emo- 
 tions, those of family affection. I do not know 
 that the question has ever been faced : What 
 are the moral effects of our enormous Hos- 
 pitals ? From the side of the bodily interests of 
 the patients, they may be wholly advantageous.* 
 But as regards the sacred institutions of the 
 Family, on which society itself is based, I ask 
 what, except evil, can result from the habitual 
 separation of relatives the moment that illness 
 makes a claim for tenderness and care ? 
 
 It is the law of human nature that the senti- 
 ment of sympathy should be drawn forth by 
 personal service to the suffering ; and feelings 
 of gratitude and affection by the receipt of 
 such personal service. In comparison of these 
 sources of emotion, those which act in times of 
 prosperity are weak and poor. If we subtract 
 in imagination from our own affections those 
 which have come to us either through nursing 
 or being nursed in sickness and danger, the 
 residue will represent all which we leave within 
 reach of the million. Many of us can remem- 
 ber quarrels which have been reconciled, un- 
 kindnesses atoned for, and bonds of sacred 
 
 * Readers of that singular book, " St. Bernard's " (Swan, Sonnen- 
 schein & Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, "Dying 
 Scientifically," may possibly entertain doubts on this subject. 
 
6O THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 union in faith and eternal hope linked beside 
 beds of pain when death seemed standing at 
 the door. These things form some of the 
 highest educational influences which Provi- 
 dence brings to bear on the human spirit, and 
 out of them arise the sweetest affections, the 
 warmest gratitude, the most vivid sense of a 
 common nearness to God and the Immortal 
 Life. 
 
 And of all this the entire working class of 
 the nation is systematically deprived ! Formerly 
 it was only in cases of extreme poverty, where 
 the crowded lodging was an altogether unfit 
 place to nurse the sufferer, that recourse was had 
 to the public Hospitals. Now it has become 
 the invariable practice the moment that illness, 
 even of non-infectious kind, declares itself, to 
 send straight away to the hospital artisans, 
 small tradesmen, and farmers from their own 
 comfortable abodes, servants from the large 
 and airy houses where they have labored faith- 
 fully, and even children from their mothers' 
 arms. It is not a mere matter of conjecture 
 that such a custom must do harm and weaken 
 the sense of family obligation. It is a fact that 
 it has done so already, and is doing so more 
 every day. Sons and daughters place their 
 blind and palsied parents in asylums; wives 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 6 1 
 
 send their husbands in a decline to Brompton 
 Hospital; and it has become a surprising piece 
 of filial devotion if a daughter remain at home 
 to take care of a bed-ridden mother, even when 
 her means fully permit of such sacrifice of time. 
 What deadly injury is all this to the hearts of 
 men, women, and children ! 
 
 Of course Hospitals have their important 
 uses. No one denies it. Some cases of dis- 
 ease and some degrees of poverty require such 
 institutions. But this does not justify the 
 monstrous over-use of them now in vogue. 
 Even for the class whose homes are too 
 crowded to admit of nursing being properly 
 or safely done in them, I cannot but think 
 that small Cottage Hospitals, where the wife 
 or mother or daughter would be free to per- 
 form her natural duties by the bedside, and 
 where she would be shown how best to per- 
 form them, would be infinitely preferable for 
 every reason, moral and physical, to our pres- 
 ent Palaces of Pain. Excellent also in all 
 ways will be the plan of Nurses provided for 
 the poor in their own homes by the Queen's 
 wise gift of the balance of her Women's Jubi- 
 lee Fund. The secret of the excessive resort 
 to Hospitals is of course the encouragement 
 to patients given by the medical schools at- 
 
62 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 tached to them, for the sake of obtaining a 
 large supply of " clinical material." 
 
 Lastly, we come to speak of the Education 
 of the Religious Emotions. We have already 
 referred to the outbursts of contagious enthu- 
 siasm in the Crusades and Revivals. It re- 
 mains to say a few words respecting the 
 various sources of religious emotion, at first 
 and second hand. 
 
 A fundamental difference between the Cath- 
 olic and Puritan mind seems to be that the 
 former seizes on every available means for pro- 
 ducing religious emotion through the senses; 
 the latter turns away from such means with 
 intense mistrust, and limits itself to appeals 
 through the mind. Dark and solemn churches 
 like that at Assisi decorated by Giotto (which 
 the friar who showed it told me was the " best 
 place in the whole world for prayer "), gorgeous 
 altars, splendid functions, pictures, music, in- 
 cense, all these are to the Catholic and High 
 Churchman veritable "means of grace"; i.e., 
 they call out in them emotions which either 
 are religious or they think lead to religion. 
 Long Prayers, Hymns, Bible-readings, and 
 preachings, these, on the other hand, are the 
 Evangelicals' means of grace, and they pro- 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 63 
 
 duce in them emotions distinctly religious. 
 We must, I think, treat these differences as 
 matters of spiritual taste, concerning which it 
 is proverbially idle to dispute. Both have 
 their advantages, and both their great perils: 
 the Catholic method has the peril of lapping 
 the soul in a fool's paradise of fancied piety, 
 which is only sensuous excitement; the Puri- 
 tan method has that of creating the hysteria 
 of a Revival. In each case it is the contagion 
 of the emotion of a multitude which creates the 
 danger. Solitary religious emotion, either pro- 
 duced by the glory and majesty of Nature or 
 by lonely prayer and communings with God, 
 can lead to no evil ; nay, is the climax of 
 purest joy vouchsafed to man. Not misguided 
 are those who enter into their chambers and 
 shut the door "to pray to Him who sees in 
 secret," or who go up into the hills and woods 
 
 " To seek 
 
 That Being in whose honor shrines are weak, 
 Upreared by human hands." 
 
 The converse of the emotions of Awe and 
 Reverence namely, the tendency to jest and 
 ridicule are supposed by some to be danger- 
 ous enemies to religion. I do not believe they 
 are so. I think a genuine sense of humor and 
 a keen eye for the ludicrous is a most precious 
 
64 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 protection against absurdities and excesses. 
 Like Tenderness and Strength, the sense of 
 the Sublime and of the Ridiculous are com- 
 plementary to each other, and exist only in 
 perfection together in the same character. It 
 is the man who cannot laugh who never 
 weeps. 
 
 Finally, we reach the point where the relig- 
 ious emotions, produced either alone or by 
 contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual mira- 
 cles : that " conversion " or revulsion of the 
 soul which ancient India, no less than Chris- 
 tendom, likened to a New or Second Birth. 
 It would appear that, when this mysterious 
 change does not take place by the solitary work 
 of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so 
 by the attractive power of another human soul, 
 which has itself already undergone the great 
 transformation. It is the living Saint who 
 conveys spiritual life. He need not be a very 
 great or far advanced soul in the spiritual 
 realm. Many a simple person with no excep- 
 tional gifts has " turned to the wisdom of the 
 just " the hearts of strong men, whom the most 
 eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have 
 failed to move by a hair. But the greater the 
 saint, the greater naturally must be his power. 
 It was the contagion of Divine Love, caught 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 65 
 
 from him who felt it most of all the sons of 
 men, which moved the little band in the 
 upper chamber of Jerusalem who moved the 
 world. 
 
 It is worthy of notice that when a man so 
 powerfully influences another as to "convert" 
 him in the true sense, i.e. to bring him to the 
 higher spiritual life, it very often happens that 
 at the same time he " converts " him in the 
 lower sense, to the doctrines of the special 
 Church to which he himself belongs. The 
 man has received the impulse of religion from 
 that particular direction. It has come to him 
 colored by the hues of his friend's piety, and 
 he accepts it, doctrines and all, as he finds it. 
 The matter has been one of emotional con- 
 tagion, not of critical argument on either side. 
 
 It is impossible to form the faintest estimate 
 of the good the highest kind of good 
 which a single devout soul may accomplish in 
 a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of 
 the Love of God in widening circles around it. 
 But just as far as the influence of such men is 
 a cause for thankfulness, so great would be the 
 calamity of a time, if such should ever arrive, 
 when there should be a dearth of saints in the 
 world, and the fire on the altar should die 
 down. A Glacial Period of Religion would 
 
66 THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 
 
 kill many of the sweetest flowers in human 
 nature ; and woe to the land where (as it would 
 seem is almost the present case in France at 
 this moment) the priceless tradition of Prayer 
 is being lost, or only maintained in fatal con- 
 nection with outworn superstitions. 
 
 To resume the subject of this paper. We 
 have seen that the Emotions, which are the 
 chief springs of human conduct, may either be 
 produced by their natural stimuli or conveyed 
 by contagion from other minds, but that they 
 can neither be commanded nor taught. If we 
 desire to convey good and noble emotions to 
 our fellow-creatures, the only means whereby 
 we can effect that end is by filling our own 
 hearts with them till they overflow into the 
 hearts of others. Here lies the great truth 
 which the preachers of Altruism persistently 
 overlook. It is better to be good than to do 
 good. We can benefit our kind in no way so 
 much as by being ourselves pure and upright 
 and noble-minded. We can never teach Relig- 
 ion to such purpose as we can live it. 
 
 It was my privilege to know a woman who 
 for more than twenty years was chained by a 
 cruel malady to what Heine called a " mattress 
 grave." Little or nothing was it possible for 
 
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS 67 
 
 her to do for any one in the way of ordinary 
 service. Her many schemes of usefulness and 
 beneficence were all stopped. Yet, merely by 
 attaining to the lofty heights of spiritual life 
 and knowledge, that suffering woman helped 
 and lifted up the hearts of all who came around 
 her, and did more real good, and of the highest 
 kind, than half the preachers and philanthro- 
 pists in the land. Even now, when her beauti- 
 ful soul has been released at last from its 
 earthly cage, it still lifts many who knew her to 
 the love of God and Duty to remember what 
 she was, and to the faith in immortality to 
 think what now she must be, within the golden 
 gates. 
 
ESSAY III. 
 
 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM. 
 
 WHEN the new " Science of Religions " has 
 been further developed, it will probably be rec- 
 ognized that the character of each is deter- 
 mined, not only by its own proper dogmas, but 
 by those of the religion which it has super- 
 seded. Men do not, as they often imagine, 
 tear up an old faith by the roots and plant a 
 new one on the same ground. They only cut 
 across the old and graft the new on its stem. 
 Thus it comes to pass, for example, that much 
 of the sap of Roman Paganism runs through 
 the pores of Latin Christianity, and much of 
 that of Odin worship through those of Teuton 
 and Scandinavian Protestantism. Still more 
 certainly does the faith held by an individual 
 man in his earlier years dye his mind with its 
 peculiar color, so that no subsequent conver- 
 sion ever wholly obliterates it, but makes him 
 like a frescoed wall on which yellow has been 
 painted over blue, leaving as the result green. 
 
72 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 The tint of Anglican piety may be discerned 
 even beneath a pervert Cardinal's scarlet robe. 
 A Romish acolyte, transformed into the most 
 brilliant of sceptical essayists, still boasts that 
 the ecclesiastical set of his brain enables him 
 "alone in his century" to understand Christ 
 and Saint Francis.* A Jew, baptized and be- 
 come Prime Minister of England, wrote novels 
 and made history altogether in the vein of the 
 author of the Book of Esther. Beneath the 
 wolf's clothing of the whole pack of modern 
 Secularists, Agnostics, and Atheists, friction 
 reveals (for the present generation, at all 
 events) a flock of harmless Christian sheep. 
 For this reason hasty efforts to fuse relig- 
 ious bodies which happen to manifest tenden- 
 cies to doctrinal agreement seem predestined 
 to failure. Much else besides mere readiness 
 to pronounce similar symbols of faith is needed 
 to gather men permanently into one temple. 
 Amalgamation attempted prematurely can only 
 result in accentuating those diversities of senti- 
 ment which have stronger power to dissever 
 than any intellectual affinities have charms 
 to unite. Ecclesiastical schisms are infinitely 
 easier to effect than ecclesiastical coalitions. 
 
 *"C'est pourquoi, seul dans mon siecle, j'ai su comprendre Jesus 
 Christ et St. Frai^ois d'Assise." M. Renan. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 73 
 
 Nevertheless, the levelling of the fences 
 which have for ages kept men of different 
 religions apart is, per se, a matter for such 
 earnest rejoicing that we may well exult at any 
 instance of it, independently of ulterior hopes 
 or projects. Especially must our sympathies 
 with those who are thus clearing the ground 
 be quickened when the faith to be dis-itnmured 
 is an old and venerable one, the nearest of all 
 to our own, a faith whereof any important 
 modification must be fraught with incalculable 
 consequences to the civilized world. The new 
 Reform among the Jews is emphatically such 
 a movement, an effort to throw down the 
 high and jealous walls behind which Judaism 
 has kept itself in seclusion. The gates of the 
 Ghettos, which for a thousand years shut in 
 the Jews at night in every city in Europe, were 
 not more rigid obstacles to social sympathy 
 and intercourse than have been the nation's 
 own iron-bound prejudices and customs. But 
 just as these Ghettos themselves, so long " lit- 
 tle provinces of Asia dropped into the map 
 of Europe," have been thrown open at last by 
 the growing enlightenment of Christian States, 
 so the Jewish moral walls of prejudice are 
 being cast down by the advanced sentiment of 
 cultured Jews. 
 
74 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 It is the specialty of the higher religions to 
 unfold continually new germs of truth, while 
 the lower ones remain barren and become over- 
 grown with the rank fungi of myth and fable. 
 I do not speak now of the results of external 
 influences bearing on every creed, and tending 
 to vivify and fructify it. Such influences have 
 done much, undoubtedly, even for Christianity 
 itself, which has been stirred by all the agencies 
 of the Saracen conquests, the classic Renais- 
 sance, modern ethics and metaphysics, modern 
 critical science, and at last in our time by the 
 extension of the theological horizon over the 
 broad plains of Eastern sacred literature. I 
 am speaking specially of the prolific power of 
 the richer creeds to go on, generation after 
 generation, bringing forth fresh, golden har- 
 vests, like the valleys of California. If we look 
 for an instance of the opposite barrenness, we 
 shall find it in the worn-out religions of China, 
 ice-bound and arid as the desolate plains and 
 craters of the moon; the Tae-ping rebellion 
 having been perhaps a solitary development of 
 heat caused by the impingement on them of 
 the orb of Christianity. If, on the other hand, 
 we seek for a supreme instance of fertility, we 
 find it in the religion of Nazareth, which seems 
 to enjoy perpetual seed-time and perpetual 
 harvest. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 75 
 
 The question is one of more than historical 
 interest: Is Judaism likewise a religion capable 
 of bearing fresh corn and wine and oil for the 
 nations ? We know that both Christianity and 
 Islam are developments of the Jewish idea, 
 the Semitic development (Islam) carrying out 
 its monotheistic doctrine in all its rigidity, but 
 losing somewhat on the moral and spiritual 
 side; the Aryan development (Christianity) 
 abandoning the strictly monotheistic doctrine, 
 but carrying far forward the moral and the 
 spiritual part. But both these Banyan-like 
 branches have struck root for themselves, and 
 their growth can no longer be treated as de- 
 rived from the trunk of Judaism. Our prob- 
 lem is, Can Judaism further develop itself along 
 its own lines ? Or is it (as generally believed) 
 destined to permanent immobility, with no pos- 
 sible future before it save gradual dismember- 
 ment and decay? Shall we best liken it to 
 Abraham's oak at Mam re, whose leaf has not 
 failed after three thousand years of sun and 
 storm, and when the very levin-bolt of heaven 
 has blasted its crown, or to the hewn and 
 painted mast of some laden argosy wherein float 
 the fortunes of Israel ? 
 
 There are, it would appear, three parties now 
 existing among modern Jews. There is, first, 
 
76 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 the large Orthodox party, which holds by the 
 verbal inspiration of the Old Testament and 
 the authority of the Talmud.* 
 
 Secondly, there is the party commonly called 
 that of Reformed Jews, which separated about 
 forty years ago from the Orthodox by a schism 
 analogous to that which cut off the Free Kirk 
 from the Kirk of Scotland. The raisons d'etre 
 of this reform were certain questions of ritual 
 (the older ritual having fallen into neglect) and 
 the relinquishment by the reforming party of 
 the authority of the Talmud. The progress so 
 effected occasioned great heart-burnings, now 
 happily extinguished, and proceeded no fur- 
 ther than these very moderate reforms.! 
 
 *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 mtre 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 Or- 
 thodox 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. 
 
 t 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, dif- 
 fering chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, 
 is in use in this synagogue. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 77 
 
 Lastly, there is a third Jewish party, existing 
 chiefly in Germany and America, and number- 
 ing a few members among the younger genera- 
 tions in England. For convenience' sake, I 
 shall distinguish it from the older Reformed 
 party by calling it the party of the New 
 Reform, or of Broad Church Jews, the analogy 
 between its attitude towards Orthodox Judaism 
 and that of the late lamented Dean Stanley 
 and his friends to the Church of England being 
 singularly close. 
 
 The attitude even of the Orthodox and older 
 Reformed Jews (alike for our present purpose) 
 is, theoretically, not wholly unprogressive, not 
 necessarily purely tribal. They have admitted 
 principles inconsistent with stagnant tribalism. 
 They believe that, though the ceremonialism of 
 Judaism is for Jews alone, yet the mission of 
 Judaism is to spread through all the nations 
 its great central doctrine of the Unity of God. 
 As Philipsohn (who, it is said, has since some- 
 what receded from his position) observed in his 
 Lectures so far back as 1847 : 
 
 Judaism has never declared itself to be in its specific 
 form the religion of all mankind, but has asserted itself 
 to be the religion of all mankind in and by the religious 
 idea. . . . Talmudism itself admits that he even who no 
 longer observes the law, but who utters as his confession 
 
78 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 of faith the words, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God 
 the Eternal is One," may be considered still to be a Jew. 
 Development of the Religious Idea, p. 256. 
 
 The saying of the Talmud, " The pious 
 among all nations shall have a place in the 
 world to come," has become a stock quotation, 
 and has been of the utmost value to modern 
 Jewish orthodoxy. Thus even this most con- 
 servative party among the Jews is not without 
 a certain expansive principle. It must be ad- 
 mitted, however, that it does little or nothing 
 to make that principle practically efficacious, 
 and is content to wait for the advent of Mes- 
 siah to convert the nations by miracle without 
 any trouble to Jews to strive to enlighten them 
 beforehand. Considering what the Jews for 
 ages have had to bear from those who vouch- 
 safed to try to convert them, we may pardon 
 this lack of zeal for proselytism as far from 
 unnatural; yet the consequences have been de- 
 plorable. He who holds a precious truth con- 
 cerning eternal things, and fails to feel it to be 
 (as Mrs. Browning says) " like bread at sacra- 
 ment," to be passed on to those beside him, 
 loses his right to it, and much of his profit in 
 it. It is " treasure hid in a field." The atti- 
 tude is anti-social and misanthropic of a people 
 who practically say to their neighbors: "We 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 79 
 
 possess the most precious of all truths, of 
 which we are the divinely commissioned guar- 
 dians and witnesses. But we do not intend to 
 make the smallest effort to share that truth 
 with you, and generations of you may go to 
 the grave without it for all we care. We are 
 passive witnesses, not active apostles. By and 
 by, the Messiah will appear, and convert all 
 who are alive in his time, whether they will or 
 not; but, for the present, Christendom is joined 
 to idols, and we shall let it alone." The faith 
 which speaks thus stands self-condemned. If 
 a creed be not aggressive and proselytizing, 
 like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, it con- 
 fesses either mistrust of itself or else misan- 
 thropic indifference to the welfare of mankind. 
 Thus the Orthodox and the elder Reformed 
 Jews have tacitly pronounced their own sen- 
 tence. 
 
 Turn we now from these to the new Refor- 
 mation. This last is a development of Juda- 
 ism, truly on its own lines, but yet extending 
 far beyond anything contemplated by the elder 
 bodies. To measure it aright, we must cast 
 back a glance over the path which Judaism 
 traversed in earlier times, and note how com- 
 pletely this new and vast stride is a continu- 
 ance of that march towards higher and wider 
 religious truth. 
 
80 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 From the earliest conception of Jahveh as 
 the Tribal God, a conception which even 
 Kuenen admits to be native to the race of 
 Israel, and tmtraceable to any other people, 
 from this conception, which plainly assumed 
 the existence of other and rival gods of neigh- 
 boring nations, it was an enormous step in 
 advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord 
 of all the earth, whose House should be a 
 " House of prayer for all nations." 
 
 Still vaster was the progress from anthropo- 
 morphic and morally imperfect ideas of the 
 character of the tribal God to the adoration of 
 Isaiah's " High and Holy One, who inhabiteth 
 eternity," who dwells in the high and holy 
 place with the pure in heart and the contrite. 
 
 Again, there was made a bound forward by 
 Judaism when the earlier simple secularism and 
 disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world 
 vanished before the belief in Immortality which 
 grew up in spite of the teachings of Antigonus 
 and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never 
 faded out again altogether. 
 
 And finally, with the development of the 
 Prophetic spirit, Worship assumed more its true 
 forms of praise, confession of sin, and thanks- 
 giving ; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody 
 sacrifices (long limited to the sacred enclosure) 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 8 1 
 
 came to an end forever amid the smoking 
 ruins. 
 
 These were truly great steps of progress 
 made by Israel of old; but the last of them 
 left the nation to carry into its sorrowful exile 
 an intolerable burden of ceremonialism and 
 dusty superstitions, whereof the Talmud is 
 now the lumber-room, and possessed also by 
 an unhappy demon of anti-social pride, which 
 forbade it to extend to or accept from other 
 nations the right hand of human brotherhood. 
 The Jews did not go out from Jerusalem as 
 the little band of Christian missionaries had 
 gone, eager to scatter their new wealth of truth 
 among the nations, and, though stoned and 
 crucified by those whom they sought to bless, 
 yet ever after by their children's children to be 
 revered and canonized. The Jews went out as 
 misers of truth, holding their full bags of treas- 
 ure hid in their breasts. Nor in the ages fol- 
 lowing the Dispersion, while Christianity di- 
 verged further and further from pure Theism, 
 and through Mariolatry and Hagiolatry sank 
 well-nigh to polytheism and idolatry, do we 
 ever once hear of an attempt by any Jewish 
 teacher, even by such a man as Maimonides, 
 to call back the wandering nations by pro- 
 claiming in their ears the " schema Israel " 
 
82 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 " THE LORD YOUR GOD THE ETERNAL is ONE." 
 Before the expulsion from Palestine, for a brief 
 period, Judaism (as one of its bitterest enemies 
 has remarked) showed promise of becoming a 
 proselytizing creed, " when, under the influence 
 of Greek philosophy and other liberalizing in- 
 fluences, it was tending from the condition of 
 a tribal to that of a universal creed. But Plato 
 succumbed to the Rabbins. Judaism fell back 
 for eighteen centuries into rigid tribalism, and, 
 as Lord Beaconsfield cynically said of it, has 
 ever since ' no more sought to make converts 
 than the House of Lords.'"* 
 
 At last the long pause in the progress of 
 Judaism, considered as a religion, seems draw- 
 ing to an end; and we may hail its present 
 advance as the continuance of that noble march 
 which the Jewish race began to the music of 
 Miriam's timbrel. 
 
 This last step forward of Reformed Judaism 
 consists, according to its latest interpreter, in 
 " the struggle now consciously and now uncon- 
 sciously maintained to emancipate the Jewish 
 faith from every vestige of tribalism, and to 
 enshrine its wholly catholic doctrines in a 
 wholly catholic form." This end is to be 
 pursued through the " DENATIONALIZATION of 
 
 * Professor Goldwin Smith, in the Nineteenth Century. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 83 
 
 the Jewish religion, by setting aside all the 
 rules and ceremonies which do not possess an 
 essentially religious character or are maintained 
 merely for the sake of the national, as distinct 
 from the religious, unity." 
 
 The following are the modes in which this 
 programme may be followed out : 
 
 i. Reformed Judaism abandons the Messi- 
 anic hope. It neither desires nor expects the 
 coming of Messiah, and the resettlement of 
 the Jews in Palestine as a nation it regards as 
 retrogression toward tribalism.* 2. It rejects 
 the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Old 
 Testament, nor does it recognize the perfection 
 and immutability of the law contained within 
 the Pentateuch. 3. It rejects the theory of a 
 Divine tradition recorded in the Mischna, and 
 does not admit the authority of the Talmudic 
 laws. 4. It puts aside, as no longer binding, 
 all the legal, hygienic, and agrarian ordinances 
 of the Pentateuch, together with the laws re- 
 lating to marriages and to the Levites. 5. It 
 
 * 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. 
 
84 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 cuts down the feasts and fasts to the Sabbath, 
 the Passover, and four others. 6. It adopts 
 the vernacular of each country for a larger or 
 smaller part of the service of the synagogue, 
 instead of retaining the whole in Hebrew. 
 
 Besides these six great changes, there are 
 two others looming in the distance. Reformed 
 Judaism still regards the rite of circumcision 
 as binding, though several distinguished re- 
 formers (notably Geiger) have recommended 
 that proselytes should not be required to adopt 
 it. Of the change of the Sabbath day from 
 Saturday to Sunday, I am informed that the 
 transference of the holy day has already been 
 made by one synagogue in Berlin, which holds 
 its services on the Sunday, and by many 
 independent Jewish men of business ; and that 
 it is very much desired in some other quarters. 
 The difficulty attendant on this change obvi- 
 ously is: that it would prove so favorable to 
 the interests of Jews in a secular sense that, 
 if adopted, the charge of worldly motives 
 is certain to be brought against those who 
 advocate it. 
 
 These, then, in brief, are the negations of 
 Reformed Judaism. On the positive side, it 
 reaffirms those dogmas which are the kernel 
 of Judaism, "the Unity of God; His just 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 85 
 
 judgment of the world; the free relation of 
 every man to God ; the continual progress of 
 humanity ; the immortality of the soul ; and 
 the Divine election of Israel " (understood to 
 signify that the Jews, under the will of God, 
 possess a specific religious mission not yet 
 entirely fulfilled). As to the observances of 
 Reformed Judaism, the framework of life and 
 habit under which it proposes to exist, " they 
 will remain distinctively Jewish, and must not 
 bear the mere stamp of nineteenth century 
 religious opinion." The Jewish Reformer 
 thus, like many another Radical, is an aristo- 
 crat at heart, and shrinks from descending to 
 the level of a parvenue faith. In my humble 
 judgment, he is entirely right in his decision. 
 So long as he places the interests of truth and 
 honesty above all, he cannot do better than 
 hold fast by everything which reminds himself 
 and the world of his pedigree through a hun- 
 dred generations of worshippers of Jehovah. 
 
 The extent to which such reformation as 
 that now sketched prevails at this hour among 
 Jews is difficult to ascertain. The movement 
 has been going on for some time, and yet 
 counts but a moderate number of adherents, 
 chiefly, as I have said, German and American 
 Jews. Nay, what is most unhopeful, the 
 
86 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 disease of religious indifference, that moral 
 phylloxera which infests the choicest spiritual 
 vineyards, is working its evil way among the 
 broader-minded Jews, as it works (we know 
 too well) among the broader-minded Christians. 
 To unite depth of conviction with width of 
 sympathy has ever been a rare achievement. 
 " Tout comprendre sera tout pardonner," may 
 be rendered, in intellectual matters, " To find 
 truth everywhere is to contend for it nowhere." 
 There is good room to hope, however, that 
 if some fall out of the ranks, the Reformed 
 party will yet possess enough energy, vigor, 
 and cohesion to make its influence erelong 
 extensively felt. 
 
 It is a startling prospect which has been thus 
 opened before us. If anything seemed fixed in 
 the endless flux of nations and religions, it was 
 the half-petrified religion of the Jew. That 
 the stern figure which we have beheld walking 
 alone through the long procession of history 
 should come at last and take a place beside his 
 brothers is hard to picture. We live in a time 
 when, 
 
 " Faiths and empires gleam, 
 Like wrecks of a dissolving dream." 
 
 Every solid body is threatened with disintegra- 
 tion ; and the new powers of cohesion, if such 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 87 
 
 there be, have scarcely come into play. But, 
 of all changes fraught with momentous conse- 
 quences, none could well be more important 
 than that of a stripping off of its tribal gaber- 
 dine by Judaism, and the adoption of " a law 
 fit for law universal." The old fable is real- 
 ized. The wind and hail of persecution ulew 
 and pelted the Jew for a thousand years, and 
 he only drew his cloak closer around him. 
 The sunshine of prosperity and sympathy has 
 shone upon him, and, lo ! his mantle is already 
 dropping from his shoulders. 
 
 For the present we can only treat the matter 
 as a grand project, but we may endeavor to esti- 
 mate the value of a Reformation of J udaism 
 such as Luther accomplished for Christianity. 
 In the first place, it is, I conceive, the sole 
 chance for the permanent continuance of the 
 Jewish religion that it should undergo some 
 such regeneration. If the proposed Reform 
 perish in the bud, Orthodox Judaism will 
 doubtless survive for some generations, but, 
 according to the laws which govern human 
 institutions, its days must be numbered* In 
 former times, when every nation in Europe 
 held aloof from its neighbors in fear and jeal- 
 ousy, it was possible for alien tribes, like the 
 Jews and gypsies, to move among all, holding 
 
88 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 rigidly to their own tribal alliances and ob- 
 servances ; hated and mistrusted, indeed, but 
 scarcely more so than their Christian next-door 
 neighbors. But now that Christian nations 
 are all blending together under the influence 
 of perpetual intercourse, and their differences 
 of belief, governments, costumes, habits, and 
 ideas are effacing themselves year by year, the 
 presence of a non-fusing, non-intermarrying, 
 separatist race a race brought by commerce 
 into perpetual friction with all the rest 
 becomes an intolerable anomaly. 
 
 For once Mr. Goldwin Smith was in the 
 right in this controversy, when he remarked 
 that " the least sacred of all races would be that 
 which should persistently refuse to come into 
 the allegiance of humanity." 
 
 The Jews have shown themselves the stur- 
 diest of mankind, but the influences brought 
 to bear on them now are wholly different 
 from those which they met with such stub- 
 born courage of old. Political ambition, so 
 long utterly closed to them, but to which 
 Lord Beaconsfield's career must evermore 
 prove a spur ; pleasure and self-indulgence, to 
 which their wealth is an ever ready key; the 
 scepticism and materialism of the time, to which 
 their acute and positive minds seem to render 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 89 
 
 them even more liable than their contempo- 
 raries, these are not the elements out of 
 which martyrs and confessors are made. A re- 
 formed, enlightened, world-wide creed, which a 
 cultivated gentleman may frankly avow and 
 defend in the salons of London, Paris, Berlin, or 
 New York, and in the progress of which he may 
 feel some enthusiasm, a creed which will make 
 him free to adopt from Christianity all that he 
 recognizes in it of spiritually lofty and morally 
 beautiful, such a creed may have a future 
 before it of which no end need be foreseen. 
 But for unreformed Judaism there can be 
 nothing in store but the gradual dropping 
 away of the ablest, the most cultured, the 
 wealthiest, the men of the world and the men 
 of the study, the Spinozas, the Heines, the 
 Disraelis and the persistence only for a few 
 generations of the more ignorant, fanatical, 
 obscure, and poor. 
 
 Again, besides giving to Judaism a new lease 
 of life, the Reform projected would undoubtedly 
 do much to extinguish that passion vijuden- 
 hasse which is the disgrace of Eastern Chris- 
 tendom, and the source of such manifold woes 
 to both races. The root of that passion is the 
 newly awakened sense (to which I have just 
 referred) of impatience at the existence of a 
 
9O PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 nation within every nation, having separate 
 interests of its own and a solidarity between 
 its members, ramifying into every trade, 
 profession, and concern of civil life. Were 
 this solidarity to be relinquished, and the 
 mutual secret co-operation of Jews* reduced 
 to such natural and fitting friendliness as 
 exists between Scotchmen in England, and 
 were it to become common for Jews to marry 
 Christians and discuss freely with Christians 
 their respective views, were this to happen, 
 mutual respect and sympathy would very 
 quickly supersede mutual prejudice and mis- 
 trust. After two generations of such Reformed 
 Judaism, the memory of the difference of race 
 would, I am persuaded, be reduced to that 
 pleasant interest wherewith we trace the 
 ancestry of some of our eminent statesmen 
 to " fine old Quaker families," or remark that 
 
 *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 manip- 
 ulation 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. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 9! 
 
 some of our most brilliant men of letters have 
 in their veins the marvellous Huguenot blood.* 
 It is superfluous to add that the Jewish 
 people, thus thoroughly adopted into the com- 
 ity of European nations, and Judaism recog- 
 nized as the great and enlightened religion of 
 that powerful and ubiquitous race, the true 
 mission of Judaism, as taught by Bible and 
 Talmud that of holding up the torch of 
 monotheistic truth to the world would begin 
 its practical accomplishment. The Latin 
 nations in particular, to whom religion has 
 presented itself hitherto in the guise of eccle- 
 siasticism and hagiolatry, and who are fast 
 
 * 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 admi- 
 rable. 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 
 
92 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 verging into blank materialism as the sole 
 alternative they know, would behold at last, 
 with inevitable respect, a simple and noble 
 worship, at once historical and philosophic, 
 without priestly claims, and utterly at war 
 with every form of monasticism and super- 
 stition. The impression on these, and even 
 on the Northern nations, of such a spectacle 
 could not be otherwise than elevating, and 
 possibly, in the Divine order of the world, 
 might be the means whereby the tide of faith, 
 so long ebbing out in dismal scepticism, should 
 flow once more up the rejoicing shores. 
 
 Even if this be too much to hope, I cannot 
 doubt that many Christian Churches would 
 
 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 neigh- 
 bors ; 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. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 93 
 
 draw valuable lessons from the presence 
 among them of a truly reformed Judaism, 
 Especially in these days of irreverence, of 
 finikin Ritualism on one side and Salvation 
 Army rowdyism on the other, it would be a 
 measureless advantage to be summoned to 
 revert in thought to the solemn and awe- 
 inspired tone of Hebrew devotion which still 
 breathes in the services of the synagogue. It 
 has been a loss to Christians as well as to 
 Jews that these services have hitherto been 
 conducted in Hebrew.* Had the synagogue 
 services in London been conducted in the 
 English language, I believe that many of the 
 popular misapprehensions concerning Judaism 
 would never have existed, while the impres- 
 sion of profound reverence which the prayers 
 convey would have reacted advantageously 
 on Christian worship, too liable to oscillate 
 between formalism and familiarity.! 
 
 I am bound to add, on the other side, that 
 it appears to me there are some very great 
 
 *The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in 
 parallel columns. 
 
 I 1 refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of 
 Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also 
 many noble prayers hi the collection of Sabbath and other services 
 for various festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though some- 
 what deficient as regards the expression of spiritual aspiration. 
 
94 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 advantages on the side of Christianity of which 
 it behooves reforming Jews to take account. 
 These are not matters of dogma, but of senti- 
 ment ; and not only may they be appropriated 
 by Jews without departing by a hair's breadth 
 from their own religious platform, but they 
 may every one be sanctioned (if any sanction 
 be needed for them) by citations from the 
 Hebrew Scriptures themselves. The great 
 difference between Judaism and Christianity 
 on their moral and spiritual sides, in my 
 humble judgment, lies in this : that the piety 
 and charity, scattered like grains of gold 
 through the rock of Judaism, were by Christ's 
 burning spirit fused together, and cast into 
 golden coin to pass from hand to hand. Jews 
 have continually challenged Christians to point 
 to a single precept in the Gospel which has 
 not its counterpart in the Old Testament. 
 They are perhaps in the right, and possibly 
 no such isolated precept can be found differ- 
 entiating the two creeds ; but, both by that 
 which is left aside and by that which it chose 
 out and emphasized, Christianity is, practically, 
 a new system of ethics and religion. 
 
 To these three things in Christianity I would 
 direct the attention of Jewish reformers: 
 
 The Christian idea of love to God. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 95 
 
 The Christian idea of love to Man. 
 
 The Christian sentiment concerning Immor- 
 tality. 
 
 For the first, far be it from me to wrong the 
 martyr race by a doubt that thousands of Jews 
 have nobly obeyed the First Great Command- 
 ment of the Law (given in Deuteronomy vi. 4, 
 as well as repeated by Christ) and "loved the 
 Lord their God with all their heart and soul 
 and strength," even to the willing sacrifice 
 of their lives through fidelity to Him. The 
 feelings of loyalty entertained by a Jew in 
 the old days of persecution to the " God of 
 Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob " must have been 
 often a master-passion as fervid as it was 
 deep-rooted. But alongside of this hereditary 
 loyalty to the God and King of Israel there 
 might well grow somewhat of that tender per- 
 sonal piety which springs from the Evangelical 
 idea of God as holding personal relations with 
 each devout and forgiven soul. 
 
 Of the two theories of religion, that which 
 starts with the idea of a Tribe or Church, and 
 that which starts with the unit of the individual 
 soul, Judaism has hitherto held the former. 
 It has been essentially a corporate religion; 
 and to be "cut off from the congregation," 
 like Spinoza, has been deemed tantamount to 
 
96 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 spiritual destruction. It is surely time that 
 Reformed Judaism should now adopt the far 
 higher theory of religious individualism, and 
 teach men to seek those sacred private and 
 personal relations with the Lord of Spirits 
 which, when once enjoyed, cause the notions 
 of any mere corporate privileges to appear 
 childish. Had the deep experiences which 
 belong to such personal piety been often felt 
 by modern Jews (as they certainly were by 
 many of the old Psalmists), it could not have 
 happened that modern Jewish literature should 
 have been so barren as it is of devotional 
 works and of spiritual poetry. To a serious 
 reverential spirit (a sentiment far above the 
 level of that of the majority of Christians), 
 Jews too rarely join those more ardent relig- 
 ious affections and aspirations which it is the 
 glory of Christianity to inspire in the hearts 
 of her saints. Had they known these feelings 
 vividly and often, we must have had a Jewish 
 Thomas a Kempis, a Jewish Saint Theresa, 
 a Jewish Tauler, Fenelon, Taylor, Wesley. It 
 will not suffice to say in answer that Jews 
 did not need such treatises of devotion and 
 such hymns of ecstatic piety, having always 
 possessed the noblest of the world in their 
 own Scriptures. Feelings which really rise to 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 97 
 
 the flood do not keep in the river-bed for a 
 thousand years. 
 
 Again, the Christian idea of Love to Man 
 possesses an element of tenderness not per- 
 ceptible in Jewish philanthropy. Jews are 
 splendidly charitable not alone to their own 
 poor, but also to Christians. Their manage- 
 ment of their public and private charities has 
 long been recognized as wiser and more liberal 
 than that of Christians at home or abroad. 
 They are faithful and affectionate husbands 
 and wives ; peculiarly tender parents ; pious 
 children ; kindly neighbors. The cruel wrongs 
 of eighteen centuries have neither brutalized 
 nor imbittered them. Well would it be if 
 whole classes of drunken, wife-beating English- 
 men would take example in these respects from 
 them! But of certain claims beyond these, 
 claims always recognized by Christian teachers, 
 and not seldom practically fulfilled by Christian 
 men and women, the claims of the erring to 
 be forgiven, of the fallen to be lifted out of the 
 mire, Jews have hitherto taken little account. 
 The parable of the Lost Sheep is emphati- 
 cally Christian; and among Christians only, till 
 quite recently, have there been active agencies 
 at work to seek and save ruined women, drunk- 
 ards, criminals, the " perishing and dangerous 
 
98 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 classes." * Mary Magdalene did well to weep 
 over the feet of Jesus Christ. It was Christ 
 who brought into the world compassion for 
 her and for those like her. And for the for- 
 giveness of enemies, also, the Christian spirit, 
 if not absolutely unique, is yet supreme. The 
 very core of the Christian idea fitly found 
 its expression on the Cross, " Father, forgive 
 them, for they know not what they do." That 
 divinest kind of charity, which renounces all 
 contests for rights, and asks not what it is 
 bound to do, but what it may be permitted to 
 do, to bless and serve a child of God, that 
 charity may, I think, justly be historically 
 named Christian. Of course, every pure The- 
 ism is called on to teach it likewise. 
 
 *So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first 
 published, a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Chris- 
 tian character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in 
 London. I have before me the " Report of the Jewish Ladies' Asso- 
 ciation for Prevention and Rescue Work" for 1886-87, printed for 
 private circulation. The president of the association is Lady Roth- 
 schild ; 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 con- 
 vinced 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." 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 99 
 
 With regard to women, the attitude of Juda- 
 ism is peculiar. It has always recognized some 
 " Rights of Women," and has never fallen into 
 the absurdity of cherishing mental or physical 
 weakness in them as honorable or attractive. 
 As Mrs. Cyril Flower (then Miss Constance 
 de Rothschild) showed in an interesting arti- 
 cle published some years ago, the " Hebrew 
 Woman," so magnificently described in the 
 last chapter of Proverbs, has always been the 
 Jewish ideal : " Strength and honor are her 
 clothing. She openeth her mouth with wis- 
 dom." No jealousy, but, on the contrary, joyful 
 recognition, awaited in each age the vigorous 
 actions of Miriam and Deborah, of Judith and 
 Esther, and of the mother of the seven martyrs 
 in the Book of Maccabees. Jewish marriages 
 (till quite recently formed always on the East- 
 ern rather than on the Western system) are 
 proverbially faithful and affectionate ; and the 
 resolution of Jews never to permit their wives 
 to undertake labor outside their homes (such 
 as factory work and the like) has undoubtedly 
 vastly contributed to the health and welfare 
 of the nation. Yet, notwithstanding all this, 
 something appears to be lacking in Jewish 
 feeling concerning women. Too much of 
 Oriental materialism still lingers. Too little 
 
IOO PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 of Occidental chivalry and romance has yet 
 arisen. In this respect, strange to say, the 
 East is prose, the West poetry. The relations 
 of men and women, above all of husband and 
 wife, cannot be ranked as perfect till some 
 halo of tender reverence be added to sturdy 
 good will and fidelity.* 
 
 And, beyond their human brethren and 
 sisters, Christians have found (it is one of 
 those late developments of the fertile Chris- 
 tian idea of which I have spoken) that the 
 humbler races of living creatures have also 
 claims upon us, moral claims founded on the 
 broad basis of the right of simple sentiency 
 to be spared needless pain; religious claims 
 founded on the touching relation which we, 
 the often forgiven children of God, bear to 
 "the unoffending creatures which he loves." 
 This tender development of Christianity, and 
 the discovery consequent on it, that " he pray- 
 eth well who loveth well both man and bird 
 and beast," is assuredly worthy of the regard 
 of those Reformers who would make Judaism 
 a universal religion. Semitic literature has 
 hitherto betrayed a hardness and poverty on 
 this side which it is needful should now be 
 
 *See this affectingly brought out in that charming book, 
 "The Jews of Barnow." 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM IOI 
 
 remedied, if Judaism is to ride on the full 
 tide of Aryan sympathies. 
 
 And, lastly, the Christian sentiment concern- 
 ing Immortality deserves special attention from 
 Reforming Jews. The adoption of the dogma 
 of a Future Life has scarcely even yet, after 
 some fifty generations, imprinted on the Jewish 
 mind the full consciousness of 
 
 " That great world of light which lies 
 Behind all human destinies." 
 
 Jews have, it would appear, essentially the 
 esprit positif. They are content to let the 
 impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and 
 the future world, that veil which the Aryan 
 soul strives impatiently, age after age, to tear 
 away, or on which it throws a thousand 
 phantasms from the magic-lanthorn of fancy. 
 Millions of Christians have lived with their 
 " treasures " truly placed in that world where 
 moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves 
 break through and steal. Especially have the 
 bereaved among us dwelt on earth with their 
 hearts already in heaven where their beloved 
 ones await them. To too great an extent, no 
 doubt, has this "other-worldliness" been carried, 
 especially among ascetics ; but, on the whole, 
 the firm anchorage of Christian souls beyond 
 
IO2 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 the tomb has been the source of infinite 
 comfort and infinite elevation. Of this sort 
 of projection of the spirit into the darkness, 
 this rocket-throwing of ropes of faith over the 
 deeps of destruction, whereby the mourner's 
 shipwrecked soul is saved and reinstated, the 
 Jewish consciousness seems yet scarcely cog- 
 nizant. Perhaps these days of pessimism and 
 mental fog are not those wherein any one is 
 likely to find his faith in immortality quickened. 
 As Dr. Johnson complained that he was " in- 
 jured " by every man who did not believe all 
 that he believed, so each of us finds his hope 
 of another life chilled by the doubts which, 
 like icebergs, float in the sea of thought we are 
 traversing. But, for those Jews who thoroughly 
 accept the dogma of immortality, it would surely 
 be both a happiness and a source of moral ele- 
 vation to give to such a stupendous fact its 
 place in the perspective of existence. There 
 is infinite difference between the molelike 
 vision which sees nothing beyond the grass- 
 roots and the worms of earth, though dimly 
 aware of a world of sunlight above, and the 
 eagle glance which can measure alike things 
 near and afar; between the man who counts 
 his beloved dead as lost to him because he 
 beholds and hears and touches them no more, 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 1 03 
 
 and the man who can say calmly amid his 
 sorrow, 
 
 " Take them, thou great Eternity ! 
 
 Our little life is but a gust, 
 Which bends the branches of thy tree, 
 And trails its blossoms in the dust." 
 
 Turning now from the results on Judaism 
 itself and on Christianity at large of a great 
 Jewish Reformation, we may indulge in some 
 reflections on the possible bearings of such an 
 event on that not inconsiderable number of 
 persons who, all over Europe, are hanging 
 loosely upon or dropping silently away from 
 the Christian Churches. I am not speaking 
 of those who become Atheists or Agnostics 
 and renounce all interest in religion, but of 
 those who, like Robert Elsmere, pass into 
 phases of belief which may be broadly classed 
 under the head of Theism. These persons 
 believe still in God and in the life to come, 
 and hold tenaciously by the moral and spiritual 
 part of Christianity, perhaps sometimes feeling 
 its beauty and truth more vividly than some 
 orthodox Christians who deem the startling, 
 miraculous, and " apocalyptic " part to consti- 
 tute the essence of their faith. But this 
 "apocalyptic part," and all which Dr. Mar- 
 tineau has called the " Messianic mythology," 
 
IO4 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 they have abandoned. Of the number of these 
 persons, it is hard to form an estimate. Some 
 believe that the Churches are all honeycombed 
 by them, and that a panic would follow could 
 a census of England be taken in a Palace of 
 Truth. Not a few in the beginning and 
 middle of this century quitted their old folds, 
 and under the names of " Unitarians,"' " Free 
 Christians," and " Theists " have thenceforth 
 stood confessedly apart.* But of late years 
 the disposition to make any external schism 
 has apparently died away. The instinct, once 
 universal, to build a new nest for each brood 
 of faith seems perishing among us. The 
 Church-forming spirit, so vigorous of old in 
 Christianity and in Buddhism, is visibly fail- 
 ing, and making way for new phases of 
 development, of which the Salvation Army 
 
 *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 con- 
 stitute 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 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 105 
 
 may possibly afford us a sample. Among 
 cultivated people subtle discrimination of dif- 
 ferences and fastidiousness as regards ques- 
 tions of taste are indefinitely stronger than 
 that desire for a common worship which, in 
 the breasts of our forefathers, who " rolled the 
 psalm to wintry skies," and dared death merely 
 to pray together, must have mounted to a pas- 
 sion. Englishmen generally still cling to public 
 worship, but it is chiefly where an ancient lit- 
 urgy supplies by old and holy words a dreamy 
 music of devotion, into which each feels at 
 liberty to weave his own thoughts. Wherever 
 the demand is made for prayers which shall 
 definitely express the faith and aspirations 
 of the modern-minded worshipper, there the 
 subtleties and the fastidiousness come into 
 play, and, instead of being drawn together, 
 men sorrowfully discover that they are made 
 
 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 
 
IO6 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 conscious by common worship of a hundred 
 discrepancies of opinion, a thousand disharmo- 
 nies of taste and feeling. In all things, we 
 men and women of the modern Athens are 
 not "too superstitious," but too critical; and 
 in religion, which necessarily touches us most 
 vitally, our critical spirit threatens to paralyze 
 us with shyness. The typical English gentle- 
 man and lady of to-day are at the opposite pole 
 of sentiment in this respect from the Arab 
 who kneels on his carpet on the crowded deck 
 for his evening orison, or from the Italian con- 
 tadina who tells her beads before the way- 
 side Madonna. Doubtless, here is one reason 
 among many why such multitudes remain with- 
 out any definite place in the religions of the 
 land. They hang languidly about the old hive, 
 feebly humming now and then, but feeling no 
 impulse to swarm, and finding no queen-spirit 
 
 archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by every- 
 body to mean, not the recognition of the virtues of physical science, 
 nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recogni- 
 tion 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, how- 
 ever, 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. 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 107 
 
 to lead them to another home where they might 
 build their proper cells and make their own 
 honey. 
 
 But, whether embodied in any religious sect 
 or Church, or hanging loosely upon one, the 
 persons of whom we have been speaking, as 
 believers in God and in the spiritual, but not 
 the apocalyptic side of Christianity, Chris- 
 tian Theists, as we may best call them, are 
 of course nearer in a theological point of view 
 than any others to those Reformed Jews whom 
 we may call Jewish Theists. The intellectual 
 creeds of each, in fact, might, without much 
 concession on either side, be reduced to iden- 
 tical formulas. Now, Christian Theists have 
 hitherto wanted a rallying point, and have 
 been taunted with the lack of any historic 
 basis for their religion. Why (it will be asked 
 by many) should not this Reformed Judaism 
 afford such a rallying point, and the old rocky 
 foundations laid by Moses support a common 
 temple of Christian and Jewish Theism ? 
 
 It may prove that such a consummation may 
 be among the happy reunitings and reconstruc- 
 tions of the far future. But for the present 
 hour, and for the reasons I have given in the 
 beginning of this paper, I do not believe it 
 can be near at hand. I am also quite sure 
 
I08 PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 that it would be the extreme of unwisdom to 
 hamper and disturb the progress of Reformed 
 Judaism along its own lines by any hasty 
 efforts at amalgamation with outsiders, who 
 would bring with them another order of relig- 
 ious habits and endless divergencies of opinion. 
 Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden 
 candlestick, and set it aloft, and it will give 
 light unto all which are in the house, not 
 only the House of Israel, but in the House 
 of Humanity. A glorious future may in God's 
 Providence await such purified, emancipated 
 Judaism. It is true, it may not exhibit the 
 special form of religion which one party or 
 another among us altogether desires to see ex- 
 extended in the world. Some radical reformers 
 who sympathize in its general scope would 
 wish to find it stripping off altogether its Jew- 
 ish character, and torn up from the root of 
 Mosaism. Many more orthodox Christians 
 will undervalue it because it shows no indica- 
 tion of a tendency to adopt from Christianity 
 such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, 
 or the Atonement, even while, on the spirit- 
 ual side, it is imbued with the essential ideas 
 of him whom it will doubtless recognize as 
 the great Jewish Rabbi and Prophet, Jesus of 
 Nazareth. But it is not for us to seek to 
 
PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM 
 
 modify, scarcely even to criticise, such a move- 
 ment as this. A respectful interest and a 
 hopeful sympathy seem to me the only sen- 
 timents wherewith Christians and Christian 
 Theists should stand aside and watch this last 
 march forward of that wondrous patriarchal 
 faith, whereof Christianity itself is the first- 
 born son, and Islam the younger ; and which 
 now in the end of the ages prepares to cross 
 a new Jordan, and take possession of a new 
 Holy Land. 
 
 *** NOTE. It is proper to mention, in republishing this essay at 
 the desire of Jewish friends, that it was received on its first appear- 
 ance with the utmost possible disfavor by the Jewish press. 
 
ESSAY IV. 
 
 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING. 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING. 
 
 ENDLESS books have been written about the 
 Laws of Thought, the Nature of Thought, and 
 the Validity of Thought. Physiologists and 
 metaphysicians have vied with one another to 
 tell us in twenty different ways how we think 
 and why we think and what good our thinking 
 may be supposed to be as affording us any real 
 acquaintance with things in general outside our 
 thinking-machine. One school of philosophers 
 tells us that Thought is a secretion of the brain 
 (i.e., that Thought is a form of Matter), and 
 another that it is purely immaterial, and the 
 only reality in the universe, i.e., that Matter 
 is a form of Thought. The meekest of men 
 "presume to think" this, that, and the other; 
 and the proudest distinction of the modern 
 sage is to be a "Thinker," especially a "free" 
 one. But with all this much ado about 
 Thought, it has not occurred to any one, so 
 far as I am aware, to attempt a fair review of 
 
114 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 what any one of us thinks in the course of 
 the twenty-four hours; what are the number 
 of separable thoughts which, on an average, 
 pass through a human brain in a day; and 
 what may be their nature and proportions in 
 the shape of Recollections, Reflections, Hopes, 
 Contrivances, Fancies, and Reasonings. We 
 are all aware that when we are awake a 
 perpetual stream of thoughts goes on in 
 "what we are pleased to call our minds," 
 sometimes slow and sluggish, as the water in 
 a ditch ; sometimes bright, rapid, and sparkling, 
 like a mountain brook; and now and then 
 making some sudden, happy dash, cataract-wise, 
 over an obstacle. We are also accustomed to 
 speak as if the sum and substance of all this 
 thinking were very respectable, as might be- 
 come "beings endowed with the lofty faculty 
 of thought " ; and we always tacitly assume 
 that our thoughts have logical beginnings, 
 middles, and endings commence with prob- 
 lems and terminate in solutions or that we 
 evolve out of our consciousness ingenious 
 schemes of action or elaborate pictures of 
 Hope or Memory. If our books of mental 
 philosophy ever obtain a place in the Circu- 
 lating Libraries of another planet, the "general 
 reader" of that distant world will inevitably 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 115 
 
 suppose that on our little Tellus dwell a thou- 
 sand millions of men, women, and children, who 
 spend their existence as the interlocutors in 
 Plato's Dialogues passed their hours under the 
 grip of the dread Socratic elenchus, arguing, 
 sifting, balancing, recollecting, hard at work as 
 if under the ferule of a schoolmaster. 
 
 The real truth about the matter seems to 
 be that, instead of taking this kind of mental 
 exercise all day long, and every day, there are 
 very few of us who ever do anything of the 
 kind for more than a few minutes at a time ; 
 and that the great bulk of our thoughts pro- 
 ceed in quite a different way, and are occupied 
 by altogether less exalted matters than our 
 vanity has induced us to imagine. The 
 normal mental locomotion of even well-edu- 
 cated men and women, save under the spur 
 of exceptional stimulus, is neither the flight 
 of an eagle in the sky nor the trot of a horse 
 upon the road, but may better be compared 
 to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady 
 lane, now dawdling pensively, now taking a 
 hop-skip-and-jump, now stopping to pick black- 
 berries, and now turning to right or left to 
 catch a butterfly, climb a tree, or make dick- 
 duck-and-drake on a pond ; going nowhere in 
 particular, and only once in a mile or so pro- 
 
Il6 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 ceeding six steps in succession in an orderly 
 and philosophical manner. 
 
 It is far beyond my ambition to attempt to 
 supply this large lacune in mental science, and 
 to set forth the truth of the matter about the 
 actual Thoughts which practically, not theo- 
 retically, are wont to pass through human 
 brains. Some few observations on the subject, 
 however, may perhaps be found entertaining, 
 and ought certainly to serve to mitigate our 
 self-exaltation on account of our grand mental 
 endowments, by showing how rarely and under 
 what curious variety of pressure we employ 
 them. 
 
 The first and familiar remark is that every 
 kind of thought is liable to be colored and 
 modified in all manner of ways by our physi- 
 cal conditions and surroundings. We are not 
 steam thinking-machines, working evenly at 
 all times at the same rate, and turning out the 
 same sort and quantity of work in the same 
 given period, but rather more like windmills, 
 subject to every breeze, and whirling our sails 
 at one time with great impetus and velocity, 
 and at another standing still, becalmed and 
 ineffective. Sometimes it is our outer condi- 
 tions which affect us, sometimes it is our own 
 inner wheels which are clogged and refuse to 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING I I 7 
 
 rotate ; but, from whatever cause it arises, the 
 modification of our thoughts is often so great 
 as to make us arrive at diametrically opposite 
 conclusions on the same subject and with the 
 same data of thought, within an incredibly 
 brief interval of time. Some years ago, the 
 President of the British Association frankly 
 answered objections to the consistency of his 
 inaugural address by referring to the different 
 aspects of the ultimate problems of theology 
 in different " moods " of mind. When men 
 of such eminence confess to "moods," lesser 
 mortals may avow their own mental oscilla- 
 tions without painful humiliation, and even 
 put forward some claim to consistency if the 
 vibrating needle of their convictions do not 
 swing quite round the whole compass, and 
 point at two o'clock to the existence of a 
 Deity and a Life to come, and at six to a 
 nebula for the origin, and a "streak of morning 
 cloud " for the consummation of things. Pos- 
 sibly, also, the unscientific mind may claim 
 some praise on the score of modesty if it delay 
 for the moment to instruct mankind in either 
 its two o'clock or its six o'clock creed, and 
 wait till it has settled down for some few 
 hours, weeks, or months, to any one definite 
 opinion. 
 
Il8 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 Not to dwell for the present on these serious 
 topics, it is only necessary to carry with us 
 through our future investigations that every 
 man's thoughts are continually fluctuating and 
 vibrating, from inward as well as outward 
 causes. Let us glance for a moment at some 
 of these. First, there are the well-known con- 
 ditions of health and high animal spirits, in 
 which every thought is rose-colored ; and cor- 
 responding conditions, of disease and depres- 
 sion, in which everything we think of seems to 
 pass, like a great bruise, through yellow, green, 
 blue, and purple to black. A liver complaint 
 causes the universe to be enshrouded in gray; 
 and the gout covers it with an inky pall, and 
 makes us think our best friends little better 
 than fiends in disguise. Further, a whole 
 treatise would be needed to expound how our 
 thoughts are further distempered by food, bev- 
 erages of various kinds, and narcotics of great 
 variety. When our meals have been too long 
 postponed, it would appear as if that Evil 
 Personage who proverbially finds mischief for 
 idle hands to do were similarly engaged with 
 an idle digestive apparatus, and the result is 
 that, if there be the smallest and most remote 
 cloud to be seen in the whole horizon of our 
 thoughts, it sweeps up and over us just in pro- 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING I 19 
 
 portion as we grow hungrier and fainter, till 
 at last it overwhelms us in depression and 
 despair. "Why?" we ask ourselves, "why has 
 not A. written to us for so long? What will 
 
 B. think of such and such a transaction ? How 
 is our pecuniary concern with C. to be settled? 
 What is the meaning of that odd little twitch 
 we have felt so often here or there about 
 our persons?" The answer to our thoughts, 
 prompted by the evil genius of famine, is 
 always lugubrious in the extreme. "A. has 
 not written because he is dead. B. will quar- 
 rel with us forever because of that transaction. 
 
 C. will never pay us our money, or we shall 
 never be able to pay C. That twitch which 
 we have so thoughtlessly disregarded is the 
 premonitory symptom of the most horrible of 
 all human maladies, of which we shall die in 
 agonies and leave a circle of sorrowing friends 
 before the close of the ensuing year." Such 
 are the id'ees noires which present themselves 
 when we want our dinner ; and the best-inten- 
 tioned people in the world, forsooth ! recom- 
 mend us to summon them round us by fasting, 
 as if they were a company of cherubim instead 
 of imps of quite another character ! But the 
 scene undergoes a transformation bordering on 
 the miraculous when we have eaten a slice of 
 
I2O THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 mutton and drunk half a glass of sherry. If 
 we revert now to our recent meditations, we 
 are quite innocently astonished to think what 
 could possibly have made us so anxious with- 
 out any reasonable ground. Of course, A. 
 has not written to us because he always goes 
 grouse-shooting at this season. B. will never 
 take the trouble to think about our little trans- 
 action. C. is certain to pay us, or we can 
 readily raise money to pay him ; and our 
 twitch means nothing worse than a touch of 
 rheumatics or an ill-fitting garment. 
 
 Beyond the alternations of fasting and feast- 
 ing, still more amazing are the results of nar- 
 cotics, alcoholic beverages, and of tea and 
 coffee. Every species of wine exercises a 
 perceptibly different influence of its own, 
 from the cheery and social "sparkling grape 
 of Eastern France " to the solemn black wine 
 of Oporto, the fit accompaniment of the blandly 
 dogmatic post-prandial prose of elderly gentle- 
 men of orthodox sentiments. A cup of strong 
 coffee clears the brain and makes the thoughts 
 transparent, while one of green tea drives them 
 fluttering like dead leaves before the wind. 
 Time and learning would fail to describe the 
 yet more marvellous effects of opium, hem- 
 lock, henbane, haschish, bromide, and chloral. 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 121 
 
 Every one of these narcotics produces a differ- 
 ent hue of the mental window through which 
 we look out on the world; sometimes distorting 
 all objects in the wildest manner (like opium), 
 sometimes (like chloral) acting only perceptibly 
 by removing the sense of disquiet and restoring 
 our thoughts to the white light of common- 
 sense cheerfulness ; and again acting quite dif- 
 ferently on the thoughts of different persons, 
 and of the same persons at different times. 
 
 Only secondary to the effects of inwardly 
 imbibed stimulants or narcotics are those of 
 the outward atmosphere, which in bracing 
 weather makes our thoughts crisp like the 
 frosted grass, and in heavy November causes 
 them to drip chill and slow and dull, like the 
 moisture from the mossy eaves of the Moated 
 Grange. Burning, glaring Southern sunshine 
 dazes our minds as much as our eyes, and a 
 London fog obfuscates them, so that a man 
 might honestly plead that he could no more 
 argue clearly in the fog than the Irishman 
 could spell correctly with a bad pen and 
 muddy ink. 
 
 Nor are mouths, eyes, and lungs by any 
 means the only organs through which influ- 
 ences arrive at our brain, modifying the 
 thoughts which proceed from them. The 
 
122 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 sense of Smelling, when gratified by the odors 
 of woods and gardens and hay-fields, or even 
 of delicately perfumed rooms, lifts all our 
 thoughts into a region wherein the Beautiful, 
 the Tender, and the Sublime may impress us 
 freely; while the same sense, offended by dis- 
 gusting and noxious odors, as of coarse cook- 
 ery, open sewers, or close chambers inhabited 
 by vulgar people, thrusts us down into an 
 opposite stratum of feeling, wherein poetry 
 entereth not, and our very thoughts smell of 
 garlic. Needless to add that in a still more 
 transcendent way Music seizes on the thoughts 
 of the musically-minded, and bears them off in 
 its talons over sea and land, and up to Olym- 
 pus like Ganymede. Two easily distinguish- 
 able mental influences seem to belong to 
 music, according as it is heard by those who 
 really appreciate it or by others who are 
 unable to do so. To the former it opens a 
 book of poetry, which they follow word for 
 word after the performer, as if he read it to 
 them, thinking the thoughts of the composer 
 in succession with scarcely greater uncertainty 
 or vagueness than if they were expressed in 
 verbal language of a slightly mystical descrip- 
 tion. To the latter the book is closed; but 
 though the listener's own thoughts unroll 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 123 
 
 themselves uninterrupted by the composer's 
 ideas, they are very considerably colored 
 thereby. " I delight in music," said once Sir 
 Charles Lyell to me : " I am always able to 
 think out my work better while it is going 
 on ! " As a matter of fact, he resumed at the 
 moment a disquisition concerning the date of 
 the Glacial Period at the precise point at 
 which it had been interrupted by the per- 
 formance of a symphony of Beethoven, having 
 evidently mastered in the interval an intricate 
 astronomical knot. To ordinary mortals with 
 similar deficiency of musical sense, harmonious 
 sound seems to spread a halo like that of light, 
 causing every subject of contemplation to seem 
 glorified, as a landscape appears in a dewy sun- 
 rise. Memories rise to the mind and seem in- 
 finitely more affecting than at other times, 
 affections still living grow doubly tender, new 
 beauties appear in the picture or the landscape 
 before our eyes, and passages of remembered 
 prose or poetry float through our brains in 
 majestic cadence. In a word, the sense of the 
 Beautiful, the Tender, the Sublime, is vividly 
 aroused, and the atmosphere of familiarity and 
 commonplace, wherewith the real beauty and 
 sweetness of life are too often veiled, is lifted 
 for the hour. As in a camera-obscura or 
 
124 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 mirror, the very trees and grass which we had 
 looked on a thousand times are seen to possess 
 unexpected loveliness. But all this can only 
 happen to the non-musical soul when the har- 
 mony to which it listens is really harmonious, 
 and when it comes at an appropriate time, 
 when the surrounding conditions permit and 
 incline the man to surrender himself to its 
 influences; in a word, when there is nothing 
 else demanding his attention. The most bar- 
 barous of the practices of royalty and civic 
 magnificence is that of employing music as an 
 accompaniment to feasts. It involves a con- 
 fusion of the realm of the real and ideal, and 
 of one sense with another, as childish as that 
 of the little girl who took out a peach to eat 
 while bathing in the sea. Next to music 
 during the dinner-time comes music in the 
 midst of a cheerful evening party, where, when 
 every intellect present is strung up to the note 
 of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, 
 there is a sudden douche of solemn chords from 
 the region of the pianoforte, and presently some 
 well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all 
 the lazy people, who are lounging in easy-chairs 
 after a good dinner, into the empyrean of emo- 
 tion " sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy " 
 of Beethoven or Mozart ; or some meek damsel, 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 125 
 
 with plaintive note, calls on them, in Schubert's 
 Addio, to break their hearts at the memory or 
 anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are 
 either behind or before every one of us, and 
 which it is either agony or profanation to 
 think of at such a moment. All this is as- 
 suredly intensely barbarous. The same people 
 who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music 
 with incongruous enjoyments of another kind 
 would be guilty of giving a kiss with their 
 mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what 
 we may term extra-mural music, the hideous 
 noises made by the aid 'of vile machinery in 
 the street, it is hard to find words of con- 
 demnation strong enough for it. Probably 
 the organ-grinders of London have done more 
 in the last twenty years to detract from the 
 quality and quantity of the highest kind of 
 mental work done by the nation than any two 
 or three colleges of Oxford or Cambridge have 
 effected to increase it. One mathematician 
 alone, as he informed the writer, estimated the 
 cost of the increased mental labor they have 
 imposed upon him and his clerks at several 
 thousand pounds' worth of first-class work, for 
 which the State practically paid in the added 
 length of time needed for his calculations. 
 Not much better are those church bells which 
 
126 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 now sound a trumpet before the good people 
 who attend " matins " and other daily services 
 at hours when their profane neighbors are 
 wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their 
 appointed tasks. 
 
 Next to our bodily Sensations come in order 
 of influence on our thoughts the Places in 
 which we happen to do our thinking. Medi- 
 tating like the pious Harvey " Among the 
 Tombs" is one thing; doing the same on a 
 breezy mountain side among the gorse and the 
 heather, quite another. Jostling our way in a 
 crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, 
 rattling in an English express train or floating 
 by moonlight in a Venetian gondola or an Egyp- 
 tian dahabieh, though each and all favorable 
 conditions for thinking, create altogether dis- 
 tinct classes of lucubrations. If we endeavor 
 to define what are the surroundings among 
 which Thought is best sustained and most 
 vigorous, we shall probably find good reason 
 to reverse not a few of our accepted and famil- 
 iar judgments. The common idea, for example, 
 that we ponder very profoundly by the sea- 
 shore, is, I am persuaded, a baseless delusion. 
 We think indeed that we are thinking, but for 
 the most part our minds merely lie open, like 
 so many oysters, to the incoming waves, and 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 127 
 
 with scarcely greater intellectual activity. The 
 very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in 
 the fact that it reduces us to a state of mental 
 emptiness and vacuity, while our vanity is 
 soothed by the notion that we are thinking 
 with unwonted emphasis and perseverance. 
 Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us 
 with the monotonous passes of her billowy 
 hands, and lulls us into a slumberous hypno- 
 tism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix 
 our eyes and thoughts, like biologized men, on 
 the rising and falling of every wave. If it be 
 tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed 
 till the beautiful white crests topple over and 
 dash in storm and thunder up the beach ; 
 and, if it be a summer evening's calm, we note 
 with placid, never-ending contentment how the 
 wavelets, like little children, run up softly and 
 swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their 
 gifts of shells and seaweed, and then retreat, 
 shy and ashamed of their boldness, to hide 
 themselves once again under the flowing skirts 
 of Mother Ocean. 
 
 Again, divines and poets have united to 
 bolster up our convictions that we do a great 
 deal of important thinking at night when we 
 lie awake in bed. Every preacher points to 
 the hours of the " silent midnight," when his 
 
128 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 warnings will surely come home, and sit like 
 incubi on the breast of sinners who, too often 
 perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they 
 flew, bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. 
 Shelley, in " Queen Mab," affords us a terrible 
 night scene of a king who, after his dinner of 
 "silence, grandeur, and excess," finds sleep 
 abdicate his pillow (probably in favor of indi- 
 gestion); and Tennyson, in " Locksley Hall," 
 threatens torments of memory still keener to 
 the "shallow-hearted cousin Amy" whenever 
 she may happen to lie meditating 
 
 " In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof." 
 
 Certainly, if there be any time in the twenty- 
 four hours when we might carry on consecu- 
 tive chains of thought, it would be when we 
 lie still for hours undisturbed by sight or sound, 
 having nothing to do, and with our bodies so 
 far comfortable and quiescent as to give the 
 minimum of interruption to our mental proceed- 
 ings. Far be it from me to deny that under 
 such favorable auspices some people may think 
 to good purpose. But, if I do not greatly err, 
 they form the exception rather than the rule 
 among bad sleepers. As the Psalmist of old 
 remarked, it is generally " mischief " which a 
 man wicked or otherwise "devises upon 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 129 
 
 his bed " ; and the truth of the observation in 
 our day is proved from the harsh Ukases for 
 domestic government which are commonly pro- 
 mulgated by Paterfamilias at the breakfast 
 table, and by the sullenness de parti pris which 
 testifies that the sleepless brother, sister, or 
 maiden aunt has made up his or her mind dur- 
 ing the night to " have it out " with So-and-so 
 next morning. People are a little faint and 
 feverish when they lie awake, and nothing 
 occurs to divert their minds and restore them 
 to equanimity, and so they go on chewing the 
 bitter cud of any little grudge. Thus it comes 
 to pass that, while Anger causes Sleeplessness, 
 Sleeplessness is a frequent nurse of Anger.* 
 
 Finally, among popular delusions concerning 
 propitious conditions of Thoughts, must be 
 reckoned the belief (which has driven hermits 
 and philosophers crazy) that thinking is better 
 done in abnormal isolation than in the natural 
 social state of man. Of course there is benefit 
 quite incalculable in the reservation of some 
 portion of our days for solitude. How much 
 excuse is to be made for the shortcomings, the 
 ill-tempers, the irreligion of those poor people 
 
 *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. 
 
130 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 who are scarcely alone for half an hour be- 
 tween the cradle and the grave, God alone can 
 tell. But, with such reasonable reservation of 
 our hours and the occasional precious enjoy- 
 ment of lonely country walks or rides, the 
 benefits of solitude, even on Zimmermann's 
 showing, come nearly to an end; and there is 
 little doubt that, instead of thinking more, the 
 more hours of loneliness we devote to doing it, 
 the less we shall really think at all, or even 
 retain capacity for thinking and not degenerate 
 into cabbages. Our minds need the stimulus 
 of other minds, as our lungs need oxygen to 
 perform their functions. After all, if we analyze 
 the exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant 
 and suggestive conversation, one of its largest 
 elements will be found to be that it has quick- 
 ened our thoughts from a heavy amble into a 
 gallop. A really fine talk between half a dozen 
 well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, 
 who discuss an interesting subject with their 
 manifold wealth of allusions, arguments, and 
 illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derby- 
 day, wherein our brains are excited to their 
 utmost speed, and we get over more ground 
 than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. 
 It is superfluous to add that if our constitu- 
 tional mental tendency be that of the gentle- 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 man who naively expressed his feelings by 
 saying impressively to a friend, " I take great 
 interest in my own concerns, I assure you I 
 do," it seems doubly desirable that we should 
 overstep our petty ring-fence of personal hopes, 
 fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam with 
 our neighbors over their dominions, and into 
 further outlying regions of public and universal 
 interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions for 
 making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is 
 difficult to imagine a better than the orthodox 
 plan of the " Selig-gemachende Kirche " for 
 making a Saint. Take your man or woman, 
 with a morbidly tender conscience and a perni- 
 cious habit of self-introspection. If he or she 
 have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or 
 sorrow overshadowing the whole of life, so 
 much the better. Then shut the individual up 
 in a cell like a toad in a stone, to feed on his 
 or her own thoughts, till death or madness puts 
 an end to the experiment. 
 
 But if the seaside and solitude and the mid- 
 night couch have been much overrated as pro- 
 pitious conditions of thought, there are, per 
 contra, certain other conditions of it the value 
 of which has been too much ignored. The 
 law of the matter seems to be that real hard 
 Thought, like Happiness, rarely comes when 
 
132 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 we have made elaborate preparation for it; 
 and that the higher part of the mind which is 
 to be exercised works much more freely when 
 a certain lower part (concerned with " uncon- 
 scious cerebration ") is busy about some little 
 affairs of its own department and its restless 
 activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in 
 fifty does his best thinking quite motionless, 
 but instinctively employs his limbs in some 
 way when his brain is in full swing of argu- 
 ment and reflection. Even a trifling fidget of 
 the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a piece 
 of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our 
 plate at dinner, supplies in a degree this desid- 
 eratum, and the majority of people never carry 
 on an animated conversation involving rapid 
 thought without indulging in some such habit. 
 But the more complete employment of our un- 
 conscious cerebration in walking up or down 
 a level terrace or quarter-deck, where there are 
 no passing objects to distract our attention and 
 no need to mark where we plant our feet, 
 seems to provide even better for smooth-flow- 
 ing thought. The perfection of such condi- 
 tions is attained when the walk in question is 
 taken of a still, soft November evening, when 
 the light has faded so far as to blur the sur- 
 rounding withered 'trees and flowers, but the 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 133 
 
 gentle gray sky yet affords enough vision to 
 prevent embarrassment. There are a few such 
 hours in every year which appear absolutely 
 invaluable for calm reflection, and which are 
 grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors 
 at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet 
 unneeded fire. 
 
 There is also another specially favorable 
 opportunity for abstruse meditation, which I 
 trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name. 
 It is the grand occasion afforded by the laud- 
 able custom of patiently listening to dull speak- 
 ers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit. 
 A moment's reflection will surely enable the 
 reader to corroborate the remark that we sel- 
 dom think out the subject of a new book or 
 article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic 
 scheme, a family compact, or the menu of a 
 large dinner, with so much precision and lucid- 
 ity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness 
 at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stu- 
 pidity on theology or science. The voice of 
 the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as 
 soothing as the sound of the waves on the 
 shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the 
 attention ; while the repose of all around gently 
 inclines the languid mind to alight like a but- 
 terfly on any little flower it may find in the 
 
134 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 arid waste, and suck it to the bottom. This 
 beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing 
 is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by 
 the stuffiness of the room, the hardness and 
 shallowness of the seats (as in that place of 
 severe mortification of the flesh, the Royal 
 Institution in Albemarle Street), and lastly by 
 the unpardonable habit of many orators of lift- 
 ing their voices in an animated way, as if they 
 really had something to say, and then solemnly 
 announcing a platitude, a process which acts 
 on the nerves of a listener as it must act on 
 those of a flounder to be carried up into the 
 air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron 
 and then dropped flat on the mud. Under 
 trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the 
 sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt 
 to assume quite unaccountable and morbid 
 shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational 
 kind, as in a dream. The present writer and 
 some sober-minded acquaintances have, for 
 example, all felt themselves impelled at such 
 hours to perform aerial flights of fancy about 
 the church or lecture-room in the character 
 of stray robins or bats. " Here," they think 
 gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of 
 the absurdity of their reflection), " here, on this 
 edge of a monument, I might stand and take 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 135 
 
 flight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I 
 might run along to the top of that pillar ; and 
 from thence, by merely touching the bald tip of 
 the preacher's head, I might alight on the back 
 of that plump little angel on the tomb opposite, 
 while a final spring would take me through 
 the open pane of window and perch me on the 
 yew-tree outside." The whole may perhaps be 
 reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-represen- 
 tation of the Psalmist's cry : " Oh that I had 
 wings like a dove, for then would I flee away 
 and be at rest." 
 
 Another kind of meditation under the same 
 aggravated affliction is afforded by making 
 fantastic pictures out of the stains of damp 
 and tracks of snails on the wall, which often (in 
 village churches especially) supply the young 
 with a permanent subject of contemplation in 
 "the doctor with his boots," the "old lady and 
 her cap," and the huge face which would be 
 quite perfect if the spectator might only draw 
 an eye where one is missing, as in the fresco of 
 Dante in the Bargello. Occasionally, the sun- 
 shine kindly comes in and makes a little lively 
 entertainment on his own account by throwing 
 the shadow of the preacher's head ten feet long 
 on the wall behind him, causing the action of 
 his jaws to resemble the vast gape of a croco- 
 
136 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 dile. All these, however, ought perhaps to be 
 counted as things of the past ; or, at least, as 
 very " Rural Recreations of a Country Parish- 
 ioner,'' as A. K. H. B. might describe them. 
 It is not objects to distract and divert the 
 attention which anybody can complain of want- 
 ing in the larger number of modern churches 
 in London. 
 
 But, if our thoughts are wont to wander off 
 into fantastic dreams when we are bored, they 
 have likewise a most unfortunate propensity to 
 swerve into byways of triviality no less mis- 
 placed when, on the contrary, we are interested 
 to excess, and our attention has been fixed 
 beyond the point wherein the tension can be 
 sustained. 
 
 Every one has recognized the truth of Dick- 
 ens's description of Fagin, on his trial, thinking 
 of the pattern of the carpet ; and few of us can 
 recall hours of anguish and anxiety without 
 carrying along with their tragic memories 
 certain objects on which the eye fastened with 
 inexplicable tenacity. In lesser cases, and when 
 we have been listening to an intensely interest- 
 ing political speech, or to a profoundly thought- 
 ful sermon (for even Habitans in Sicco may 
 sometimes meet such cases), the mind seems 
 to "shy" suddenly, like a restive horse, from 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 137 
 
 the whole topic under consideration, and we 
 find ourselves, intellectually speaking, landed 
 in a ditch. 
 
 Another singular phenomenon under such 
 circumstances is that, on returning, perhaps 
 after the interval of years, to a spot wherein 
 such excessive mental tension has been ex- 
 perienced, some of us are suddenly vividly 
 impressed with the idea that we have been 
 sitting there during all the intervening time, 
 gazing fixedly on the same pillars and cornices, 
 the same trees projected against the evening 
 sky, or whatever other objects happen to be 
 before our eyes. It would appear that the 
 impression of such objects made on the retina, 
 while the mind was wholly and vehemently 
 absorbed in other things, must be somehow 
 photographed on the brain in a different way 
 from the ordinary pictures to which we have 
 given their fair share of notice as they passed 
 before us, and that we are dimly aware they 
 have been taken so long. The sight of them 
 once again bringing out this abnormal con- 
 sciousness is intensely painful, as if the real 
 self had been chained for years to the spot, 
 and only a phantom " I '' had ever gone away 
 and lived a natural human existence elsewhere. 
 
 Passing, now, from the external conditions 
 
138 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 of our Thinking, if we attempt to classify the 
 Thoughts themselves, we shall arrive, I fear, at 
 the painful discovery that the majority of us 
 think most about the least things, and least 
 about the greatest ; and that, in short, the mass 
 of our lucubrations is in the inverse ratio of 
 their value. For example, a share of our 
 thoughts, quite astonishing in quantity, is oc- 
 cupied by petty and trivial Arrangements. 
 Rich or poor, it is an immense amount of 
 thought which all (save the most care-engrossed 
 statesmen or absorbed philosophers) give to 
 these wretched little concerns. The wealthy 
 gentleman thinks of how and where and when 
 he will send his servants and horses here 
 and there, of what company he shall entertain, 
 of the clearing of his woods, the preservation 
 of his game, and twenty matters of similar 
 import; while his wife is pondering equally 
 profoundly on the furniture and ornaments of 
 her rooms, the patterns of her flower-beds or 
 her worsted-work, the menu of her dinner, 
 and the frocks of her little girls. Poor people 
 need to think much more anxiously of the 
 perpetual problem, " How to make both ends 
 meet," by pinching in this direction and earn- 
 ing something in that, and by all the thousand 
 shifts and devices by which life can be carried 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 139 
 
 on at the smallest possible expenditure. One 
 of the very worst evils of limited means con- 
 sists in the amount of thinking about sordid 
 little economies which becomes imperative 
 when every meal, every toilet, and every at- 
 tempt at locomotion is a battle-field of ingenu- 
 ity and self-denial against ever-impending debt 
 and difficulty. Among men, the evil is most 
 commonly combated by energetic efforts to 
 earn rather than to save ; but among women, to 
 whom so few fields of honest industry are open, 
 the necessity for a perpetual guard against the 
 smallest freedom of expense falls , with all its 
 cruel and soul-crushing weight, and on the 
 faces of thousands of them may be read the 
 sad story of youthful enthusiasm all nipped by 
 pitiful cares, anxieties, and meannesses, per- 
 haps the most foreign of all sentiments to 
 their naturally liberal and generous hearts. 
 
 Next to actual arrangements which have 
 some practical use, however small, an inordi- 
 nate quantity of thought is wasted by most of 
 us on wholly unreal plans and hypotheses 
 which the thinker never even supposes to bear 
 any relation with the living world. Such are 
 the endless moony speculations, " if such a 
 thing had not happened " which did happen, or 
 "if So-and-so had gone hither" instead of 
 
I4O THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 thither, or " if I had only said or done " what 
 I did not say or do, " there would have fol- 
 lowed" heaven knows what. Sometimes we 
 pursue such endless and aimless guessings 
 with a companion, and then we generally stop 
 short pretty soon with the vivid sense of the 
 absurdity of our behavior; unless in such a 
 case as that of the celebrated old childless 
 couple, who, looking back over their fireside on 
 forty years of unbroken union, proceeded to 
 speculate on what they should have done if 
 they had had children, and finally quarrelled 
 and separated for ever on a divergence of 
 opinion respecting the best profession for their 
 (imaginary) second son. But, when alone, we 
 go on weaving interminable cobwebs out of 
 such gossamer threads of thought, like poor 
 Perrette with her pot of milk, a tale the 
 ubiquity of which among all branches of the 
 Aryan race sufficiently proves the universality 
 of the practice of building chateaux en Es- 
 pagne. 
 
 Of course, with every one who has a profes- 
 sion or business of any kind, a vast quantity 
 of thought is expended necessarily upon its 
 details, insomuch that to prevent themselves, 
 when in company from " talking shop " is 
 somewhat difficult. The tradesman, medical 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 141 
 
 man, lawyer, soldier, landholder, have each 
 plenty to think of in his own way; and in 
 the case of any originality of work such as 
 belongs to the higher class of literature and 
 art the necessity for arduous and sustained 
 thought in composition is so great that (on the 
 testimony of a great many wives) I have come 
 to the conclusion that a fine statue, picture, or 
 book is rarely planned without at least a week 
 of domestic irritation and discomfort, and the 
 summary infliction of little deserved chastise- 
 ment on the junior branches of the distin- 
 guished author or artist's family. 
 
 Mechanical contrivances obviously give im- 
 mense occupation to those singular persons 
 who can love Machines, and do not regard 
 them (as I must confess is my case) with min- 
 gled mistrust, suspicion, and abhorrence, as 
 small models of the Universe on the Atheistic 
 Projection. Again, for the discovery of any 
 chemical desideratum, ceaseless industry and 
 years of thought are expended ; and a Palissy 
 deems a quarter of a lifetime properly given 
 to pondering upon the best glaze for crockery. 
 Only by such sacrifices, indeed, have both the 
 fine and the industrial arts attained success; 
 and happy must the man be counted whose 
 millions of thoughts expended on such topics 
 
142 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 have at the end attained any practical conclu- 
 sion to be added to the store of human knowl- 
 edge. Not so (albeit the thoughts are much 
 after the same working character) are the end- 
 less meditations of the idle on things wholly 
 personal and ephemeral, such as the inordi- 
 nate care about the details of furniture and 
 equipage now prevalent among the rich in 
 England, and the lavish waste of feminine 
 minds on double acrostics, art, embroidery, 
 and, above all, Dress ! A young lady once 
 informed me that, after having for some hours 
 retired to repose, her sister, who slept in the 
 same room, had disturbed her in the middle 
 of the night : " Eugenie, waken up ! I have 
 thought of a trimming for our new gowns ! " 
 Till larger and nobler interests are opened to 
 women, I fear there must be a good many 
 whose " dream by night and thought by day " 
 is of trimmings. 
 
 When we have deducted all these silly and 
 trivial and useless thoughts from the sum of 
 human thinking, and evil and malicious 
 thoughts, still worse by far, what small re- 
 siduum of room is there, alas, for anything 
 like real serious reflection! How seldom do 
 the larger topics presented by history, science, 
 or philosophy engage us! How yet more 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 143 
 
 rarely do we face the great questions of the 
 whence, the why, and the whither of all this 
 hurrying life of ours, pouring out its tiny 
 sands so rapidly ! To some, indeed, a noble 
 philanthropic purpose or profound religious 
 faith gives not only consistency and mean- 
 ing to life, but supplies a background to all 
 thoughts, an object high above them, to 
 which the mental eye turns at every moment. 
 But this is, alas ! the exception far more than 
 the rule; and, where there is no absorbing 
 human affection, it is on trifles light as air 
 and interests transitory as a passing cloud 
 that are usually fixed those minds whose boast 
 it is that their thoughts "travel through 
 eternity." 
 
 Alone among Thoughts of joy or sorrow, 
 hope or fear, stands the grim, soul-chilling 
 thought of Death. It is a strange fact that, 
 face it and attempt to familiarize ourselves 
 with it as we may, this one thought ever pre- 
 sents itself as something fresh, something we 
 had never really thought before, " / shall 
 die ! " There is a shock in the simple words 
 ever repeated each time we speak them in 
 the depths of our souls. 
 
 There are few instances of the great change 
 which has passed over the spirit of the mod- 
 
144 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 ern world more striking than the revolution 
 which has taken place in our judgment re- 
 specting the moral expediency of perpetually 
 thinking about Death. Was it that the whole 
 Classic world was so intensely entrancing and 
 delightful that, to wean themselves from its 
 fascinations and reduce their minds to com- 
 posure, the Saints found it beneficial to live 
 continually with a skull at their side ? For 
 something like sixteen centuries Christian 
 teachers seem all to have taken it for granted 
 that merely to write up " Memento mori " was 
 to give to mankind the most salutary and 
 edifying counsel. Has anybody faith in the 
 same nostrum now, and is there a single Saint 
 Francis or Saint Theresa who keeps his or her 
 pet skull alongside of his Bible and Prayer- 
 book ? 
 
 A parallel might also be drawn between the 
 medical and spiritual treatment in vogue in 
 former times and in our own. Up to our 
 generation, when a man was ill, the first idea 
 of the physician was to bleed him and reduce 
 him in every way by " dephlogistic " treatment, 
 after which it was supposed the disease was 
 " drawn off " ; and, if the patient expired, the 
 survivors were consoled by the reflection that 
 Dr. Sangrado had done all which science and 
 
THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 145 
 
 skill could effect to preserve so valuable a life. 
 In the memory of some now living, the pres- 
 ence of a medical man with a lancet in his 
 pocket (instantly used on the emergency of a 
 fall from horseback or a fit of apoplexy, epi- 
 lepsy, or intoxication), was felt by alarmed re- 
 lations to be quite providential. Only some- 
 where about the period of the first visitation of 
 cholera in 1832 this phlebotomizing dropped 
 out of fashion ; and, when the doctors had 
 pretty nearly abandoned it, a theory was 
 broached that it was the human constitution, 
 not medical science, which had undergone a 
 change, and that men and women were so 
 much weaker than heretofore that, even in 
 fever, they now needed to be supported by 
 stimulants. Very much in the same way it 
 would appear that in former days our spiritual 
 advisers imagined they could cure moral dis- 
 ease by reducing the vital action of all the 
 faculties and passions, and bringing a man 
 to feel himself a " dying creature " by way of 
 training him to live. Nowadays our divines 
 endeavor to fill us with warmer feelings and 
 more vigorous will, and tell us that 
 
 " 'Tis life of which our veins are scant ; 
 O Life, not Death, for which we pant ; 
 More life, and fuller, that we want." 
 
146 THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING 
 
 Is it possible that human nature is really a 
 little less vigorous and passionate than it was 
 when Antony and Cleopatra lived on the 
 earth, or when the genius of Shakspere made 
 them live on the stage ? 
 
ESSAY V. 
 
 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW. 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW. 
 
 THE father of Grecian philosophy held that 
 " Man was created to know and to contem- 
 plate." The father of Hebrew philosophy 
 whose " Song," if not his " Wisdom," is canon- 
 ical, and whose judgment, if not his life, is sup- 
 posed to have been divinely guided taught 
 the somewhat different lesson : " He that in- 
 creased! knowledge increaseth sorrow." 
 
 We have been more or less steadily trying 
 the validity of Solomon's dictum for about 
 three thousand years. Would it be premature 
 to take stock of the results, and weigh 
 whether it be really for human well-being or 
 the reverse that Knowledge is "increasing," 
 not only at the inevitable rate of the accumu- 
 lating experience of generations, but also at 
 the highly accelerated pace attained by our 
 educational machinery ? It is at least slightly 
 paradoxical that the same State should call on 
 its clergy to teach as an infallible truth that 
 
I5O TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 " he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sor- 
 row," and at the same time decree for all its 
 subjects, as if it were a highly benevolent 
 measure, universal compulsory education. 
 
 I fear that the prejudice in favor of Knowl- 
 edge is so potent that no reader will give me 
 credit for entering on this inquiry in any other 
 spirit than one of banter. Nevertheless, I pro- 
 pose in the present paper to examine, to the 
 best of my ability, the general bearings of 
 book-knowledge upon human happiness and 
 virtue, and so attain to some conclusion on the 
 matter, and decide whether Solomon did or 
 did not give proof of profound sagacity in 
 originating the axiom that " Ignorance is 
 bliss " in the usual negative form of Hebrew 
 verities ; and also in foretelling (nearly thirty 
 centuries before the present London publish- 
 ing season) that "of the making of books 
 there is no end." Knowledge, like other evils, 
 it seems, is infinitely reproductive. 
 
 The larger and simpler objections to book- 
 lore lie on the surface of the case. First. 
 Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength 
 are almost inevitably exchanged in a certain 
 measure for learning. Ardent students are 
 rarely vigorous or agile ; and, in the humbler 
 ranks, the loss of ruddy cheeks and stalwart 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 151 
 
 limbs among the children of the peasantry, 
 after schools have been established in a vil- 
 lage, has been constantly observed. The 
 close and heated class-rooms in which the 
 poor urchins sit (often in winter with clothes 
 and shoes drenched through with rain or 
 snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical 
 point of view, for the scamper across the com- 
 mon, and the herding of sheep on the moun- 
 tain. Let us put the case at its lowest. Sup- 
 pose that, out of three persons who receive an 
 ordinary book-education, one always loses a 
 certain share of health; that he is never so 
 vigorous as he would have been, and is more 
 liable to consumption, dyspepsia, and other 
 woes incident to sedentary humanity, of which 
 again he bequeaths a tendency to his off- 
 spring. Here is surely some deduction from 
 the supposed sum of happiness derivable from 
 knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric 
 of all the poets make atonement for the loss 
 of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the 
 cool brain of perfect health ? 
 
 Secondly. It is not only the health of life's 
 noon and evening which is more or less com- 
 promised by study, but the morning hours of 
 life's glorious prime, hours such as never can 
 come again on this side heaven, which are 
 
152 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 given to dull, dog's-eared books and dreary 
 "copies," and sordid slates, instead of to cow- 
 slips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field, 
 and the flying of the white kite, which soars up 
 into the deep dark blue and carries the young 
 eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing 
 and the child-angels are playing among the 
 rolling clouds of summer. There was once 
 a child called from such dreams to her lesson, 
 the dreary lesson of learning to spell possi- 
 bly those very words which her pen is now 
 tracing on this page. The little girl looked 
 at her peacock, sitting in his glory on the bal- 
 ustrade of the old granite steps, with nothing 
 earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat 
 nice brown bread and call " Pea-ho ! " every 
 morning, and the poor child burst into a 
 storm of weeping, and sobbed, " I wish I were 
 a peacock ! I wish I were a peacock ! " Truly 
 Learning ought to have something to show 
 to compensate for the thousand tears shed in 
 similar anguish ! School-rooms are usually the 
 ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms 
 in the houses where they exist; and yet in 
 these dens we ruthlessly imprison children day 
 after day, year after year, till childhood itself 
 is over, never, never to return. And then the 
 young man or woman may go forth freely 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 153 
 
 among the fields and woods, and find them 
 fair and sweet, but never so fair or so sweet 
 as they were in the wasted years of infancy. 
 Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say 
 that a cowslip or a daffodil smells now as it 
 used to smell when it was so very much easier 
 to pluck it, quite on our own level ? Do straw- 
 berries taste as they did, and is there the same 
 drop of honey in each of the flowerets of the 
 red clover? Are modern kittens and puppies 
 half so soft and so funny as they were in 
 former days when we were young? No one 
 will dare affirm any of these things who has 
 reached years of discretion. Is it not then a 
 most short-sighted policy giving away of a 
 bird in hand for a bird in the bush to sacri- 
 fice the joyous hours of young existence for 
 the value of advantages ( if advantages indeed 
 they be) to be reaped in later and duller years? 
 Watch a child at play, O reader, if you have 
 forgotten your own feelings. Let it be Col- 
 eridge's 
 
 " Little singing, dancing elf, 
 Singing, dancing by itself." 
 
 Catch, if your dim orbs are sharp enough, 
 those cloudless blue eyes looking straight into 
 yours, and hear the laugh which only means 
 the best of all possible jokes, " I am so happy!" 
 
154 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 Then go to your stupid desk, and calculate 
 algebraically what amount of classics and 
 mathematics are equivalent to that ecstasy of 
 young existence, wherein 
 
 " Simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, 
 Is worth the best joy which life elsewhere can give." 
 
 The pagan Irish believed in a paradise for 
 the virtuous dead, and called it " Innis-na- 
 n'Oge," the " Island of the Young." We all 
 live there the first dozen years of mortality; 
 and, unless we prove unusually excellent, I fear 
 it may be long before we arrive at a better 
 place. 
 
 But hitherto we have taken for granted that 
 the little prisoners of the school-room are all 
 sure to live and come into their fortunes of 
 erudition, earned with so many tear-blisters on 
 their lesson-books. Of course, however, this is 
 far from being the true state of the case. 
 The poor little child, whose happiness inno- 
 cent, certain, and immediate happiness is 
 bartered so ruthlessly for the remote and con- 
 tingent benefit of his later years, may very 
 probably never see those years at all ; nay, in 
 a fixed average number of cases, it is abso- 
 lutely certain that he will not grow into a 
 man. Can anything be much more sad than 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 155 
 
 such an abortive sacrifice ? Who does not 
 remember Walter Scott's " Pet Marjory," with 
 her infantine delight in her visits to the coun- 
 try, and the calves and the geese, and the 
 " bubbly-jocks " ; and how she wrote down in 
 her private journal that she was learning the 
 multiplication table, and that seven times seven 
 was a " divlish thing," and quite impossible 
 to acquire ; and how, when somehow at last 
 even the still more dreadful "eight times eight" 
 had been lodged in her poor little brains, there 
 came a day when she cried suddenly to her 
 mother, " Oh, my head ! my head ! " and then 
 in a few brief hours there was an end of les- 
 sons and their advantages for Marjory for- 
 ever ? 
 
 And yet again, when some ardent lad has 
 passed through school and college, foregoing 
 all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes 
 and honors, till he stands a first-class man of 
 Oxford or Cambridge, and his father's sacri- 
 fices and his mother's yearnings and all his 
 own gallant and self-denying labors seem on 
 the point of reaping their reward, how often 
 does it come to pass that with the close of 
 the struggle come the reaction, the decline, 
 the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against 
 hope, and then death ! 
 
156 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 Thirdly. There is the waste of Eyesight in 
 education. It is understood, when we see a 
 young man with the "light of the body" 
 dimmed behind glass spectacles, that he has 
 hurt his eyes by poring over books. A farmer, 
 a sportsman, or a soldier, purblind at twenty- 
 five or thirty, is a rare thing to see. It is the 
 scholar, lawyer, or divine who has paid the 
 penalty of seeing God's beautiful world ever- 
 more through those abominable bits of glass. 
 And for what mighty advantage? Again I 
 say, it ought to be something excessively val- 
 uable for which a man will exchange the apple 
 of his eye. Suppose Bell Taylor were to ask a 
 blind gentleman a fee of a thousand pounds to 
 give him his sight as he has given it to more 
 than one born blind. The blind man, if he 
 possessed the money, would doubtless pour it 
 out like water to obtain the priceless boon of 
 vision. And this is the gift which our boys 
 exchange for a moderate acquaintance with 
 the Greek language, to be forgotten in a few 
 years after they leave school ! 
 
 Half the vast Teutonic nation beholds the 
 universe from behind spectacles; owing, no 
 doubt, to their vaunted compulsory education, 
 aided by their truculent black types. And we 
 open-eyed Britons are exhorted, forsooth, to 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 157 
 
 admire and follow in the steps of those bar- 
 nacled Prussians ! 
 
 Such are three of the most obvious losses 
 to be placed in the scale against the gains 
 of Knowledge, the loss to many of bodily 
 health; to all of the unshackled freedom of 
 childhood ; and to not a few of perfect eye- 
 sight. 
 
 But we cannot suppose it was' to any of 
 these things Solomon alluded when he linked 
 Knowledge and Sorrow in one category. It is 
 not likely that those studies of his, about the 
 hyssop and the cedar, injured his health; nor 
 that the royal sage sat on his famous ivory 
 throne to receive the Queen of Sheba in a 
 pair of spectacles. As to the loss of the pleas- 
 ures of childhood, his well-known opinion of 
 the value of the Rod (to the wisdom of which 
 the subsequent conduct of his son Rehoboam 
 afforded an illustration) makes it probable 
 that he would have approved of the torture of 
 infants through the instrumentality of lessons. 
 Knowledge and Sorrow had, no doubt, some 
 other connection in his mind ; and that con- 
 nection we have still to mark. 
 
 It is a paradox only too readily verified that 
 the mind as well as the body suffers in more 
 ways than one from the acquirement of book 
 
158 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 knowledge. In the first place, the Memory, 
 laden with an enormous mass of facts, and 
 accustomed to shift the burden of carrying 
 them to written notes and similar devices, 
 loses much of its natural tenacity. The igno- 
 rant clodhopper always remembers the parish 
 chronicles better than the scholarly parson. 
 The old family servant, who is strongly sus- 
 pected of not knowing how to write and whose 
 spectacles are never forthcoming when there 
 is any necessity to read, is the living annalist 
 of the house, and was never yet known to for- 
 get an order, except now and then on purpose. 
 Not only are the interests, and consequently 
 the attention and retentive powers, of illiterate 
 persons monopolized by the practical concerns 
 of life and the tales of the past which may 
 have reached their ears, but they have actually 
 clearer heads, less encumbered by a multi- 
 tude of irrelevant ideas, and can recall what- 
 ever they need, at a moment's notice, without 
 tumbling over a whole lumber-room full of 
 rubbish to get at it. The old Rabbinical sys- 
 tem of schooling, which mainly consisted in 
 the committal to memory of innumerable 
 aphorisms and dicta of sages and prophets, 
 possessed this enormous advantage over mod- 
 ern instruction, that whatever a man had so 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 159 
 
 learned he possessed at his fingers' ends, ready 
 for instant use in every argument. But, as 
 half the value of knowledge in practical life 
 depends on the rapidity with which it can be 
 brought to bear at a given moment on the 
 point of issue, and as a ready-witted man will 
 not merely outshine in discussion his slow- 
 brained antagonist, but forestall and outrun 
 him in every way, save in the labors of the 
 library, it follows that to sacrifice the ready 
 money of the mind for paper hard to negotiate 
 is extremely bad economy. iMere book-learn- 
 ing, instead of rendering the memory more 
 strong and agile, accustoms it to hobble on 
 crutches. 
 
 Other mental powers suffer even more than 
 the memory by the introduction of books. 
 That method which we familiarly call the 
 "Rule of Thumb" that is, the method of 
 the Artist is soon lost when there come to 
 be treatises and tables of calculation to form, 
 instead, the Method of the Mechanic. The 
 boats of Greece are to this day sculptured 
 rather than wrought by the shipwrights, even 
 as the old architects cut their marble archi- 
 traves by the eye of genius trained to beauty 
 and symmetry, not by the foot-rule of prece- 
 dent and book-lore. The wondrous richness 
 
160 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 and harmony of coloring of Chinese and In- 
 dian and Turkish stuffs and carpets and por- 
 celain are similarly the result, not of any rules 
 to be reduced to formulae, but of taste unfet- 
 tered by pattern-books, unwarped by Schools 
 of Art Manufacture, bequeathed through long 
 generations, each acquainted intimately with 
 the aforesaid "rule of thumb." 
 
 For the Reasoning powers, the noblest in 
 the scale of human faculties, it may be fairly 
 doubted whether the modern increase of 
 Knowledge has done much to strengthen them, 
 when we find ourselves still unprotected by 
 common sense against such absurdities as those 
 which find currency amongst us. Men are 
 treated amongst us like fowls, crammed to the 
 crop with facts, facts, facts, till their digestion 
 of them is impaired. 
 
 As to the Imagination, books are like the 
 stepping-stones whereon fancy trips across an 
 otherwise impassable river to gather flowers on 
 the further bank. But it may be questioned 
 whether the reading eye ever really does the 
 same work as the hearing ear. The voice of 
 tradition bears, as no book can do, the burden 
 of the feelings of generations. A ballad 
 learned orally from our mother's lips seems to 
 have far other meaning when we recall it, per- 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW l6l 
 
 chance long years after that sweet voice has 
 been silent, than the stanzas we perused yes- 
 terday through our spectacles in a volume 
 freshly reviewed in the Times. 
 
 Such are the somewhat dubious results of 
 book-lore on the faculties exercised in its ac- 
 quisition. It is almost needless to remark 
 that there are also certain positive vices fre- 
 quently engendered by the same pursuit. 
 Bacon's noble apophthegm, that "a little 
 knowledge leads to atheism, but a great deal 
 brings us back to God," needs for commentary 
 that "a little "must be taken to signify what 
 many people think " much." Read in such a 
 sense, it applies not only to religious faith, but 
 to faith in everything, and most particularly to 
 faith in Knowledge itself. Nobody despises 
 books so much as those who have read many 
 of them, except those still more hopeless infi- 
 dels who have written them. Watch the very 
 treatment given to his library by a bookworm. 
 Note how the volumes are knocked about, and 
 left on chairs, and scribbled over with ill-penned 
 notes, and ruthlessly dog's-eared and turned 
 down on their faces on inky tables, and sat 
 upon in damp grass under a tree! Contrast 
 this behavior towards them with the respect- 
 ful demeanor of unlettered mortals, who range 
 
1 62 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 the precious and well-dusted tomes like sol- 
 diers on drill on their spruce shelves; nobody 
 pushed back out of the line, nobody tumbling 
 sideways against his neighbor, nobody stand- 
 ing on his head! History is not jumbled 
 ignominiously with romance ; moral treatises 
 are not made sandwiches of (as we have be- 
 held) between the yellow covers of Zola ; and 
 " Sunday books " have a prominent pew all to 
 themselves, where they are not rubbed against 
 by either profane wit or worldly wisdom. 
 Such is the different appreciation of literature 
 by those to whom it is very familiar and by 
 those to whom it preserves still a little of the 
 proverbial magnificence of all unknown things. 
 We used to hear, some years ago, so much 
 about the Pride of Learning that it would be 
 a commonplace to allude to that fault among 
 the contingent disadvantages of study. One 
 of the Fathers describes how he was flogged 
 by an angel for his predilection for Cicero, 
 an anecdote which must have made many a 
 school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel that 
 life was only a dilemma between the rods of 
 terrestrial and celestial pedagogues. But it is 
 obvious that the saint had in his mind a sense 
 that the reading of "Tusculan Disputations" 
 had set him up saint though he was above 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 163 
 
 the proper spirit of implicit docility and unqual- 
 ified admiration for more sacred instructions. 
 The critical spirit, which is the inevitable 
 accompaniment of high erudition, is obviously 
 a good way off from that ovine frame of mind 
 which divines, in all ages, have extolled as the 
 proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in a 
 truer and better sense than that of the open- 
 mouthed credulity so idly inculcated, it must 
 be owned that, short of that really great knowl- 
 edge of which Bacon spoke and which allies 
 itself with the infinite wisdom of love and 
 faith, there are few things more hurtful to a 
 man than to be aware that he knows a great 
 deal more than those about him. The main 
 difference between what are called self-made 
 men and those who have been educated in 
 the upper grades is that the former, from their 
 isolation, have a constant sense of their own 
 knowledge, as if it were a Sunday coat, while 
 the others wear it easily as their natural attire. 
 The best thing which could happen to a 
 village Crichton would be to be mercilessly 
 snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when 
 women were " Precieuses " and " Blue Stock- 
 ings " were those in which it was a species of 
 miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they 
 were lifted into the heaven of Latin Grammar. 
 
164 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 But, passing over the injury to healthy eye- 
 sight and mental vigor contingent on learning, 
 and the moral faults sometimes engendered 
 thereby, I proceed to ask another question. 
 What is the ethical value of the Knowledge 
 bought at such a price, and heaped together 
 by mankind during the thirty centuries since 
 Solomon uttered his warning? How has it 
 contributed to their moral welfare ? 
 
 Surely it is true that even as Art too often 
 gilds sensuality, and renders it attractive to 
 souls otherwise above its influence, so Knowl- 
 edge must open new roads to temptation, and 
 take off from sin that strangeness and horror 
 which is one of the best safeguards of the 
 soul. The old jest of the confessor, who 
 asked the penitent whether he did such and 
 such dishonest tricks, and received the reply, 
 " No, Father ; but I will do them next time," 
 was only a fable of one form of the mischief 
 of knowledge; and that not the most fatal 
 form either. To know how to do wrong is 
 one small step towards doing it. To know 
 that scores and hundreds and thousands of 
 people, in all lands and ages, have done the 
 same wrong, is a far larger encouragement 
 to the timidity of guilt. Not only is it dan- 
 gerous to know that there is a descent to 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 165 
 
 Avernus, but specially dangerous to know 
 that it is easy and well trodden. Dr. Watts 
 was injudicious, to say the least of it, to betray 
 to children that the way to perdition is a 
 
 " Broad road, where thousands go," 
 
 which, moreover, 
 
 " Lies near, and opens fair." 
 
 Better let people suppose that it has become 
 quite grass-grown and impassable. 
 
 Many offences, such as drunkenness, de- 
 bauchery, swindling, adulteration, and false 
 weights, are diseases propagated, chiefly, if 
 not solely, like small-pox by direct infection 
 conveyed in the knowledge that A, B, C, and 
 D do the same things. David was not so 
 far wrong to be angry; and divines need not 
 be so anxious to excuse him for being so, 
 when he saw the " wicked " flourishing " like 
 green bay-trees." Such sights are, to the last 
 degree, trying and demoralizing. 
 
 In a yet larger and sadder sense, the knowl- 
 edge of the evil of the world, of the baseness, 
 pollution, cruelty, which have stained the 
 earth from the earliest age till this hour, is 
 truly a knowledge fraught with dread and woe. 
 He who can walk over the carnage field of 
 history and behold the agonies of the wounded 
 
1 66 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 and the fallen, the mutilations and hideous 
 ruin of what was meant to be such beautiful 
 humanity, he who can see all this, ay, or but 
 a corner of that awful Aceldama, and yet 
 retain his unwavering faith in the final issue 
 of the strife, and his satisfaction that it has 
 been permitted to human free will, must be 
 a man of far other strength than he who 
 judges of the universe from the peaceful pros- 
 perity of his parish, and believes that the 
 worst of ills is symbolized by the stones under 
 which " the rude forefathers of the hamlet 
 sleep." Almost every form of knowledge is 
 some such trial of faith. Look at zoology 
 and palaeontology. What revelations of pain 
 and death in each hideous artifice of jagged 
 tooth, and ravening beak, and cruel claw! 
 What mysterious laws of insect and fungus 
 life developed within higher organisms, to 
 whom their presence is torture ! What savage 
 scenes of pitiless strife in the whole vast strug- 
 gle for existence of every beast and bird, every 
 fish and reptile ! Turn to ethnology, and 
 gather up the facts of life of all the barbarian 
 tribes of Africa and Polynesia; of the count- 
 less myriads of their progenitors; and of those 
 who dwelt in Europe and Asia in bygone aeons 
 of prehistoric time. Is not the story of these 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 167 
 
 squalid, half-human, miserable creatures full 
 of woe? Our fathers dreamed of a Paradise 
 and of a primeval couple dwelling there in 
 perfect peace and innocence. We have at 
 last so eaten of the Tree of Knowledge that 
 we have been driven out of even the ideal 
 Eden ; and instead thereof we behold the 
 earliest parents of our race, dwarf and hirsute, 
 shivering and famished, contending with mam- 
 moths in a desert world, and stung and goaded 
 by want and pain along every step in the first 
 advance from the bestiality of the baboon into 
 the civilization of a man. 
 
 Turn to astronomy, and we peer, dazed and 
 sick, into the abysses of time and space opened 
 beneath us; bottomless abysses where no plum- 
 met can sound, and all our toylike measures 
 of thousands of ages and millions of miles drop 
 useless from our hands. Can any thought be 
 more tremendous than the question, What 
 are we in this immensity? We had fondly 
 fancied we were Creation's last and greatest 
 work, the crown and glory of the universe, and 
 that our world was the central stage for the 
 drama of God. Where are we now? When 
 the "stars fall from heaven," will they "fall 
 on the earth even as a fig-tree casteth her 
 untimely figs " ? Nay, rather will one of the 
 
1 68 TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 heavenly host so much as notice when our 
 little world, charged with all the hopes of 
 man, bursts like a bubble, and falls in the 
 foam of a meteor shower, illumining for a 
 single night some planet calmly rolling on its 
 way? 
 
 Let us pass from the outer into the inner 
 realm, and glance at the developments of 
 human thought. The knowledge of Philoso- 
 phy, properly so called, from Pythagoras and 
 Plato to Kant and Spencer, is it a Knowl- 
 edge the increase of which is wholly without 
 "sorrow"? Not the most pathetic poem in 
 literature seems to me half so sad as Lewes's 
 History of Philosophy. Those endless wan- 
 derings amid the labyrinths of Being and 
 Knowing, Substance and Phenomenon, Nomi- 
 nalism and Realism, which, to most men, seem 
 like a troubled "dream within a dream," to 
 him who has taken the pains to understand 
 them rather appear like the wanderings of the 
 wretch lost in the catacombs. He roams 
 hither and thither, and feels feebly along the 
 walls, and stumbles in the dark, finding him- 
 self in a passage which has no outlet, and 
 turns back to seek another way of escape, and 
 grasps at something he deems may contain a 
 clew to the far distant daylight, and, lo ! it is 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 169 
 
 but an urn filled with dust and dead men's 
 bones. 
 
 Faust is the true type of the student of 
 metaphysics when he marks the skull's " spec- 
 tral smile " : 
 
 " Saith it not that thy brain, like mine, 
 Still loved and sought the beautiful, 
 Loved truth for its own sake, and sought, 
 Regardless of aught else the while, 
 Like mine the light of cloudless day, 
 And in unsatisfying thought 
 By twilight glimmers led astray, 
 Like mine, at length, sank overwrought ? " 
 
 There may be truth within our reach. Some 
 of us deem we have found it in youth, and, 
 passing out of the metaphysic stage of thought, 
 use our philosophy as a scaffolding wherewith 
 to build the solid edifice of life, gradually heed- 
 ing less and less how that scaffolding may 
 prove rotten or ill-jointed. But, even in such 
 a case, the knowledge of all that has been, and 
 is not, in the world of man's highest thought 
 is a sorrowful one. As we wander on from 
 one system to another, we feel as if we were 
 but numbering the gallant ships with keels 
 intended to cut such deep waters, and top- 
 masts made to bear flags so brave, which lie 
 wrecked and broken into drift-wood along the 
 shore of the enchanted Loadstone Isle. 
 
I7O TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 What is, then, the conclusion of our long 
 pleading ? Knowledge is acquired at the cost 
 of a certain measure of health, and eyesight, 
 and youthful joy. Knowledge involves the 
 deterioration of some faculties as well as the 
 strengthening of others. Knowledge engen- 
 ders sundry moral faults. In the realms of 
 history, of physical and of mental science, the 
 survey of things obtained through knowledge 
 is full of sadness and solemnity. The tele- 
 scope which has revealed to us a thousand 
 galaxies of suns has failed to show us the 
 Heaven which we once believed was close 
 overhead. 
 
 Is then the pursuit of Knowledge, after all, 
 truly a delusion, the worst and weariest of 
 human mistakes, a thing to which we are 
 driven by our necessities on one hand and 
 lured by our thirst for it on the other, but 
 which, nevertheless, like the martyrs' cup of 
 salt water, only burns our lips with its bitter 
 brine ? 
 
 Not so! a thousand times, no! Knowledge, 
 like Virtue, is not good because it is useful, but 
 useful because it is good. It is useful contin- 
 gently, and good essentially. The joy of it is 
 simple, and not only needs not to be supple- 
 mented by accessory advantages, but is well 
 
TO KNOW, OR NOT TO KNOW 
 
 worth the forfeit of many advantages to 
 obtain. The most miserable wretch we can 
 imagine is the ignorant convict locked up in 
 a solitary cell, with nothing to employ his 
 thoughts but unattainable vice and frustrated 
 crime, whereon his stupid judges leave him to 
 ruminate as if such poison were moral medi- 
 cine to heal the diseases of his soul. And, 
 on the other hand, one of the happiest beings 
 we can imagine is the man at the opposite end 
 of the intellectual scale, who lives in the free 
 acquirement of noble knowledge. What is 
 any "increase of sorrow" incurred thereby, 
 compared to the joy of it ? To build Memory 
 like a gallery hung round with all the loveliest 
 scenes of nature and all the masterpieces of 
 art ; to make the divine chorus of the poets 
 sing for us their choicest strains whenever we 
 beckon them from their cells; to talk famil- 
 iarly, as if they were our living friends, with 
 the best and wisest men who have ever lived 
 on earth, and link our arms in theirs in the 
 never-withering groves of an eternal Academe, 
 this is to burst the bounds of space and 
 bring the ages together, and lift ourselves out 
 of the sordid dust to sit at the banquet of 
 heroes and of gods. 
 
ESSAY VI. 
 
 THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE 
 COUNTRY MOUSE. 
 
THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE 
 COUNTRY MOUSE. 
 
 WHETHER it is best to live rapidly or slowly; 
 whether the " twenty years of Europe " be pref- 
 erable to the " cycle of Cathay " ; and what 
 is to be said on behalf of each of the two 
 modes of existence, supposing that we have 
 the choice between them, seem to be ques- 
 tions not unworthy of a little consideration. 
 It is quite possible that the common impulse 
 to be " in among the throngs of men," and to 
 cram a month's ideas and sensations into a 
 day, may be the truest guide to happiness; 
 indeed, it is rather sorrowful to doubt that it 
 should be so, considering how every successive 
 census shows the growth of the urban over the 
 rural populations, and how strongly the mag- 
 nets of the great cities seem destined in future 
 years to draw into them all the loose attract- 
 able human matter in each country. Never, 
 theless, it must be admitted to be also possible 
 
1 76 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 that, like the taste for tobacco or alcohol or 
 opium, the taste for town life may be an 
 appetite the indulgence of which is deleteri- 
 ous, and that our gains of enjoyment thereby 
 obtained may be practically outbalanced by 
 the loss of pleasures which slip away mean- 
 while unperceived. It would be satisfactory, 
 once for all, to feel assured that in choosing 
 either town or country life (when we have the 
 choice), we not only follow immediate inclina- 
 tion, but make deliberate selection of that 
 which must necessarily be the higher and 
 happier kind of life, on which, when the time 
 comes for saying good-night, we shall look 
 back without the miserable regret that we 
 have permitted the nobler duties and the 
 sweeter joys to escape us, while we have spent 
 our years in grasping at shadows and vanities. 
 The dog with the bone in his mouth, who 
 drops it to catch the bone in the water, is a 
 terrible warning to all mankind. But which 
 is the real bone, and which is only the 
 reflection ? The question is not easily an- 
 swered. 
 
 Let us premise that it is of English country 
 life and town life alone I mean to speak. 
 Foreigners Frenchmen, for example who 
 live in the country seem always to do so 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 177 
 
 under protest, and to wish to convey to the 
 traveller that, like the patriarch, they are only 
 strangers and sojourners in the rural districts, 
 seeking a better country, even a Parisian. 
 Moliere's Comtesse d'Escarbagnas, who has 
 been six weeks in the capital once in her life, 
 and who indignantly asks her visitor, " Me 
 prenez-vous pour une provinciate, Madame ? " 
 is the type of them all. Of course, country 
 life taken thus as a temporary and rather dis- 
 graceful banishment can never display its true 
 features or produce its proper quantum of 
 enjoyment. 
 
 And again, among English forms of coun- 
 try life, it is life in bona fide rural districts 
 which we must take for our type. All round 
 London there now exists a sort of intellectual 
 cordon, extending from twenty to thirty miles 
 into Kent and Surrey, and about ten miles 
 into Herts and Essex. Professor Nichols 
 might have mapped it as he did our starry 
 cluster, by jotting down every house on the 
 boundary inhabited by politicians, literary men, 
 and artists, and then running a line all round 
 from one to another. Within this circumfer- 
 ence (of course, extending year by year), the 
 ideas, habits, and conversation of the inhabi- 
 tants are purely Londonesque. The habitue 
 
178 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 of London dinner-parties finds himself per- 
 fectly at home at every table where he sits 
 down, and may take it for granted that his 
 hosts and their guests will all know the same 
 familiar characters, the same anecdotes of the 
 season, the books, the operas, the exhibitions ; 
 and, much more than all this, will possess the 
 indescribable easy London manner of lightly 
 tripping over commonplace subjects, and seri- 
 ously discussing only really interesting ones, 
 which is the art of conversational perspective. 
 Beyond the invisible mental London Wall 
 which we have described, the wanderer seems 
 suddenly to behold another intellectual realm. 
 As the author of the " Night Thoughts " de- 
 scribes a rather more startling experience, he 
 stands on the last battlement, which 
 
 " Looks o'er the vale of non-existence," 
 
 at the end of all things wherewith he is famil- 
 iar. He has, in short, penetrated into the 
 Rural Districts of the Mind, where men's 
 ideas have hedges and ditches no less than 
 their fields. 
 
 And once again we must take English coun- 
 try life in its most elevated and perfect form, 
 that of the hereditary landed gentry, to 
 contrast it most advantageously with the life 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 179 
 
 of towns. To understand and enjoy country 
 life as it may be enjoyed, a man should not 
 only live in one of those " Stately Homes of 
 England," of which Mrs. Hemans was so 
 enamoured, but be born and have spent his 
 youth in such a house, built by his fathers in 
 long past generations. A wealthy merchant or 
 a great lawyer who buys in his declining years 
 the country seat of some fallen family, to 
 enjoy therein the honorable fruits of his labors 
 may probably be a much more intelligent per- 
 son than the neighboring squire, whose acres 
 have descended to him depuis que le monde est 
 monde. But he can no more make himself 
 into a country gentleman, and acquire the 
 tastes and ideas of one, or learn to understand 
 from the inside the loves and hates, pleasures 
 and prejudices of squiredom, than he can ac- 
 quire the dolce favella Toscana by buying him- 
 self a Florentine barony. 
 
 And, lastly, our typical country life must 
 neither be that of people so great and wealthy 
 as to be called frequently by political interests 
 up to Parliament, and who possess two or 
 more great estates (a man can no more have 
 two homes than he can have two heads), nor 
 yet that of people in embarrassed and narrow 
 circumstances. The genuine squire is never 
 
l8o TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 rich in the sense in which great merchants 
 and manufacturers are rich ; for, however many 
 acres he may possess, it is tolerably certain 
 that the claims on them will be quite in pro- 
 portion to their extent. There is, in fact, a 
 kind of money which never comes out of land ; 
 a certain freedom in the disposal of large sums 
 quite unknown among the landed gentry, at 
 least in these days. But, if not possessed of 
 a heavy balance at their bankers, the country 
 family must have the wherewithal for the 
 young men to shoot and hunt and fish, and 
 for the girls to ride or amuse themselves 
 with garden and pleasure-grounds according to 
 taste. All these things, being elements of the 
 typical English country life, must be assumed 
 as at least attainable at will by our " Coun- 
 try Mouse" if he is not to be put altogether 
 out of countenance by his brother of the 
 town. 
 
 As for the Town Mouse, he need not be rich, 
 nor is it more than a trifling advantage to him 
 (felt chiefly at the outset of his career) that his 
 father or grandfather should have occupied the 
 same social position as himself. All that is 
 needed is that, in the case of a man, he should 
 belong to a good club, and go out often to din- 
 ner ; and, in the case of a lady, that she should 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE l8l 
 
 have from one hundred to five hundred people 
 on her visiting list. Either of these fortunate 
 persons may, without let or hindrance, experi- 
 ence pretty nearly all the intellectual and 
 moral advantages and disadvantages of living 
 in a town, provided their place of abode be 
 London. Over every other city in the empire 
 there steals some breath of country air, if it 
 be small ; or, if it be large, its social character 
 is so far modified by special commercial, indus- 
 trial, or ecclesiastical conditions that its influ- 
 ence cannot be held to be merely that of a 
 town pur et simple ; nor are the people who 
 come out of it properly typically towny, but 
 rather commercial-towny, manufacturing-towny, 
 or cathedral-towny, as the case may be. 
 
 Turn we now from these preliminaries to 
 the characteristics of the Town life and the 
 Country life, each in its own most perfect 
 English form. Let us see first what is to be 
 said for each, and then strike our balance. 
 Very briefly we may dismiss the commonly 
 recognized external features of both, and pass 
 as rapidly as possible to the more subtle ones, 
 which have scarcely perhaps been noted as 
 carefully as their importance as items in the 
 sum of happiness will warrant. 
 
1 82 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 TOWN MOUSE loquitur. 
 
 "I confess I love London. It is a confes- 
 sion, of course, for everybody who lives in the 
 country seems to think there is a particular 
 virtue in doing so, resembling the cognate 
 merit of early rising. Even that charming 
 town poet, Mr. Locker, practically admits the 
 same when he says, 
 
 * I hope I'm fond of much that's good, 
 As well as much that's gay ; 
 I'd like the country if I could, 
 I like the Park in May.' 
 
 " The truth is that one wants to live, not to 
 vegetate ; to do as much good, either to our- 
 selves or other people, as time permits ; to 
 receive and give impressions ; to feel, to act, 
 to be as much as possible in the few brief years 
 of mortal existence ; and this concentrated 
 Life can be lived in London as nowhere else. 
 If a man have any ambition, here it may best 
 be pursued. If he desire to contend for any 
 truth or any justice, here is his proper battle- 
 field. If he love pleasure, here are fifty enjoy- 
 ments at his disposal for one which he can 
 obtain in the country. The mere sense of 
 forming part of this grand and complicated 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 183 
 
 machine, whereof four millions of men and 
 women work the wheels, makes my pulse beat 
 faster, and gives me a sense as if I were 
 marching to the sound of trumpets. Then the 
 finish and completeness of London life is 
 delightful to the thoroughly civilized mind. 
 It is only the half-reclaimed savage who is 
 content with unpaved and unlighted roads, ill- 
 trained servants, slovenly equipages, and badly 
 cooked, badly attended dinners. Like my lit- 
 tle nibbling prototype who served his feast 
 * sur un tapis de Turquiel I like everything, 
 down to the little card on which my menu is 
 written, to be perfect about me. The less I 
 am reminded by disagreeable sensations of my 
 animal part, the more room is left for the 
 exercise of my higher intellectual functions. 
 The ascetic who lives on locusts and wild 
 honey, and catches the locusts, has far less 
 leisure to think about better things than the 
 alderman who sits down every day to ten 
 courses, served by a well-trained staff of Lon- 
 don servants. The sense of order, of ease, of 
 dignity and courtesy, is continually fostered 
 and flattered in the great Imperial City, which, 
 notwithstanding its petty faults of local govern- 
 ment, is still the freest and noblest town the 
 globe has ever borne. People talk of the 
 
184 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 ' freedom ' of the country, and my quondam 
 host, the Country Mouse, is perpetually boast- 
 ing of his 'crust of bread and liberty.' But, 
 except the not very valuable license to wear 
 shabby old clothes, I am at a loss to discover 
 wherein the special freedom of rural life con- 
 sists. You are certainly watched, and your 
 actions, looks, and behavior commented on 
 fifty times more by your idle neighbors in the 
 country, gasping for gossip, than by your busy 
 neighbors in town, who never trouble them- 
 selves to turn their heads when you pass them 
 in the street, or even to find out your name 
 if you live next door. In the country, you 
 have generally the option of going on either 
 of three or four roads. In London, you have 
 the choice of as many thousand streets. In 
 the country, you may ' kill something ' when- 
 ever you take your walks abroad, if that special 
 privilege of the British gentleman be dear to 
 your soul, and you care to shoot, hunt, or 
 fish. Or, if you belong to the softer sex or 
 sort, you may amuse yourself in your garden 
 or shrubbery, play tennis, teach in the village 
 school, or pay a visit to some country neighbor 
 who will bore you to extinction. In London, 
 you have ten times as large a choice of occu- 
 pations, and five hundred times as pleasant 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 185 
 
 people to visit; seeing that in the country 
 even clever men and women grow dull, and 
 in town the most stupid get frotte with other 
 people's ideas and humor. 
 
 "Again, and this is a most important con- 
 sideration in favor of London, when a man 
 has no particular bodily pain or mental afflic- 
 tion, and is not in want of money, the worst 
 evil which he has to dread is ennui. To be 
 bored is the ' one great grief of life ' to people 
 who have no other grief. But can there be 
 any question whether ennui is better avoided 
 in London or in the country? Even in the 
 month of August, as somebody has remarked, 
 4 when London is " empty," there are always 
 more people in it than anywhere else'; and 
 where there are people there must be the end- 
 less play of human interests and sympathies. 
 Nay, for my part, I find a special gratification 
 in the cordiality wherewith my acquaintances, 
 left stranded like myself by chance in the dead 
 season, hail me when we meet in Pall Mall 
 like shipwrecked mariners on a rock ; and in 
 the respectful enthusiasm wherewith I am 
 greeted in the half-deserted shops, where in 
 July I made my modest purchases, unnoticed 
 and unknown. In the country, on the con- 
 trary, Ennui stalks abroad all the year round ; 
 
1 86 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 and the puerile ceremonies wherewith the 
 ignorant natives strive to conjure away the 
 demon the dismal tea and tennis parties, 
 the deplorable archery meetings, and, above all, 
 the really frightful antediluvian institution, 
 called * Spending a Day ' only place us 
 more helplessly at his mercy, We conjugate 
 the reflective verb * to be Bored,' in all moods 
 and tenses; not in the light and airy way of 
 townsfolk, when they trivially observe they 
 were * bored at such a party last night/ or 
 decline to be ' bored by going to hear such 
 a preacher on Sunday morning,' but sadly and 
 in sober earnest, as men who recognize that 
 boredom is a chronic disease from which they 
 have no hope of permanent relief. There is, 
 in short, the same difference between ennui in 
 the country and ennui in town as between 
 thirst in the midst of Sahara and thirst in 
 one's home, where one may ring the bell at 
 any moment and call for soda water." 
 
 So speaks the modern Town Mouse, describ- 
 ing the more superficial and obvious advan- 
 tages of his abode over those of his friend in 
 the country. And (equally on the surface of 
 things) straightway replies 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 187 
 
 COUNTRY MOUSE. 
 
 " There is some sense in these boasts of my 
 illustrious friend and guest, but against them 
 I think I can produce equivalent reasons for 
 preferring the country. In the first place, if 
 he lives faster, I live longer ; and I have better 
 health than he all the time. My lungs are not 
 clogged with smoke, my brain not addled by 
 eternal hurry and interruption, my eyes not 
 dimmed by fog and gaslight into premature 
 blindness. While his limbs are stiffening year 
 by year till he can only pace along his monoto- 
 nous pavement, I retain till the verge of old 
 age much of the agility and vigor wherewith 
 I walked the moors and climbed the mountains 
 in my youth. He is pleased at having twenty 
 times as many sensations in a day as I ; but, 
 if nineteen out of the twenty be jarring noises, 
 noxious smells, plague, worry, and annoyance, 
 I am quite content with my humbler share of 
 experience. Even if his thick-coming sensa- 
 tions and ideas be all pleasant, I doubt if he 
 ever have the leisure necessary to enjoy them. 
 Very little would be gained by the most ex- 
 quisite dinner ever cooked, and the finest 
 wines ever bottled, if a man should be obliged 
 to gobble them standing up, while his train, 
 
1 88 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 just ready to start, is whistling behind him. 
 Londoners gulp their pleasures, we country 
 folk sip such as come in our way ; think of 
 them a long time in advance with pleasant 
 anticipation, and ruminate on them and talk 
 them over for months afterwards. I submit 
 that even a few choice gratifications thus care- 
 fully prized add to a man's sense of happiness 
 as much as double the number which are 
 received when he is too weary to enjoy or too 
 hurried to recall them. 
 
 "Again, the permanent and indefeasible 
 delights of the country seem somehow to be 
 more indispensable to human beings than the 
 high-strung gratifications of the town. The 
 proof of this fact is that, while we can live at 
 home all the year round, Town Mice, after 
 eight or nine months' residence at longest, 
 begin to hate their beloved city, and pine for 
 the country. Even when they are in the full 
 fling of the London season, it is instructive to 
 notice the enthusiasm and sparkle wherewith 
 they discuss their projected tours a few 
 weeks later among Swiss mountains or up 
 Norwegian fiords. Also it may be observed 
 how of all the entertainments of the year the 
 most popular are the Flower-shows, and the 
 afternoon Garden-parties in certain private 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 189 
 
 grounds. Even the wretched, unmanly sport 
 of Hurlingham has become fashionable, chiefly 
 because it has brought men and women out of 
 London for a day into the semblance of a 
 country place. Had the gentlemen shot the 
 poor pigeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields or 
 Bloomsbury, the admiring spectators of their 
 prowess would have been exceedingly few. 
 Nay, it is enough to watch in any London 
 drawing-room wherein may stand on one table 
 a bouquet of the costliest hot-house flowers, 
 and on the other a bowl of primroses in March, 
 of hawthorn in May, and of purple heather in 
 July, and see how every guest will sooner or 
 later pay some little affectionate attention to 
 the vase which brings the reminiscence of the 
 fields, woods, and mountains, taking no notice 
 at all of the gorgeous azaleas and pelargoni- 
 ums, gardenias, and camellias, in the rival nose- 
 gay. It is very well to boast of the 'perfec- 
 tion ' and * finish ' of London life, but the 
 * perfection ' fails to supply the first want of 
 nature, fresh air; and the 'finish' yet waits 
 for a commencement in cheerful sunlight un- 
 obscured by smoke and fog, and a silence 
 which shall not be marred all day and night 
 by hideous, jarring, and distracting sounds. 
 What man is there who would prefer to live 
 
I9O TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 in one of the Venetian palace chambers, gor- 
 geously decorated and adorned with frescos 
 and marbles, and gilding and mirrors, but with 
 a huge high wall, black, damp, and slimy, 
 within two feet of the windows, shutting out 
 the light of day and the air of heaven, rather 
 than in a homely English drawing-room, fur- 
 nished with nothing better than a few passable 
 water-color sketches and some chintz-covered 
 chairs and sofas, but opening down wide on 
 a sunny garden, with an acacia waving its 
 blossoms over the emerald sward, and the chil- 
 dren weaving daisy chains round the neck of 
 the old collie who lies beside them, panting 
 with the warmth of the weather and his own 
 benevolence ? 
 
 " Then as to the dulness of our country con- 
 versation, wherewith my distinguished friend 
 the Town Mouse has rather impolitely taunted 
 us. Is it because we take no particular inter- 
 est in his gossip of the clubs that he thinks 
 himself justified in pronouncing us stupid? 
 Perhaps we also think him a trifle local (if we 
 may not say provincial) in his choice of topics, 
 and are of opinion that the harvest prospects 
 of our country, and the relations of agricultural 
 labor to capital, are subjects quite as worthy of 
 attention as his petty and transitory cancans 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 1 91 
 
 about articles in reviews, quarrels, scandals, and 
 jests. East Indians returning to Europe after 
 long absence are often amazed that nobody at 
 home cares much to hear why Colonel Chutnee 
 was sent from Curriepoor to Liverabad, or how 
 it happened that Mrs. Cayenne broke off her 
 engagement with old General Temperatesty. 
 And in like manner perhaps a Londoner may 
 be surprised without much reason that his in- 
 tensely interesting 'latest intelligence' is rather 
 thrown away upon us down in the shires." 
 
 These, as we premised, are the obvious and 
 salient advantages and disadvantages of Town 
 and Country life respectively observed and 
 recognized by everybody who thinks on the 
 subject. It is the purport of the present paper 
 to pass beyond them to some of the more 
 subtle and less noticed features of either mode 
 of existence, and to attempt to strike some 
 kind of balance of the results as regards indi- 
 viduals of different character and the same 
 individual in youth and old age. 
 
 When we ask seriously the question which, 
 of any two ways of spending our years, is the 
 most conducive to Happiness, we are apt to 
 overlook the fact that it is not the one which 
 supplies us with the most numerous isolated 
 
I Q2 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 items of pleasure, but the one of which the 
 whole current tends to maintain in us the 
 capacity for enjoyment at the highest pitch and 
 for as long a time as possible. There is some- 
 thing exceedingly stupid in our common prac- 
 tice of paying superabundant attention to all 
 the external factors of happiness down to the 
 minutest rose-leaf which can be smoothed out for 
 our ease, and all the time forgetting that there 
 must always be an internal factor of delight- 
 ability to produce the desired result, just as 
 there must be an eye wherewith to see as well 
 as candles to give light. The faculty of taking 
 enjoyment, of finding sweetness in the rose, 
 grandeur in the mountain, refreshment in food 
 and rest, interest in books, and happiness in 
 loving and being loved, is as we must per- 
 ceive the moment we consider it indefinitely 
 more precious than any gratification which can 
 be offered to the senses, the intellect, or the 
 affections, just as eyesight is more valuable 
 than the finest landscape, and the power of 
 loving better than the homage of a world. 
 Yet, as Shelley lamented, 
 
 " Rarely, rarely comest thou, 
 Spirit of Delight " ; 
 
 and we allow it to remain absent from our souls, 
 and grow accustomed to living without it, while 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 193 
 
 all the time we are plodding on, multiplying 
 gratifications and stimulants, while the delicate 
 and evanescent sense they are meant to please 
 is becoming numb and dead. We often, indeed, 
 make religio-philosophical remarks on the beau- 
 tiful patience and cheerfulness of sufferers 
 from agonizing disease, and we smile at the un- 
 failing hilarity wherewith certain Mark Tapleys 
 of our acquaintance sustain the slings and 
 arrows of outrageous fortune. We quote, 
 with high approval, the poet who sings that 
 
 " Stone walls do not a prison make, 
 Nor iron bars a cage." 
 
 Nevertheless, the singular phenomenon of evi- 
 dent, unmistakable Happiness enjoyed, in de- 
 spite of circa nstances, never seems to teach 
 us how entirely secondary all objective circum- 
 stances needs must be to the subjective side of 
 the question, and how much more rational it 
 would be on our part to look first to securing 
 for ourselves the longest and completest tenure 
 of the internal elements of enjoyment before we 
 turn our attention to the attainment of those 
 which are external. 
 
 The bearing of this remark on the present 
 subject is, of course, obvious. Is it Life in 
 Town or Life in the Country wherein the 
 
194 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 springs of happiness flow with perennial fresh- 
 ness, and wherein the Spirit of Delight will 
 burn brightest and longest? To solve this 
 problem, we must turn over in our minds the 
 various conditions of such a state of mind and 
 spirits, the most generally recognized of which 
 is bodily Health. 
 
 There is not the smallest danger in these 
 days that any inquirer, however careless, should 
 overlook the vast importance of physical sound- 
 ness to every desirable mental result. Indeed, 
 on the contrary, we may rather expect shortly 
 to find our teachers treating Disease as the 
 only real delinquency in the world, and all 
 crimes and vices as mere symptoms of dis- 
 ordered nerves or overloaded stomach, klepto- 
 mania, dipsomania, homicidal mania, or some- 
 thing equally pardonable on the part of autom- 
 ata like ourselves. Seriously speaking, a high 
 state of health, such as the " Original " described 
 himself as having attained, or even something 
 a few degrees less perfect, is, undoubtedly, a 
 potent factor in the sum of happiness, causing 
 every separate sensation sleeping, waking, 
 eating, drinking, exercise, and rest to be de- 
 lightful ; and the folly of people who seek for 
 Happiness, and yet barter away Health for 
 Wealth or Fame, or any other element thereof, 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 195 
 
 is like that of a man who should sell gold for 
 dross. Admitting this, it would seem to fol- 
 low that Life in the Country, generally under- 
 stood to be the most wholesome, must be the 
 most conducive to the state of enjoyment. 
 But there are two points not quite cleared up 
 on the way to this conclusion. First, bodily 
 health seems to be, to some people, anything 
 but the blessing it ought to be, rendering them 
 merely coarse and callous, untouched by those 
 finer impulses and sentiments which pain has 
 taught their feebler companions, and so shut- 
 ting them out from many of the purest and most 
 spiritual joys of humanity. Paley questioned 
 whether the sum of happiness would not be in- 
 creased to most of us by one hour of moderate 
 pain in every twenty-four; and, though few 
 would directly ask for the increment of enjoy- 
 ment so attained, there are perhaps still fewer 
 who would desire to unlearn all the lessons 
 taught in the school of suffering, or find them- 
 selves with the gross, oxlike nature of many a 
 farmer or publican, whose rubicund visage bears 
 testimony to his vigorous appetite and to the 
 small amount of pain, sorrow, or anxiety which 
 his own or anybody else's troubles have ever 
 caused him. Taking it all in all, it seems 
 doubtful, then, whether the most invariably 
 
196 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 robust people are really much higher than 
 those with more fluctuating health who have 
 taken from the bitter cup the sweet drop which 
 is always to be found at the bottom by those 
 who seek it. For those, unhappiest of all, 
 whom disease has only rendered more selfish 
 and self-centred and rebellious, there is, of 
 course, no comparison possible. 
 
 And, secondly, Is it thoroughly proved that 
 country life is invariably healthier than the life 
 of towns ? The maladies arising from bad air, 
 late hours, and that overwork and overstrain 
 which is the modern Black Death, are of course 
 unknown in the calm-flowing existence of a 
 rural squire and his family. But there are other 
 diseases which come of monotonous repose, un- 
 varying meals, and general tedium vitae, quite as 
 bad as the scourges of the town. Of all sources 
 of ill health, I am inclined to think lack of 
 interest in life, and the constant society of dull 
 and disheartening people, the very worst and 
 most prolific. Undoubtedly, it is so among 
 the upper class of women ; and the warnings of 
 certain American physicians against the adop- 
 tion by girls of any serious or earnest pursuit 
 seems painfully suggestive of a well-founded 
 alarm lest their own lists of hysterical and 
 dyspeptic patients should show a falling off 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 1 97 
 
 under the new impetus given to women's work 
 and study. In London, people have very much 
 less leisure to think about their ailments, or 
 allow the doctor's visit to become a permanent 
 institution, as is so often the case in country 
 houses. The result is that (whether or not 
 statistics prove the existence of more sickness 
 in town than in the country) at least we do not 
 hear of eternally ailing people in London 
 nearly so often as we do in country neighbor- 
 hoods, where there are always to be found as 
 stock subjects of local interest and sympathy 
 old Mr. A.'s gout, and Lady B.'s liver com- 
 plaint; and those sad headaches which yet 
 fortunately enable poor Mrs. C. to spend at 
 least one day in the week in her darkened bed- 
 room out of the reach of her lord's intolerable 
 temper.* Be it also that the maladies which 
 townsfolk mostly escape namely, dyspepsia, 
 hysteria, and neuralgia are precisely those 
 which exercise the most direct and fatal influ- 
 ence on human powers of enjoyment, whereas 
 the ills to which flesh is heir in great cities, 
 among the upper and well-fed classes, are gen- 
 erally more remotely connected therewith. 
 But pace the doctors and all their material- 
 
 * I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine afflic- 
 tion classified as the " Bad Husband Headache." 
 
198 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 istic followers I question very much whether 
 bodily health, the mere absence of physical 
 disease, be nearly as indispensable a condition 
 of happiness as certain peculiarities of the 
 mental and moral constitution. The disposi- 
 tion to Anxiety, for instance, which reduces 
 many lives to a purgatory of incessant care, 
 about money, about the opinion of society, or 
 about the health and well-being of children, 
 is certainly a worse drawback to peace and 
 happiness than half the diseases in the Regis- 
 trar-General's list. This anxious temperament 
 is commonly supposed to be fostered and 
 excited in towns, and laid to sleep in the 
 peaceful life of the country; and, if it were 
 certainly and invariably so, I think the balance 
 of happiness between the two would well-nigh 
 be settled by that fact alone. But again there 
 is something to be said on the side of the 
 town. An African traveller has described to 
 me how, after months exposed to the intermi- 
 nable perils from man and brute and climate, he 
 felt, after his first night on board a homeward- 
 bound English ship, a reaction from the terr 
 sion of anxiety which revealed to himself the 
 anguish he had been half-unconsciously endur- 
 ing for many months. In like manner the 
 city man or the statesman feels, when at last 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 199 
 
 he takes his summer holiday, under what tre- 
 mendous pressure of care he has been living 
 during the past year, or session, in London ; 
 and he compares it, naturally enough, with the 
 comparatively careless life of his friend, the 
 country squire. But every one in London 
 does not run a race for political victory or 
 social success, and there are yet some sober 
 old ways of business both legal and mercan- 
 tile which do not involve the alternative of 
 wealth or ruin every hour. For such people 
 I apprehend London life is actually rather a 
 cure for an anxious temperament than a provo- 
 cative of care. There is no time for dwelling 
 on topics of a painful sort, or raising spectres 
 of possible evils ahead. Labors and pleasures, 
 amusements and monetary worries, succeed 
 each other so rapidly that the more serious 
 anxieties receive less and less attention as the 
 plot of London life thickens year by year. 
 One nail drives out another, and we are now 
 and then startled to remember that there has 
 been really for days and months a reasonable 
 fear of disaster hanging over us to which we 
 have somehow scarcely given a thought, while 
 in the country it would have filled our whole 
 horizon, and we should scarcely have forgotten 
 it day or night. 
 
2OO TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 And, again, quite as important as bodily 
 health and freedom from anxiety is the posses- 
 sion of a certain childlike freshness of char- 
 acter; a simplicity which enables men and 
 women, even in old age, to enjoy such inno- 
 cent pleasures as come in their way without 
 rinding them pall, or despising them as not 
 worth their acceptance. Great minds and 
 men of genius seem generally specially gifted 
 with this invaluable attribute of perennial 
 youth; while little souls, full of their own 
 petty importance and vanities, lose it before 
 they are well out of the school-room. The 
 late sculptor, John Gibson (whose works will 
 be, perhaps, appreciated when all the mon- 
 strosities of modern English statuary are con- 
 signed to the lime-kiln), used to say in his old 
 age that he wished he could live over again 
 every day and hour of his past life precisely as 
 he had spent it. Let the reader measure what 
 this means in the mouth of a man of trans- 
 parent veracity, and it will appear that the 
 speaker must needs have carried on through 
 his seventy years the freshness of heart of a 
 boy, never wearied by his ardent pursuit of 
 the Beautiful, and supported by the conscious- 
 ness that this pursuit was not wholly in vain. 
 People who are always " looking for the next 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2OI 
 
 thing," taking each phasure not as pleasure 
 per se, but merely as a useful stepping-stone to 
 something else which may possibly be pleasure, 
 or as a subject to be talked of; people who 
 are always climbing, like boys at a fair, up the 
 slippery pole of ambition, cannot possibly 
 know the meaning of such genuine and ever 
 fresh enjoyment. 
 
 Is a man likely to grow more or less simple- 
 hearted and single-minded in Town or in the 
 Country? Alas! there can be little or no 
 doubt that London life is a sad trial to all such 
 simplicity; and that nothing is more difficult 
 than to preserve, in its hot, stifling atmosphere, 
 the freshness and coolness of any flower of 
 sentiment, or the glory of any noble, unselfish 
 enthusiasm. Social wear and tear, and the 
 tone of easy-letting-down commonly adopted 
 by men of the world towards any lofty aspira- 
 tion, compel those who would fain cherish 
 generous and conscientious motives to cloak 
 them under the guise of a hobby or a whim, 
 and, before many years are over, the glow and 
 bloom of almost every enthusiasm is rubbed off 
 and spoiled. 
 
 But it is time to pass from the general sub- 
 jective conditions of happiness common to us 
 all to those individual tastes and idiosyncrasies 
 
202 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 which are probably more often concerned in the 
 preference of town or country life. We are all 
 of us mingled of pretty nearly the same ingre- 
 dients of character ; but they are mixed in very 
 different proportions in each man's brewing, 
 and in determining the flavor of the compound 
 everything depends on the element which hap- 
 pens to prevail. By some odd chance, few of 
 us, notwithstanding all our egotism and self- 
 study, really know ourselves well enough to 
 recognize whether we are by nature gregarious 
 or solitary, acted upon most readily by meteoro- 
 logical or by psychological influences, capable 
 of living only on our affections or requiring the 
 exercise of our brains. We are always, for ex- 
 ample, talking about the gloom or brightness 
 of the weather, as if we were so many pimper- 
 nels, to whom the sun is everything and a 
 cloudy day or a sharp east wind the most piti- 
 able calamity. The real truth is that, to ninety- 
 nine healthy English men and women out of a 
 hundred, atmospheric conditions are insignifi- 
 cant compared to social ones; and the spectacle 
 of a single member of the family in the dumps, 
 or even the suspicion that the servants are 
 quarrelling in the kitchen, detracts more from 
 our faculty of enjoyment than a fall of the 
 barometer from Very Dry to Stormy. In the 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 203 
 
 same way we talk about people "loving the 
 country" or "loving the town," just as if the 
 character which fitted in and found its natural 
 gratification in the one were qualified to enjoy 
 quite equally the other. Obviously, in some of 
 us the passion for Nature and natural beauty is 
 so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must 
 needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by 
 the sight of pictures reminding us of woods 
 and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled 
 and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington 
 House or the Grosvenor Gallery, we miss so 
 much out of life that nothing can make up for 
 it, and no pleasures of the intellect in the com- 
 pany of clever people, or gratification of taste 
 in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to 
 banish the regret. A young branch swaying in 
 the breeze of spring, and the song of the lark 
 rising out of the thyme and the clover, are 
 better than all the pictures, the concerts, the 
 conversation which the town can offer. And 
 just in the opposite way there are others 
 amongst us in whom the aesthetic element is 
 subordinate to the social, and who long to 
 take a part in the world's work rather than to 
 stand by and watch the grand panorama of 
 summer and winter move before them while 
 they remain passive. Is it not patently absurd 
 
2O4 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 to talk as if persons so differently constituted as 
 these could find happiness, the one where his 
 ingrained passion for Nature is permanently 
 denied its innocent and easy gratification, the 
 other where his no less deeply rooted interest 
 in the concerns of his kind is narrowed within 
 the petty sphere of rural social life ? 
 
 But let us now pass on, hoping that we have 
 found the round man for the round hole, and 
 the square man for the square one. What are 
 the more hidden and recondite charms of the 
 two modes of life, of which the Town Mouse 
 and the Country Mouse have rehearsed the 
 superficial characters? What is the meaning 
 in the first place of that taste for " Life at 
 High Pressure," against which W. R. Greg 
 cautioned us, and Matthew Arnold inveighed? 
 How was it that the sage Dr. Johnson felt 
 undoubtedly a twinge of the same unholy pas- 
 sion when he remarked to the faithful Boswell 
 how delightful it was to drive fast in a post- 
 chaise, in such a post-chaise, and over such 
 roads as existed in his time? I apprehend 
 that the love for rapid movement comes from 
 the fact that it always conveys to us a sense 
 of vivid volition, and effectually stirs both our 
 pulses and our brains, causing us not only to 
 seem to ourselves, but actually to become, 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 205 
 
 more intelligent. At first the bustle and 
 hurry of London life bewilder the visitor; and, 
 finding it impossible to think, move, and 
 speak as fast as is needful, he feels as a feeble 
 old lady might do arm-in-arm with Jack in his 
 Seven-league boots. But after a little while 
 he learns to step out mentally as rapidly as 
 his neighbors, and thereby acquires the double 
 satisfaction of the intrinsic pleasure of think- 
 ing quickly and not dwelling on ideas till they 
 become tedious, and the further sense of grati- 
 fied vanity in being as clever as other people. 
 This last is again a curious source of metro- 
 politan satisfaction. It is all very well to boast 
 of having "also dwelt in Arcadia." Such 
 pastoral pride is humility beside the conceit 
 of being a thorough-bred Londoner. There 
 may live many men with souls so dead as 
 never to themselves to have said anything 
 signifying peculiar appropriation of the soil of 
 Scotland, or of any other " native land." But 
 who has ever yet met a Cockney who was not 
 from the bottom to the top of his soul proud 
 of being a Londoner, and deeply convinced 
 that he and his fellows can alone be counted 
 as standing " in the foremost files of time " ? 
 Of course, whilst he is actually in London, he 
 has no provocation to betray his self-satisfac- 
 
2O6 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 tion among people who can all make the same 
 boast. But watch him the moment he passes 
 into the country. Observe the pains he takes 
 that the natives shall fully understand what 
 manner of man, even a Londoner, they have 
 the privilege of entertaining, and no doubt will 
 remain as to how immensely superior he feels 
 himself to those who habitually dwell "far from 
 the madding crowd." If he wander into the 
 remoter provinces, say of Scotland, Wales, or 
 Ireland, there is always in his recognition of 
 the hospitality shown to him a tone like that 
 of the shipwrecked apostle in Malta : " The Bar- 
 barous people there showed us no small kind- 
 ness." He manages to convey by looks, words, 
 and manners his astonishment at any vestiges 
 of civilization which he may meet on those 
 distant shores, and exhibits graceful forbear- 
 ance in putting up with the delicious fresh 
 fruit, cream, vegetables, and home-fed beef 
 and mutton of his entertainers in lieu of 
 the stale produce of the London shops. One 
 such stranded Cockney I have known to 
 remark that he " observed " that the eggs at 
 
 N , and at another country house where 
 
 he occasionally visited, had in them a "pecul- 
 iar milky substance," about whose merits he 
 seemed doubtful ; and another I have heard, 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2O7 
 
 after landing at Holyhead on his return from 
 Ireland, complacently comparing his watch 
 (which had, like himself, faithfully kept Lon- 
 don time during all his tour) with the clock 
 in the station, and observing to his fellow-pas- 
 sengers "that there was not a single clock 
 right in Dublin, they were all twenty minutes 
 too slow, and, when he went to Galway, he 
 found them still worse." 
 
 Even if a man sincerely prefer country life, 
 and transfer his abode from London to the 
 rural districts, he still retains a latent satis- 
 faction at having lived once in the very centre 
 of human interests, close to the throbbing heart 
 of the world. The old squire, who has been 
 too gouty and too indolent to run up to town 
 for twenty years, will still brighten up at the 
 names of the familiar streets and play-houses, 
 and will tell anecdotes, the chief interest of 
 which seems to lie in the fact that he formerly 
 lodged in Jermyn Street, or bought his seals at 
 the corner of Waterloo Place, or had his hair 
 cut in Bond Street, preparatory to going to the 
 play in Drury Lane. 
 
 As volunteers enjoy a field day with the 
 manoeuvres and marches, so a Londoner expe- 
 riences a dim sense of pleasure in forming part 
 of the huge army of four millions of human be- 
 
2O8 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 ings who are for ever moving hither and thither, 
 and yet strangely bringing about, not confusion, 
 but order. The Greek philosophers and states- 
 men, who thought such a little tiny " Polis " as 
 Athens or Sparta (not an eighth part of one 
 postal district of London) almost a miracle of 
 divine order, would have fallen down and wor- 
 shipped at the shrine of Gog and Magog for 
 having provided that a whole nation should be 
 fed, housed, clothed, washed, lighted, warmed, 
 taught, and amused for years and generations 
 in a single city eight miles long. It is impos- 
 sible not to feel an ever fresh interest and even 
 surprise in the solution of so marvellous a 
 problem as this human ant-hill presents, and 
 Londoners themselves, perhaps even more than 
 their visitors, are wont to watch with pleasant 
 wonder each occurrence which brings its mag- 
 nitude to mind: the long quadruple train of 
 splendid equipages filing through Hyde Park of 
 a summer afternoon ; the scene presented by 
 the river at the Oxford and Cambridge boat- 
 race ; or the overwhelming spectacle of such 
 crowds as greeted the Queen on her Jubilee. 
 
 The facility wherewith a busy-minded person, 
 possessed of moderate pecuniary resources, can 
 carry out almost any project in London, is 
 another great source of the pleasure of town 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 209 
 
 life. At every corner a cab, a hansom, an 
 omnibus, an underground station, or a penny 
 steamboat, is ready to convey him rapidly and 
 securely to any part of the vast area; and a 
 post-pillar or post-office or telegraph office, to 
 forward his letter or card or telegram. He 
 has acquired the privilege of Briareus for do- 
 ing the work of a hundred hands, while the 
 scores of penny and half-penny newspapers 
 give him the benefit of the hundred eyes of 
 Argus to see how to do it. 
 
 Not many people seem to notice wherein the 
 last and greatest of London pleasures, that of 
 London society, has its special attraction. It 
 is contrasted with the very best society which 
 the Country can ever afford, by offering the 
 charm of the imprevu. There are always in- 
 definite possibilities of the most delightful and 
 interesting new acquaintances or of the re- 
 newal of old friendships in London: whereas 
 even in the most brilliant circles in the country 
 we are aware, before we enter a house, that our 
 host's choice of our fellow-guests must have lain 
 within a very narrow and restricted circle, and 
 that, if a stranger should happily have fallen 
 from the skies into the neighborhood, his ad- 
 vent would have been proclaimed in our note 
 of invitation. Now it is much more piquant to 
 
2IO TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 meet an agreeable person unexpectedly than by 
 formal rendezvous ; and, for that large propor- 
 tion of mankind who are not particularly agree- 
 able, it is still more essential that they should 
 be presented freshly to our acquaintance. 
 Other things being equal, a Stranger Bore is 
 never half so great a bore as a Familiar Bore, 
 of whose boredom we have already had inti- 
 mate and painful experience. There yet hangs 
 about the Stranger Bore somewhat of the mists 
 of early day, and we are a little while in pierc- 
 ing them and thoroughly deciding that he is 
 a bore and nothing better. Often, indeed, for 
 the first hour or two of acquaintanceship, he 
 fails to reveal himself in his true colors, and 
 makes remarks and tells anecdotes the dulness 
 of which we shall only thoroughly recognize 
 when we have heard them repeated on twenty 
 other occasions. With our own Familiar Bore 
 no illusion is possible. The moment we see 
 him enter the room, we know everything that 
 is going to be said for the rest of the evening, 
 and Hope itself escapes out of Pandora's box. 
 Thus, even if there were proportionately as 
 many bores in London as in the provinces, we 
 should still, in town, enjoy a constant change 
 of them, which would considerably lighten the 
 burden. This, however, is very far from being 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 211 
 
 the case ; and the stupid wives of clever men 
 and the dull husbands of clever wives, who 
 alone smuggle into the inner coteries (few 
 people having the effrontery to omit them in 
 their invitations), are so far rubbed up and in- 
 structed in the best means of concealing their 
 ignorance, silliness, or stupidity, that they are 
 often quite harmless and inoffensive, and even 
 qualified to shine with a mild reflected lustre 
 in rural society in the autumn. Certain im- 
 mutable laws made and provided by society 
 against bores are brought sooner or later to 
 their knowledge. They do not tell stories more 
 than five minutes long in the narration, nor 
 rehearse jokes till they fancy they can recall 
 the point, nor entertain their friends by an 
 abridgment of their own pedigree, or by a cata- 
 logue of the ages, names, heights, and attain- 
 ments in the Latin grammar of their hopeful 
 offspring. To all this sort of thing the miser- 
 able visitor in the country is liable to be sub- 
 jected in every house the threshold of which he 
 may venture to cross ; for, even if his host and 
 hostess be the most delightful people, they 
 generally have some old uncle or aunt, or priv- 
 ileged and pompous neighbor, with whom no- 
 body has ever dared to interfere in his ruthless 
 exercise of the power to bore, and who will 
 
212 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 fasten on a new comer just as mosquitoes do on 
 fresh arrivals at a seaport after having tor- 
 mented all the old inhabitants. 
 
 And if London Bores are as lions with drawn 
 teeth and clipped claws, London pleasant 
 people on the other hand are beyond any 
 doubt the pleasantest in the world ; more true 
 and kind and less eaten up by vanity and 
 egotism than Parisians, and twice as agile- 
 minded as the very cleverest German. 
 
 Again, a great charm of London is that 
 wealth is of so much less social weight there 
 than anywhere else. It is singular what mis- 
 apprehensions are current on this subject, and 
 how apt are country people to say that money 
 is everything in town, whereas the exact con- 
 verse of the proposition is nearer the truth. In 
 a country neighborhood, the man who lives in 
 the largest house, drives the handsomest horses, 
 and gives the most luxurious entertainments is 
 allowed with little question to assume a prom- 
 inent position, be he never so dull and never so 
 vulgar ; and, though respect will still be paid to 
 well-born and well-bred people of diminished 
 or narrow fortune, their position as regards 
 their nouveau riche neighbors is every year less 
 dignified or agreeable. Quite on the contrary 
 in town: with no income beyond what is need- 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 213 
 
 f ul to subscribe to a club and wear a good coat, 
 a man may take his place (hundreds do so take 
 a place) in the most delightful circles, welcomed 
 by all for his own worth or agreeability, for the 
 very simple and sufficient reason that people 
 like his society and want nothing more from 
 him. In a city where there are ten thousand 
 people ready to give expensive dinners, it is 
 not the possession of money enough to enter- 
 tain guests which can by itself make the owner 
 an important personage, or cause the world to 
 overlook the fact that he is a snob; nor will the 
 lack of wealth prevent those thousands who 
 are on the look-out only for a pleasant and 
 brilliant companion from cultivating one, be he 
 never so poor. The distinction between the 
 rural and the urban way of viewing a new 
 acquaintance as regards both birth and fortune 
 is very curiously betrayed by the habit of towns- 
 folk to ask simply "what a man may be" 
 (meaning, " Is he a lawyer, a litterateur, a poli- 
 tician, a clergyman, above all, is he a pleasant 
 fellow ? ") and that of country gentry invari- 
 ably to inquire, " Who is he ? " (meaning, Has 
 he an estate, and is he related to the So-and-so's 
 of such a place ? ) It is not a little amusing 
 sometimes to witness the discomfiture of both 
 parties when a bland old gentleman is intro- 
 
214 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 duced in London to some man of world-wide 
 celebrity, whose antecedents none of the com- 
 pany ever dreamed of investigating, and the 
 squire courteously intimates, as the pleasantest 
 thing he can think of to say, that he " used to 
 meet often in the hunting field a gentleman of 
 that name who had a fine place in Cheshire," 
 or that " he remembers a man who must surely 
 have been his father a gentleman-commoner 
 of Christchurch." 
 
 For those men and women numerous 
 enough in these days who hold rather pro- 
 nounced opinions of the sort not relished in 
 country circles, who are heretics regarding the 
 religious or political creed of their relatives 
 and neighbors, London offers the real Broad 
 Sanctuary, where they may rest in peace, and 
 be no more looked upon as black sheep, sus- 
 picious and uncomfortable characters, the "gen- 
 tleman who voted for Topsy Turvey at the 
 last election," or " the lady who doesn't go to 
 church on Sundays." In town, not only will 
 their errors be overlooked, but they will find 
 scores of pleasant and reputable persons who 
 share the worst of them and go a great deal 
 further, and in whose society they will soon 
 begin to feel themselves by comparison quite 
 orthodox, and perhaps rather conservative 
 characters. 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 215 
 
 And lastly, besides all the other advantages 
 of London which I have recapitulated, there 
 is one of which very little note is ever taken. 
 If many sweet and beautiful pleasures are lost 
 by living there, many sharp and weary pains 
 also therein find a strange anodyne. There 
 is no time to be very unhappy in London. 
 Past griefs are buried away under the surface, 
 since we may not show them to the unsym- 
 pathizing eyes around ; and present cares and 
 sorrows are driven into dark corners of the 
 mind by the crowd of busy every-day thoughts 
 which inevitably take their place. A man 
 may feel the heart-ache in the country, and 
 wander mourning by the solitary shore or 
 amid the silent winter woods. But let him go, 
 after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into 
 the busy London streets, and be obliged to 
 pick his way amid the crowd ; to pass by a 
 score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over 
 by an omnibus, give a penny to a street- 
 sweeper, push through the children looking at 
 Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail 
 a hansom and drive to his office or his cham- 
 bers, and at the end of the hour how many 
 thoughts will he have given to his sorrow? 
 
 Before it has had time to sink into his mind, 
 many days of similar fuss and business will 
 
2l6 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 have intervened; and by that time the edge 
 of the grief will be dulled, and he will never 
 experience it in its sharpness. Of the influ- 
 ence of this process, continually repeated, on 
 the character, a good deal might be said ; and 
 there may be certainly room to doubt whether 
 thus perpetually shirking all the more serious 
 and solemn passages of life is conducive to the 
 higher welfare. After we have suffered a good 
 deal, and the readiness of youth to encounter 
 every new experience and drink every cup to 
 the dregs has been exchanged for the dread 
 of strong emotions and the weariness of grief 
 which belong to later years, there is an im- 
 mense temptation to spare our own hearts as 
 much as we can ; and London offers the very 
 easiest way, without any failure of kindness, 
 duty, or decorum, to effect such an end. 
 Nevertheless, the sacred faculties of sympathy 
 and unselfish sorrow are not things to be 
 lightly tampered with; and it is to be feared 
 that the consequences of any conscious evasion 
 of their claims must always be followed by 
 that terrible Nemesis, the hardening of our 
 hearts and the disbelief in the sympathy of 
 our neighbors. We have made love and 
 friendship unreal to ourselves, and it becomes 
 impossible to continue to believe they are real 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 21 / 
 
 to other people. Yet, I think, if the shelter 
 be not wilfully or intentionally sought, if it 
 merely come in the natural course of things 
 that the business and variety of town life pre- 
 vent us from dwelling on sorrows which can- 
 not be lightened by our care, it seems a better 
 alternative than the almost infinite durability 
 and emphasis given to grief in the monotonous 
 life of the country. 
 
 If these be the advantages of Town life, 
 however, there are to be set against them many 
 and grievous drawbacks. First, as the Country 
 Mouse justly urges, half those quickly following 
 sensations and ideas which constitute the highly- 
 prized rapidity of London life are essentially 
 disagreeable in themselves, and might be dis- 
 pensed with to our much greater comfort. In 
 the country, for example, out of fifty sights, 
 forty-nine at least are of pretty or beautiful 
 objects, even where there is no particularly fine 
 scenery. Woods, gardens, rivers, country roads, 
 cottages, wagons, ploughs, cattle, sheep, and 
 over all, always, a broad expanse of the blessed 
 sky, with the pomps of sunrises and sunsets, and 
 moonlight nights and snow-clad winter days, 
 these are things on which everywhere (save in 
 the Black Country, which is not the country at all) 
 the eye rests in peace and delight. In the town, 
 
2l8 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 out of the same number of glances of our tired 
 eyeballs, we shall probably behold a score of 
 huge advertisements, a line of hideous houses 
 with a butcher's shop as the most prominent 
 object, an omnibus and a brewer's dray, a score 
 of bricklayers returning (slightly drunk) from 
 dinner, and a handsome carriage with the unfort- 
 unate horses champing their gag-bits in agony 
 from their tight bearing-reins while the coach- 
 man flicks them with his whip. In the country, 
 again, out of fifty odors the great majority will 
 be of fresh herbage, or hay, or potato or bean 
 fields, or of newly ploughed ground, or burning 
 weeds or turf. In the town, we shall endure the 
 sickly smell of drains, of stale fish, of raw meat, 
 of carts laden with bones and offal, the insuffer- 
 able effluvium of the city cook-shops ; and last 
 not least pervading every street and shop 
 and park, puffed eternally in our faces, the vilest 
 tobacco. And finally, in the country, our ears 
 are no less soothed and flattered than our senses 
 of smelling and sight. The golden silence when 
 broken at all is disturbed only by the noise of 
 running waters, of cattle lowing, sheep bleating, 
 thrushes and larks and cuckoos singing, rooks 
 cawing on the return home at evening, or the 
 exquisite " sough " of the night wind as it passes 
 over the sleeping woods as in a dream. In the 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 19 
 
 town, we have the relentless roar and rattle of a 
 thousand carts, cabs, drags, and omnibuses, the 
 perpetual grinding of organs and hurdy-gurdies, 
 the unintelligible and ear-piercing cries of the 
 costermongers in the streets, and generally, to 
 complete our misery, the jangle of a pianoforte 
 heard through the thin walls of our house, as if 
 there were no partitions between us and the 
 detestable children who thump through their 
 scales and polkas for six hours out of the twenty- 
 four. Such are the sufferings of the senses 
 in London, surely worth setting against the 
 luxuries it is supposed to comand, but which 
 it only commands for the rich, whereas neither 
 rich nor poor have any immunity from the ugly 
 sights, ugly smells, and ugly noises wherewith 
 it abounds. But, beyond these mortifications 
 of the flesh, London entails on its thorough- 
 going votaries a heavier punishment. Sooner 
 or later on every one who really works in 
 London there comes a certain pain, half 
 physical, half mental, which seems to have its 
 bodily seat somewhere about the diaphragm, 
 and its mental place between our feelings and 
 our intellect, a sense, not of being tired and 
 wanting rest, for that is the natural and whole- 
 some alternative of all strong and sustained 
 exercise of our faculties, but of being "like 
 
22O TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 dumb driven cattle," and of having neither 
 power to go on nor to stop. We seem to be 
 under some slave-master who whips us here 
 and there, and forbids us to sit down and take 
 breath. We want fresh air, but our walks 
 through the crowded streets or parks only 
 add fatigue to our eyes and weariness and 
 excitement to our brains. We need food, but 
 it does us little good ; and sleep, but we 
 waken up before half the night is past with our 
 brains busy already with the anxieties of the 
 morrow. We are conscious we are using up 
 brains, eyesight, health, everything which makes 
 life worth possessing, and yet we are entangled 
 in such a mesh of engagements and duties that 
 we cannot break loose. We can only break 
 down; and that is what we pretty surely do 
 when this state of things has lasted a little too 
 long. 
 
 Perhaps the reader is inclined to say, Why 
 not try the golden mean, the compromise be- 
 tween town and country, to be found in some 
 rus in urbe in Fulham or Hampstead, or a villa 
 a little way further, at Richmond or Norwood 
 or Wimbledon ? I beg leave humbly to con- 
 tend that the venerable Aristotelian " Meson " 
 is as great a mistake in geography as in ethics, 
 and that it will be generally found that people 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 221 
 
 adopting the Half-way House system of lodge- 
 ment will be disposed to repeat the celebrated 
 Scotch ode with slight variations. " Their 
 heart is " - in London ; " their heart is not," 
 by any means, in Hampstead or Twickenham. 
 Their days are spent either in waiting at rail- 
 way stations to go in or out of town, or in the 
 yet more tantalizing anticipation of friends who 
 have promised to " give them a day," and for 
 whom they have provided the modern substi- 
 tute for the fatted calf, but who, on the par- 
 ticular morning of their engagement, are sure 
 to be swept off their consciences by an unex- 
 pected ticket for the opera, which they " could 
 not enjoy if they had gone so far in the morn- 
 ing as dear Mr. A.'s delightful villa." Of 
 course, it is possible to live in the outer circle 
 of real London, and have fresh air and compar- 
 ative quiet, infinitely valuable. But he who 
 goes further afield, the ambitious soul who 
 dreams of cocks and hens, or even soars to a 
 paddock and a cow, is destined to disillusion 
 and despair. He tries to " make the best of 
 both worlds," and he gets the worst of both. 
 The genuine Londoner considers his proffers 
 of hospitality as an imposition ; and the gen- 
 uine country cousin is indignant, on accepting 
 them, to find how far is his residence from the 
 
222 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 exhibitions and the shops. His trees are black, 
 his roses cankered, and his soul imbittered by 
 the defalcations of friends, the blunders and 
 extortions of cabmen, and his own infructuous 
 effort to be always in two places at once. 
 
 Nor is the second and, apparently, more 
 facile resource of the tired Londoner that of 
 quartering himself on his kind country friends 
 for his holidays very much more successful. 
 The country would indeed be delightful for our 
 Christmas fortnight or our Easter or Whitsun- 
 tide week, if we were permitted to enjoy in it 
 that repose we so urgently need and so fondly 
 seek. We are quite enamoured, when we first 
 turn our steps from the smoky city, with the 
 trees and fields ; and we enjoy indescribably 
 our rides and drives and walks, the varied as- 
 pects of nature, and the beasts and birds where- 
 with we are surrounded. But one thing we 
 have not bargained for, and that is country 
 Society. Of course we love our friends and 
 relations in whose homes we are received with 
 kindness and affection, whom we know to be 
 the salt of the earth for goodness, and who love 
 us enough to feel an interest even in our towni- 
 est gossip. But their country friends, the neigh- 
 boring gentlefolk, the clergyman's wife, the 
 family doctor, the people who are invariably 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 223 
 
 invited to meet us at the long formal country 
 dinner ! This is the trial beneath which our 
 new-found love of rural life is apt to succumb. 
 Sir Cornewall Lewis's too famous dictum re- 
 turns, slightly modified, to our memories 
 As "life would be tolerable but for its pleas- 
 ures," so the country would be enchanting, 
 were it not for its society. Could we be 
 allowed to live in the country, and see only 
 our hosts, we should be as happy as kings and 
 queens. But to fly, for the sake of rest and 
 quiet, from the tables where we might have met 
 some of the most brilliant men and women of 
 the day, and then to find that we shall incur 
 the disgrace of being unsociable curmudgeons 
 if we object to spend the afternoon in playing 
 tennis with the rector's stupid daughters, and 
 to dine afterwards at the house of a particularly 
 dull and vulgar neighbor with whom we would 
 fain avoid such acquaintance as may justify 
 him in visiting us in town, this is surely an evil 
 destiny ! When, alas ! will all the good and 
 kind people who invite town friends to come 
 and rest with them in the country forbear to 
 make their acceptance the occasion for a round 
 of rural dissipation, and believe that their weary 
 brother would be only too glad, did civility per- 
 mit, to inscribe on the door of his bedroom 
 
224 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 during his sojourn the affecting Italian epitaph, 
 Imp lor a pace ! 
 
 The Country Mouse has naturally said as 
 little as possible of the drawbacks of his favorite 
 mode of existence, metaphorically speaking, 
 the dampness of his " Hollow Tree," and its 
 liability to be infested by Owls. It may be 
 well to jot off a few of the less recognized 
 offsets to the pleasures of rural life before lis- 
 tening to any eulogies thereof. 
 
 The real evil of country life I apprehend is 
 this: the whole happiness or misery of it is so 
 terribly dependent on the character of those 
 with whom we live that, if we are not so fort- 
 unate as to have for our companions the best 
 and dearest, wisest and pleasantest, of men and 
 women (in which case we may be far happier 
 than in any other life in the world), we are 
 infinitely worse off than we can ever be in 
 town. One, two, or perhaps three relatives and 
 friends, who form our permanent housemates, 
 make or mar all our days by their good or evil 
 tempers, their agreeability or stupidity, their 
 affection and confidence, or their dislike and 
 jealousy. Eire avec les gens quon aime, cela 
 suffit, says Rousseau ; and he speaks truth. But 
 etre avec les gens quon riaime pas, and buried 
 in a dull country house with them, without any 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 25 
 
 prospect of change, is as bad as having a mill- 
 stone tied round our necks and being drowned 
 in the depth of the sea. In a town house, if 
 the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, 
 scold and wrangle, if the husband be a bear or 
 the wife a shrew, there is always the refuge of 
 the outer circle of acquaintances wherein cheer 
 and comfort, or, at least, variety and relief, may 
 be found. Reversing the pious Dr. Watts's 
 maxim, we cry, 
 
 " Whatever brawls disturb the home, 
 Let peace be in the street." 
 
 The Club is the shelter of henpecked man; 
 a friend's house, or Marshall and Snellgrove's, 
 the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the 
 stormiest domestic debate, the advent of a 
 visitor intervenes, throwing temporary oil on 
 the waters, and compelling the belligerents to 
 put off their quarrels and put on their smiles; 
 and, when the unconscious peacemaker has de- 
 parted, it is often found difficult, if not impos- 
 sible, to take up the squabble just where it was 
 left off. But there is no such luck for cross- 
 grained people in country houses. Humboldt's 
 "Cosmos " contains several references to cer- 
 tain observations made by two gentlemen who 
 passed a winter together on the inhospitable 
 
226 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 northern shores of Asia, and one of whom bore 
 the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult 
 to imagine any trial more severe than that of 
 spending the six dark months of the year with 
 Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea. 
 But this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hun- 
 dreds of unlucky English men and women 
 spend their winters every year in country 
 houses, limited, practically, to the society of a 
 Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a burden 
 by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, 
 suspicion, jar, and jolt. As regards children 
 or dependent people or the wives of despotic 
 husbands, the case is often worse than this. 
 By a terrible law of our nature, an unkindness, 
 harshness, or injustice done once to any one has 
 a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the 
 victim (I have elsewhere called the passion 
 heteropathy) and a restlessness to heap wrong 
 on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to 
 justify the first fault. Woe to the hapless step- 
 child or orphan nephew or penniless cousin, or 
 helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under 
 this terrible destiny in a country house where 
 there are few eyes to witness the cruelty and 
 no tongue bold enough to denounce it ! The 
 misery endured by such beings, the poor young 
 souls which wither under the blight of the per- 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 22 7 
 
 petual unmerited blame, and the older sufferers 
 mortified and humiliated in their age, must be 
 quite indescribable. Perhaps by no human act 
 can truer charity be done than by resolutely 
 affording moral support, if we can do no more, 
 to such butts and victims; and, if it be possible, 
 to take them altogether away out of their ill- 
 omened conditions, and "deliver him that is 
 oppressed from the hand of the adversary." It 
 is astonishing how much may be done by very 
 humble spectators to put a check to evils like 
 these, even by merely showing their own sur- 
 prise and distress in witnessing them ; and, on 
 the contrary, how deplorably ready are nine 
 people out of ten to fall in with the established 
 prejudices and unkindnesses of every house 
 they enter. 
 
 Very little of this kind of thing goes on in 
 towns. People are too busy about their own 
 affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all 
 kinds are too much diffused among the in- 
 numerable men and women with whom they 
 come in contact, to permit of concentrated 
 dislike settling down on any inmate of their 
 homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the 
 country. 
 
 Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret 
 of the difference of Town and Country life. 
 
228 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are 
 more are less dissipated in town, and concen- 
 trated and deepened in the country. Even a 
 very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of 
 hours of meals too late or too early for our 
 health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a 
 door below stairs perpetually banged, assumes 
 a degree of importance when multiplied by the 
 infinite number of times we expect to endure 
 it in the limitless monotony of country life. 
 Our nerves become in advance irritated by all 
 we expect to go through in the future, and the 
 consequence is that a degree of heat enters 
 into family disputes about such matters which 
 greatly amazes the parties concerned to remem- 
 ber when the wear and tear of travel or of 
 town life have made the whole mode of exist- 
 ence in a country home seem a placid stream, 
 with scarcely a pebble to stir a ripple. 
 
 And now, at last, let us begin to seek out 
 wherein lie the more hidden delights of the 
 country life ; the violets under the hedge which 
 sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved 
 even by those who would fain gather up the 
 flowers. We return in thought to one of those 
 old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees and 
 with the work-day world far enough away be- 
 hind the park palings so that the sound of 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 2 29 
 
 wheels is never heard save when some friend 
 approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What 
 is the key-note of the life led by the men and 
 women who have grown from childhood to 
 manhood and womanhood in such a place, and 
 then drop slowly down the long years which 
 will lead them surely at last to that bed in the 
 green churchyard close by, where they shall 
 " sleep with their fathers " ? That " note " seems 
 to me to be a peculiar sense exceeding that 
 of mere calmness of stability, of a repose of 
 which neither beginning nor end is in sight. 
 Instead of a " changeful world," this is to them 
 a world where no change comes, or comes so 
 slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost every- 
 thing which the eye rests upon in such a home 
 is already old, and will endure for years to come, 
 probably long after its present occupants are 
 under the sod. The house itself was built 
 generations since, and its thick walls look as 
 if they would defy the inroads of time. The 
 rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the 
 father's marriage ; another, tradition tells us, by 
 a famous great-grandmother; the halls no 
 one remembers by whom or how long ago. 
 The old trees bear on their boles the initials of 
 many a name which has been inscribed long 
 years also on the churchyard stones. The gar- 
 
230 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 den, with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers and 
 clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has 
 been a garden so long that the rich soil bears 
 blossoms with twice the perfume of other 
 flowers ; and, as we pace along the broad ter- 
 raced walks in the twilight, the odors of the 
 well-remembered bushes of lavender and jessa- 
 mine and cistus (each growing where it has 
 stood since we were born) fall on our senses 
 like the familiar note of some dear old tune. 
 The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, 
 the herons shrieking among their nests, the 
 rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle 
 driven in to milking and lowing as they go, all 
 in some way suggest the sense, not of restless- 
 ness and turmoil like the noises of the town, 
 but of calm and repose and the unchanging 
 order of an " abode of ancient Peace." 
 
 Then the habits of the owners of such old 
 seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhyme. 
 There are the lesser beats at intervals through 
 the long day, when the early laborer's bell, and 
 the gong at nine o'clock, and one o'clock, and 
 seven o'clock, sound the call to prayers and to 
 meals. And there are the weekly beats, when 
 Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the 
 psalm of life. And yet again there are the 
 half-yearly summer strophe and winter anti- 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 23! 
 
 strophe of habits of each season, taken up and 
 laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the 
 family life oscillates like a pendulum between 
 the first of May, which sees the domestic 
 exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, 
 and the first of November, which brings the 
 return into the warm, oak-panelled library. 
 To violate or alter these long-established rules 
 and precedents scarcely enters into the head of 
 any one, and the child hears the old servants 
 (themselves the most dear and permanent insti- 
 tutions of all) speak of them almost as if they 
 were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds 
 life from the very beginning set for him to a 
 kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way; 
 and he learns to think that " Order is Heaven's 
 first law," and that change will never come over 
 the placid tenor of existence. The difficulty 
 to him is to realize in after years that any 
 vicissitudes have really taken place in the old 
 home, that it has changed owners, or that the 
 old order has given place to new. He almost 
 feels thinking perhaps of his mother in her 
 wonted seat that Shelley's dreamy philoso- 
 phy must be true 
 
 " That garden sweet, that lady fair, 
 And all bright shapes and odors there, 
 In truth have never passed away : 
 'Tis we, 'tis ours, have changed, not they." 
 
232 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 The anticipation of perpetual variety and 
 change which is the lesson commonly taught 
 to children by town-life, the Micawber-like 
 expectation of " something turning up," to 
 amuse or distract them, and for which they are 
 constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is pre- 
 cisely reversed for the little scion of the old 
 country family. For him nothing is ever 
 likely to turn up beyond the ordinary vicis- 
 situdes of fair weather and foul, the sickness of 
 his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival 
 of his new gun. All that is to be made out of 
 life he invents for himself in his sports and 
 in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is 
 sent to school. And when the epochs of school 
 and college are over, when he returns as heir 
 or master, life lays all spread out before him in 
 a long, straight, honorable road, all his duties 
 and his pleasures lying by the wayside, ready 
 for his acceptance. For the girl there is often 
 even longer and more unbroken monotony, 
 lasting (unless she marry) into early woman- 
 hood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the 
 eventlessness of many a young lady's life in such 
 a home. Her walks to her village school, or to 
 visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and 
 disasters ; her rides and drives along the famil- 
 iar roads which she has ridden and driven over 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 233 
 
 five hundred times already ; the arrival of a 
 new book, or of some old friend (more often her 
 parent's contemporary than her own), make 
 up the sum of her excitements, or even expec- 
 tations of excitement, perhaps, through all the 
 years when youth is most eager for novelty, 
 and the outer world seems an enchanted place. 
 The effects on the character of this extreme 
 regularity and monotony, this life at Low Press- 
 ure, vary, of course, in different individuals. 
 Upon a dull mind without motu proprio or 
 spring of original ideas, it is, naturally, depress- 
 ing enough ; but it is far from equally injurious 
 to those possessed of some force of character, 
 provided they meet the affection and reason- 
 able indulgence of liberty without which the 
 heart and intellect can no more develop health- 
 fully than a baby can thrive without milk, or a 
 child's limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes. 
 The young mind slowly working out its prob- 
 lems for itself, unwarped by the influence (so 
 enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions, 
 and devouring the great books of the world, fer- 
 reted out of a miscellaneous library by its own 
 eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps 
 ripening in a healthier way than the best 
 taught town child, with endless " classes " and 
 masters for every accomplishment under the 
 
234 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 sun. Even the imagination is better cultivated 
 in loneliness, when the child, through its sol- 
 itary rambles by wood and shore, spins its 
 gossamer webs of fancy, and invents tales of 
 heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or 
 pantomime ever yet brought to the town child's 
 exhausted brain. Then the affections of the 
 country child are concentrated on their few 
 objects with a passionate warmth of which the 
 feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst 
 scores of friends and admirers, affords no 
 measure whatever. The admiration amounting 
 to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to 
 some older woman who represents to her all 
 of grace and goodness she has yet dreamed, 
 and who descends every now and then from 
 some far-off Elysium to be a guest in her home, 
 is one of the least read and yet surely one of 
 the prettiest chapters of innocent human senti- 
 ment. As to the graver and more durable 
 affections nourished in the old home, the fond 
 attachment of brothers and sisters, the rever- 
 ence for the father, the love, purest and 
 deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child 
 and child for mother, there can be little doubt 
 that their growth in the calm, sweet country life 
 must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can 
 well be elsewhere. 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 235 
 
 And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful 
 and solitary youth soon enters the deeper 
 waters of the moral and spiritual life, and 
 breathes religious aspirations which have in 
 them, in those early years, the freshness and 
 the holiness of the morning. Happy and good 
 must, indeed, be that later life from the heights 
 of which any man or woman can dare to look 
 back on one of these lonely childhoods without 
 a covering of the face. Talk of hermitages 
 or monasteries ! The real nursery of religion 
 is one of these old English homes, where every 
 duty is natural, easy, beautiful ; where the pleas- 
 ures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven 
 with the duties that the one need scarcely 
 be defined from the other; and where the 
 spectacle of Nature's loveliness is forever sug- 
 gesting the thought of Him who built the blue 
 dome of heaven, and scattered over all the 
 ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy 
 child dwelling in such a home, with a father and 
 mother who speak to it sometimes of God and 
 the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude 
 into that Holy of Holies, a young soul's love 
 and penitence and resolution, is the place on 
 earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame 
 of religion. Of the cruelty and wickedness 
 and meanness of the world the child hears only 
 
236 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 as of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who 
 may roam or crawl in African deserts. They are 
 too far off to force themselves on the attention 
 as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved 
 on pain of moral death. Even sickness, poverty, 
 and death appear oftenest as occasions for the 
 kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and 
 guides. 
 
 To turn to lighter matters. Of course 
 among the first recognized pleasures of the 
 country is the constant intercourse with, or 
 rather bathing in, Nature. We are up to the 
 lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees. 
 It is not one beautiful object or another which 
 attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, 
 without being interrupted by thinking of them 
 individually, they influence us en masse. Dame 
 Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us 
 with her own lullaby. Probably, on the whole, 
 country folks admire each separate view and 
 scrap of landscape less than their visitors from 
 the town, and criticise it as little as school-boys 
 do their mother's dress. But they love Nature 
 as a whole, and her real influence appears in 
 their genial characters, their healthy nervous 
 systems, and their optimistic opinions. Nor is 
 it by any means only inanimate nature where- 
 with they are concerned. Not to speak of 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 237 
 
 their poorer neighbors (of whom they know 
 much more, and with whom they usually live 
 in far more kindly relations than townsfolk with 
 theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes 
 and birds. How much, to some of us, the 
 leisurely watching of stately cattle, gentle 
 sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driv- 
 ing of generous, kindly-natured horses and the 
 companionship of loving dogs, add to the sum 
 of the day's pleasures and tune the mind to 
 its happiest keynote, it would be difficult to 
 define. For my own part, I have never ceased 
 to wonder how Christian divines have been able 
 to picture Heaven and leave it wholly un- 
 peopled by animals. Even for their own sakes 
 (not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated 
 brutes), would they not have desired to give 
 their humble companions some little corner in 
 their boundless sky ? A place with perpetual 
 music going on and not a single animal to 
 caress, even those which Mahomet promised 
 his followers, his own camel, Balaam's ass, 
 \nd Tobit's dog, would, I think, be a very 
 incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed ! 
 
 It has often been said that the passion of 
 Englishmen for field sports is really due to this 
 love of Nature and of animals; that, like sheep- 
 dogs (who, when they are not trained to guard 
 
238 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 sheep, will, by an irresistible impulse, follow 
 and harry them), they feel compelled to have 
 something to do with hares and foxes and par- 
 tridges 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 sports- 
 men unquestionably are) not merely endure to 
 kill, but actually take pleasure in killing, inno- 
 cent 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, 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 239 
 
 Sport is an inexplicable passion to the non- 
 sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very 
 easy to contemplate with philosophical for- 
 bearance, much less with admiration. 
 
 A larger source of wonder is it to reflect 
 that this same unaccountable passion for kill- 
 ing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep 
 a root in English life that its arrest and dis- 
 appointment by such a change of the Game 
 laws as would lead to the abolition of game 
 would practically revolutionize all our man- 
 ners. 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 de- 
 termines the season; and, as women love the 
 London Season quite as much as men like fox- 
 hunting, both parties are equally bound to the 
 
240 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 same unfortunate division of time, and year 
 after year passes, and the lilacs and labur- 
 nums 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-pre- 
 serving, 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 prob- 
 ably, 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, per- 
 haps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized 
 on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 24! 
 
 happiness, pure, stable, dignified, and blame- 
 less, 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 famil- 
 iar 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 tapes- 
 try 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 
 
242 TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 
 
 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 up- 
 stairs 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 rush- 
 ing to and fro of London, but which settles 
 
TOWN MOUSE AND COUNTRY MOUSE 243 
 
 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. 
 
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