GIFT OF
; "^
VIEWS
ON
VEXED QUESTIONS.
BY
WILLIAM W. KINSLEY.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
1881.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by
W. W. KINSLEY,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D.C.
Ac*-
TO HEK
WHO WILL READ BETWEEN THE LINES A RECORD OF THE
HOME-LIFE AT INGLESIDE,
THIS VOLUME,
AS A SOUVENIR,
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR
308845
CONTENTS.
PART FIRST.
PA OR
THE SUPERNATURAL 9
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN 89
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? .... 151
PART SECOND.
SATAN ANTICIPATED 191
THE KEY TO SUCCESS 231
SHELLEY .......... 255
THE BRONTE SISTERS 303
PAET FIRST.
THE SUPERNATURAL.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN?
THE SUPERNATURAL.
DRIFT OF MODERN THOUGHT.
THE laws of nature, which are by many erroneously
considered self-operating entities, are simply the names
of methods of working. The vitalizing forces them-
selves are hidden behind an impenetrable veil of mys-
tery. Of the certain existence of secret somethings
wholly distinct from the particles of matter wrapped
up within the folds of germs or within the faces of
crystals we have palpable proofs in phenomena, but
the most searching scientific analysis has never yet
lifted or rent the veil. We think we account by
gravity for the rush of the avalanche and the tides of
the sea. Hydrogen and oxygen embrace at the touch
of fire, and we call it chemical affinity. Frost utters
some potent spell over the particles of a water-drop
and they fall into line and effect symmetrical combina-
tions with the precision of drilled infantry, and we
flatter ourselves we have solved the riddle when we
christen it crystallization. Kernels of wheat taken
from the hand of an Egyptian mummy, where they
had lain through the long roll of three thousand years
seemingly dead, when dropped into the earth were
9
ig ', ; VIEW'S ON 7 EX ED qUESTIONS.
found filled with skilled alchemists who, in unknown
proportions and by unknown processes, compounded
in their crucibles ingredients of dew, air, soil, and sun-
light. That there should have been power left to pro-
duce vegetable cell-growth after this death-like sleep of
thirty centuries we may well pronounce a mystery, but
what that was which slept and in its waking goldened
the fields with grain again is a mystery infinitely
greater. Two embryos so minute as scarcely to be
discernible to the naked eye, their points of difference
seldom, if ever, detected even when placed in the focus
of the microscope, will, when favorably circumstanced,
develop, one into a winged butterfly, the other into a
bounding tiger: why, none can tell.
Among the lower orders of creation are exhibitions
of a wisdom absolutely perfect in prescribed spheres,
existing prior to experience and independent of the
aids of instruction. Men partially attain by protracted
efforts and after multiplied failures what insects and
brutes reach at a single bound. The ultimate nature
of this animal instinct, the methods of its creation and
maintenance, its springs of action, its final destiny, are
among the subtilest of the secrets that hide behind the
manifestations of the outer world. Philosophy has
long sought for them, but, baffled and blinded, it now
stands with uncovered head in the presence of their
phenomenal glory. We indeed meet mystery in the
very instrument we use for the search, in that intro-
vertive power, self-consciousness, that ego seemingly
sitting apart, recognizing and judging thought-processes,
even attempting an analysis of itself.
To the ancients nature seemed a chaos of conflicting
THE SUPERNATURAL. H
forces. Their mythologies bear traces of the perplexity
and awe with which they witnessed her phenomena.
Knowing comparatively nothing of the systematic pre-
cision of her laws, possessed of an intuitive religious
belief, and daily experiencing that each man's body is
in subjection to a distinct intelligence with whose indi-
viduality it can by no intimacy ever become merged,
they readily reasoned that every outside object was but
the incarnation of some divinity. Hence to the Scan-
dinavians rivers, rocks, and soil were the blood, bones,
and muscles of Imer. The Giants, the Cyclops, and
the Titans were the three classes of deities into which
the Greeks divided the elemental forces. Rivers and
fountains were considered active personalities and Avor-
shipped as divine. JEschyltis, in one of his tragedies,
introduced the fountains as pitying the chained Prome-
theus and complaining of Jove's tyranny. We to-day
may call this simply fine poetic personification. It
was once believed in as stern realism. Enceladus was
the fire-god of the hills. The rock and the whirlpool
in the Straits of Messina were rapacious sea-monsters;
kingfishers were the winged spirits of Ceyx and Hal-
cyone, whose presence calmed the tempest. Iris was
embodied in the rainbow, and when the sky was lit
with her bent beauty she was on an errand of peace to
the dying to break the flesh-fetters of the soul. While
they thus believed in the incarnation of deities in the
different objects of nature, they entertained a kindred
though conflicting notion that these objects were simply
kingdoms subject to their control. Nereus and his
fifty beautiful nymph children lived in crystal sea-
palaces and were governmental ministers to Neptune.
12 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Not a condition, not a change in the world of the senses,
not a mental phantasm, branch of industry, past event,
dreaded retribution, or unfulfilled desire, but was be-
lieved, if enveloped in mystery, to be in the immediate
presence and subject to the direct control of the gods.
Indeed, in that early day -the Divine influence was
judged by mankind to be as potent and pervasive as
light and air. The top of Olympus disappeared above
the clouds, and in consequence was considered the place
where Jupiter held court. The Styx, a river in Arca-
dia, from being impregnated with fatal poisons and
suddenly sinking from sight, was supposed to roll
through the dominions of Pluto, its black current
forming between this and the other life a barrier im-
passable except to Charon the boatman and departed
souls who could pay the fare of the ferry. The Garden
of the Hesperides, the Elysium of the Greek fancy
where the golden apples grew, lay just beyond the
line of the horizon, because that then constituted the
boundary of the known.
A vital change has since marked man's interpreta-
tions of nature. Science now boldly analyzes what
was once worshipped as divine. An insatiable curiosity
now pries into secrets which long escaped examination
through an undue religious awe. Forces that were
supposed to be in chaotic conflict have been found cor-
related, working by fixed methods and perfecting dif-
ferent parts of a single plan. In short, the vagaries
of a superstitious fancy have happily given place to
the more careful discriminations of an informed reason.
Astronomers have catalogued the stars, foretold eclipses,
weighed planets and suns, thrown a measuring-line
THE SUPERNATURAL. 13
about the rings of Saturn, disentangled with their tele-
scopes the light of nebulae, computed the distances and,
with the aid of the lately-invented spectroscope, even
the rates of speed of some of the fixed stars. Com-
parative anatomists have arrived at such extensive and
accurate knowledge of the laws that govern in the
structure of animal organisms that they can determine
from single bones the species, general structure, habits,
and homes of those of which they once formed part.
Chemists, by retort and crucible, have unmasked the
elements, and discovered the conditions that unfetter
their forces. Geologists have so diligently studied the
leaves of the stone record, turned by the fingers of earth-
quakes, that they have carried the torch of knowledge
beyond the drift, past the mammal, the reptile, and the
fish, back of the forests of fern, back even of the birth
of continents, the break of day, or the breath of life. .
There is something imposing in the aggressive spirit
of the present. There is a dash, a boldness, a persist-
ency in investigation never before known. Intricacies
and perils act as incentives. Every field of thought
is undergoing systematic research. Every day uncov-
ers some secret. The sun, despite its blinding splen^
dor, has been forced to furnish photographs of itself
and submit to a chemical analysis of its atmosphere.
The dangerous ice-fields of the North have proved
irresistible charms thrown about the open polar sea.
Not long after the intrepid Kane brought back news
that he had caught the gleam of its waves as they
broke ice-free in the sunlight, the American Congress,
swept along by this strong tide of the times, equipped
a corps of scientists in hope that they might force
14 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
their way a few leagues farther into the desolate realms
of frost.
Two threatening evils are, however, becoming mani-
fest in the midst of this universal quickening of the
intellect which lias resulted from such eager search for
secrets, and they can be directly traced to these very
conquests of scientific research of which we are so
justly proud.
The first is the decline of poetic taste. This has
become emphatically a utilitarian age, an age of inven-
tions. By a careful analysis and classification of phe-
nomena we have not only discovered that natural
forces work by fixed laws, but have determined in
great measure what those laws are, and to utilize this
knowledge has become the master-purpose of modern
thought. This passion has indeed grown so intense that
the ideal world has been rapidly lapsing into neglect.
We may rightly glory in our steamships, railroads,
telegraphs, and printing-presses. To flash an idea
through three thousand miles of ocean cable, to trans-
port passengers by steam-carriages from New York to
San Francisco in a week, to tunnel the Alps, to link
the Mediterranean to the Red Sea by a ship-canal, thus
bringing the wealth of the Indies to the very doors of
civilized life, are no mean triumphs of the mind. I
would not decry their importance, but they will be
costly triumphs if through their influence the earth
comes to be viewed merely as a magazine of physical
comforts, its mountains to be valued only for their
gold-bearing quartz and its prairies for their fields of
standing corn. It was designed for something higher
than to serve simply as man's workshop or his dining-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 15
hall. There are'in nature subtiler secrets than those
solved by experiments in physical science, whose un-
veiling will demand and develop grander powers and
render a much more exalted service to mankind.
The decline of the religious sentiment is the second
evil resulting from this increase of knowledge. Many
of the divinities of the ancient mythology have been
found but vague personifications of mysteries which
have since yielded to scientific analysis. The discovery
that the forces in nature are conditional, working by
fixed methods, has given birth to bold theorists who
stoutly contend that all force is a constituent element of
matter and that matter is eternal, thereby eliminating
God from the universe. La Place, a supposed tower of
strength in mathematical astronomy, seizing upon the
suggestions of Sir William Herschel, propounded in the
interests of atheism what is now known as the Nebular
Hypothesis. In this he claims it possible that the
worlds originated in a vastly diffused homogeneous fire-
mist; that some of its particles cooling and condensing
sooner than others began to attract the lighter ones,
which, deviating from a straight course because of the
resistance they encountered from each other, were thrown
into a spiral motion which was finally communicated to
the entire mass ; that from this mass rings were succes-
sively disengaged and condensed about nuclei into suns
from which rings were broken and condensed jnto planets,
and from these planets, which were suns until by irra-
diation their flame-billows were cooled and crusted with
continents and seas, rings were again broken and con-
densed into moons. Evolutionists still further assert
that out from this dead matter thus separated, solidified,
16 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and grouped into systems there have been evolved by
the operation of natural laws through successive grades
of progression all the multiform manifestations of vege-
table and animal life, tracing human genealogy back
to infusoria, and claiming that these at the first were
but the spontaneous product of chemical action. Her-
bert Spencer in his " First Principles" expressly states
that " those modes of the unknowable which we call
motion, light, heat, and chemical affinity are alike trans-
formable into each other and into those which we dis-
tinguish as sensation, emotion, and thought, solar heat
being the final source of the force manifested by society."
It is claimed by this school of philosophy that appetites
and passions are but attractions akin to that of an acid
for an alkali, that even actions of will are but chemical
changes necessarily accompanying a particular organi-
zation of nervous matter. Professor Huxley, though
repudiating any sympathy with Comte and the Posi-
tive Philosophy, in a paper on the " Physical Basis of
Life," which has lately attracted considerable attention
in scientific circles, holds that protoplasm, consisting of
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen in complex
chemical union, is the very matter and basis of all life.
He also claims* that the properties of this protoplasm,
like those of water, are simply the result of the nature
and disposition of its molecules. Professor Tyndall, in
his chapter .on Vitality, near the close of his " Frag-
ments of Science," remarks, " Are the forces of organic
matter different in kind from those of inorganic ? The
philosophy of the present day negatives the question.
* Lay Sermons, p. 138.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 17
It is the compounding in the organic world of forces
belonging equally to the inorganic that constitutes the
mystery and the miracle of vitality. The tendency,
indeed, of modern science is to break down the wall of
partition between the organic and inorganic, and to re-
duce both to the operation of forces which are the same
in kind but whose combinations differ in complexity.
Consider now the question of personal identity in rela-
tion to this of molecular form." After speaking of the
continual waste and renewal of the body, he continues,
" How is this sense of personal identity maintained
across this flight of molecules ? To man as we know
him matter is necessary to consciousness ; but the matter
of any period may be all changed while consciousness
exhibits no solution of continuity. Like changing sen-
tinels, the oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon that depart
seem to whisper their secret to their comrades that arrive,
and thus, while the non-ego shifts, the ego remains intact.
Constancy of form in the grouping of the molecules,
and not constancy of the molecules themselves, is the
correlation of this constancy of perception. Life is a
wave which in no two consecutive moments of its ex-
istence is composed of the same particles. Supposing
then the molecules of the human body, instead of re-
placing others and thus renewing a pre-existing form,
to be gathered first-hand from nature and put together
in the same relative positions as those which they occupy
in the body, that they have the self-same forces and
distribution of forces, the self-same motions and distri-
bution of motions, would this organized concourse of
molecules stand before us as a sentient, thinking being?
There seems no valid reason to believe it would not.
18 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Or, supposing a planet carved from the sun and set
spinning around an axis and revolving around the sun
at a distance from him equal to that of our earth, would
one of the consequences of its refrigeration be the de-
velopment of organic forms ? I lean to the affirmative.
Structural forces are certainly in the mass, whether or
not those forces reach to the extent of forming a plant
or an animal. In an amorphous drop of water lie
latent all the marvels of crystalline force; and who will
set limits to the possible play of molecules in a cooling
planet ? If these statements startle, it is because matter
has been defined and maligned by philosophers and
theologians who were equally unaware that it is at bot-
tom essentially mystical and transcendental."
Note the doctrine. Merely molecular force is de-
clared sufficient to account for the evolution of a molten
mass into a peopled world. It is denied that vital force
exists as an entity distinct from the molecules and their
forces which make up the organism. Life is resolved
into a form, a wave, which on the disintegration of the
body is gone like a dream ; the ego consisting simply in
a relation which non-egos bear to each other, an empty
impersonation, a figment of the fancy. So soon as the
testimony of self-consciousness is thus impeached, the
mind is at once afloat in a sea of doubt, and is finally
left to doubt whether it doubts. This doctrine is not
only a death-blow to morals and to our hopes of im-
mortality, but effectually undermines the very possibil-
ity of any theistic faith, for our conceptions of the Di-
vine nature are alone predicable on those of the human.
Thus, while the ancients believed that everything
was God, modern materialists are seeking to exclude
THE SUPERNATURAL. 19
God from everything. There is a golden mean of belief
between the poetic pantheism of the past and the mate-
rialism of to day. The overshadowing presence of mys-
tery gave birth to the one ; the partial solution of it, the
other. A more thorough investigation will exhibit alike
the weakness and the strength of both. What lies back
of gravity, chemical affinity, crystallization, organic life,
brute instinct, and the human mind still keeps closely
veiled. That phenomena are synonymous with God,
science has proved to be the mere puerility of a super-
stitious ignorance ; that there is no God behind phe-
nomena, science will with equal emphasis prove to be
but the proud presumption of an imperfect knowledge.
THE NATURE OF FORCE.
There are among modern scientists wide differences
of opinion respecting the nature of force. Many regard
forces merely as mutually convertible modes of motion,
and embrace in their definition not only mechanical and
chemical but even all vital phenomena. If this be true,
then, as far as our powers of conception go, the existence
of spirits is a myth; matter is the only real entity possible.
At first there appear to be solid grounds for such a faith.
When we witness cold iron by its arrest of the black-
smith's falling hammer raised to red heat, one force thus
instantly vanishing, another as instantly taking its place,
we naturally infer that the second is but a changed
form of the first, and that, as the first is a motion of
mass and the second a motion of molecules, the second
is simply the first distributed. By a parity of reason-
ing, the same conclusions are reached in reference to the
20 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
other forces. As a waste of brain-tissue always accom-
panies processes of thoughts and decisions of will, the
latter appear to be but chemical affinities or electrical
forces in other forms, and all, in fact, but different mo-
tions of matter.
Other theorists, while they hold that forces are thus
mutually convertible, contend that they are different
forms under which one and the same spiritual entity
makes its appearance. If this be true, we may per-
haps infer the existence of a God, but it is at best the
impersonal god of pantheism, for a permanent person-
ality, or even any, cannot be affirmed of a whole the
personalities of whose parts, by which alone it is
known, are confessedly separate and perishable. That
personal identity can be destroyed is possible, but to
affirm that it is convertible involves an absolute con-
tradiction of terms. Faraday, in his remarks on the
" Conservation of Force/'* says, " There may be per-
fectly distinct and separate causes of what are called
chemical actions, electrical actions, and gravitating
actions constituting so many forces ; but if the conser-
vation of force is a good and true principle [and this
he most emphatically declares], each of these forces
must be subject to it; none can vary in its absolute
amount, each must be definite at all times, whether for
a particle or for all the particles in the universe, and
the sum also of the three forces must be equally un-
changeable. Or there may be but one cause for these
three sets of actions, and in place of three forces we
may really have but one, convertible in its manifesta-
* Youmans's Collection of Monographs on "The Correlation
and Conservation of Forces," p. 379.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 21
tions." In this same paper* he observes that " the
commonly received idea of gravity appears to ignore
entirely the principle of conservation of force, and by
the terms of its definition, if taken in an absolute sense,
' varying inversely as the square of the distance/ to be
in direct opposition to it."
This apparent creation and annihilation of force,
however, he thinks science will some day account for,
perhaps by the discovery of phenomena proving that
the bodies whose attraction for each other so mysteri-
ously comes and goes, experience exactly corresponding
structural changes, and that thus conservation is main-
tained. But this strange conduct on the part of this,
one of nature's most prevalent forces, has occasioned a
growing distrust in the soundness of these theories, and
a new one has accordingly been propounded which bids
fair eventually to prevail. Professor Tyndall, perhaps
its ablest advocate, has left us a very clear statement of
it in an article on " The Constitution of Nature" in his
u Fragments of Science." The theory, as I understand
it, is briefly this. Of essential causes science has no
knowledge, and concerning their nature and ways of
working it can safely make no statement. They and
their phenomena have, however, been sadly con-
founded, and the law of conservation has consequently
been falsely affirmed of both. All matter is supposed
to consist of elastic molecules. When the hammer
strikes the bar of iron the molecules thus forced
together rebound, and being again driven in again re-
bound, and when this vibratory motion reaches a cer-
* Youmans's Collection, p. 363.
22 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
tain violence our nerves of touch recognize it as heat,
and, if suffered still further to increase, it finally affects
our nerves of sight, the iron begins to glow. But there
is here no exhibition of conservation of force proper,
for the motions of mass and of molecules to which
alone the law of conservation applies are energies, not
essential causes, the motions of mass being the result of
several forces, gravity among the number, the motions
of molecules being the result of atomic repulsion. The
attraction of gravity constantly increases while the
hammer is approaching the bar, and reaches its maxi-
mum the instant the blow is struck. The increase is
a direct creation, so far as science sees. On the other
hand, as the bar's atoms are driven together by the
blow, a repellent power appears among them which
thenceforward constantly increases until it is able to
hurl them back again. This increase cannot come from
gravity, for this does not suffer from the collision the
least diminution in either hammer or bar. At each
oscillation of the atoms force is seemingly both created
and destroyed, no one knows how.
Tyndall remarks,* " When two atoms of hydrogen
unite with one of oxygen to form water, the atoms are
first drawn toward each other, they move, they clash,
and then, by virtue of their resiliency, they recoil and
quiver. To this quivering motion we give the name of
heat. We must not imagine the chemical attraction
destroyed or converted into anything else, for the atoms
when mutually clasped to form a molecule of water are
held together by the very attraction which first drew
* Fragments of Science, p. 30.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 23
them toward each other," He also says in the same
essay,* "As regards convertibility into heat, gravity
and chemical affinity stand on precisely the same foot-
ing. The attraction in the one case is as indestructible
as in the other. What is meant in the case of chemical
affinity is that the pull of that affinity, acting through
a certain space, imparts a motion of translation of the
one atom toward the other. The motion of translation
is not heat, nor is the force that produces it heat, but
when the atoms strike and recoil the motion of trans-
lation is converted into a motion of vibration, and
this latter motion is heat." On the thirty-first page
he makes the general statement, " Of the inner quality
that enables matter to attract matter we know nothing,
and the law of conservation makes no statement re-
garding that quality." Carefully distinguishing be-
tween the effect and the force of gravity, he shows
how unconsumed tensions and vis viva, the work-pro-
ducing power of a particle, constitute a constant quan-
tity styled energy, and that to this combination, and to
this alone, the law of conservation pertains. Gravity
thus explained proves no exception to the rule.
I wish to call special attention to the ground here
taken by Professor Tyndall, for his views are now gener-
ally conceded to be those of the most advanced science.
He has made the subject a specialty, has published ex-
tensive treatises upon it, and his writings are quoted as
standard authority throughout the scientific world.
According to him, forces are not simply mutually
convertible modes of motion, neither are they different
* Fragments of Science, p. 16.
24 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
manifestations of some one force, but are distinct spirit-
ual entities, and are each possessed of an indestructible
identity. Of energies and not of forces can converti-
bility be affirmed. This gives us in inorganic nature
fifty-seven or more individual elemental powers, and,
however far science peers into the past, it can detect no
diminution of that number. The homogeneity of mat-
ter and force, then, to which Herbert Spencer so con-
fidently points as the primal state out of which has been
evolved the heterogeneity of to-day, is all a chimera.
In the inorganic world there has been no advance from
the simple to the complex in the ingredients them-
selves, but only in their combinations. These particles,
Avhich chemists at present call hydrogen, oxygen, car-
bon, nitrogen, have never been anything else than what
they now are; they have been the dwelling-places of
precisely the same wonder-working spirits ; not a
single virtue has gone out of them, not a single virtue
has entered in ; a thousand million years proving as
impotent as a single fleeting second to effect any change.
If the evolutionists refuse to accept this theory of Tyn-
dall, and persist in asserting the conservation of force
rather than of energy, gravity confronts them insisting
upon an explanation, and no system of philosophy can
long withstand the seemingly direct opposition of a
force acknowledged to be absolutely universal.
THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS.
The Nebular Hypothesis, as presented by its modern
advocates, rests on a very insecure foundation. Ac-
cording to the American Cyclopaedia, it supposes the
THE SUPERNATURAL. 25
universe to have commenced as a homogeneous nebula
and to have experienced the following changes: mutual
gravitation of its atoms, atomic repulsion, evolution of
heat by overcoming this repulsion, molecular combina-
tion, heat set free by this chemical action, radiation of
heat, and consequent precipitation of binary atoms form-
ing irregular flocculi ; finally, a rotary motion induced
by gravity acting on these irregular masses.
If, at the beginning, there was but one kind of
matter and but the one force, gravity, the latter would
have to change a part of itself into atomic repulsion
before it could encounter it and thus generate heat.
This might be considered a very marvellous feat for a
physical force. But even suppose it possible, the par-
ticles as they approach each other, instead of losing
any of their mutual attraction, have it, as we have
seen, vastly increased. Whence, then, comes the atomic
repulsion? Indeed, whence comes the increase of
gravity? Here both the initial force is multiplied
and another force absolutely created. On the other
hand, if it is granted that neither of these forces pre-
ceded the other and that neither can be changed into
the other, what hinders us from predicating the same
of the rest of the elemental forces ?
Not only do the advocates of this hypothesis en-
counter these perplexities at the outset, but the worlds
into which the homogeneous fire-mist is finally rolled
present difficulties equally formidable. If their theory
is true, the farther a planet is from the sun, the larger,
the lighter, and the swifter it should be. What are
the facts ? " Mars is smaller than the Earth, Uranus
smaller than Saturn, Saturn smaller than Jupiter,
26 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and Jupiter succeeds immediately to a host of planets
which, on account of their smallness, are almost im-
measurable. It is true the rate of rotation generally
increases with the distance from the sun, but it is in
the case of Mars slower than in that of the Earth,
and slower in Saturn than in Jupiter."* A few pas-
sages farther on, Humboldt remarks, " Taking water
as the unity of density, Mercury is 6.71 ; Venus, 5.11 ;
Earth, 5.44; Mars, 5.21 ; Jupiter, 1.32; Saturn, 0.76 ;
Uranus, 0.97; Neptune, 1.25; the Sun, 1.37."f The
sun, instead of being denser than any of its satellites,
is but one-sixteenth heavier than Neptune, the outer
one, and nearly five times lighter than Mercury, the
inner. The comets and the moons of Uranus move
in orbits whose planes lie at angles that flatly con-
tradict this theory, and, as more than seven millions
of the former visit our solar system and are among the
largest bodies known, no hypothesis which their facts
oppose can long survive.
The spectroscope, in its examination of hundreds of
nebulae, lias indeed found many of them to be, what
their name purports, thin banks of nebulous matter,
but without exception heterogeneous in their nature,
while at the same time not sufficiently so to render
them fit building-material for any such worlds as at
present exist.
Against the assertion that the universe is without
beginning in either space or time, Dr. Robert Patterson
has ably argued that a continuous cloud of nebulous
* Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. iv. p. 425.
f Ibid., vol. iv. p. 447.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 27
light would be overspreading the firmament were that
the fact. There would be but one unbroken Milky
Way made up of the blended light of an infinitude of
suns. It could not be properly claimed that it would
be impossible for light from multitudes of them to have
yet reached us because of their inconceivable distance,
for since the rays started out on their journeyings there
has been an equally inconceivable lapse of time. He
also remarks that if the universe is without bounds it
must be without a common centre. We at once see
that in the supposed original homogeneous nebula there
must have been as many centres as there were particles.
Every particle must have attracted every other equally,
and have thus hopelessly prevented that initial motion
without which the evolution of the present irregular
masses of heterogeneous matter whirling through space
never could have occurred. But to grant that the
universe has bounds is as fatal to atheism as to concede
to it a beginning; for, as the same author observes, if
a reason can be assigned why one portion of space is
occupied and not another, that reason must show a cause,
and that cause must not only have antedated the uni-
verse, but have been sufficient to produce it.
Sir David Brewster remarks,* "Mr. Otto Struve
and Professor Bond, of Cambridge, Mass., have lately
studied with the great Munich telescope, at the observa-
tory of Pulkowa, the third ring of Saturn, which Mr.
Lassell, of Liverpool, and Mr. Bond found to be fluid.
They saw distinctly the dark interval between this fluid
ring and the two old ones, and even measured its dimen-
* More Worlds than One, p. 27.
28 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
sions ; and they perceived at its inner margin an edge
feebly illuminated, which they thought might be the
commencement of a fourth ring. These astronomers
are of opinion that the fluid ring is not of very recent
formation, and that it is not subject to rapid change ;
and they have come to the extraordinary conclusion
that the inner border of the ring has since the time of
Huygens been gradually approaching the body of
Saturn, and that we may expect sooner or later to see
the rings united with the body of the planet." If this
1)6 true, the fact, to say the least, is quite damaging to
the Nebular Hypothesis.
Against this Hypothesis stands also the celebrated
law of Carnot. Helmholtz, in his " Introaction of
Natural Forces,"* thus states it : " Only when heat
passes from a warmer to a colder body, and even
then only partially, can it be converted into mechanical
work." An equilibrium, therefore, is constantly being
approached, the warmer bodies imparting their heat to
the colder. Energy under new forms is constantly ap-
pearing, but only a part of this can be reconverted into
heat, and only a part of the resultant heat can be
turned again into energy. A state of rest is approach-
ing, otherwise perpetual motion would be possible in
nature, an achievement of course utterly out of the
reach of realization, for, to illustrate, if a weight by
its fall could turn a wheel and the wheel raise a weight
equal to the first one, then that weight would prove to
be heavier than itself. Helmholtzf justly claims that
in order to have the planetary system eternal the
* Youmans's Collection, p. 228. f Ibid., p. 242.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 29
worlds must, first, be solid, and, second, must whirl
in perfect vacuum. The behavior of Encke's comet
indicates that the latter is not true; and as to the
former, our own earth is largely fluid ; there are signs
of water on Mars; indeed, the sun, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn are held by astronomers to be
enveloped by an atmosphere. "The motion of tides
produces friction, all friction destroys vis viva, and the
loss in this case can only affect the vis viva of the planet-
ary system. We come thereby to the unavoidable
conclusion that every tide, although with infinite slow-
ness, still with certainty, diminishes the store of me-
chanical force in the system; and, as a consequence,
the rotation of the planets around their axes must
become more slow ; they must therefore approach
the sun, and their satellites must approach them."
Speaking of the sun's heat, he remarks* that "the
inexorable laws of mechanics indicate that its store
of force which can only suffer loss and not gain must
be finally exhausted."
The universe, consequently, must at last become a
single mass of motionless matter unless new energy is
introduced into it from without ; and if it is true that
it is approaching its end it must be equally true that it
has had a beginning.
Dr. Bushnell, in an article on " Progress," forcibly
argues that common sense itself has been outraged by
the theory that the present system of progression ex-
tends back in an unbroken series infinitely. However
slow the advancement, perfection must have been
* Youmans's Collection, p. 245.
30 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
readied numberless times, for eternity, though past, is
no less an endless duration, and what finite ideal could
still be unfulfilled if toward it an infinite number of
approaches have already been made? Here and there
a thinker apparently foreseeing this dilemma has, as he
observes, taken refuge behind the assertion that nature
by some law of its own runs in cycles, returning into
itself by as many relapses as it makes advances. But
this is no real progress, but is simply the monotonous
vibrations of a pendulum. Humboldt in his "Cos-
mos" and Spencer in his " First Principles" advocate
this vieAV, but the vast majority of the philosophers of
this school stoutly deny any retrogression. Emerson
in his " Conduct of Life" says, " No statement of the
universe can have any soundness which does not admit
the ascending effort. The book of Nature is the book
of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages leaf after leaf,
never re- turn ing one."
Such are some of the seemingly fatal flaws in the
foundations on which evolutionists are still busily build-
ing an imposing biological superstructure. To a brief
examination of this edifice w r e now turn.
VITALITY.
Max Muller, in his lectures on " Darwin's Philosophy
of Language,"* tells us that Professor Haeckel, the
most distinguished and strenuous advocate of Darwin-
ism in Germany, claims that in the present state of
physiological knowledge the idea of a Life-Giver has
* Eclectic Magazine, September, 1873, from Eraser's.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 31
become unscientific; that the admission of one pri-
mordial form is sufficient, and that that was a moner,
consisting principally of carbon in the form of the
white of an egg, of a chemical nature solely, and that
this moner is the product of self-generation.
I have already quoted Tyndall as claiming that there
would be no valid reason for denying that were the
molecules that compose the human body gathered first-
hand from nature and placed in the same relative po-
sitions and possessed of their present molecular forces
and motions, they would stand before us a sentient,
thinking being ; that were our planet carved from the
sun and set spinning around its axis and in its orbit as
now, the consequence of its refrigeration would be the
development of organic forms. " In an amorphous
drop of water/ 7 he says, " lie latent all the marvels of
crystalline force ; and who will set limits to the possible
play of molecules in a cooling planet?" This is sub-
stantially the ground taken by Spencer, Huxley, Bain,
and others of the Evolution school. When these the-
orists assert that no impassable gulf separates the in-
organic from the organic, that the forces of the one
differ from those of the other only as one motion differs
from another, that heat or electricity becomes not only
thought, emotion, or action of will, which are simply
the phenomena of the ego, but the very ego itself, by
changing the motion of identically the same matter, we
must hold them to accurate experimental demonstration,
for the doctrine is a death-blow to everything noble in
aspiration or hope.
It seems to me that Tyndall has unconsciously sug-
gested a most powerful argument against the soundness
32 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
of his own conclusions. He has championed the theory
that the forces in the inorganic world are entities, not
mutually convertible, maintaining their individuality
intact under all circumstances ; that only energies are
interchangeable. What hinders the same discrimina-
tion being made in the realm of vitality between ener-
gies and forces, the one being simply convertible
motions, the other inconvertible entities, concerning
whose nature science can safely make no statement ?
As far as I can see, precisely the same arguments
apply.
Dr. Carpenter, President of the Royal Society of
England and member of the French Academy, in his
article on the " Correlation of Physical and Vital
Forces,"* states that "the best physiologists of the
present day separate into a distinct category vital phe-
nomena, claiming them to differ in kind altogether
from those of physics or chemistry." They are pro-
duced by what he styles germinal capacity, an inherent
hereditary power within the germ, an agency whose
office it is simply 'to direct in the use of light, heat,
electricity, and the other elemental energies, and thus
by their help build up matter into an organism answer-
ing to an ideal given it. The vital force is supposed
not to supply a single particle of energy, but only to
turn into its own individual channel a portion of what
it finds outside. The Arabian romance of the slave-
genii and the lamp here finds its realization. While
the physical and chemical forces are subject to the
vital, the resulting energies assume entirely new feat-
* Youmans's Collection, p. 402.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 33
nres ; but so soon as the spell is broken they become
as before. When molecules enter the organism they
part with none of their molecular forces ; when they go
out from it they leave none behind ; while in it those
forces continue as operative as ever, being simply over-
powered and directed for the time being by some sepa-
rate superior force, for as soon as it is gone at death's
coming they straightway set themselves at work to
tear down what they have until then been forced to
build up and maintaip. These elemental genii are no
willing servants to the lamp, but slaves rather, ready,
when released, for riot and ruin.
Herbert Spencer not only affirms that all the multi-
form varieties in inorganic nature have been evolved
from strict homogeneity, but he most positively states
that the same is true of the still greater diversities in
the realms of life. In his work on " Progress,"* he
says, " In its primary stage every germ consists of a
substance that is uniform throughout both in texture
and chemical composition/' Whence, then, the succeed-
ing heterogeneity? we may ask. It is surely not the
result of any one physical or chemical force, for if sci-
ence has proved anything it has proved that a simple,
an element, as gold or oxygen, has no power to change
itself or to undergo change by being mixed only with
its like. Then some force separate and superior must
be at work. But to grant this would be fatal to his
philosophy, for the germinal substance cannot be ho-
mogeneous Jf two or more forces are lodged within it.
Turning again to TyndalPs " Fragments of Science,"
* Page 2.
3
34 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
we find how entirely gratuitous is this statement of
Spencer, although it is one of the foundation-stones in
his system of thought : " When the contents of a
cell are described as perfectly homogeneous, as abso-
lutely structureless, because the microscope fails to dis-
tinguish any structure, then I think the microscope
begins to play a mischievous part. . . . Have the dia-
mond, the amethyst, and the countless other crystals
formed in the laboratories of nature and of man no
structure? Assuredly they have; but what can the
microscope make of it? Nothing. It cannot be too
distinctly borne in mind that between the microscope
limit and the true molecular limit there is room for
infinite permutations and combinations."*
Science thus far has also failed to bring to light any
instance of spontaneous generation. Many very inge-
nious experiments have been made revealing new
truths in biology, but not this. Huxley, in his " Ori-
gin of Species," says, " Nobody has yet built up inor-
ganic matter into living, organized proteine, and I sup-
pose it Avill be a long while before any one does. A
distinguished foreign chemist contrived to fabricate
urea, a substance of a very complex character, which
forms one of the waste products of animal structures.
Of late years a number of other compounds, such as
butyric acid, has been added to the list. I need not tell
you that chemistry is an enormous distance from the
goal I indicate." In his article on " Biology" in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, he affirms that " the chasm
between the living and the non-living the present state
* Page 152.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 35
of knowledge cannot bridge ;" and in his " Introduc-
tion to the Classification of Animals" he asserts that
life is the cause of organization, and not organization
the cause of life. Yet this eminent scientist, notwith-
standing these frank confessions, expresses the hope
that this goal chemistry will some day attain.
All of what was supposed to be spontaneous genera-
tion has been found to come from minute spores, or
eggs, floating in the atmosphere, which heat would kill,
or which would lodge yi cotton-wool if placed in the
mouth of the flask containing the prepared liquid.
The air is full of u germ-dust." Huxley gives a very
interesting history of the attempts of chemists in this
direction, showing how, on close examination, in each
were found fatal defects. A fluid preparation was
shut from the outer air, as it was thought, by being
inverted in a bed of mercury, and infusoria appeared ;
but it was afterward discovered that the mercury was
fairly saturated with spores. A bottle was filled with
boiled milk, and the neck stopped with cotton-wool,
with the same result. On further examination it was
found that the alkali in the milk protected the spores
from the effects of the heat. The milk was made ten
degrees hotter, and no animalcules were developed. M.
Pasteur finally filled, with an extremely decomposable
substance, a vessel having a long S-shaped neck. This
preparation he boiled, and left the bottle open. No life
appeared, the eggs from the outside air being deposited,
as afterward found, at the entrance of the bent neck.
The tube was then broken off near the vessel, and in
forty-eight hours life was evolved. These and other
like tests Huxley regarded as settling the question that
36 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
at the time of his writing no instance of spontaneous
generation had come to light. Dr. Bastian, who has
indeed proved himself both earnest and able in this field
of inquiry, has lately issued a second work, in which he
claims that beyond all doubt he has produced life from
chemical action solely ; but even his most careful experi-
ments are found far from conclusive. Grant that after
he had so bottled some niduses he had to all appear-
ance wholly excluded the outside air, and that then he
had subjected them to temperatures reaching as high as
150 C., and that when the mixtures cooled they
swarmed with life, yet this may serve but to prove that
eggs when lodged in some mixtures will resist greater
heat than in others, the absolute limit of such resistance
being yet a matter undetermined.
Professor Tyndall by a very ingenious contrivance
recently obtained air which, by the use of the electric
beam, he proved to be free from motes. To this air he
exposed infusions of every kind, animal and vegetable,
after having boiled them for five minutes in a bath of
brine or oil, and in not a single instance did any micro-
scopic life appear. Portions of the same infusions, which
were six hundred in number, when exposed to the com-
mon air, swarmed, every one, with myriad life, show-
ing that the lowest and minutest forms of existence
are no exception to the rule that life comes from the egg.
It was supposed that the fact that inside unfertilized
henVeggs infusoria had appeared, settled the matter,
until some prying individual announced that he had
discovered the spores of infusoria deposited in the hen's
ovary. Microscopists have succeeded in tracing the en-
tire life-cycles of monads, and have found them to begin
THE SUPERNATURAL. 37
and end in the egg. These animalcules so closely ap-
proximate bacteria in form, structure, and size, though
somewhat larger, that it may be safely inferred that
they pass through analogous changes. The fact that
their spores cannot be seen does not prove that they do
not exist, for gum-mastic may be dissolved in alcohol
and the solution so diluted with water that the particles
of the gum, though crowding the entire field of vision,
become absolutely invisible even to carefully- trained
eyes looking through the most powerful instrument.
Science on the questions of the origin, nature, and ulti-
mate destiny of the physical and vital forces is thus
gradually growing conscious of her limitations.
PANGENESIS.
The perplexing problems of biology have awakened
the profoundest interest, not only in philosophers and
scientists, but in almost the entire reading public. The
solutions oifered reveal more or less that same natural-
istic bias already noted in modern thought; but, while
none reach satisfactory conclusions, none are without
valuable suggestions, out of which, if properly com-
bined, we believe satisfactory conclusions may be
reached. To their consideration we now invite at-
tention.
Darwin is not strictly an evolutionist: Spencer is.
The former's position is briefly this. Offspring inherit
the traits of their parents, with slight individual differ-
ences. Those differences which help in the struggle
for life are, through inheritance, gradually intensified
and fixed ; those which hinder disappear. This he
38 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
names natural selection. To account for another class
of phenomena he directs attention to the wellnigh uni-
versal warfare of rival lovers, the victor securing the
female and perpetuating in his progeny the traits which
won him the battle. This he names sexual selection.
On these two pillars rests his theory of the Origin of
Species. To explain the origin of the individual he
offers Pangenesis, a provisional hypothesis, which, for
the convenience of my argument, I will consider first.
In this he claims that each living organism is com-
posed of an inconceivable number of minute organic
atoms which he calls gemmules. Each of these has the
power to reproduce its kind. They come from every
part not only of the present, living organism, but even
of ancestral ones back for several generations. Each
has the power of circulating freely through the entire
structure. One of every kind of this inconceivable
multitude is found in every spermatozoon, that mys-
terious, microscopic animalcule which is supposed to be
the embodiment of germ-life. In this way he attempts
to account for the fact that in the lowest animals repro-
duction is produced by budding, claiming that, if every
cell has the power to reproduce the whole organism of
which it forms a part, it must contain elements derived
from every part of that organism. He also thus at-
tempts to account for the reappearance, in the child, of
counterparts of the physical, intellectual, and emotional
peculiarities of its parents. The reappearance of remote
ancestral traits comes from the final developing of
gemmules which have been lying dormant perhaps for
generations. At first glance this seems a simple and
sensible explanation of what are undoubted facts in
THE SUPERNATURAL. 39
nature; but will it bear the test of close analysis ? The
subdivision of matter which it demands does not simply
border on the infinite, but is so absolutely. For though
he claims these gemmules to be ultimate organic atoms,
they are not, for he also claims for them spontaneous
subdivision and multiplication. If thus divisible, as
are germ-cells, they must be made up of still more
minute gemmules, and these being also divisible must
still be composed of others, and so the division must go
on without end, the existence of the original gemmules in
their absolute infinitude thus becoming impossible to hu-
man thought. This is the inevitable dilemma into which
Darwin falls, for he is forced to advocate gemmule-fis-
sion or he can lay no claim U> having approached a hair's
breadth toward the solution of the mystery of individual
life. If a gemmule can ultimately be reached which
cannot be divided, that is to say, the true gemmule,
whence comes the reproduction by it of a second?
It cannot come from the first, for it is, according to the
supposition, absolutely indivisible, while if the first has
power to breathe into a speck of amorphic matter an
organizing spirit like its own yet no part of it, then
every gemmule must possess this same creative energy,
which is the sole prerogative of Divinity, each living
thing and each infinitesimal particle that composes it
thus becoming by turns creature and creator. Verily
then Pan is God, and Pangenesis the genesis of God.
The critics of Darwin have not, as I am aware, followed
his hypothesis so far into the regions of the absurd, but
I fail to see how, under the inexorable laws of logic,
any different conclusion can be reached. By this
theory, instead of accounting for the origin of the in-
40 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
dividual, Darwin really strikes a death-blow at individ-
uality. His invisible and, as I have shown, his truly
inconceivable gemmules must each embody a separate
identity, if identity is at all affirmed. In such a case
the organism of which they are ultimate organic atoms
would be only an aggregation of individuals, an organ-
ized cosmos. But our consciousness affirms that in each
organism there is but one pervading spirit, that this
spirit is a unit, indivisible, dwelling in and at the same
time apart from the body. Sever an arm, and still the
personality, the egOj remains untouched. The surgeon's
knife, directed with all the skill of surgical art, has no
power to mar it. When Darwin advocates gemmule-
fission, claiming that a gemmule can spontaneously di-
vide, forming two perfect gemmules, each capable as
the first to reproduce its kind, each precisely like the
first, having as distinct a personality as that from which
it came, he advocates a spontaneous division of the in-
dividuality. Now, if an ego can divide itself infinitely,
and thus make out of itself an infinite number of egos,
our intuitions concerning personality are wholly at sea,
for once disturb the unity of the ego, take from it in
the least, and its only distinguishing characteristic, its
identity, is destroyed. Professor Delpino, who urges
in part the above objection, remarks that should the re-
ply be made that the separate existence of this ego, this
vital principle, was at best problematical, he would
answer that this comes with poor grace from an advo-
cate of Pangenesis, for it involves at least four unproved
hypotheses, the existence of the gemmules, their propa-
gative affinity, their germinative affinity, and their
multiplication by fission.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 41
This attempt of Darwin at the solution of life's mys-
tery, like many others, leaves the problem as it found
it. The mystery remains a mystery still. Each theo-
rist professes to have traced to its last hiding-place
these secret somethings. The atom, the physiological
unit, the gemmule, these are the names given to the
inner temples where these spirits dwell. The apart-
ments thus assigned them are absolutely inconceivable
in their minuteness, yet they afford ample room and an
effectual hiding-place.
The theory of Pangenesis is offered as an explanation
of the phenomena of inheritance. Even were it true,
it gives no solution of the source of individual differ-
ences, dealing as it does solely with the question of the
transmission of likeness. The former arise no one
knows how, as Darwin frankly admits, and with this
admission, as Argyll has pointed out, he unconsciously
confesses that all he has yet done at the best by his
three theories is to account for the perpetuation, and
not the origin, of species; for, note, his natural and
sexual selection is no more than a choosing between
traits already mysteriously originated. Furthermore,
how those favorable individual differences become in-
tensified and finally fixed merely through these choices
is still another most perplexing problem, of which Dar-
win ventures no solution, contenting himself with offer-
ing evidence in proof simply of its truth. But even
against the soundness of this conclusion distinguished
investigators in science, Mivart, Argyll, Wallace,
Thompson, Miiller, Lyell, Huxley, even Darwin him-
self, have brought to light many most interesting
and convincing facts and have given us valuable aid
3*
42 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
in their interpretation. We will glance at a few of
them.
MIMICRIES IN NATURE.
There are in nature many remarkable instances of
mimicry under whose shelter some animals take refuge
from deadly enemies, others insidiously steal upon their
prey.
Mr. Wallace remarks of the leaf-butterfly which he
found in Borneo, " We come to a still more extraordi-
nary part of the imitation, for we find among butter-
flies representations of leaves in every stage of decay,
variously blotched and mildewed and pierced with
holes, and in many cases irregularly covered with pow-
dery black dots gathered into patches and spots, so
closely resembling the various kinds of minute fungi
that grow on dead leaves that it is impossible to avoid
thinking at first sight that the butterflies have been
attacked by real fungi." The imitation is said to ex-
tend through all the metamorphoses of the insect. The
eggs resemble seeds, and the larva? bits of stalk, or
chips, or fragments of leaves. Argyll tells us that
many species of the genus Mantis are wholly modelled
in the forms of vegetable growths: "The eggs are
made to imitate leaf-stalks, the body is elongated and
notched so as to simulate a twig, the segment of the
shoulders is spread out and flattened in the likeness of
a seed-vessel, and the large wings are exact imitations
of a mature leaf, with all its veins and skeleton com-
plete, and all its color and apparent texture. It is a
predaceous insect armed with most terrible weapons
hid under the peaceful forms of the vegetable world.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 43
It is its habit to sit on leaves which it so closely re-
sembles, apparently motionless, but really advancing on
its prey with a slow and insensible approach."
There are some conspicuously -colored varieties of
butterfly which are exceedingly unpalatable and have
about them an offensive odor. The more noticeable
they are the less liable to be mistaken for those that are
sweet and savory and the more likely to be shunned by
the hungry bird. There are other varieties which by
their imitation of the gaudy coloring of these and their
style of flight pass themselves off for quite the oppo-
site of what they are. In the English orange-tip the
under surfaces of the wings resemble the bloom of the
wild parsley on which it rests at night. Darwin
notices* the mimicry of butterflies of both withered
and green leaves in form, color, veining, and foot-stalk,
but passes it by with the simple remark that the color-
ing has been modified for purposes of protection. Ac-
cording to his theory, the imitation came through in-
heritance by slow degrees. The first was a chance
change and the imitation very faint, but its possessor,
escaping its enemies by means of it, while its less for-
tunate comrades were devoured, transmitted the pecu-
liarity to its offspring, and those to which had been
given the strongest protective likeness survived, and
thus along down the line the imitation grew until the
present marvellous perfection was attained. But how
happens it, we may ask, that many other kinds, such
as our Admiral and Peacock varieties, our white cab-
bage butterflies, or the great swallow-tailed Papilio,
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 380.
44 VIEWS OX VEXED qUESTIONS.
all blazing with conspicuous colors/ have not been
favored with similar imitations?
There is a species of moth of which both sexes are
white, and these are so distasteful that all feeders, to
which most moths are a choice morsel, will not touch
them. There is another, the Cycnia, whose females
alone imitate the appearance of these for purposes of
protection. As sexual selection is supposed by Darwin
to be inoperative among moths, it must be the males
are denied this protective garb by some power not ac-
counted for in his philosophy. He remarks,* " If we
assume that the females before they became brightly
colored in imitation of some protected kind were ex-
posed during each season for a longer period to danger
than the males, or if we assume that they could not
escape so swiftly from their enemies, we can understand
how they alone might originally have acquired, through
natural selection and sexually limited inheritance, their
present protective colors." But what is there to hinder
the males from thus varying in favor of protection
through natural selection, and also through that of sex-
ual should it chance to be operative, for it too would
incline toward the bright appearance ? Grant the males
are swifter-winged, yet they are nevertheless in great
danger and need shelter, and moreover the gayer their
garb the greater their chances for success in seasons of
courtship.
There are lizards living upon the bare plains of the
La Plata which are of such mottled tints that when,
at the approach of danger, they suddenly shut their
* Descent of Man, vol= i. p. 400.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 45
eyes and flatten their bodies, it is wellnigh impossible
to tell where they lie. The flounder on its upper
surface is speckled like the sand-bars of the sea on
which it spends its days. A pipe-fish, with its red-
dish, streaming filaments, is hardly distinguishable
from the sea-weed to which it clings with its pre-
hensile tail.
One of Darwin's main arguments in favor of the
theory that out of brute life came the human under the
laws of natural and sexual selection, is the fact that
between the two there exist so many striking resem-
blances. Applying this to the species which possess
this protective mimicry, we must not only hold that the
palatable and the nauseous butterflies have a common
ancestry, but that the same is true of butterflies and
leaves, of pipe-fish and the red streaming weeds of the
sea. This argument of his loses much of its weight
when it is shown not to be susceptible of universal
application, for if he takes the liberty to explain any
of nature's resemblances in any other way he must
accord to us the same liberty, he must grant it possible
that those resemblances which exist between brutes and
men may be susceptible of a widely-different interpre-
tation, that the many points of likeness may be ac-
counted for simply by the fact that they are the product
of a single designing mind.
Darwin confesses ignorance as to how the imitation
began, or how it, step by step, grew stronger. He in
reality attempts to explain only its subsequent adoption,
and even to accomplish this he is forced to summon to
his aid the law of inheritance, which proves to be a
greater mystery, if possible, than the one he is attempt-
46 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
ing to fathom, for in*different places through his "De-
scent of Man" he speaks of the sexual ornaments of
males being transmitted equally to both sexes, of their
being transmitted only to the males ; of the protective
color and occasionally of the superior strength of
females being in some instances confined to them, in
others allowed to both, showing that here is a force the
methods of whose working have thus far proved past
finding out. Seemingly conscious of the unsatisfactory
character of this mode of interpretation, he essays by
his theory of Pangenesis to throw light upon the phe-
nomena of inheritance, but, as we have seen, this very
hypothesis is fatally at fault, and even were it true he
has succeeded only in following the mystery until it
vanishes at last within the diminutive walls of the
gemmule.
COREELATED GROWTH.
There are phenomena of correlated growth which
pointedly controvert the positions of both Darwin and
Spencer. There are serial, bilateral, and vertical cor-
relations Avhereby symmetry, a correspondence of parts,
is secured to the organism. But there is a profounder
correlation than even this, connecting the organism
with its environment. The first, as Argyll observes,
suggests the working of forces possessing inherent
polarity of action, the other, adjustment with a view
to purpose. The exquisite patterns of flowers and of
shells, the nice balancings of parts, noticeable, in fact,
in nearly all organisms, are illustrations of the first
class. Darwin's and Spencer's explanation of the phe-
nomena is that correspondence of parts comes from a
THE SUPERNATURAL. 47
like correspondence in the external influences. As
organisms are seldom out of harmony with their sur-
roundings, it is difficult to cite facts controverting this
position, however false it may be ; yet some have come
to light which are clearly of another origin. For in-
stance, in cats, eyes with a blue iris are found associated
with deafness, and a tortoise-shell-colored fur with the
female sex. There are malformations and abnormal
developments under what are styled symmetrical dis-
eases that reveal at times very grotesquely this intimate
relationship. Darwin himself gives us instances of un-
usual growth that show correlation. He says, " In
several distinct breeds of pigeons and fowls the legs
and two outer toes are feathered, so that in the trumpeter
pigeon they appear like little wings." These feathers
are sometimes even longer than those of the wings, and
resemble them in structure. In such cases tendencies
appear for completing the resemblance by some of the
toes growing together. A mechanical origin cannot
well be claimed for the serial homology displayed in
the development of the worm Syllis, dividing as it
does spontaneously, a new head with all its complexity
and unity forming midway in the body of the parent.
The issuing of the legs, wings, and eyes of Diptera,
two-winged flies, out of masses of formative tissue, and
the building up of a body and head by their approxi-
mation, is a process not possibly referable to outside in-
fluences; neither is the fact that the larva of the Hessian
fly gives rise to a second within it which bursts the
body of the first, the second to a third, the third to a
fourth ; neither is the fact of the vertical completeness
of the bony pike, for it can make no use of it ; nor, for
48 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
a similar reason, that of the extra series of ossicles on
the outer side of the paddle of the ichthyosaurus ; nor
that of each hand of the eft having one more finger
than his foot has toes. .
If Spencer claims for his " physiological units"
power to grow into as perfect animals as those from
which they sprang, how can he consistently pronounce
incredible the evolution of nature's homologies by some
internal, individual force? Murphy, in his work on
" Habit and Intelligence," remarks that in crystals form
or structure does not depend on function, for they have
none, and that analogous formative forces may reside
in living organisms. This is especially evident among
radiates and mollusks. The symmetry of their shells
is no less wonderful in its perfection than that displayed
in salt or snow crystals. In the same species of sea-
worms, males and females differ so widely that natural-
ists for a long while mistook them for different genera
and even families ; yet Darwin admits that sexual selec-
tion is not sufficient to account for this wide variation,
they being too low in the scale to choose partners or
attempt rivalry. Natural selection surely cannot ac-
count for it, for they live amid similar surroundings
and fight similar battles. There are species of insects
in which the male is a fly and the female a worm. To
have made it possible for this species to be an offshoot
of some other, the changes effected by selections in one
sex must have been intimately and most mysteriously
correlated with those in the other. The simultaneous-
ness and correlation of these changes are wholly unac-
counted for in Darwin's philosophy. On this point
Argyll cites the plumage of the humming-birds. Not
THE SUPERNATURAL. 49
only do marked differences exist between the four hun-
dred species, but between the sexes of each species, and
unless the variations occurred at the same time and were
homologous between the sexes the divergence would
exhibit for a time the phenomena of mixture or termi-
nate in reversion. Yet Gould, a most acute observer,
declares that among the thousands of specimens he has
examined he has never yet found a single case of mix-
ture or hybridism.
There are phenomena of the second class of correlated
growth, those in which a close connection is discover-
able between the organism and its environment, which
must especially perplex these philosophers to explain.
Among these are the mimicries in nature which we have
just been describing, such as is seen in the resemblance
borne by the Mantis to the vegetable forms about it,
under whose show of harmless quiet it carries on its
work of blood, such as is seen in those masked butter-
flies who safely flaunt their borrowed brightness in the
very face of their enemies, or in others still whose
wings are so serrated, colored, veined, dotted, and
pierced that they easily elude their pursuers by their
close likeness to the withered, fungi-eaten autumn
leaves attached to the branches on which they alight,
or in the semblance of the mottled tints of lizards and
flounders to the sands of desert and sea, or the red,
streaming filaments of pipe-fish to those water-weeds
to which, under some mysterious influence, they cling
with their tails.
Note the case of the poison of snakes. Argyll states*
* Keign of Law, p. 36.
50 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
regarding it that " it is a secretion of definite chemical
properties, which have reference not only, not even
mainly, to the organism of the animal in which it is
developed, but especially to the organism of another
animal which it is intended to destroy. . . . How will
the law of growth adjust the poison in one animal with
such subtle knowledge of the organism of another that
the deadly virus shall in a few minutes curdle the blood,
benumb the nerves, and rush in upon the citadel of
life?" The electric battery of the ray or torpedo is a
case equally in point. In the second volume of Owen's
"Lectures on Comparative Anatomy" it is described
as composed of nine hundred and forty hexagonal col-
umns resembling honey-comb, each of which is subdi-
vided by one of a series of horizontal plates seemingly
analogous to the plates of the voltaic pile. The whole
is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter,
four great branches of which are as large as the animal's
spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of
thread-like filaments around the prismatic columns,
and finally pass into all the cells. Here is presented
a threefold correlation, embracing the organism of the
fish, the organism of the enemy, and the nature of the
conducting medium.
In the fertilization of the orchids this class of cor-
relation is especially noticeable. Its history is as full
of the marvellous as an Arabian tale. We here find
contrivances of unrivalled ingenuity, and by their com-
plications and many nice adjustments displaying, one
would think, beyond all possible cavil, an intelligent
purpose. Two or three illustrations will answer the
demands of the argument. Darwin relates of the Co-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 51
ryanthes* that it has its lower lip enlarged into a
bucket, above which stand two water-secreting horns.
These latter replenish the bucket, from which, when
half filled, the water overflows by a spout on one side.
Bees visiting the flower fall into the bucket and crawl
out at the spout. By the peculiar arrangement of the
parts of the flower the first bee that falls in carries
away the pollen mass glued to his back, and then when
he has his next involuntary bath in another flower, as
he crawls out the pollen mass attached to him comes
in contact with the stigma of that second flower and
fertilizes it. In another variety he tells us that when
the bee gnaws a certain part of the flower he inevitably
touches a long delicate projection which he calls the
antenna. This transmits a vibration to a certain mem-
brane, which is instantly ruptured, setting free a spring
by which the pollen mass is shot forth like an arrow
in the right direction and adheres by its viscid ex-
tremity to the back of the bee. With this strange
cargo under sealed orders, he wings his way to another
flower, and thus, while busy gathering nectar for his
comb, he is made an unconscious instrument in fulfilling
conditions under which a new vegetable life comes
forth, instructed in that same wonder-working alchemy
that changes into a new orchid nectar-cup the soil,
shower, and sunlight which nature has furnished for its
fashioning.
Darwin, in his volume on this subject, uses this
remarkable language : " The Label him is developed into
a long nectary in order to attract Lepidoptera, and we
* Origin of Species, 5th edition, p. 236.
52 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
shall presently give reasons for suspecting that the nec-
tar is purposely so lodged that it can be sucked only
sloAvly in order to give time for the curious chemical
quality of the viscid matter setting hard and dry." Of
one particular structure he says, " The contrivance of
the guiding ridges may be compared to the little instru-
ment sometimes used for guiding a thread into the eye
of a needle." In speaking of the clue which led him
to the discovery of the right working of the mechanism
in one instance, he says, " The strange position of the
Labellum perched on the summit of the column ought
to have shown me that here was the place for experi-
ment. I ought to have scorned the notion that the
Labellum was thus placed for no good purpose. I neg-
lected this plain guide, and for a long time completely
failed to understand the flower." The valuable work
from which these sentences have been taken was written
by Darwin not as a theorist but as an acute and pains-
taking observer. We ask for no better witness than
Darwin himself against his and Spencer's explanation
of the phenomena of correlated growth. Evidences of
an intelligent purpose, of the workings of self-conscious
mind, are too overpowering to be ignored.
In the interior of the ear there is an immense number
of minute, rod-like bodies, termed Fibres of Corti,
having the appearance of a key-board. Each fibre is
connected with a filament of the auditory nerve. These
shreds of the nerves are strings, and the fibres the keys
that strike them. This is supposed to be a key-board
in function as well as appearance, and through it not
only melody but even harmony of sounds finds an
avenue to the brain. Here, as Mivart suggests, is an
THE SUPERNATURAL. 53
anticipatory contrivance, for our progenitors had no
wants in their simple modes of life which could possibly
call into play an instrument of such unlimited resources
of symphony, an instrument that has proved itself
capable of interpreting to privileged multitudes the
pathos and the rapture of a Beethoven and a Mendels-
sohn.
In the human eye there have been discovered by
anatomists upwards of eight hundred distinct contri-
vances. Seven matched socket-bones, a self-adjusting
curtain with its delicate fringe of hair, a projecting eye-
brow, six outer muscles of the ball, one of them geared
through a pulley, oil- and tear-glands with an accompa-
nying waste-pipe, a hard, transparent, elastic cornea set
in the white sclerotica, an expanding and contracting
pupil, an aqueous, a crystalline, and a vitreous humor,
an inward net-work of nerve, such are some of the more
noticeable points of an instrument which, in the inge-
nuity of its adjustments, eclipses any invention of any
human genius of any era. Note but one of its contri-
vances. By this its possessor can both thread a needle
and sight a star. The sclerotic and choroid coats are
filled with minute muscles which can flatten and press
back toward the retina the crystalline humor, and by
the same movement change also the form and refracting
power of the vitreous humor in which the lens lies. A
reverse process can be effected with equal ease. Thus
the ends that are clumsily, painfully, imperfectly attained
by the apparatus of the astronomer and the microsco-
pist are here secured without spherical aberration,
instantly and by simple volition.
It would seem impossible to account for the develop-
54 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
ment of such a complicated instrument by means of a
natural selection from among minute, indefinite, for-
tuitous variations, that selection being guided simply by
the urgent demands of a struggle for life, for the instru-
ment in order to be of any advantage in this struggle
must have a concurrence of parts predicating a multi-
tude of initial concurrent departures from the parental
type. Only on this concurrence comes the gift of sight,
and the very fact that such an end has been attained by
such complicated means at the very outset before any
selection can possibly take place, furnishes, it would
seem, a complete answer to the Darwinian theory.
Even the simplest eyes, those that are fixed and angular
and of least focal power, furnish us this argument in
its full force, for not one of them is so simple but that
even it is the resultant of simultaneous and correspond-
ing growths of different parts, each of an independent
origin and development, and each utterly useless until
conjoined with the others in a symmetrical whole. Also
at each advance step in compass and complexity the
same difficulties confront Darwin, for each is made up
of an entirely separate set of concurrent changes. It
is a very significant fact that the trilobites, one of the
oldest of fossil forms, to all appearance coming suddenly
upon the scene, without as yet any discovered ancestry,
possessed fully-developed organs of sight.
The human frame has diverged from that of brutes
in the direction of greater physical helplessness, being
left naked, without great teeth or claws, comparatively
weak, and possessed of little speed and of slight powers
of smell with which to find food or safety.
At the time these changes occurred in the body cor-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 55
responding ones must have reached the brain, for the one
change without the other, as Darwin confesses, would
have been a serious hindrance in the struggle for life,
and, if his theory be true, could not have long sur-
vived. As in the formation of the eye and ear, modi-
fications occurring at different starting-points, and each
developing along an independent line, must have united
in a concert of action before they could be of any advan-
tage, so independent, synchronous, and corresponding
changes must have taken place in both the body and
brain of the brute to have produced the man, even waiv-
ing the question of his being distinctively endowed with
a moral accountable nature. Selection from minute in-
definite variations, such as Darwin supposes, could have
here played no part. Would creation be a misnomer
for such a circle of change ? Brutes, though thus men's
progenitors, could have sustained to them no closer re-
lation than the soil to the flowers which open out from
it their tinted and perfumed petals.
In examining the phenomena of homologous growth
the question very naturally suggests itself, Is utility
always the end aimed at, or is the securing of mere
beauty or variety in any single instance a controlling
purpose ? If the latter is true, then the hypothesis of
the survival of the fittest is fatally at fault, as its author
has felt himself forced to confess.
Darwin, strange as it may seem, is the very first to
enter the list against his own theory, openly acknowl-
edging that in the colors and forms of flowers the forces
of correlated growth " do modify important structures
independent of utility, and therefore of natural selec-
tion." But we need not enter the vegetable kingdom
56 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
to find overwhelming testimony against the soundness
of his philosophy.
There is a class of microscopic animals, the Dia-
tomacese, which have existed in such vast numbers
that entire mountains have been found composed of
their remains. The forms of their infinitesimal shells,
when magnified, are discovered to be of most exquisite
beauty and of every conceivable pattern. u ln the
same drop of moisture/ 7 writes Argyll, l( there may be
some dozen or twenty forms, each with its own dis-
tinctive pattern, all as constant as they are distinctive,
yet all having apparently the same habits and without
any perceptible difference of function." Neither sexual
nor natural selection has any governing influence here.
Mere ornament and variety is the evident purpose.
" The most probable view in regard to the splendid
tints of many of the lowest animals seems to be that
their colors are the direct result either of the chemical
nature or of the minute structure of their tissues inde-
pendently of any benefit thus derived."* Darwin at-
tributes the beauty of the maiden's cheek to the color
of the arterial blood ; the extreme beauty of some of
the naked sea-slugs, to the biliary glands seen through
the translucent integuments. But are not the tints of
autumn and of sunset and of flower-petal susceptible of
like explanation? There is no sexual selection and
consequently no secondary sexual characteristics among
mollusks, yet they are beautifully colored and shaped.
Darwin admits these colors to have no use as a protec-
tion, and accounts for them by the nature of the tissues,
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 314.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 57
while the sculpture of the shells he attributes to their
manner of growth. Suppose he were asked to explain
the origin of London Bridge : would he answer, think
you, that it is the result of certain mechanical and chem-
ical forces working under fixed laws ? Yet nothing is
more settled in science than that these very forces per-
formed the entire work. All the will of man has done
is to direct them in their working.
Note the case of the tropical butterflies. Mr. Bates,
quoted by Darwin as high authority, has proved that
their gorgeous colors are not due to the greater heat and
moisture to which they are exposed ; that, though both
sexes in many cases are subject to the same conditions
and live on the same food, they so widely differ, the
male being gayly dressed while the female goes about in
plain Quaker costume, that naturalists for a long while
ranked them as of different genera ; and that in other
cases both sexes are alike in external appearance, both
presenting very broad and brilliantly tinted wings.
Darwin affirms his belief that the same causes have
probably affected the color in all as the same type is
preserved. As, evidently, in many, neither sexual
selection, nor environment, nor habits of life, nor pur-
poses of protection are concerned, to what cause can
this display of marvellous beauty be attributed ? What
hinders a belief that the same Divine Artist who
painted the sunset, the rainbow, the flowers, and the
autumnal glory, garnished also " these winged blossoms
of the woods"?
Darwin informs us* that " the ocelli on the feathers
* Descent of Man, vol. ii. pp. 87, 88.
4
58 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
of the Argus-pheasant are so beautifully shaded they
stand out like a ball lying loosely within a socket.
These feathers have been shown to several artists, and
all have expressed their admiration at the perfect shad-
ing. It may well be asked, Could these ornaments have
been formed by means of sexual selection?" This
question the author answers in the affirmative. But
how happens it that choices made by birds in seasons
of courtship out of indefinite variations of adornment
result in a work of such high art ? Have these choices,
granting them to have been made, been guided by a
capricious taste, or are they but one, and that too a sub-
ordinate one, of many agencies organized and controlled
by a self-conscious will for the embodiment in color and
form of some definitely preconceived ideal ? Darwin
attempts to show that minute steps have been taken in
forming the ocellus, that there has been a gradual ap-
proach toward the resemblance to the ball and socket.
But in the case of the mouth of the whale and the
throat of the kangaroo, as we shall see, the entire de-
parture from the ordinary construction must have been
effected at once. Why may not the ocellus have as
suddenly appeared in all its completeness ?
" No one, I presume, will attribute the shading, which
has excited the admiration of many experienced artists,
to chance, to a fortuitous concourse of atoms of color-
ing-matter. That these ornaments should have been
formed through the selection of many successive varia-
tions, not one of which was originally intended to pro-
duce the ball-and-socket effect, seems as incredible as
that one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been
formed by the selection of chance daubs of paint made
THE SUPERNATURAL. 59
by a long succession of young artists, not one of whom
intended at first to draw the human figure."* Here is
a clear admission that a certain species of bird comes
upon the stage charged with a distinct mission, the work
of producing on a feather-canvas a picture whose shad-
ing shall be of such faultless finish that the foremost
painters of the age shall bear testimony that it is indeed
the work of a master. I fail to see why it would not
be reasonable to claim, even if it be granted that this
resemblance in its perfectness is but the result of a long
series of change, that at the very instant the tide of
taste turned in the mind of the Argus-pheasant, the
very instant the new pattern was set, the new impetus
given, a new creation occurred. Suppose that at some
time the directing, germinal power of an acorn becomes
so affected that, instead of growing up into a genuine
old-fashioned oak, one or two of the characteristics of
an elm make their appearance, and that in the next
generation one or two more are added, and thus little
by little the change goes on until all the characteristics
of the one have been supplanted by those of the other.
Although centuries are consumed in perfectly embody-
ing the new ideal, yet are we not warranted in saying
that the moment the new germinal impulse is given that
moment a new creative fiat goes forth ? The laws of
sexual and natural selection, of inheritance, of homol-
ogous growth, as well as all other laws of life whose
nature is yet unknown, are, as we have remarked, but
methods of working. The birds and beasts are uncon-
scious instruments, they are blind to the final consum-
* Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 135.
60 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
mation. The directive force that finally produces the
ball-and-socket ocellus is no less mysterious than that
force which is wrapped up within the walls of an acorn
or within the faces of a crystal. The fact that the
botanist can point out each step in the process of de-
velopment whereby the oak is fashioned out of dew,
air, soil, and sunlight, that he can talk learnedly of the
osmotic force, does not prove that he has solved the
riddle of growth, nor does his showing that centuries
are necessary to bring the tree to perfection lift a single
inch the hiding curtain.
NATUKAL AND SEXUAL SELECTIONS.
There appear strong barriers opposing change in
animal organisms in certain directions, and equally
strong tendencies toward change in others. The expe-
rience of fanciers has proved this. Darwin himself
has pointed out extreme variability in dogs, horses,
fowls, and pigeons, and the singularly inflexible organ-
ization of the goose, the peacock, and the guinea-hen.
He calls our attention to the fact of " a whole organ-
ization seeming to have become plastic and tending to
depart from the parental type." Professor Huxley, in
his " Lay Sermons," remarks, " We greatly suspect that
nature does make considerable jumps in the way of
variation now and then, and that these saltations give
rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the
series of known forms." Professor Owen, in his
" Anatomy of Vertebrates," speaking of the origin of
species, says, " Natural history teaches that the change
would be sudden and considerable ; it opposes the idea
THE SUPERNATURAL. (51
that species are transmitted by minute and slow degrees.
An innate tendency to deviate from the parental type
operating through periods of adequate duration is the
way of operation of the secondary law whereby species
have been derived one from another." This is essen-
tially Mivart's theory, in contradistinction to that of
Darwin's selection and transmission of minute, indefi-
nite, fortuitous variations until they become intensified
and fixed. Darwin, after mentioning the characteristics
acquired through natural and sexual selection, uses this
remarkable language :* " An unexplained residuum of
change, perhaps a large one, must be left to the assumed
uniform action of those unknown agencies which occa-
sionally induce strongly-marked and abrupt deviations
of structure in our domestic productions." Both Dar-
win and Huxley thus open the door by their confessions
for the theory of Owen, Mivart, and Argyll. They
indeed open it for all that by natural interpretation is
meant in the Mosaic record, for if there are "consider-
able jumps," as one expresses it, or, as the other,
"strongly-marked and abrupt variations," what need
for any of Darwin's supposed ape-like progenitors,
intermediate links? and if for these marked changes
they have, as they are forced to allow, absolutely no
explanation, what valid objection can they urge to ours?
Huxley confesses that although there is seemingly a
greater difference in structural character between some
of the varieties of pigeons, as the pouter and the tum-
bler, than between what naturalists call distinct species,
as the ring-pigeon and stock-dove, yet the varieties
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 148.
62 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
among all animals may be crossed indefinitely, and the
mongrels will continue fertile inter se, while the hybrid
offspring of crossed species are in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred sterile inter se. Does not this confession,
made by one of the most learned of scientists, one
favorably inclined to Darwin's interpretations of nature,
warrant us in the belief that true species cannot be de-
veloped through the adoption and transmission of in-
dividual peculiarities? Ought not this limitation to
constitute one of the definitions of species ? Have not
naturalists occasionally mistaken varieties for species,
and will not this test serve as a corrective? Huxley
remarks,* " To sum up, the evidence, so far as we have
gone, is against the argument as to any limit to diver-
gencies so far as structure is concerned, and in favor of
a physiological limitation. By selective breeding we
can produce structural divergencies as great as those of
species, but we cannot produce equal physiological di-
vergencies." It matters not one whit, as he says,
whether this sterility is universal or whether it exists
only in a single case. No hypothesis can stand which
is inconsistent with one of the facts for which it pro-
fesses to account.
Darwin has put on record this frank confession :f
" Not until I read an able article in the North British
Review, which has been of more use to me than any
other criticism, did I see how great the chances were
against the preservation of variations, whether slightly
or strongly pronounced, occurring only in single indi-
* Origin of Species, p. 111.
f Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 120.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 63
victuals." The article here referred to appeared in June,
1867. The writer of it urges that there must be a
simultaneous modification of many individuals to ren-
der that modification permanent, or the bare weight of
numbers would carry the day. He forcibly illustrates
his argument by supposing a white man to go upon an
island whose whole population is black and to marry
with the natives. It will be readily seen that even
under the most favorable circumstances, instead of the
race finally bleaching out, the few drops of white blood
would soon be lost sight of forever in the great ocean
of black. Mivart remarks that Darwin's admission of
the justness and soundness of this argument "seems
almost to amount to a change of front in the face of
the enemy." If the modification is simultaneous in
many individuals, creation would be no misnomer, and
Darwin, as we have seen, candidly admits that a whole
organization has been known to become plastic, to tend
to depart from the parental type.
Sir William Thompson calculates, as Mivart informs
us, that, judging from the influence of the tides, the
condition of the sun, and the present amount of the
earth's internal heat, life could not have commenced
farther in the past than a thousand million years. He
calculates that at least twenty times that period was
necessary to produce the present life-development by
the Darwinian method. If we go back to the upper
Silurian strata, we have already nearly reached the life-
limit, if Thompson's figures are correct; yet at this
ancient epoch we find the forms of the animal sub-
kingdoms highly developed, while prior to this the
fossiliferous deposits are strangely meagre. These facts
64 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
furnish strong presumptive proof of life's sudden intro-
duction, as opposed to its protracted evolution through
minute, fortuitous, indefinite variations. Impressed by
these facts, Darwin acknowledges, " The case at present
must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a
valid argument against my views."
The doctrine of sexual selection is, it would seem, in
altogether too flexible a state to be of any very great
scientific value. As we have already had occasion to
remark, Darwin, under the stress of different emergen-
cies, has spoken of male characteristics being trans-
ferred equally to both sexes, also of their being trans-
ferred only to the males, of the protective colors of
females being in some instances an exclusive privilege
of that sex, in others being shared by both. The phe-
nomena of sexually limited inheritance are the effects
of forces whose nature and methods of working Dar-
win has evidently failed to fathom. He struggles
manfully, but without avail, to free his theories from
these entangling webs. I alluded to some of the trou-
blesome facts when treating of mimicry. I will call
attention to others, many of them of his own sugges-
tion.
The males of some species of fish have the duty as-
signed them of hatching the eggs, and during this sea-
son are exposed to great danger, yet they are far more
brilliantly colored than their mates. It would seem
that a protective garb should be given them, as the
fate of each involves the fate of thousands of their
progeny. With some genera the males have marsupial
sacks in which the eggs laid by the females are hatched.
But the genus Solenostoma offers a very curious excep-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 65
tional case. The female has these sacks and hatches
her own eggs, yet, strange to say, is more vividly col-
ored and spotted than the male, and thus more exposed.
This double inversion is truly very remarkable, and has
not yet proved susceptible of a naturalistic explana-
tion. The brilliance cannot be for protection, as Dar-
win admits, for with the multitude of fishes the males
are the brighter, although to the race the females are
equally important, and so he, twisting his theory of
sexual selection to suit the case, suggests that, contrary
to the usual custom, the males here become the choos-
ers of partners in seasons of courtship. He takes the
same tack in explaining the exceptional appearance of
some species of birds. When the females are equally
brilliant with the males, he claims that the latter first
differed and then transmitted their newly-acquired orna-
ments equally to both ; when less, that the males transmit-
ted them exclusively to their own sex ; when more, that
the males, after having transmitted them to the females,
have themselves lost the distinctive features. It is
strange that the male fish, which are ardent in their
courtship, often closing with their rivals in death-strug-
gle, should be smaller than the female. Sexual selection
should work uniformly among land and water animals.
It is also strange that while the males are more beauti-
ful than the females, some of them taking on their
ornaments during the spawning season, the females
should among their lovers exercise no preference.
There are cases, as in some beetles, in which the males
are larger and stronger than the females, yet are not
known to fight together in rival courtship. Darwin
admits that this fact puzzles him.
4*
QQ VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
The survival of the fittest of the minute, indefinite
variations of individuals is wholly inadequate to ac-
count for the mouth of the. whale or the throat of the
kangaroo. The former, we are told by Mivart, is lined
with two series of horny plates lying close together.
Their inner edges are furnished with coarse, hair-like
processes of the same material, apparently the frayed
ends of the plates, constituting a sieve, through which
the whale strains from the ocean-water, as it passes out
at his blow-pipes, the minute creatures that form its
food. This most extraordinary contrivance is utterly
useless to its possessor until it has reached perfection.
As it could offer no assistance in the struggle for life
until then, some other instrumentality than that sup-
posed by Darwin must have carried it on through its
incipient stages of development, if there were any,
down that long line of whale-ancestry steadily toward
the goal of its availability. Furthermore, the whale's
whole mode of existence must have undergone radical
change at the time it began effectively to use this
strainer, for before this its food and its devices for ob-
taining it must have been radically different.
The larynx of the kangaroo reaches up to the pos-
terior end of the nasal passages. In the vast majority
of the mammals it stops at the floor of the mouth and
is shielded by the epiglottis in times of swallowing.
The young of this species comes into the world too im-
perfect to suck and swallow, and so its mother is en-
abled by nature to place it upon the nipple, and by a
special muscular movement of the mammary gland to
throw the milk into its mouth. The peculiar length-
ening of the windpipe prevents strangulation, the milk
THE SUPERNATURAL. 67
passing on each side of it into the gullet. If this was
the original form, why the change? for it could not pos-
sibly work any harm to any one. If, on the other
hand, this is a departure from the original, and by slow
degrees, the first young had no other alternative than
choking or starvation. The race must at once have
become extinct, or, in other words, the change never
could have occurred. Mivart tells us that the gavials
and the crocodiles also have this peculiarity. While
for the one it is of no apparent use, the other turn it to
advantage in drowning their prey while holding them
under water with their teeth.
What explanation has Darwin for the fact that one
of the eyes of the flatfish gradually shifts its position
from one side of the head to the other? Here is
something more than the selection and transmission of
some favorable individual peculiarity. Here is actual
motion predicating the presence of force. It cannot be
asserted that the fish is thus better fitted to battle for
life, for other species thrive without this change. They
swim and fight and feed as well. Neither can it be
claimed as a sexual ornament. How, then, at the first
chanced the eye to project a journey so unique, and by
what marvellous means has it reached at last its desti-
nation ?
Darwin, speaking on the subject of rudiments, re-
marks,* " But the latter stages of reduction, after dis-
use has done all that can fairly be attributed to it, and
when the saving to be effected by the economy of
growth would be very small, are difficult to under-
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 18.
68 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
stand. The final and complete suppression of a part
already useless and much reduced in size, in which case
neither compensation nor economy can come into play,
is perhaps intelligible by the aid of the hypothesis of
pangenesis, and apparently in no other way." If the
arguments we have stated against this hypothesis are
sound, these very phenomena of rudimentary organs,
to which Darwin generally points so confidently in
support of his theory, and which are indeed the most
favorable of any, present insuperable objections to it ;
for if by his own confession he can account for them in
no other way than by this theory, which is really un-
tenable, then there is no resource left him. Besides, I
am unable to see how pangenesis is at all pertinent, as
it bears only on the transmission of likeness, the per-
petuation of a trait, not its gradual disappearance.
Darwin claims* that from the fact of the existence of
rudimentary organs " we ought frankly to admit the
community of descent of men and brutes : to take any
other view is to admit that our own structure and that
of all the animals around us is a mere snare laid to
entrap our judgment." Following out the theory of
Owen, Mivart, and Argyll, I would reply that, as crea-
tion comes through birth under law, man would retain
many rudimentary brute characteristics, while at the
same time he would enter upon the possession of others
distinctively human. Darwin argues that inasmuch as
we in our embryonic life resemble at different times
different animals, we must count such-like animals
among our ancestors. Agassiz has answered that sub-
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 31.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 69
stantially in this way. If two germs though seemingly
alike grow under all circumstances, the one into an ape
and never above, the other into a man and never
below, then the two germs, though indistinguishable at
first, and though following for a time the same line of
embryonic development, are radically different from
the beginning, whatever that beginning may have been.
He regarded the evolution revealed in nature as one of
ideas, each typical form appearing through the creative
fiat of one mind.
Hugh Miller maintained* that the influence of physi-
cal surroundings utterly fails to account for the phe-
nomena of reduction and degradation. He has informed
us that it was not until after the full development of
the reptile dynasty that there were introduced into the
ichthyic division all those irregular' and degraded forms
such as sun- and frog-fishes, and that the footless serpent
did not come until mammals had entered upon the
scene. Professor Dana statesf that the earliest repre-
sentatives of a zoological group are generally a little
above the lowest of the series, evolution reaching down-
ward as well as up. He also remarks,;); " In the case of
man, the abruptness of transition from preceding forms
is more extraordinary than all others, and especially
because it occurs so near the present time. In the
highest man-ape, the nearest allied of living species, the
capacity of the cranium is but thirty-four inches, while
the skeleton throughout is not fitted for an erect position,
and the forelimbs are essential to locomotion ; but in
* Footprints of the Creator, p. 321.
f Manual of Geology, p. 39G. t Ibid., p. 603.
70 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
the lowest of existing men, the capacity of the cranium
is sixty-eight inches; every bone is made and adjusted
for the erect position; and the forelimbs, instead of
being required in locomotion, are wholly taken from
the ground and have other and higher issues."
Professor Winchell, in his " Doctrine of Evolution,"
offers some seemingly insuperable objections to all
naturalistic theories. The lengthening of the forelegs
of the giraffe is a correlated growth not referable to any
known physical force. The weight of the animal
would tend to shorten them. " It will not suffice to
call it a physiological force, if by this is meant some
force resolvable into endosmose, capillarity, affinity, as
maintained by Draper, Barker, Spencer, and others, for
these forces are physical, and, like mechanical, act along
lines of least resistance. Then it must be some force
super-physical."* He shows that animals with similar
wants and surroundings have been dissimilarly de-
veloped, while others, such as the whale and ox, both
air-breathing, have under diversified conditions an
identity of conformation. Land animals could not
have been evolved out of fish by any protracted pro-
cess, for unless the gills were at once changed into lungs
life could not have been preserved. So, too, the tran-
sition from birds and reptiles to mammals must have
been instantaneous. The chasm between the verte-
brates and the invertebrates is not bridged, as some have
claimed, by the young ascidian's row of cells resem-
bling the dorsal cord, for these cells are on the ven-
tral not dorsal side, and when the animal advances in
* Winchell's " Doctrine of Evolution," p. 71.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 71
age the cells disappear instead of becoming more pro-
nounced.
Darwin frankly says,* " Our ignorance of the laws
of variation is profound." In qualifying his assertion
that the changes are due to chance, he states that he
means " only to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of
the cause of each particular variation." Thus by his
own showing he has not discovered the origin of species,
although his work bears that title. His theories of
Natural and Sexual Selection and of Pangenesis can
relate only to the perpetuity and intensifying of forms
born into the world he knows not how.
When he remarks, f " I believe in no law of neces-
sary development," he places himself without the pale
of the Evolution school. The unfoldings of life in the
world are not to him the progressive work of forces under
law. His belief on this point seems to be this. The
variations from which natural and sexual selections are
made are so indefinite that it is impossible to discover in
them either order or design, and those only are chosen
which help most in a struggle for life under a seem-
ingly chance set of circumstances. There is, according
to his theory, a continual progress through the ages
toward the most fit, simply because in every instance
the most fit are chosen and survive, but there is no uni-
versal scheme of development carried out by a company
of correlated agencies constituted and controlled by a
will that is at once self-conscious and creative. Once
in a while, when some such fact as the ocellus of the
Argus-pheasant confronts him, he is betrayed into re-
* Origin of Species, p. 131. f Ibid., p. 351.
72 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
flections not readily reconciled with this the main drift
of his thought.
CREATIVE FORCES.
I have now passed in review a few of the facts in
the light of which many of our foremost thinkers have
felt forced to regard the theories of Darwin and the
Evolutionists as lacking in the essentials of sound
science. To the creed of Mivart, Argyll, and Owen
I now direct attention.
Mivart believes, using his own words, " in the effi-
cient presence of an unknown, internal natural law or
laws, conditioning the evolution of new specific forms
from preceding ones modified by the action of surround-
ing conditions by natural selection and by other con-
trolling influences."
Argyll says,* " If I am asked whether I believe that
every separate species has been a separate creation, not
born but separately made, I must answer that I do not.
I think the facts do suggest to the mind the idea of
the working of some creative law almost as certainly
as they convince us we know nothing of its nature or
of the conditions under which it does its glorious work."
Owen, in his " Anatomy of Vertebrates," uses this
language, to which we have already directed attention :
" Natural history teaches that the change would be
sudden and considerable ; it opposes the idea that spe-
cies are transmitted by minute and slow degrees. An
innate tendency to deviate from the parental type oper-
* Reign of Law, p. 249.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 73
ating through periods of adequate duration is the way
of operation of the secondary law whereby species have
been derived one from another."
These eminent authors, it appears, hold that new
species are developed out of old ones with as much
regularity and as little direct interposition of Divine
will as oaks from acorns ; that in all organisms there
are tendencies to depart from the parental type; that
those tendencies are innate and ready to manifest them-
selves whenever certain conditions are fulfilled; that
those conditions are determined by immutable laws,
and that those laws were established at the first in-
breathings of organic life. Darwin is criticised, not
because he believes in the existence of such conditional
forces, but because he claims to have discovered them ;
these authors contending that natural and sexual selec-
tions, though instrumentalities, are not the only, nor the
chief, nor even the prominent ones appointed for this
work ; that the changes, instead of commencing in
minute, indefinite, individual variations, and advancing
at a very slow and steady pace to meet the emergencies
of an endless battle for life or love, reach their goal at
a single bound under the influence of forces whose na-
ture and methods of working are yet enveloped in the
profoundest mystery.
While they have shown upon what insecure founda-
tions rest the hypotheses of Darwin, they have at the
same time failed to establish thoroughly their own.
They are forced to make two concessions that render
possible an interpretation of the phenomena of nature
which, while answering as fully the claims of science,
is more in consonance with the natural and commonly
74 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
received interpretation of the Scripture record, and sat-
isfies in larger measure the cravings of the hungry
human heart. The concessions are these : first, that
they know nothing either of the nature of these sup-
posed creative forces or of their methods of working ;
second, that, to use Mivart's own words,* " the soul of
every individual man is absolutely created in the strict
and primary sense of the word, that it is produced by
a direct and supernatural act, and that by such an act
the soul of the first man was similarly created." What
valid objection can they urge to the suggestion that
those so-called creative forces are set free by distinct
volitions of some self-conscious intelligence, inasmuch
as they confessedly know nothing about them, and es-
pecially as they concede that there are phenomena, the
introduction of human souls, which can thus, and only
thus, be explained? Grant, if you please, that there
are, indeed, forces properly denominated creative, that
they are subject to unchangeable laws, that new species
are born out of old ones, that out of brute life has
sprung the human, yet, as we are conscious that our
own wills are essential causes, sources of unfailing force,
lying outside of the chain of natural cause and eifect,
and are capable with a finite knowledge of stepping in
and by skilled appliances directing the elemental forces
to the accomplishment of their own sovereign purposes,
we can readily conceive that the Divine will, guided
by an infinite knowledge, can, by complying with the
conditions that unfetter these forces creative, turn the
currents of organic life into whatever channel it chooses.
* Genesis of Species, p. 295.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 75
The transformations wrought by the human will upon
the earth are marvellous. Yet no natural force has
been destroyed, no law abrogated. The relation of the
Divine will to the universe need be no less intimate,
but rather may be inconceivably more so. If the will
of Jacob could, by conforming to certain laws, cause
the cattle of Laban to foal speckled calves, if the will
of the pigeon-fancier of to-day can develop the tum-
bler and pouter out of native breeds, may not the
will of God by precisely analogous methods make
these very creative forces its ready servitors? The fact
that such forces exist, instead of precluding the idea of
the interposition of will, strongly suggests it. Our own
experiences ought to teach us this, utilizing as we have
so many of the mechanical and vital forces. Huxley
thinks that all the differences between men and brutes
are traceable to the effects of the gift of speech, and
that it might come from the very slightest change in
the structure of the nerves that control the muscles
attached to the vocal cords. Let these muscles vary
never so slightly from their present exact parallel ac-
tion, and we should be struck dumb and soon sink into
brute life. While controverting the conclusion to which
he endeavors to lead us by this unquestioned fact concern-
ing the structure and working of our vocal organs, we
acknowledge the service he renders in revealing how
by the slightest exercise of the Divine will, informed
as it is by an infinite knowledge, the widest revolutions
of change in organic life may be inaugurated and then
intrusted for its further development to the effect of
forces already at work in the world under established
law. May not even Huxley's spontaneous and Dar-
76 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
win's fortuitous variations be the result of this Divine
interference, if it be true in any instance that species
have thus begun ? As these theorists make no preten-
sions to having discovered the origin of these individ-
ual variations, how can they reasonably object to our
reverently regarding them as the results of direct voli-
tions of Divinity ? It might, perhaps, be suggested
that as the intellectual and emotional states of the
mother at certain critical periods in the development
of the foetus leave upon it an indelible impress, pos-
sibly God may by dropping a simple suggestion at those
times of crisis effect any desired change, for surely he
can communicate with his creatures if they can with
each other ; indeed, we may safely say his facilities for
this mental commerce as far transcend ours as does his
knowledge of mental law.
While, then, we can hold it quite probable that crea-
tions have come through birth under law, we can also
perceive how this system of conditional forces can help
rather than hinder the efficient interposition of Divine
will. We can therefore offer no welcome to the thought
that God ended direct personal shaping of the destiny
of his creatures in a past so remote that seons of geolo-
gic time have since then rolled by in an almost endless
succession ; for the very theory that thus removes him
as a Creator, when followed out to its legitimate, logical
conclusions, equally removes him as Father and Friend,
as the sympathetic Answerer of the passionate pleadings
of stricken hearts.
THE SUPERNATURAL. 77
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY.
Buckle, in his " History of Civilization in England/'
a work of exhaustive research and bold inductive reason-
ing, champions what is now one of the most popular of
the fallacies that have sprung from this naturalistic
tendency of modern thought which we have been con-
sidering. Natural phenomena have been discovered, as
we have remarked, to be the effects of conditional forces
working by fixed methods. Buckle attempts, and with
a show of success, to reduce all social phenomena to a
like perfect regularity in proof that human history is
subject to laws as immutable, irresistible, and compre-
hensive as those which control in the revolutions of
planets, the crystallization of salts, or the growth of
trees; that mind and matter, being each under the
absolute control of a separate code of exact laws, pro-
duce, when brought into collision, reciprocal modifica-
tions that are also, in their turn, as unavoidably syste-
matic as the simpler actions of which they are the
necessary resultants ; that it is possible, the general
antecedents and surroundings of nations or individuals
being given, to predict their future destinies with the
certainty of a solar eclipse.
I will briefly outline his more important statements.
Men multiply most rapidly, he claims, in those coun-
tries where nature furnishes food in greatest abundance
in return for the least toil. This cheap living, followed
by this overstock in the labor-market, rendering work
very productive and wages very low, leads inevitably
78 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
to an unequal distribution of wealth. The great mass
of the people, thus kept hopelessly poor and ignorant,
become the hereditary burden-bearers of capitalists
whom their productive industry has made incalculably
rich. Here civilizations must first take rise, and gov-
ernments must become uniformly despotic. The Brah-
mins, the Pharaohs, and the Incas are instanced as at
once the oldest and the most absolute of the world's
dynasties. India has her rice-fields, Egypt her date-
palms, and Peru her Indian corn. These products have
from the remotest antiquity constituted the national
food ; they are indigenous to the soil, abound in nutri-
ment, and, under the joint action of the excessive heat
and moisture common to these lands, return a fabulous
yield. On the other hand, the eastern portions of North
America are far better watered than the western, while
the western are much warmer. Moisture and heat being
thus widely separated, nature is less bountiful, and in
consequence only wild tribes of Indians roamed through
her forests at the time that powerful and populous civ-
ilizations flourished in Southern Mexico and Central
America. There are still extant ruins of royal palaces
that unquestionably point to dense multitudes, unequal
distribution of wealth, and most despotic forms of gov-
ernment, hundreds of thousands of workmen being
employed for entire generations upon the walls of a
single edifice. In Brazil an excess of vegetation has
worked results similar to those caused by its deficiency
elsewhere. Covered with a net-work of the noblest
rivers, heated by a tropical sun, and swept by eastern
trade-winds that sup up the waters of the Atlantic only
to shower them down again when chilled by the lofty
THE SUPERNATURAL, 79
mountain-ranges on the west, its plant, insect, and brute
life exists in such wild profusion that all hope of human
subjugation and tillage is forever precluded. Though
it is twelve times the size of France, and its coast
studded with the finest natural harbors in the world, no
ruins have ever yet been found within it of former
civilizations, and its scattered people can boast of none
to-day.
He further claims that in tropical and volcanic coun-
tries literatures and religions owe their distinguishing
characteristics to irresistible influences that there emanate
from the sublime and threatening aspects of nature, the
imagination inevitably tyrannizing over every other
mental faculty. The Italians and the Spaniards, for
example, have enthusiastically and successfully culti-
vated poetry and painting, while with them the study
of the sciences has perceptibly languished. The books
of India, written on whatever theme and with whatever
intent, have, with but rare exceptions, been expressed
in metaphor and in rhythm. The Hindoo histories are
filled with the wildest fancies, millions of years being
soberly claimed for the lifetime of some of their early
kings, and thousands of millions of years for their code
of laws, the Institutes of Menu. The forms of their
temples and the character of their gods witness to the
terrible conceptions that throng their thoughts in con-
sequence of the mysterious physical forces which with
titanic strength ruthlessly smite down at once their
homes and their hopes. Siva, one of the Hindoo triad,
is a hideous, three-eyed, mad monster, girdled with
snakes, wearing a necklace of human bones, and clothed
with the fierce tiger's skin, while over his shoulder rears
80 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
the head of the deadly cobra-de-capello. The descrip-
tion of his wife, Doorga, is a still more frightful fancy,
evidently the joint work of dread and wonder. In
Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, as far as known, kindred
religious beliefs were entertained. But in Greece,
where nature was less dominant and destructive, much
milder ideas of the supernatural prevailed; the gods
were clothed with forms, feelings, and forces mainly
human. That the present strongholds of the Roman
hierarchy are in volcanic countries is accounted for on
the same hypothesis.
It is confidently asserted that these influences of
nature upon nations thus peculiarly circumstanced are
insurmountable, that these mischievous inequalities in
property, so replete with despotism, it is impossible to
prevent, and that the wildest and most ruinous super-
stitions must forever curse the religious thinking of
those whose imaginations are thus by impending perils
incessantly kept at fever-heat. In countries, however,
where the climate is mainly temperate, where food and
shelter are secured at greatest expense and the aspects
of nature are less imposing, the population is propor-
tionately diminished, property is more widely distrib-
uted, there is less of the spirit of caste, the prerogatives
of rulers are hedged in by constitutional guarantees,
the imagination is no longer left to tyrannize over the
reason, the earth and its inhabitants are matters of
scientific inquiry, and prevailing religious beliefs are
founded on broader and calmer thought. The scales
thus turned, nature subordinated to man rather than
man to nature, we would naturally conclude that here
surely human will becomes the arbiter of human des-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 31
tiny; but it is boldly claimed that a careful study of
statistics inevitably leads to a directly opposite conclu-
sion. By generalizing countless observations extending
over countries in different grades of civilization, with
different opinions, morals, and habits of life, a remark-
able regularity in human actions is professed to have
been found, and this is claimed as an incontestable proof
that the minds as well as the bodies of men are subject
to immutable laws ; they, when freed from the tyranny
of nature, implicitly obeying internal spiritual enact-
ments, developing according to the condition of their
own organism. Crimes of every sort, even those ap-
parently most arbitrary, are professedly found from the
reports of government officials to be as uniform as the
ebb and flow of ocean tides. Schools of philosophy,
operations in trade, solemnizations of marriage, even
aberrations of memory, are claimed to be marked by
the same necessary and inevitable system. Indeed,
none of the actions of men are believed ever to be in-
consistent, however capricious in appearance, but rather
to constitute parts of a scheme of universal order. The
progress of inquiry is becoming so rapid and earnest in
this direction, a confident expectation is expressed that
before another century the chain of evidence for this
belief will become complete, and it will be as rare to
find a historian who denies this undeviating regularity
in the mental world as it now is to find a philosopher
who denies it in the physical.
Such is the Doctrine of Averages, which Buckle has
ransacked the libraries of every language to prove, and
on which through two ponderous volumes he has lav-
ished a most brilliant rhetoric. To reduce history thus
5
82 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
to a science is, beyond mistake, one of the manifest
tendencies of the times, growing out of the wonderful
success that has attended investigations of natural phe-
nomena. This new method of research, studying man-
kind en massej tabulating human actions into certain
averages, is no doubt destined to afford invaluable help
in the solution of many a puzzling problem of life ; but
its advocates, instead of modestly regarding the results
thus far reached as partial and imperfect views of
truth, pronounce without hesitancy as unscientific, and
consequently false, the doctrine that men are free and
that God answers prayer. However plausibly these
philosophers may argue against free will, so long as they
classify human actions as either virtuous or vicious,
which is frequently done in the pages of Buckle, their
reasoning requires no refutation, for moral accountabil-
ity can never be predicated of machines. Only their
second conclusion need, therefore, engage our present
attention.
Granting that modern science has successfully proved
that the forces that produce intellectual as well as phys-
ical phenomena are strictly conditional, working by
unalterably fixed methods, does it necessarily follow
that the effects of prayer are simply retroactive, that
its practice is but the fruit of superstitious ignorance,
destined with it sooner or later to disappear? Horace
Bushnell, ably following out the suggestions of another,
helps us to an intelligent negative answer. Although
the arguments popularized by him were designed solely
to remove objections urged by physicists, this new doc-
trine not yet having passed into print, I can see no
reason why they are not equally fatal to objections that
THE SUPERNATURAL. 83
grow out of Buckle's theory of thought. Both are
based on the common error of confounding the super-
natural with the contra-natural. The human will, being
unconditioned in its action, is rightly considered super-
natural, though it is wholly incapable of destroying a
single one of nature's forces or of abrogating a single
law. For instance, Flift a book. I have not by this
act destroyed the force of gravity. The book still has
weight : I have simply overcome that force by a supe-
rior one. How the will through the nerves contracts
the muscles, no one can tell ; but that it does, all agree.
God once willed that an axe should float upon the
water. It is not necessary to suppose that he destroyed
the weight of that axe. It may still have been heavier
than the water, as the book is still heavier than the
air. The force of his will for the time being may
simply have overmastered the force of gravity, not
'destroyed it.
Take another view of the subject. God has imparted
to matter, as has been remarked, certain chemical forces
that remain inoperative until certain fixed conditions
are fulfilled. I hold in my hand a match. There is
here imprisoned a devouring fire-monster. By a single
stroke I comply with the conditions that unfetter it, and
it bursts into flame. That force, once freed, will, if the
conditions of its action continue to be complied with,
finally consume continents and convert oceans into
steam. I pour a few drops of nitro-glycerin into a
mountain of solid granite. By the simple blow of a
hammer I can break the chain of the Titan, and the
mountain will be convulsed with earthquake. Thus by
the strictest compliance with nature's laws I make ser-
84 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
vants of her forces. If the human will, guided by an
exceedingly limited knowledge, has been able so wonder-
fully to transform the face of the earth, whitening its
seas with sails, bridging its streams, tunnelling its ranges
of mountains, covering its continents with a closely-
woven net-work of canals, railroads, and telegraphs,
turning deserts, even ocean-beds, *into gardens, clay and
pebbles into porcelain and plate-glass, trees into tem-
ples, and quarries of rock into pillared palaces, why
may not the Divine will, guided by an infinite knowl-
edge, accomplish its purposes, as we have already sug-
gested, by precisely similar processes without the least
disturbance of natural law ? A miracle is both super-
natural and superhuman, its accomplishment requiring
stronger will and profounder knowledge than are within
man's reach. That Christ violated or annulled a single
natural law I seriously question, although the evidence
is incontestable that in checking certain natural pro-
cesses and quickening others he transcended human
power. By administering proper antidotes at proper
seasons men have succeeded in arresting many diseases
which would have destroyed their victims had the course
of nature been left undisturbed, and there are well-
authenticated cases of like results being secured by
simple acts of will.
If Christ was gifted with an indefinitely multiplied
and sustained power of will, embracing unbounded
personal magnetism, a point too often overlooked, and
was also gifted with an intuitive insight from which
not a single secret of nature was hidden, what disease
could he not master ? Indeed, what hinders us from
believing that without the repeal of a single phys-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 85
ical law the dead were by him again quickened into
life?
Apply this power of will, if you please, to the cur-
rents of human thought. Grant that opinions are crys-
tallized with as much regularity as diamonds, that the
laws in each case are equally immutable, yet, though
the human will cannot stop the flow of thought, it can
materially change its direction ; though it cannot annul
laws of association and suggestion, it can fix the atten-
tion, and thus, by the aid of those very laws, secure any
desired end. Grant that persons have been powerfully
influenced by natural scenery, national and social sur-
roundings, inherited restrictions and biasses of thought,
that those influences have left such an indelible im-
press that we can readily detect the residence, parentage,
pursuit, and position in life .of casual acquaintances ;
still those same influences have repeatedly yielded to
the superior might of the human will. Buckle him-
self inadvertently admits that great thinkers have ap-
peared from time to time, who, devoting their lives to
a single purpose, have been able to anticipate the prog-
ress of mankind, and to produce a new religion, or a
new philosophy, by which important effects have been
eventually secured ; that frequently their sentiments
have been so far in advance of their age as to remain
for a long while inoperative, and to call down upon
them the bitterest persecution. He has with the same
remarkable inadvertence also admitted that the cause of
the coming of these heralds and helpers of progress is
wholly unknown. Here, it seems to me, he has gratui-
tously placed in the hands of his opponents means for
a complete refutation of his whole argument. What
86 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
hinders the belief that in such cases God quietly
dropped a suggestion and then left it to the control
of the immutable laws of thought? Is God neces-
sarily shut out from us any more than we from each
other? That men's wills are by no means thus en-
slaved, but that, on the contrary, the Divine sugges-
tions are often scornfully ruled out of the mind, the
very presence of sin in the world is a sufficient wit-
ness ; that these fixed mental methods, instead of ex-
cluding God's providence, are susceptible of rendering
it invaluable aid, scientific discoveries, when once they
are carefully and candidly studied, most emphatically
affirm.
There is another of Buckle's admissions which tells
powerfully against him and gives a peculiar emphasis
to my last remark. It is that nearly all advancements
in knowledge have come through deductive forms of
reasoning, by first conceiving theories, then subjecting
them to the test of accredited facts, a remarkable ad-
mission from a strenuous advocate of Baconian phi-
losophy, but its truth was too well known to admit of
successful denial. Whence came those sudden flashes
of thought that in the fulness of the years worked
such mighty revolutions in human destiny? Why was
the mind so constituted as to pass into those strangely
receptive moods so common to it, of which we all
have at times been conscious ? I know of but one
answer.
Many Christian defenders are disposed to hold that
the course of nature is nothing but God's will pro-
ducing certain effects in a constant and uniform man-
THE SUPERNATURAL. 87
ner, every event in nature being the direct act of God.
They perhaps would apply to the phenomena of the
intellect this same interpretation. The formation of
a crystal, the opening of a rose-bud, the flutter of an
insect, as well as the overthrow of a sinful Sodom,
would to them imply the immediate presence and direct
volition of Divinity.
Others hold that God has foreplanned everything
that has or will come to pass, to the minutest detail and
to the remotest time ; that each miracle of Christ, that
each answer to prayer, was fully provided for in that
far-off past when planets and suns were yet but un-
realized thoughts revolving in the Divine mind ; that
the whole universe is constructed like a music-box,
which, once wound, produces with unbroken regularity,
by the arrangement of the posts on its revolving cylin-
der, tunes of the widest selection, some of them in-
different, some discordant, some of surpassing sweet-
ness, the changes effected in nature and history being
but the methodic movements of a machine, God
dwelling at an infinite distance from his creatures, no
longer actively interested in the affairs of the world.
The first theory would rarely gain a convert among
men of science ; the second does violence to every
craving of the heart.
But the theory which I adopt, and in this paper
have attempted to prove, is that physical, and perhaps
intellectual, phenomena are due to an efficiency once
imparted by the Creator to the earth and its inhabit-
ants, but now abiding in them, operating apart from
himself and subject to fixed conditions; that through
compliance with these conditions the forces of matter
88 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and of thought become servitors of the Divine will in
the same way as of the human, only in an immeasu-
rably greater degree. This theory, I think, accords
most perfectly with the claims of science, and enables
sad and discouraged souls to feel the warm grasp of the
hand of their heavenly Father.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.
I EEMEMBER reading some years since a very inge-
nious paper* advocating that crystallization is but one
form of organic life. The molecules as they take their
places, like trained soldiery, along certain lines inclined
at certain fixed angles, seem to be obeying the bugle-
call of some mysterious, vitalizing force within. There
is here such oneness of conception, such concert of action,
that an explanation like this very naturally suggests it-
self. But these marvellously symmetrical structures can
be crushed, or melted, or dissolved, their atoms widely
separated, their order destroyed, yet they will, when
again favorably circumstanced, congregate after the
same set patterns, embodying the same conceptions of
faultless form. Can it be that when one particle after
another of the crystal is wrenched from the grasp of
the organizing spirit, this spirit, disembodied, robbed
of its kingdom, driven out of matter, waits somewhere
and watches until the victor force has spent itself or
has entered upon other conquests, and then suddenly
retakes its throne and pronounces over the subject mole-
cules the self-same spells of enchantment ?
*Bev. Dr. H. B. Baker, in Psychological Journal, July, 1870.
5* 89
90 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
This certainly is true of no other vital force. Fur-
thermore, we cannot detect in it that perpetual change,
that constant arrival and departure of atoms, that cease-
less activity, which characterize all other life. .^Eons of
time may come and go, and there will remain precisely
the same matter cast in precisely the same mould. This
crystalline spirit, if such there be, must date its birth far
back in that " beginning" of the Mosaic record, for, as
with it death is at most but a temporary suspension of
animation, it must have been twin-born with matter
itself. Still, though the majority of scientists conclude
to place it at the head of the class of inorganic forces,
they have but named the mystery, not solved it. We
still stand confronted with the fact that the atoms rally
at the bugle-call of some recognized commander.
Investigators have also been puzzled to draw sharply
the dividing-line between vegetable and animal life.
There are some plants that seem half animal ; some
animals that seem half plant. Touch the sensitive plant,
even breathe upon it, and its delicate leaves fold together
and its branches droop languidly as though through
their tissues lay a net- work of minute nerves and along
those nerves ran shudders of pain, even shocks of par-
alysis. When the sun sets this plant falls asleep like a
tired child. At this same hour, too, the blossoms of the
anemone close their petal eyelids and wait for day.
The goat's-beard chooses an earlier hour, but is equally
regular in this strange procedure. The leaf of the
Venus's flytrap with its viscid surface, or that of the
sundew with its limed bristles, is but a net spread for
some unwary insect. Let the little creature seek to
rest its feet never so lightly, and its doom is sealed.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 91
While it is struggling desperately to free itself, the
sides of the leaf close in over it like the lids of fate,
and the plant drinks its blood with the heartlessness
and greed of a spider.
Dr. Carpenter, in his " Introduction to the Study of
the Foraminifera,"* says, " The physiologist has a case
in which those vital operations, which he is elsewhere
accustomed to see carried on by an elaborate apparatus,
are performed without any special instruments what-
ever; a little particle of apparently homogeneous jelly
changing itself into a greater variety of forms than the
fabled Proteus, laying hold of its food without mem-
bers, swallowing it without a mouth, digesting it with-
out a stomach, appropriating its nutritious, material with-
out absorbent vessels or a circulating system, moving
from place to place without muscles, feeling, if it has any
power to feel, without nerves, propagating itself without
genital organs, and not only this, but in many instances
forming shelly coverings of a symmetry and complex-
ity not surpassed by those of any testaceous animals."
While some plants have stomachs, some animals have
roots. The rhizocephalous crustaceans do not feed by
mouth, for they are destitute of an alimentary canal, but
live by absorbing through root-like processes the juices
of the animals on which they are parasitic. The jelly-
fish is a transparent and also almost structureless mass
of vitalized matter. As it rises and sinks in the wave
it seems little else than delicately tinted sunlight, caught
in some wandering eddy. Take it from the water, and
it fades to a film.
* Preface, p. 8.
92 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Trembley,* the naturalist, once chanced upon some
strange forms of diminutive water-life, which for a time
he was at a loss how to interpret. They were insect-
eaters, their cylindrical bodies having fringed ends with
which they seized their prey. Trembley in the course
of his experiments cut them into as many as fifty pieces,
and, to his astonishment, found that instead of destroy-
ing life he had but multiplied it, for in forty-eight hours
each piece became a distinct individual. He also found
on these living cylinders a number of small adventitious
buds, cropping out everywhere, which gradually en-
larged, sent out tentacles on their free ends, and finally
dropped off" into perfect beings. These pseudo-plants
are now known as one of many species of polyps, of
which other equally strange facts have come to light.
The larvsef that are hatched from the eggs of the Au-
relia swim about very lively for a couple of days, and
then, as if tired out, anchor themselves to the floor of
the sea. This done, they grow up into long slender
stalks with enlarged tops, in the centre of each of which
a hole opens, uncovering a cavity, and around the hole
little buds appear that lengthen at last into limber fila-
ments. Thus equipped, these creatures never again
move from their moorings. After a while the surfaces
of these stems are rougllened here and there with buds,
some of which unfold without further delay into per-
fect polyps ; while out from others slender shoots com-
mence trailing along the ground, until, at some secret
* A. de Qualrefages' " Metamorphoses of Man and Lower
Animals," pp. 137-38.
f Ibid , pp. 153-55.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 93
signal, their ends widen out into mouths with fringed
borders and a new individual life begins. Are these
some rare variety of strawberry-plants that flourish in
Neptune's sea-gardens? But here and there one of
these trumpet-shaped bodies becomes cylindrical and
three or four times the length of its fellows, and soon
just beneath its fringed end a groove makes its appear-
ance, as if some invisible cord was being drawn tightly
about it ; then another a little farther down, and then
another, until the cylinder is changed into a series of
rings. As the grooves deepen, the edges of the rings
become scolloped, and their wave-lines gradually more
marked until they are changed into eight little arms
with forked ends. This process of individual ization
goes on until each fringe of arms acquires an independ-
ent motion and until at last a complete separation is
effected, one wheel after another swimming away with
as distinct and perfect a nature as falls to the lot of any
radiate, each destined to become the founder of a new
family somewhere along the populous ocean-bottoms.
From the egg of another species,* called the Cam-
panularia, springs a larva, which, after it has fastened
itself to something solid, is changed into a little flat
cake with a hole in the centre. About this hole there
shoots up a hollow stem, and on the end of the stem
there comes a bud, which swells out into the shape of
an inverted bell. After certain changes have taken
place inside its horny covering, a new polyp with ten-
tacled mouth bursts through the membrane and unfolds
like an opening flower. Then another bud appears on
* Quatrefages, pp. 173-74.
94 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
the stalk, and the same process is repeated, branch after
branch growing out of the bowl of the stem. In the
axils of the branches more buds come and they blossom
out into more polyps.
Corals and stone-lilies, now known as the fossil skel-
etons of polyps, were, until the last century, regarded
as rock-plants. The nature of sponges has, among
naturalists, long been, and to some extent still is, a
matter of question. Indeed, there are several phenom-
ena which are catalogued under the non-committal
name zoophytes, a combination of two Greek words cor-
responding in our language to "animal" and " plant."
In the propagation of the Epistylis, an infusoria,*
we find the semblance to vegetable life carried a step
farther. It multiplies both by buds and fission. The
individual that develops from the larva divides itself
into halves. On each half, which still remains joined
to the parent stem, another branch starts and grows to
the same height. These secondary stems also in time
divide as the first, and so with the third and succeeding
ones, until the colony presents the form of a wide-
spreading tree, from the tip of each of whose branches
opens the hungry mouth of an Epistylis. Here and
there around the neck of one and another of these ani-
mals a groove appears, and about the groove a circle of
fine hairs. The fissure continues to deepen until, like
a ripe acorn, this strange fruit at last drops to the foot
of the tree. But, instead of lying there like an acorn,
it picks itself up and swims away to root fast to some
other rock and become the starting-point of another
* Quatrefages, pp. 194-95.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 95
tree in that mysterious, miniature sea-forest God first
planted away back when the world was young.
These forms of being unquestionably mark transi-
tion-periods in creation. We surely witness in them
new departures in nature, advances upon the lower
forms, with but a partial attainment of the higher.
They are the gray twilight of dawn into whose texture
are woven the fading threads of the old era and the
faintest threads of the new. They lie along that
border-line where the adjacent colors of the rainbow
mingle. Yet, strange as it may seem, they furnish no
basis for the hypothesis of Evolution, for their organs
and habits have, without perceptible change, main-
tained their ground against all the supposed developing
impulses of all the ages. By no influences of their nat-
ural environment, or of any artificial surroundings of
man's devising, have they been advanced a hair's breadth
from the good old ways of their earliest ancestors.
And right here, too, the theory of spontaneous gen-
eration, the establishment of which, extreme evolution-
ists hold, completes the chain of evidence that the origi-
nal nebulae of amorphic matter contained the promise
and potency of all life, this theory, as Quatrefages
contends, is overthrown from its lowest foundations in
the discovery of the law of geneagenesis. This emi-
nent French savant asserts* that all known species,
down to the very lowest in the scale of existence, in the
vegetable as well as animal kingdom, however widely
for a time they may seem to depart from the ordinary
mode of reproduction, must, at stated periods, have re-
* Quatrefages, p. 280.
96 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
course to it or become extinct. For example, several
generations of virgin aphides may be produced, and
Bonnet,* in his experiments, has demonstrated this
possible; yet, after a while, not only must females se-
crete true ova, but males must fertilize them, in order
to secure a renewal of the pristine vigor of the species.
The same is true of the ascidians. So, too, propaga-
tion by buds and fission is not perpetual. Polyps and
infusoria may multiply for a certain set season without
the union of the sexes, but there are, nevertheless, and
must be, regularly appointed recurrences of the contact
of sperm and germ, and in the individuals that spring
from this union reappears the original plenitude of
power. However long and tortuous may be the wind-
ings of the route chosen by nature in certain cases, it is
clearly defined, and ends where it began, in fertilized
ova. Such being the universal and invariable law,
each species must be the descendants of a single first
pair, possessing correlated sexual parts and functions,
the possible product only of some direct, intelligent,
creative fiat. Thus the profoundest researches of sci-
ence confirm the statements of the inspired Seer.
Descartes and his followers, in their arguments
against the existence of a soul, have cited the case of
some of these pseudo-plants, to which we have briefly
alluded. If, after a polyp has been severed into fifty
pieces, a new head and tail will bud out of the cut ends
of each piece, and the processes of life go on without
abatement; if infusoria can of themselves divide and
subdivide until, by spontaneous fission, a populous col-
* Quatrefages, pp. 130-81.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 97
ony springs from a single progenitor; if the cylindrical
Aurelia can cut itself into a dozen slices, and each slice
become an independent being, then we are necessarily
precluded from predicating of these and like types of
existence the possession of a spiritual nature, indeed, of
any proper personality, for an ego that is not absolutely
indivisible is to us an impossible conception. But when
these theorists predicate of the entire kingdom what has
thus far been discovered true only of certain inferior
classes in it, the soundness of their induction may well
be questioned.
The fact that all classes of animals, without ex-
ception, even foraminifera, polyps, infusoria, and earth-
worms, possess in some of their individuals, at a cer-
tain stage of their existence, the power of locomotion,
would at first blush seem to indicate that their bodies
were indeed the homes of spirits ; but on the closest ex-
amination we can find no sign of self-consciousness,
such as halting between two opinions, deliberating, ex-
ercising the power of choice, no distinctive act of the
will. Their motions may be, from all that yet appears,
as automatic and unconscious as the folding together of
the leaves of the sensitive plant, for they seem to fol-
low with as rigid a uniformity and as absolute a cer-
tainty the exciting cause. This locomotive power is,
with several classes, but a momentary possession, dis-
appearing as mysteriously as it came, the animal no
sooner striking a rock than it roots to it and sinks
down at once and forever into the plant-like stolidity
of the colonized multitude that sprout out afterward
about its lengthening stem.
There is another type of transitional beings in which
98 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
may be traced characteristics of widely divergent
classes. The most skilled anatomists are still disputing
whether the Lepidosiren, even when in an adult state,
is fish or reptile. There are fish that will with their
long pectoral fins sustain themselves a full half-minute
in mid-air and accomplish a flight of six hundred feet.
There are squirrels whose fore and hind legs are so
connected by membranes that they actually wing their
way from tree to tree, their leaps measuring wide dis-
tances. There are mammals called rear-mice, or bats,
which at twilight emerge from caverns or deserted
ruins, or the hollows of moss-grown trees, and flit
noiselessly about on distended, leathery webs, robbing
the air of any gay insect that may be gadding about.
Seals are air-breathing quadrupeds that suckle their
young, yet their habitat is the sea, their legs are like
the fins of fishes, and their nostrils they have power to
open and close. One of their species nature has dressed
in the spotted skin of the leopard ; the males of another
resemble the elephant in their lengthened probosces and
contour of head ; while those of a third have lions'
faces and about their necks flowing lions' manes. The
dolphin," the sword-fish, the porpoise, the grampus, are
all air-breathing and warm-blooded mammals, yet
finned and shaped like fish, and like them propelled by
their tails. Eels are classed among fishes, yet their ser-
pent nature has drawn out their bodies into snake-like
length and slimness and stripped them of ventral fins
and diminished and obscured their scales.
Geologists* tell us of bulky-bodied saurians that once
*WincheH's " Sketches of Creation."
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 99
peopled the seas and the air, one genus of which, the
ichthyosaurus, was shaped like a dolphin, had the head
of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, and the paddles of
a whale ; another, the plesiosaurus, had the head of a
lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, the neck of a swan, the
trunk and head of a quadruped, and the extremities of
a whale ; while still another, the pterodactyl, of twenty
different species, resembled externally both mammal
and bird, but in its essential structure was clearly rep-
tilian, the individuals of some of whose species were
veritable flying dragons with a sixteen-foot spread of
wing.
The younger Huber proved, by frequent observa-
tions and experiments, which he most interestingly
narrates in his work on Ants,* that the female red ant,
after fecundation, bids good-by to her lover, who at
once ingloriously steps out of life ; that she then strips
oif, with her own mandibles, at her own instance, and
seemingly without pain, the delicate gossamer wings
with which nature has provided her for courtship and
for easy and rapid transit in search of a suitable site for
the new colony she is destined to establish ; and that
she ever after creeps about in the grass, laying her eggs
and feeding and caring for her young as contentedly as
if she had never possessed anything but short, hair-like
legs to move her little body about, like the common
neuters, the nurses and maids-at-all-work.
The Ephemeronf for two years lives in an archiform
gallery which it has bored in some river-bank, below
the water-level, grinding monotonously day after day
* Pages 116-17. f Quatrefages, pp. 77-78.
100 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the slimy mud upon which it feeds. It walks on six
legs, and yet it breathes like a fish. When the two
years are ended, rudimentary wings bud out of the up-
per part of its thorax, and at last, in the quiet twilight
of some August evening, its old skin cracks open and
falls off like a ripe chestnut-bur, and with it, too, fall
the gills and grinding jaws, and out comes the little
creature so marvellously metamorphosed in its outward
furnishings that it is hard to convince ourselves that an
absolutely new creation has not taken place right before
our very eyes. In its new life, spanned by a single
brief hour, it abstains from food, having no mouth fit
to receive it; it breathes the air through spiracles,
poises itself on finely reticulated wings, thrills to love's
rapture, deposits its masses of eggs, and then, with the
fading twilight, flits from the scene. All insects are
characterized by similar series of metamorphoses. In-
deed, all animal life, even the human, experiences an-
alogous changes, though these developments, with the
majority, occur while the young are still unborn.
Nowhere in the animal kingdom is there so favor-
able an opportunity for peeping into nature's workshop
as in the metamorphoses of the frog. This animal* is
a worm when it comes from the" egg, and remains such
the first four days of its life, having neither eyes, nor
ears, nor nostrils, nor respiratory organs. It crawls.
It breathes through its skin. After a while a neck is
grooved into the flesh. Its soft lips are hardened into
a horny beak. The different organs, one after another,
bud out, then a pair of branching gills, and last a long
* Quatrefages, pp. 89-91.
MENTAL LIFE BftI,G'\V 'THE'
and limber tail. The worm has become a fish. Three
or four days more elapse, and the gills sink back into
the body, while in their place others come, much more
complex, arranged in vascular tufts, one hundred and
twelve in each. But they, too, have their day, and are
absorbed, together with their frame-work of bone and
cartilage, to be succeeded by an entirely different breath-
ing apparatus, the initial of a second correlated group
of radical changes. Lungs are developed, the mouth
widened, the horny beak converted into rows. of teeth;
the stomach, the abdomen, the intestines, prepared for
the reception of animal food in place of vegetable ;
four limbs, fully equipped with hip- and shoulder- bones,
with nerves and blood-vessels, push out through the
skin ; while the tail, being now supplanted by them as
a means of locomotion, is carried away piecemeal by
the absorbents, and the animal passes the remainder of
its days as an air-breathing and flesh-eating batrachian.
In this second group of phenomena investigators
have been as greatly puzzled as in the first to draw
sharply the dividing-line between the various classes
into which, according to Agassiz, are separated the four
great types of the animal kingdom. True, they have
pretty generally agreed to assign animals to those classes
in which they last appear. But the ephemera, for in-
stance, are only for a single hour winged insects, while
for two long years preceding they are a combination of
fish and worm. So, too, locusts burrow in the ground
as grubs for seven years, and sometimes for a longer
term, before they fill the air with the roar of their
wings. And it is only for six weeks they are permitted
to revel in this freer, gayer life. They eat nothing,
-ox VEXUD QUESTIONS.
subsisting simply on the deposits of fat packed away
under their skins during those long years in which they
crawled through galleries sunk far out of reach of both
sun and frost. Their sole business now seems to be,
like the ephemera, to deposit the eggs out of which shall
come the new generation. And then there are other
forms, in each of which, even in the adult state, are so
deftly joined essential characteristics of two, three, some-
times even more, classes, that they have baffled the in-
genuity of scientists to properly label them.
When man was placed on the scene, there was, I be-
lieve, an entirely new departure in creation, a departure
as radical as when animal life first came to share the
earth with the vegetable. Before man's advent there
was the reign of instinct ; with it was ushered in that of
reason. Chemists have, by their experiments, brought
to light many striking contrasts between the vegetable
and animal forces in their effects on matter. Contrasts
equally striking exist, as I purpose showing, between
instinct and reason respecting their sources of knowledge
and the character and methods of their work. I also
propose to show that as characteristics of plant and
animal are, as we have seen, sometimes strangely inter-
woven in a single organism, and also as important parts
in the bodily form and function of widely divergent
classes are found not infrequently coexisting or follow-
ing each other in unbroken sequence in the same indi-
vidual, so instinct and reason, though differing as radi-
cally as the animating principles of plant and animal,
and though as little likely to have been the outgrowth
one of the other, yet are found in each other's company,
serving as each other's complement and support when-
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 1Q3
ever any exigency arises whose demands they are sepa-
rately incompetent to meet. It has therefore proved
equally difficult to draw sharply the dividing-line be-
tween the kingdoms of these two forces, or to determine
the mental status of those of God's creatures who occupy
planes inferior to our own.
Many theories have been advanced, but none have
proved sufficiently tenable to have silenced controversy.
Indeed, I know of no question on which opinion is
more afloat than that of the thought-life of the lower
sentient creatures that so throng the waters, the earth,
and the air.
Instinct I conceive to be an impulse implanted in an
organism to aid in its development and maintenance.
It is as much a part of an organism as an appetite, and
is followed as blindly. The intelligence and skill dis-
played in the marvellous works accomplished under its
guidance belong to its Author, not its owner. It oper-
ates with as undeviating uniformity as the force that
organizes a crystal or a tree, or the shell-palace of a
foraminifera. Its workmanship bears the same marks
of Divine perfection. The animal is as ignorant of the
ends to be attained, or of the adaptation of the means
employed, as it is when, prompted by hunger or thirst,
it supplies its body with appropriate nourishment.
The ideas embodied are no more a measure of the con-
scious thought-life of the animal, than those embodied
in the processes whereby its digestive organs elaborate
its food into bones and muscle. The thinking is that
of the Creator, not of the creature. It, however, would
be as idle for us to attempt to pry into the mystery of
its real essence, as into that of the force under whose
104 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
direction the buried seed bursts its walls, and dew, air,
soil, and sunlight are moulded into branch and leaf and
flower and rounded fruit ; or to attempt to fathom the
mystery of that force which hardens into horn the pulpy
lips of a crawling, skin-breathing worm, pushes out
here a pair of branching gills and there a limber tail,
and then, when the pattern changes, quietly brushes
these aside and in their place builds up lungs and teeth
and jointed limbs, and alters the processes of digestion,
transforming thus a worm first into a fish, and after-
ward into an air-breathing, flesh-feeding batrachian.
But on examining the phenomena, which alone are
within our reach, I have been deeply impressed with
the intimate analogy I have found existing between in-
stinct, in the character and methods of its work, and
those forces which build up vegetable and animal or-
ganisms, and am persuaded to believe that it also should
be grouped with them as a kindred formative force,
and that hence its marvellous achievements should not
be regarded at all as revelations of the Mental Life be-
low the Human. I will cite a few of the facts which
I think fully justify this conclusion. ,
Autenrieth, the celebrated German naturalist, has
described for us the metamorphoses through which pass
the individuals of a species of butterfly named by him
Nachtpfauenauge. Its grub-life, like all of the same
genus, is one of unbroken monotony and dulness. The
sum-total of its experiences consists in gorging on leaf-
pulp, crawling under cover when it rains, and now and
then casting its skin. It has no home-life, its parents
having died before it began to live. It has no com-
panionship; it seeks none. This sluggish, solitary,
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 1Q5
gormandizing, creeping worm is at a certain set time
suddenly arrested by the electric thrill of some new
strange life. It stops eating, and, under a mysterious,
prophetic impulse, commences to weave about its body,
out of delicate threads that issue from it, a silken palace
of double-roof, so ingeniously braced by innumerable
supports that it both withstands violent attacks from
without, and yields to the almost spirit-touch, from
within, of that most fragile of fairies which, out of the
homely and prone body of the grub, rises erewhile, on
brilliantly- tinted wings, to flutter and float like a stray
bit of sunset on a summer's evening zephyr. By this
unique contrivance this little creature escapes on the
one hand from outside violence, and on the other from
the sad fate of self-burial.
Is it conceivable that this worm possesses such inti-
mate acquaintance with the occult laws of mechanics as
this piece of work presupposes, that it has acquired, by
its own exertions, this masterful skill in architecture,
or that it really discerns with clear prophetic vision
approaching changes in its form, its capacities, its needs,
and its destiny ? It has had no instructor, no personal
experience, no working model. This is its first attempt,
yet it bears the stamp of absolute perfection.
The butterflies of other species, when the hour is ripe
for them to issue from their cocoons, secrete a fluid that
acts on the silk as a solvent. This grub, as if conscious
from the first that such power will never be given it,
constructs its case on widely different principles. To
affirm that it inherits this knowledge, skill, and presci-
ence does not, in the least, clear up the mystery; it
only carries the inquiry farther back, for the first grub
6
106 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
must have been equally able to spin a similar cocoon on
first trial, or it never could have developed into a
butterfly and become the progenitor of a species.
The Iarv83 of ants,* though they can never secrete a
solvent, unhesitatingly enclose themselves in silk wrap-
pings, that bind them as firmly as bands of steel. It
would be utterly impossible for them, left to their own
resources, ever to break through the walls of their case.
Do they know that they will be provided with profes-
sional nurses who, somehow, will be such adepts in their
calling that they will cut the binding threads at pre-
cisely the right time, will free and extend the delicate
gossamer wings of their infant charge, and for a season
serve as their guides and purveyors?
The larvae of queen-bees also spin for themselves
silken sheaths, yet, strange to say, they leave these at
the exposed ends so imperfect that when a young queen
assumes sovereignty she easily inserts her sting, thus
killing in their cradles all those who otherwise would
have soon become powerful contestants for the crown.
Huber assertsf that this murderous instinct manifests
itself almost immediately after birth, but if the elder
neuters judge it best for the hive to swarm, the queen
is restrained by a strong guard, who drive her away
from one cell after another, until, her excitement rising
with each repulse, and spreading like a contagion
through the colony, she precipitately sallies from the
hive followed by a vast retinue of sympathizing attend-
ants. When, however, it is thought inexpedient to fur-
ther weaken the community, the queen is left free to
* Huber on Ants, p. 117. f On Bees, p. 147.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 1Q7
destroy all the seed royal with her poisoned dagger.
Why should these larvse, in marked contrast to those of
drones and neuters, always leave crevices in their cra-
dles, so that some royal assassin in a fit of jealousy can
murder them in their sleep ? Have they been informed
that a single queen can lay between two and three
thousand eggs daily, and therefore be abundantly able
of herself to populate the hive? Do they anticipate
that if allowed to live they will become burdensome
supernumeraries, except in rare crises, and are they
prompted by exalted patriotism when they provide thus
for their own early martyrdom ?
The saw-fly, after making her double incision in the
stem of a rose-bush, so poisons the tissues of the wood
that the minute eggs she deposits are saved from being
grown over and thus hopelessly crushed or imprisoned.
She also so limits the number of eggs on any one bush
that her children never go hungry. Does she under-
stand the effects of the poison ? Does she realize the
imminent danger to which her eggs are exposed ? Has
she consciously contrived how to avert it ?
By poison, locusts also provide for the safety of their
young. The branches of the forests visited by their
innumerable multitudes look as withered as if struck
with blight or swept by a tempest of fire.
The solitary wasp* brings to the mouth of a pit
which she has dug with her mandibles, and into which
she has dropped an egg, a given number of small grubs so
stung that their bodies, while smitten with paralysis,
have just enough life left to keep them from decay
* Encyc, Brit.
108 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
until there shall issue from the egg the worm, whose
hungry maw they are fated to fill. This solitary
mother- wasp, with absolutely no experience or observa-
tion of her own or of others to guide her, acts as if she
knew positively not only that a worm would some day
be hatched from her egg, but precisely when that day
would come ; that this worm would not have the fac-
ulty to care for itself, and that she would never live to
care for it ; that grub-meat, though unpalatable to her,
would be keenly relished by it ; that a given number of
grubs would suffice for its needs ; and that they, shot
through with her subtle poison, would lie dormant till
it came.
This same acute discrimination may be observed in
all insects in selecting for their egg-deposits such sur-
roundings as will most surely conduce to the hatching
and subsequent maintenance of their young, although
the conditions of their offspring's life are in most
marked contrast to their own. One will choose a par-
ticular kind of leaf, another the skin of a certain living
animal, still another that of a certain dead one. Guided
by this parental instinct, birds set out on their migra-
tory journeys across entire continents, over pathless
deserts and seas. Salmon exchange salt water for fresh,
following far inland the courses of the rivers, at times
shooting up steep water-falls of great height and swift-
ness ; the herring travel to the south, while the mack-
erel seek the colder currents of northern climes. Is it
possible that these animals, untaught and inexperienced,
are so deeply versed in biological lore that they are en-
abled by their own judgment to determine unerringly
the precise conditions fitted for the development of the
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. JQ9
embryo in the egg ? And is it also possible for them
to know in what localities they will find those con-
ditions fulfilled, or for them to thread their way thither
for the first time, without a guide, over prairies and
sand-plains and tumbling ocean billows? Dr. Jenner*
ascertained by clipping two claws from the foot of each
of twelve swifts, that after nine months' absence in
some distant country, they returned regularly for years,
with the return of the breeding-season, to their old
nesting-place.
It might be urgedf that among swallows and mar-
tins, who congregate and move off in great bodies, the
older ones have been over the route and now act as
guides; but this cannot be said of nightingales, red-
starts, or especially of cuckoos, who are deserted by
their parents before they are born and reared in the
nests of strangers. It is well known that those birds
which raise several broods desert each in its turn, and
become estranged as soon as they are old enough to re-
quire assistance no longer. This seeming knowledge of
courses animals have shown under other circumstances.
BearsJ have, in times of great scarcity, been known to
travel from their native woods through cultivated parts
of the country for hundreds of miles, on a direct course,
to a new wilderness abounding with supplies. Lord
Brougham, in his " Conversations on Instinct," gives
numerous instances of dogs, sheep, and other quadru-
peds, being taken from thirty to two hundred miles
* Philosophical Trans, of Koyal Society, London, 1824, p. 16.
flbid., p. 29.
{ Rev. M. Smith's "Elements of Mental Science."
HO VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
away from home, either in hampers behind coaches, or
on shipboard, and, though having no scent to guide
them, finding their way back, seemingly without trouble
or delay, through an unknown country.
There is a spider* which chooses a river-bottom for
its home and hunting-ground, and to effect its purpose
builds for itself a diving-bell that embodies in its con-
struction and management many of the principles of
physics. It is made air-tight, turned mouth downward
and tied on every side with strong cords to the bed of
the stream. After its bell is thus finished and fastened,
the spider comes to the surface, covers its abdomen with
fine web, swims on its back till the interstices of this
covering are filled with air; then, diving under the
mouth of the bell, presses out with its legs the air thus
entangled, displacing thereby an equal quantity of water.
Again and again this process is repeated till the bell be-
comes habitable. What, can we imagine, first deter-
mined the spider, supposing it to be following out its
own thinking, thus to locate its nest under water? for it
has neither spiracles nor gills, nor any organs fitting it
for such a habitat; or how did it study out so ingenious
a method for making such an undertaking possible ?
The inventor of this bell must have known that air is
lighter than water ; that it can be mechanically retained
in fine fabrics, and that when introduced into an inverted
receiver it will displace the water instead of becoming
absorbed by it. Has this spider been so close a student
of nature as to have discovered these laws of physics,
* Bridgewater Treatise, vol. xi. pp. 296-97; also, "The Trans-
formation of Insects," by P. M. Duncan, F.E.S.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.
and is it so gifted an inventor as thus ingeniously to
have applied its knowledge, without instruction or ex-
perience or working model ? This daintiest of palaces,
that shines through the water like a globe of polished
silver, must have been thought out in all its detail be-
fore the spider commenced spinning ite first thread, for
the weaver shows no hesitancy and makes no mistake.
It must also have been the product of a single mind,
for its parts are so intimately correlated that the absence
of a single one does not simply obscure the conception,
it totally destroys it. There must be either perfection
or flat failure. This alternative was presented to the
very first spider of the species.
There is another spider* classed among the " Va-
grants/ 7 that spreads no snare, but, when a fly settles near
it, steals along with extreme caution until, coining within
striking distance, it fastens a thread of web to the spot,
and with incredible swiftness and accuracy darts upon
its prey, the thread serving as a strong cable to save it
from a fall and enable it to regain its position. The
contrivance and forethought here exhibited cannot be
products of the spider's mind under the spur of expe-
rience, for its spinnerets are certainly not of its inven-
tion, and as the thread spun by them serves no other
end, and served that as perfectly on the first leap as on
any other, the spider must actually have been caught
on a thread itself had spun before it knew it could
spin it.
There is still another spider, f called the Pioneer,
* Bridgcwatcr Treatise, vol. xi. p. 298.
f Ibid., pp. 287-89.
112 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
which for the perfection and ingenuity of its work may
well excite our wonder. It bores in the ground a hole
three inches deep and ten lines wide, and carefully
covers it with two coats of mortar, the first rough, the
second smooth and regular. Inside these it spreads a
strong coarse web, and then over all hangs a most deli-
cate silk tapestry. The door with which it afterward
closes the entrance more especially commands our ad-
miration for felicity of design and elaborate finish. It
is a pronounced masterpiece. It is built of thirty alter-
nate layers of earth and web, has bevelled edges, is
hung on a spring hinge that makes it self-shutting, and
is also, like the tube, lined with fine silk. It fits the
aperture so perfectly, and on the outside so closely re-
sembles the ground, it seems to vanish the moment it
shuts. The mode of its construction gives it great
strength, and the bevelling of its edges prevents it from
being forced into the chamber beneath. It can never
stand ajar, but shuts tightly the instant the spider passes.
The apartment is perfectly water-tight and concealed
from foes. What more palatial residence or secure re-
treat has been provided for any of God's creatures ?
Wood-grouse are able to fly the instant they emerge
from the egg ; and there is a family of birds in Aus-
tralia whose young, hatched from eggs buried in earthen
mounds, no sooner see the light than they feed them-
selves, run and fly, and roost on trees.
How shall we explain this seemingly intuitive knowl-
edge, evinced by both bird and beast, of the laws of
perspective; their instant and perfect command over
their bodies ; their intelligent care of them, and their
old familiar ways, as if they had waked from brief
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. H3
sleep, instead of having stepped for the first time across
the threshold of life?
The bee, for the storing of its rich honey-harvests,
builds with its mandibles, out of laminae of wax it re-
moves from under its abdomen, a double row of hex-
agonal cells. Its comb, however unequal the surfaces
to which it is attached, bears the severest test of the
microscope for completeness and precision, though the
bee performs its tasks without instruction or experience
or protracted study, and works in the dark guided sim-
ply by its antenna, its eyes being stone-blind inside the
hive, their lenses having no adjustable focus and being
constructed for long range. Its comb bears also the
test of science. The most eminent mathematicians
pronounce the angles to which the planes of the sides
and ends of its cells are inclined to be precisely those
which will secure the greatest strength with the least
expenditure of material according to the principles of
maxima and minima as laid down in the Differential
Calculus. But think you the bee's apparent knowledge
of mathematics any more real than that of the buds
which break out about the bole of a tree in accordance
with the rule of arithmetical progression? Should we
be disposed to plead that the skill and knowledge here
displayed are but transmitted acquisitions of some former
age, the difficulty would still confront us of explaining
how these acquisitions could at the first have been made.
But this plea is in this instance denied us, as neither the
father nor mother of the worker-bee ever moulded a
pellet of wax, or, for purposes of storage, ever thrust
their heads inside a flower-cup. They are born aristo-
crats. They have neither skill in architecture, knowl-
6*
114 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
edge of mathematics, nor habits of thrift ; indeed, they
have neither long and flexible tongues, nor honey stom-
achs, nor pollen-baskets, nor wax-pouches, to transmit
to this their strange sexless child.
When their queen dies, the bees select the larva of a
worker less than three days old, greatly enlarge the walls
of its cell by combining it with others adjoining, change
its position from a horizontal to a vertical one, and pro-
vide for it a superior kind of food called royal jelly.
How do these nurses know that such treatment will
secure the desired transformation ? They here prove
equal to an emergency which they could not have fore-
seen, and act as if they were acquainted with laws of
biology which scientists have thus far searched for in
vain. The very first brood-comb that was ever built
by the first swarm of bees must have been made up of
neuter, drone, and queen cells, and the latter must have
been distinguished from the others by these same marked
differences in size, position, and contents.
The ducts that lead from the different ovaries of the
queen finally unite in a common oviduct, on the side of
which is a little pea-shaped sack called the spermatheca.
About it voluntary muscles are so placed that the queen
can or not, as she chooses, fertilize her eggs as they pass
down the tube and thus determine the sex and destiny
of future images. She not only seems conscious of this
power, but to use it intelligently, taking care to deposit
the unfertilized eggs only in drone cells. But is she,
in fact, conscious of the consequences of her acts ? Is
this most profound knowledge her own ? What deter-
mined the first bee-builders of drone cells to make them
larger and longer than those of neuters? or what deter-
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. H5
mined the first bee-foragers to bring home in their
baskets pollen instead of nectar to feed the future
larvae? How did they know that this was fit food for
any one? If the queen returns successful from her
marriage-flight, the workers wage a merciless war
against the drones, who, not having been provided with
any weapons of defence designedly, fall an easy prey
to the poisoned darts of their destroyers. How do the
workers know that the drones will henceforth be only
a burden to the colony ? Are they self-appointed ex-
ecutive officials of the Divine Code? Or is their com-
mission to be found in some implanted impulse which
commands and secures from them unquestioning obe-
dience ?
Do those lizards which live along the banks of the
La Plata know that when, at the approach of danger,
they suddenly shut their eyes and flatten themselves
they are actually hidden because of the close resem-
blance of their mottled tints to the sand-plains where
they lie? Or do the pipe-fish understand that they,
with their reddish streaming filaments, are hardly dis-
tinguishable from the sea-weed to which they cling
with their prehensile tails ? Does the ray or torpedo
realize at the first that it has an electric battery by
whose discharge it can send a shock of paralysis
along the nerve-fibres of its foes ? Is the cuttle-fish,
which in an instant beclouds the water with ink, any
less surprised than its bewildered pursuer? Do any
of the animals before they have actually used their
weapons, either of defence or attack, and used them, too,
dexterously, know that they possess them ? or have
they reflected how they can be used with most telling
116 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
effect ? On the first trial in each case there must have
been, it would seem, an instantaneous and unthinking
obedience to some impulse which to them is wholly
unintelligible.
Upon the testimony of such facts as these, of which
the earth is full, we are warranted in believing that in
works of pure instinct animals blindly follow impulses
that, like other forces in nature, operate methodically
and under fixed conditions; that they have no more
idea of what will be the result than they have of what
multiform changes their food is to undergo, or in what
way or for what purpose those changes are to be effected.
In most of the instances cited I have taken pains to
point out the utter impossibility of alleging that these
were but phenomena of " lapsed intelligence/ 7 a relic of
some acquired experience. This same impossibility at-
taches equally to all. In this department of the life of
animals we witness no signs of growth in either skill or
knowledge. Perfection in both is reached at a single
bound prior to experience, and independent of the aids
of instruction. There would be no change in the prob-
lem were we to transfer the inquiry to the habits and
achievements of the first individual in each species.
We are shut up to the belief that the thinking here
embodied is traceable solely to the Infinite Mind.
So deeply impressed have some observers been by the
profound wisdom and marvellous skill displayed in
works of instinct, that they have regarded the lower
animals simply as automatons, moved by direct acts
of Divine will ; as exquisitely-constructed musical
instruments, whose keys God's own fingers touch.
But how can those who entertain this view explain
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. H7
certain errors, and they are by no means few, into which
instinct is betrayed? The flesh-fly lays her eggs on
the blossom of the carrion-plant, mistaking it for veri-
table flesh, and thereby failing to secure the two great
purposes in nature, the preservation of the individual
and the continuance of the species. A hen will sit on
chalk or porcelain eggs, will have motherly attachment
for ducklings hatched by her, will worry when they go
into the water lest they drown. She has even accepted
young ferrets for a brood, and fallen into equally ludi-
crous errors. A dog will bury a bone already gnawed,
and food to which he has no occasion to return. Ani-
mals frequently use their weapons of defence on false
alarms, and they use them with all that wonderful
dexterity and inexplicable wisdom that suggest Divine
interference.
Can the phenomena of instinct be accounted for by
the peculiarities of bodily structure? Unquestionably
there exists between the two a deep harmony, a close
correlation, for changes in the instincts of insects are
found to keep pace with changes in their organization.
The ephemeron experiences no less than seventeen tol-
erably well-pronounced grades of development before
the larva attains maturity, yet it steps into its new cir-
cumstances without hesitation or embarrassment. The
old organs and the old habits make their exit together
to make way for the new. After it has crawled out of
the water, where its home has been for two years, the
only two thus far of its existence, and its skin cracks
open down its 'back, it lifts itself on its wings as fa-
miliarly as if it had been an insect always and was
escaping now only from some temporary confinement.
118 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
And the same is true of all those animals which pass
through one or more moults before becoming perfected.
But controverting this view there is the fact that this
correlation extends also to environment, and there is the
further fact that there are species which, though having
like organizations and surroundings, possess instincts
noticeably different. The younger Huber* tells us
that the brown, ash-colored, fallow, mining, sanguine,
fuliginous, and yellow ants have the same exterior or-
gans, use similar means for building their dwellings,
and resemble each other in figure, yet in their instincts
are wide apart, evidencing that physical structure
does not determine the peculiarities of instinct. Yet
this difference does not preclude perfect correlation be-
tween the organs and the instincts of these species.
The same may be predicated of spiders. They all
possess the same web-spinning apparatus, the same
organs generally. Yet one will spin a snare, another
an anchor-cable, another a diving-bell, another a bal-
loon, and still another a tapestry-hung palace. Even
the snares are not all constructed on the same principle,
for there is one variety of geometrical spider, which,
differing from its companions, spins a triangular web,
so arranged that it can, by seizing a certain single
thread, draw the entire structure to any desired ten-
sion. This it does, and then, after patiently waiting in
its concealed watch-house till a fly carelessly alights,
lets go its hold, and thus springs the meshes about its
victim. I remember having my attention arrested one
morning by a most gorgeous spider of gigantic size, its
* On Ants, p. 49.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. H9
body having a bright metallic lustre. Its web, how-
ever, differed in no respect, except in size, from that
spun by the little, gray, extremely ordinary-looking
individual which, the same morning, had chosen the
corner of my study for its hunting-ground.
These and kindred facts convince me that there is no
warrant in nature for concluding that in each act of
instinct God exercises direct volition, or that instinct
has its origin in some peculiarity of bodily structure.
This alone seems revealed, that between the organs,
the environment, and the implanted impulse there has
been established a profound correlation.
It is impossible to account for all the acts of animals
by this organic impulse of instinct. It has its limita^
tions, like every other force. There are daily recurring
emergencies which it seems inadequate to meet, and so
it has been created with possibilities of modification ;
and there also have been given it as auxiliaries, first, the
senses, which sometimes are marvellously developed ;
and second, the rudiments of all intellectual faculties, not
excepting, as I shall endeavor to show, reason itself.
The fact that the action of instinct can in any way be
modified may, at first, appear as against the theory that
instinct is an organic impulse; but experiment has proved
that even those impulses clearly organic, those that affect
the appearance and determine the habits of animals and
plants, can be more or less modified by the hand of
man, or even by a change in the surroundings effected
by natural causes. Ivy planted against a wall or tree
supports itself by radicles, yet* when reared as a stand-
* Bridgewater Treatise, vol. xi. p. 248.
120 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
ard it has been observed to send forth none. The
florist, the fruit-grower, and the stock-raiser have
amassed fortunes on these artificially produced modifi-
cations ; and Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, and other ex-
perimenters and investigators have confidently founded
a theory of creation upon the modifications which they
have discovered or effected in the modes of working of
those unquestionably organic forces that build up plant
and animal organisms. Though seriously questioning
the soundness of their conclusions, we can but grant
their statements of fact.
If such modifications are possible among confessed
organic forces, it should not surprise us that we meet
them in instinct. Some birds,* to avoid snakes, wholly
change their mode of building, hanging their nests to
the ends of branches and making the exit from beneath.
Ants in Siam do not construct their nests on the ground,
but in trees, that country being much subject to inunda-
tions. Dogs which the Spaniards left in the island of
Juan Fernandez were found to have lost the habit of
barking when Juan and D'Ulloa visited that famous
spot in their journeyings in South America. Dogs in
Guinea only howl, and those taken there from Europe
become like them after three or four generations. Hens
ushered into life in the chicken-hatching ovens of Paris
are said to lose the instinct of incubation.
Instincts which have become either injurious or use-
less through changed circumstances have not only been
modified or lost, but have been supplemented by habits
which after a lapse of time have borne to them a re-
* Brougham's Works, vol. vi. p. 263.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 121
semblance so close that they have been erroneously
placed in the same category. The mistake has hap-
pened in this way. Certain acts, at first done con-
sciously and with definite design, after a while become
unconscious and automatic, changing in some instances
the bodily structure. They have even been transmitted
to offspring. But it is utterly impossible for instincts
proper to have any such origin, as I have already shown.
Failing to note this vital distinction, Darwin has at-
tempted to draw the conclusion, from some instances of
habits having thus been changed into pseudo-instincts
and carried down from one generation to another, that
such must be the nature and origin of all impulses that
are instinctive. The skill acquired by dogs in hunting
is known to be inherited by their pups, so that South
American dogs will, the first time they are taken to the
chase, hunt in line, while those from other lands will
rush on singly and be destroyed. Here are knowledge
and skill, first acquired through experience, appearing
in subsequent generations as apparently instinctive per-
ceptions and impulses. It will be found that many of
the acts of animals which are supposed to be prompted
by instinct are really and only confirmed habits.
Instinct is also, as we have remarked, associated with
the bodily senses developed often to marvellous acute-
ness, and associated so intimately with them that its
work and theirs have frequently been confounded. It
is by the odor of the carrion-plant that the flesh-fly is
so fatally misled to deposit its eggs in its tissues. The
bee is attracted by the scent of the nectar-cups, and it
keeps sweet and healthful the air in its hive by enclos-
ing in propolis any offensive foreign substance found
122 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
within and too cumbersome to handle. A dog's power
of smell so immeasurably transcends our own that we
would not believe such subtilty of sense possible were
it not demonstrated hourly in our presence.
In the wide contrast between the conduct of bees and
that of winged ants on leaving their homes, the im-
portant part played by the sense of sight may be noted.
All bees, even queens entering upon their marriage-
flight, carefully reconnoitre, while, without an instant's
hesitation or a single glance backward, ants fly away so
far that to retrace their course becomes a practical im-
possibility. The ants have no thought of return, and
hence make no provision for it. They are simply in
search of suitable sites for the new colonies nature has
appointed them to establish.
The powers of observation of carrier-pigeons and the
tenacity of their memories, together with their undying
local attachments, at least partially account for their
wonderful achievements. Those who have them in
training first throw them a few yards from their dove-
cots, and then a little farther, each time lengthening
the distance and changing the direction until the feat-
ures of the landscape become perfectly familiar and in-
delibly impressed. Still, this is only a partial explana-
tion, for they will readily find their way back not only
after the lapse of years, but even across trackless seas,
though their schooling made them acquainted only with
the immediate neighborhood of their old home. So,
too, the flights of bees can thus be but partially ex-
plained. The flowers they are to enter and empty may
be nodding in a meadow a mile away. Their eyes, it
is true, are suited for long range, and are, no doubt,
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 123
brought into full requisition, but when after visiting
flower after flower, taking in cargo of pollen or nectar,
they rise in circles through the air, they must have
some other and surer guide than any known organ of
the body, to enable them to dart, as they do, direct as a
ray of light over hill-top and river-course and meadow-
land to their home again, for it now is to all seeming
beyond the range of both their sight and scent. When,
however, a bee chances to miss its aim and reaches the
wrong hive, it corrects its error only by circling again
in the air, showing that acute observation and a tena-
cious memory are largely concerned in the act.
No doubt it is, sometimes, by aid of the senses that
sheep and dogs, when taken long distances from home,
find their way back. They prowl over wider areas
than we are apt to suppose, and only by learning their
full history can we reach any safe conclusion. The
sight of the eagle and the scent of the carrion-bird have
become proverbial. All the architecture of ant and
bee inside hive and hill is wrought in carefully dark-
ened chambers, through the delicate touch of antennae.
Indeed, in all their systematic co-operative work, in
their accurate measurement of surfaces and angles, in
their mastery of the complicated affairs of their throng-
ing colonies, even in their interchange of thought, as
we shall find, they rely largely upon the aid of these
restless, sensitive, hair-like processes with which they
have been provided.
But as the fact that all animals are endowed with
one or more of the five senses, as guides and allies, is
universally conceded, no further argument or even
statement is required. The real questions at issue are
124 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
these : are the senses the elements that go to make up
the instinct, or is this a unique faculty, a distinct or-
ganic impulse, and are they but its servitors ? and, if the
latter be true, exactly where do the actions of each com-
mence and terminate ? All that is needed here is per-
haps a word of caution against attributing to instinct
what is really referable to the sometimes preternaturally
developed organs of sense.
In the life below our own we find not only instinct
and the bodily senses, but the rudiments, at least, of all
the mental faculties with which we ourselves have been
endowed.
Late one fall in a hive of the elder Huber one of the
centre combs, proving too weak for its load, broke, and
in its fall lodged against one of its neighbors. But the
bees, in which we should least expect conscious intelli-
gence, so thoroughly instinctive are nearly all their acts,
promptly propped the suspended fragment with pillars
of wax, which they constructed out of unfilled comb,
and then fastened it securely above and at the sides.
This done, they tore away the under supports, and thus
left the avenues of the hive again free. These insects
must have noticed that the fragment was insecurely
lodged, and, fearing lest it might be jarred or weighed
down by themselves before they could tie it, resorted to
this precautionary measure. Here must have been de-
liberative thought, an exercise of some sort of reflective
faculty. Plow else can the incident be explained?
This same acute observer tells us that he has known
bees both to discover a mistake and to remedy it. He
once placed blocks of wood in a glass hive, in such
positions that, if the combs were carried down perpen-
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 125
dicularly as commenced, the passages would be left too
narrow. The bees not only became aware of this, but
actually curved their combs and in consequence changed
the form of the cells. Here the God-given, ideal model
itself, which we suppose the insect to work out under
the spur of blind impulse, the insects themselves change
by some conscious act of superior intelligence. Huber
glazed roof and floor, and the bees began to build hori-
zontally, and when he again interposed glass they curved
the combs to reach the wooden supports at precisely the
right distance from the obstructions; thus not only
varying their usual rules of architecture, but varying
them by concerted action, different workers being busy
on different parts requiring different changes in order
that the whole might be developed symmetrically.
The younger Huber* states that he one day saw an
ash-colored ant constructing one side of an arched build-
ing. It was too low to meet the opposite partition. An-
other worker, chancing near, discovered the mistake, tore
down the arch, raised the wall the requisite height, and
then built a new arch with the fragments of the old.
This author, in the same connection, remarks that the
ash-colored ants do not build methodically, but take
advantage of whatever they may happen to find on the
selected site; varying the size, distribution, number,
and shape of the rooms according to circumstances.
Whichever one first conceives a feasible plan gives a
rough sketch, and its companions help it to complete
it. Their abodes are water-tight, several stories high,
and have many apartments and connecting galleries.
* On Ants, p. 41.
126 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Huber also informs us* that a female ant, if she is
needed at home, is seized by the workers before she can
follow out her instinctive impulse to fly away and found
a new colony, is stripped of her wings, made prisoner,
and placed under close surveillance until her desire to
wander ceases. The ants, in this instance, unquestion-
ably shape their actions to meet a new and unforeseen
emergency. They deliberately and by concerted action
plan to thwart the female in her endeavors to follow her
instinctive promptings. They not only break off her
wings and place her under close guard, but they seem
to go so far as to seek to divert her attention by a
thoughtful hospitality and by a formal presentation to
her of her spacious palace-home.
Captain King,f in Cook's last voyage, gives a singu-
lar instance of sagacity in the use by bears of means,
and almost of weapons. The wild deer are far too
swift for these lumbering sportsmen. The deer herd
in low grounds. Bears track them by scent. When
near, they climb some adjoining eminence and from
thence roll down pieces of rock ; nor do they quit their
ambush and pursue until they find that some have been
maimed.
Rev. M. Smith, in his " Elements of Mental Science,"
narrates that a fox was once seen to run down into the
water with a lock of wool in his mouth, and then to
sink, inch by inch, until only the wool could be seen,
and this, on being picked up afterward, was found full
of fleas. To have conceived and so successfully to have
executed this device for ridding the body of these pests
* On Ants, p. 116. f Brougham, vol. vi. p. 256
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 127
demanded a train of connected reflections on the part
of a self-conscious mind. The fox, in some way, must
have made the discovery that fleas cannot live under
water, and then he must have reflected that as he slowly
sank they would take their departure, provided he fur-
nished them some way of escape. He must have gone
in search of the wool or other substance, and afterward
stepped down into the stream, revolving this plan which
with such marked deliberation and conscious forethought
he had so happily originated.
By this same author we find given another instance
of fox-sagacity. The wily thief was observed in a
field playing around a group of pigs as though the
larger swine were objects of terror. The fox suddenly
caught up a piece of wood, about the size of a pig, and,
running toward the fence, jumped through an opening.
Then he dropped the wood and returned, seized a pig,
and bounded through the self-same place. Did he
compare the size of the block with that of a pig,
and then make a trial trip, so that he might not fail of
escape? or did he design to throw the mother off her
guard? In either case he deliberately, consciously
planned, exhibiting powers of comparison and judg-
ment.
Lord Brougham, in his " Dialogues," calls attention
to the habits of an American bird, called the " nine-
killer," which catches grasshoppers and strings them
upon the twigs of trees as bait for small birds with
which it proposes to supply its larder. This bird may,
however, be as unconscious and instinctive in laying its
snare as the spider. The same may be true in the case
of ants domesticating and milking the aphides, or of
128 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the man-of-war-birds in their life-long robbery of the
spoils of more skilled fishermen. But there are enough
well-authenticated instances to force upon us the con-
viction that animals can originate and carry out plans
to meet unforeseen emergencies, that are so complicated
and so sagacious that we must accord to them self-con-
sciousness, powers of observation, memory, imagination,
and judgment. The Duke of Argyll, in his " Prime-
val Man," claims that man stands radically apart from
the lower creations in the fact that he alone is a tool-
maker. Had hands been given to the animals, and
were they less marvellously endowed with implements
of industry or with weapons of war, necessity might,
for aught we know, have become with them, as with
us, the mother of inventions.
President Bascom, in his " Comparative Psychology,"
argues against the belief of the lower animals possess-
ing reason, their highest faculty being a memoriter or
associative judgment. This is, as he defines it,* but a
quasi-judgment, the union of two impressions in con-
sciousness, referable to the simple fact that they have
been so united in experience, memory being the basis.
Doubtless there have been cited, as proofs of reason,
many instances which really indicate no higher faculty
than that here designated. An incident cited by Dr.
Wilson, a former Bishop of Calcutta, of the conduct
of an elephant under most trying circumstances, is,
perhaps, a case in point. The elephant had become
almost blind. A surgeon had cauterized his eye,
causing him to utter a loud cry of pain. He got well.
* Comparative Psychology, p. 198.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 129
Some time afterward, it was thought best to touch the
other eye with the nitrate of silver. For a while his
keeper thought it would be unsafe to bring the surgeon
into his presence, knowing the elephant's memory and
fearing his revenge. But, to his utter surprise, the
elephant lay down of his own accord, evidently to
submit to another operation.
But the conduct of animals under entirely novel
circumstances, of which I have given a few examples,
the philosophy of President Bascom necessarily fails to
explain. And, further, there is to my mind abundant
incontrovertible evidence that there exists among the
lower animals a rational language, and to this I now
invite special attention.
Max Miiller, in his " Lectures on Darwin's Philoso-
phy of Language/ 7 maintains that though there is in
every human language a layer of interjectional, imita-
tive, purely emotional words, the great bulk of men's
speech, not excepting that of the lowest barbarians,
can be traced to roots which are signs of general con-
cepts; that the origin of these abstract terms marks
the beginning of rational intercourse, and that the
language of the lower animals is exclusively emotional
and imitative, absolutely no trace of a power of ab-
straction being found in the language of even the most
advanced of catarrhine apes. Interjections and imita-
tive words are, he maintains, the very opposite of roots;
one being vague and varying in sound and special in
meaning, the other definite in sound but general in
meaning; and hence the first could not have devel-
oped into the second through the lapse of however
protracted a period. Analysis of all given languages
VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
leads us back to roots; experience gives us interjections
and imitative words as the only conceivable beginning
of human language. If the two can be united, the
problem of its origin is solved. Go back to the begin-
ning of conceptual knowledge. The simplest general
concept is dual. We have, for example, a word for
father and one for mother; to express the concept
parents we would combine the two. This is actually
done. In Sanskrit pitar is father and matar is mother ;
matapitaren, parents. But this sort of combination is
cumbersome. The faculty of abstraction has helped
us out. As long as sheep, for instance, are alluded to
as sheep, or cows as cows, baa and moo will answer, or,
if they are alluded to as combined, then baa-moo; but
when more animals are included, or when all, an ab-
straction, a compromise of sound, is needed. This pho-
netic process, this friction or dis-specialization of imita-
tive sounds, Miiller claims, runs exactly parallel with
the process of generalization of our impressions, and
through this process alone are we able to understand
how, after a long struggle, the uncertain phonetic imi-
tations of special impressions become the definite pho-
netic representations of general concepts. This emi-
nent linguist maintains that in the formation of these
roots there was called into play a generalizing power
peculiar to man, that right here the languages of the
lower animals and of man diverge.
It is no doubt true that there has never yet been dis-
covered outside the human race any articulate speech,
the employment of any series of conventional sounds
distinguishable by us, for the communication of rational
ideas ; but does this fact offer sufficient foundation for
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.
the belief that rational thought does not exist, or that
the lower animals are left wholly unprovided with ade-
quate means for its expression ? It does seem strange
that, having organs of articulation and living with man
for so many thousands of years, they have not in a single
instance made the least advance toward communicating
with him. But words are not the only avenue of ra-
tional thought. The congenital mute possesses general
concepts, and expresses them through other channels.
Infants understand articulate speech long before they
attempt to use it ; and how often do we meet with ac-
counts of intelligent dogs and horses which have given
clear eVdence of understanding the wholly unimpas-
sioned language of their masters ! The fact that the
lower animals make no attempt to use their organs of
articulation for the conveyance of thought is, therefore,
by no means fatal to a belief in their possessing reason.
Lord Brougham expresses the opinion that when the
bird, dog, or horse is taught by tone of voice or gesture
to do certain things, it abstracts, connecting the sign
with the thing signified. The fear of disobeying or
the incentive to obedience is the motive. This does
not give him the means of connecting the act with the
sign; the sign is as purely arbitrary in this case as in
human language. There have come to light some
most marvellous facts, that strongly suggest not only
that they have rational ideas, but that they have ways,
yet unknown to science, of communicating them to each
other. The sacred beetle,* after having deposited its
egg, as is its wont, in a ball of refuse, rolls it about in
* Duncan's "Transformation of Insects," p. 280.
132 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
search of some fit place to bury it. In its strange
journey it now and then meets an obstacle it is unable
to master. Having exhausted its own ingenuity and
strength, by no means inconsiderable, it leaves the ball,
seemingly in discouragement, as having abandoned the
enterprise. But, instead of that, after a little, back it
comes with one or more helping comrades. The right
spot being finally reached through their assistance, the
beetle digs a hole, rolls in the ball, and covers it.
Must not this insect, after discovering its inability sin-
gle-handed to effect its purpose, not only have deliber-
ately thought out this plan of relief, but afterward
have rationally talked it over with its fellows?* Must
they not have intelligently listened to the recital and,
to a certain extent at least, have reflected as to the na-
ture of their reply? The act of depositing the egg
must have been instinctive, for the beetle could not
have known that heat was necessary to hatch it and
that the ball's decomposition would produce that heat.
But the insect's blind impulse is afterward supple-
mented by conscious reasoning to meet an unforeseen
emergency, and rational thought is, as we have every
reason to believe, interchanged through some channel
yet undiscovered.
There is a singular story told by Dupont de Nemours
in Autun's " Animaux Celebres,"* of an occurrence
which he says he himself witnessed. A swallow had
slipped his foot into the noose of a cord attached to
. a spout in the college Des Quatre Nations, at Paris,
and by endeavoring to escape had but tightened the
* Brougham, vol. vi. p. 262.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 133
knot. Its strength exhausted, it tittered piteous cries,
which called about it a vast flock of other swallows from
the large basiu between the Tuileries and Pont Neuf.
After crowding around and for a while apparently con-
sulting how best to proceed, one of the number darted
out and struck the string with its beak ; another fol-
lowed, and then another, in quick succession, each aim-
ing at the same spot, the entire company thus, for a
space of thirty minutes, forming themselves into the rim
of a whirling wheel, until, by their joint efforts, they
finally cut the cord. Though now there was nothing
further that they could do, they seemed very loath to
disperse, hovering about till nightfall. A marked
change, however, seemed to come over the spirit of the
assembly. Instead of that anxious, agitated tumult
of voices at the first, Nemours thought he recognized
a contented, happy chatter, suggesting an interchange
of congratulations over their truly remarkable exploit.
Herds of wild horses, flocks of pigeons and geese,
communities of beavers, swarms of bees, colonies of
ants, all appoint sentinels and have concerted signals.
Wild horses have been observed even to take their
turn on guard, an act hardly possible unless by some
rational intercourse they have mutually agreed to such
stated relief. Bees and ants are especially noted for
their division of labor. Among the first, besides the
patrol of watchmen, there are foragers, wax- workers,
nurses, scavengers, and fanners. The fanners, about
twenty in a company, form a line along some thorough-
fare in the hive, fasten themselves by their feet to the
floor, and for a half-hour vibrate their wings with
great vigor and constancy. When they become fatigued,
134 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
others take their places. By this most unique method,
ventilation, so essential to the life of the swarm, is
maintained.
Reaumur informs us that when a forager, whose
duty it is to scour the fields, meets any hungry comrade
who has not had time to leave home, it stretches out its
trunk so that the opening to its honey-stomach extends
a little beyond its mandibles, and the proffered food is
promptly accepted. If the forager has not thus been
met, it often makes a tour of the hive, offering a lunch
to bees it finds busily polishing and bordering the cells,
and thereby enabling them to continue their work with-
out interruption. This same courtesy has been observed
among ants. We learn from Huber* that if a new
queen is introduced into a hive, after an interregnum
of twenty-four hours, there is a general buzzing an-
nouncing the arrival. There is assigned to her a train
of picked attendants, who draw up in line on her pass-
ing by, caress her with the tips of their antennEe, and
offer her honey. When a swarm is ready to move,
delegates are selected and sent out to find a suitable site
for the new colony. Sometimes two swarms coalesce,
and then fly in an almost direct line to their new home,
showing that the report of the scouts lias been intelli-
gently rendered and adopted.
A saucerf of syrup was once placed in a recess, and
a bee conveyed to it. It remained there five or six
minutes, and then flew back home. In about a quarter
* On Bees, p. 107.
f Sir Benjamin C. Brodie's " Psychological Inquiries," p. 189 ;
who quotes from M. Dujardin's " Annales des Sciences Natu-
relles," tome xviii. p. 233.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 135
of an hour, thirty other bees issued from the same hive
and regaled themselves from the saucer. Their visits
continued as long as the syrup lasted, but the inmates
of no other hive in the apiary made their appearance.
The younger Huber* one day took an ants' nest to
populate one of the glass bells he had contrived for
making observations. One part of the colony he set
at liberty, and they established themselves at the foot of
a neighboring chestnut-tree. The rest were kept four
months in close confinement; but, on being removed
into the garden, a few escaped. They, meeting their
old comrades, made every demonstration of recognition,
gesticulating and caressing with their antennae and
taking each other by the mandibles. Then they all
entered the nest at the foot of the tree. Very soon,
however, they reappeared, accompanied by many others,
to look for those still under the bell. In a few hours
the bell was abandoned.
This same painstaking observerf remarks that he
often amused himself by dispersing in his chamber
fragments of ants' nests. The inmates, instead of fol-
lowing in each other's tracks, as caterpillars, in search
of shelter, would diverge on every side. They fre-
quently would encounter each other, for a long time
wandering about at random. At last one of the num-
ber would find a chink in the floor, leading to some
cavity hidden away in the dark, and then returning to
its companions would, by touch of antennae, appear to
tell them the good news. It would even accompany
some to the hole, and these in their turn would act as
* On Ants, pp. 171-73. f Ibid., pp. 154-55.
J36 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
guides. Every time they met, they would stop and
strike each other with their antennae, apparently im-
parting information as to the route.
Ants of the same species,* having the same form and
color, will often be at war. They will be inhabitants
of different cities. How do they distinguish between
friend and foe? When, through any inadvertence,
they chance to make a mistake, they no sooner discover
it than they relax their hold and affectionately caress.
The affairs of the two republics whose citizens are thus
met in battle go forward without either confusion or
delay, the same as in times of peace, except that now
and then reinforcements will march out of the villages,
or prisoners be borne in. In a battle once waged be-
tween sanguine and fallow ants, the two parties placed
themselves in ambuscade, and soon after commenced
the attack. When the sanguines perceived the enemy
pouring out upon them in overwhelming numbers,
couriers were instantly despatched to bring up the re-
serves ; and it was not long before from the village of
the sanguines there issued a considerable army, which
flanked the fallows and drove them from the field.
Dupont de Nemours, in his Memoirs, relates that to
guard his sugar-basin against the ants he placed it in a
dish of water. But they soon climbed to the ceiling
directly above, and dropped. As the ceiling was high,
and there was in the room a strong draught of air,
some fell into the water. Their companions running
around on the rim of the vessel, not having yet ven-
tured to make the daring leap, tried every way to rescue
* Huber on Ants, p. 193.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 137
the unfortunate adventurers. Clinging to the shore,
they stretched out their bodies to the utmost over the
water, but to little purpose. At last, growing ex-
tremely uneasy at the sight of their friends drowning
helplessly, just beyond their reach, a bright thought
seemed to strike them. A few were seen to hasten to
the ant-hill, and then to reappear, bringing with them
a squad of eight powerful, large-framed warriors.
These, without the least hesitation, plunged into the
lake, swam vigorously to the drowning ants, seized
them with their pincers, and brought eleven of them
straight to land. They then rolled them in the dust,
brushed and rubbed them, and stretched themselves
upon them to impart some of their own warmth, and
then again rolled and rubbed them. Four fully re-
vived ; another, being but partially brought to life, was
carried most carefully to the home-hill. The remain-
ing six, though dead, were not abandoned, but affection-
ately borne back for burial. This seems like a tale of
fairy-land, yet Dupout de Nemours testifies that he
himself was an eye-witness of the scene, and his ac-
count is in consonance with what is narrated by other
observers of the exploits of these truly wonderful crea-
tures.
There is no necessity for further multiplying in-
stances under this head. If what I have recounted is
true, and I have taken the precaution to select my in-
cidents from only well-accredited authors,- it seems to
me quite impossible to deny that at least some of the
animals below us have in some way, to at least a limited
extent, interchanged rational thought. The channel of
communication is still, and perhaps ever will be, a mys-
7*
138 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
tery, and, a3 we can only note results which to us im-
ply the existence of such interchange, we are liable,
it is true, to have our interpretations of scenes which
partake largely, almost entirely, of pantomime, colored
by our own experiences. Yet while this reflection
should place us on our guard and lead us to inquire
diligently whether some other interpretation is not pos-
sible, when it alone is found adequate to answer the
conditions of the problem we ought no longer to hesi-
tate in adopting it as the true solution. But at best we
are not warranted in ascribing to even the most ad-
vanced of the lower animals anything more than the
first faint glimmerings of reason, -just enough of this
higher faculty being granted them to meet the demands
of exceedingly rare emergencies when even instinct,
which generally is so trustworthy and masterful, reaches
the limitations of its power.
The next question that confronts us in this inquiry
is, do the lower animals possess any moral discernment,
do they ever act on principle, do they know what it is
to have an approving conscience or to feel the pangs of
remorse? This subject is too broad to receive the
attention it deserves, and original investigators upon
whose care and candor we can rely have gathered for us
too few facts to warrant any settled conclusion. How-
ever, I am at present strongly inclined to answer in the
negative. At all events, the vast majority of the acts
of animals, which at first seem to be prompted by either
some worthy or unworthy motive, evincing moral char-
acter, are on further examination discovered to be solely
the results of unconscious, instinctive impulse, to which
not the least responsibility attaches. It is only in some
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 139
of those rare, exceptional emergencies to which allusion
has been made, that the lower animals act consciously
and with deliberation. When a lioness endures every
manner of privation in care for her cubs, or even ex-
poses herself to most imminent peril in their defence,
there is in fact no moral heroism in her devotion, for
her conduct is purely instinctive. She is driven to it
by a blind impulse which it is absolutely impossible
for her to resist. Among all the animals, after a cer-
tain set season this maternal love is succeeded by indif-
ference, and inmany instances by absolute estrangement
and marked antipathy; and this alienation succeeds the
love with such regularity that it has come to be re-
garded as controlled by unchangeable law. With us,
but never with them, this instinctive love is followed
by a rational one.
When the spider spins its web, or pounces upon the
fly struggling in the meshes, when any beast of prey
tears the flesh and sucks the life-blood of its victim, it
at the first appears to us as heartlessly cruel, as the very
epitome of selfishness, as ruthlessly trampling down
most sacred rights ; but, on second thought, we excul-
pate it from all blame, for He who gave the weapons
of attack gave also the carnivorous instincts. As well
blame a bursting volcano that burns and buries a peo-
pled city. Bees show no hard-heartedness when they
despatch the drones with their poisoned daggers. They
are not justly open to the charge of traitorous conspiracy
when they without ceremony strike down a useless
queen to whom they have, their lives through, appar-
ently paid the highest honors. It would be a different
matter if British subjects, or even if British officials,
140 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
should thus summarily despatch their sovereign because
she had outlived her usefulness. It would be equally
idle for us to charge a young queen-bee with jealousy
whose first act is to stab in their cradles all those help-
less royal infants which may some day battle with her
for sovereignty.
Dragon-flies* are perhaps the most bloodthirsty crea-
tures known in nature. Their vision is acute, and they
fly with amazing rapidity in every direction without
being subject to the delay of turning ; their mouth is
strengthened to the utmost; their stout jaws end in
sharp points ; their mandibles are provided with keen
teeth, and their lower lips are very large, with palps
short and thick. Thus armed, they chase and pull down .
every fly, moth, or butterfly within their reach. They
rend and destroy these delicate creatures often from
wanton cruelty we should be apt to think, as they make
no use of them, just from some demoniacal passion for
inflicting torture on the helpless. It would be very
natural for us to pronounce upon them our severest
maledictions. But such judgment would be world-
wide of the truth. They are as innocent as a buzz-
saw whose teeth tear the fingers of a careless workman.
Is the cuckoo reprehensible because she lays her eggs,
when possible, in the nests of other birds ? or are her
children, which thus become the nurslings of strangers,
prompted by base ingratitude when they crowd out of
the nest the offspring of those very ones which have
thus kindly befriended them ? It is pretty well settled
that both are controlled by instinctive promptings,
* Duncan's "Transformation of Insects," p. 355.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 141
though the mother has been observed to occasionally
build her own nest and rear her own brood. The man-
of-war-bird, whose exclusive food is fish, has neither
the implement nor the instinct for catching them, and
so, perforce, turns freebooter, plundering more expert
divers whenever an opportunity offers.
There are some ants with mandibles arched, narrow,
and sharp, meant for war, not work. They belong to
the species Pplyergus. They inhabit underground nests,
built for them by brown and mining ants, the workers
of other colonies, which have been taken captive by
them in battle. Huber, in his seventh chapter, gives
an extended and very interesting account of an engage-
ment between these tribes, which he himself witnessed
near Geneva, in 1804. His attention, he tells us, was
'first arrested by a great mass of large, russet-colored
ants crossing the road. They marched rapidly, in a
solid column eight to ten feet long by three to four
inches broad. They soon came near a nest of blackish-
colored ants. The several sentinels stationed about the
door no sooner saw the approaching army than they
spread the alarm and boldly dashed upon the front of
the column. A crowd came rushing out from the en-
closure. The invaders quickened their pace, pushed
back their assailants, and clambered up the sides of the
dome. Some forced a passage along the widest avenues ;
others, with their mandibles, made a breach in the walls.
Through this opening the main army then poured in,
and the inhabitants of the city at once fell an easy prey
to the pillagers. In three or four minutes the victors
issued forth in great haste, each one holding between its
mandibles a larva or nymph, which it bore in triumph
142 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
to the home-hill. The children thus stolen grow up,
we are told, into serfs, and are assigned the household
cares and labors of their captors. Here is an organized
and thoroughly-armed band of robbers, who positively
refuse to do a stroke of work themselves, but make it
their life-profession to invade the firesides of the weak
and kidnap their helpless infants, in order that they
may have drudges and slaves to build and nurse and
forage for them while they idle and fight. Have we
presented us in the life-habits of these insects an actual
counterpart of that barbarous African slave-trade and
system of Southern servitude that once brought us under
the Divine displeasure, that cost us our good name and
nearly our national life? or are these little creatures
only blindly obeying impulses they have no power to
resist? Is the responsibility upon them, or upon Him
out of whose armory they received their weapons, and
in whose academy they were trained for fight?
Yerreaux states* that a custom prevails among ants
belonging to an Austrian genus called Thynus, in
which the males have long bodies with wings and
straight antennae, and the females short ones without
wings and with twisted antennae, for the male to carry
the female about with him in his flights, and treat her
with chivalric politeness, placing her on flower after
flower, that she may sip their nectar. Frequently,
however, other males, without mates, chance in the
vicinity, and become enamored. At once deadly jeal-
ousies are seemingly enkindled, and a fight follows. If
the protector perceives himself being gradually over-
* Duncan's " Transformation of Insects," p. 217.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 143
borne, as a last resort, in order that he may disappoint
the suitors, he falls upon her ladyship and unceremo-
niously eats her up.
Ants have frequently been seen carrying tired com-
rades and feeding hungry ones. They have been seen
succoring the wounded and helping them off the field
during the progress of an engagement. The sacred
beetle, we have remarked, will, upon invitation, assist a
comrade, and under such extraordinary circumstances
it would seem that it was conscious of the act and
actually entertained a benevolent purpose. In most
instances in which animals appear conscious of having
done wrong, of feeling remorse, their conduct can be
traced simply to a remembrance of former correction,
and to a fear that it may be repeated. The gentle,
loving faithfulness of our old dog Tray it is difficult
to believe is as blindly instinctive as the conduct of his
wild brother, the wolf, when the latter devours, with-
out sign of compassion, any comrade that, in the chances
of the chase, is so unfortunate as to receive a wound.
But we may clear our vision somewhat on this most
perplexed question if we reflect on our own instincts,
for we are by no means left wholly without such guides.
Who has not checked himself in the act of striking the
stone which has caused him to stumble? This anger
is simply the instinct of self-preservation. It is in-
stantaneous, and for the moment resistless, until after
long discipline our reason supplants it. How many
persons, of naturally generous temperament, receive
praise for acts equally characterless! As well com-
mend a thirsty traveller on some burning desert for
lifting a cup of cool water to his lips. In either case
144 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
there is a response to the call of only a blind, unreason-
ing impulse. The evidence of the existence of free
choice and of moral motive would appear in resisting
the impulse. True, such choice and motive might ex-
ist, and they often do, when the act is in the line of the
impulse ; but we are left absolutely without proof of it
until we have examples in which such impulse existed
and was withstood. The ant that helped his comrade
off the field of battle was, for aught we know, as un-
thinkingly following an instinct as the wolf that ate up
his wounded brother.
The Darwinian school of thinkers have attempted to
show that in matter of moral discernment and account-
ability the difference between man and the lower
animals is not radical, but one only of degree. Darwin
represents that man* is urged at times by opposing
instincts; that he will follow the stronger, and that if
the one that is for the moment stronger leaves on the
mind, after its gratification, a less vivid impression than
the one denied, then remorse or regret will ensue by the
retrospect ; but if it leaves one more vivid, then there
will be experienced a feeling of satisfaction. This
remorse or satisfaction, as the case may be, Darwin
defines as conscience; remarking that the migratory
birds who leave their fledglings to perish at the north,
and join company with the iioisy, restless crowd of
emigrants for the sunnier clime, would, in common
with man, have twinges of conscience at the thought
of their deserted little ones, were their memories equally
vivid, their maternal and their migratory instincts
* Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 87.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 145
urging them oppositely, and the less noble with the
greater power. But, we may ask, can nobility be pred-
icated of instinct, if, as he himself allows in the
same volume,* the very essence of an instinct is that
it is followed independently of reason? Where in-
stincts have the mastery, would it not be cruel in the
Creator to make remorse possible? Indeed, in the
very nature of things, could it be possible? Are not
it and its opposite but the concomitants of the power
and privilege of choice?
Herbert Spencer, in a letter to John Stuart Mill,
quoted in Bain's " Mental and Moral Science/' remarks,
"I believe that the experiences of utility, organized
and consolidated through all past generations of the
human race, have been producing corresponding modi-
fications, which, by continued transmission and accu-
mulation, have become in us faculties of moral intuition,
certain emotions responding to right and wrong con-
duct, which have no apparent basis in the individual
experiences of utility." Darwin, Spencer, and Mill,
though by no means disciples of the same school of
philosophy, are, from the very exigencies of their sep-
arate creeds, forced to assert that, in spite of the great
present difference between ideas of useful and right,
they are in their origin one, being but differentiations
of pleasurable and painful sensations. Right, accord-
ing to them, as Sir George Mivart remarks in his
" Genesis of Species," is but the gradual accretion of
useful predilections, which, from time to time, have
arisen in the minds of a long line of ancestors. In-
* Descent of Man, pp. 95, 96.
146 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
heriting a tendency to useful habits, we, as they hold,
come at last to consider it innate and independent of
all experience. Self-gratification, which was the initial
motive, is finally by the power of inherited habit lost
sight of, and it comes to be considered true that our
perceptions of right and duty are intuitive; in other
words, according to utilitarianism supreme self-love
becomes at last the noblest self-abnegation.
In the lower animals there are useful acts which re-
semble moral ones, and Darwin from this argues that
we in our moral nature are but developed brutes.
Rev. W. W. Roberts has exposed the contradictory
position of John Stuart Mill, who was one of the most
able of the utilitarians. Mill in his writings, speaking
of God, says, " I will call no being good who is not
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-
creatures ; and, if such a being can sentence me to hell
for not so calling him, to hell I will go." Of course
he would advise every one to take this same stand.
Rather than compromise his moral convictions, he here
expresses himself willing not only to forego the joys
of heaven, but, if need be, even to endure the hopeless
miseries of the damned. In the glow of his nobler
intuitions as a man, the cold, hard crystals of his phi-
losophy thus melt like frost-work.
The maxim, " Fiat justitia, mat codum" Mivart
justly argues could never have come out of utilitarian-
ism. Although the ultimate result of virtue is joy,
yet virtue, not joy, is the end sought by the truly vir--
tuous. Moral abhorrence of the impure and wrong,
self-sacrificing devotion to the right, cannot grow out
of mere notions of utility. Water will not flow higher
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 147
than its fountain-head. The real truth is, these intui-
tions have been forced to stem the tide of utilitarian
objections from age to age and have survived despite
their influence. If there were no incentive to right
action but notions of utility, moral disruption would
ensue. Spencer asserts that the fact that exact retribu-
tion is meted to all in this life will act as an effectual
preventive. In the first place, present retribution is
not proved, and, in the second, most men do not be-
lieve it, history and biography witnessing pointedly
against it. Spencer's model man could only be actuated
by 'the intensest self-love.
If then it be true that the lower animals in their
best estate of conscious thought reach no higher than
to entertain questions of mere utility, which seems
quite probable from the facts thus far brought to light,
there exists between them and us in matters of moral
discernment and motive and accountability not only a
marked but a positively radical difference.
We cannot properly conclude our present inquiry
without at least calling attention to a further and, if
possible, a still more difficult question than any we have
yet considered. It is this: Have the lower animals
any share with us in immortality? It might be urged
that the very fact that some of them, at least, have to
a certain extent reached a state of self-consciousness,
and had dawned upon them, however faintly, the light
of reason, furnishes presumptive evidence that they
liave actually stepped upon the threshold of an endless
life. The majority of Christian thinkers regard the
Bible as disfavoring this theory. But the proof-texts
usually quoted in this connection have, I think, been
148 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
clearly shown* to be wholly irrelevant. There are,
however, considerations drawn from the peculiar nature
of the Mental Life below the Human, which incline
me to the belief that there is in it no promise of per-
petuity. The most conclusive arguments upon which
we base our own hopes of immortality, outside the
Divine revelation, are drawn from certain mental traits
we possess, which are in pointed contrast to those with
which the lower animals have been endowed. With
them instinct is supreme; with us, reason ; and as widely
as these endowments differ, so do our experiences, our
purposes, and our prospects. They are born experts.
They have no incentive to growth, having no necessity
for it ; they consequently make no progress, and desire
none. They have, it is true, a certain amount of curi-
osity, but none which leads to true mental development.
In a certain sense, it may be said, they make slight
improvement. The cat teaches her kittens to hunt;
ants join in mock battle ; lions practise leaping ; birds
slightly improve their nests. Instincts are susceptible
of some modifications, and on rare occasions and under
the pressure of extraordinary emergencies have, as I
believe, been supplemented even by reason. But this
higher faculty, thus vouchsafed for present mainte-
nance, disappears the moment the pressure is removed
and instinct reasserts its sovereignty. During the four
thousand years of our acquaintance with their history,
they have remained substantially stationary. They
have no ambition, and seemingly no faculty for ad-
vancement. Any impetus given them by man proves
* Vide Bev. J. G. Wood's "Man and Beast," opening chapter.
MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN. 149
temporary, they, under a law of atavism, dropping
back again to the old level when man's hand is re-
moved. They are admirably equipped for this life, but
for this alone. Instinct's sole mission is to care for the
body, and instinct is the dominant form of their men-
tality, their reason, what little they have, being simply
instinct's assistant, charged as it is with this specific
trust. There is thus, so far as we can discover, no ulte-
rior purpose than to conserve the body of the individual
and to perpetuate the species. We can detect in them
no unsatisfied longings. Their mental horizon seems
bounded by the Now and the Near. We do not know
of their making any preparation for another exist-
ence, of their sacrificing anything for principle, of their
jeopardizing the interests of the life they now have, as
though they regarded it as secondary and transitory, or
of their thoughts ever reaching beyond the present to
a wider, grander destiny.
Although it is extremely difficult, as we have seen, if
not impossible, to draw sharply the dividing-line be-
tween the mineral and the vegetable, between the vege-
table and the lower animal, and between the lower
animal and man, yet no one can rise from a careful
examination of their prominent characteristics without
carrying with him a profound conviction that each
marks not only an important but a radical departure
in creation. This series of changes is an ascending
one, constituting four successive steps in the evolution
of a Divine Ideal.
The chemical forces are unalterably conditioned.
Here is the reign of absolutism, of mathematical for-
150 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
mulas, of fixed fate. Their energizings are marked by
the utter absence of choice. In the vegetable forces
we note the first faint dawn of a day of liberty. The
species are slightly modified by climatic influences, by
differences in soil, moisture, or sunlight, and by cross-
breeding: so that varieties have been multiplied and
improved by both natural and artificial changes in their
environment, though these modifications have proved
extremely circumscribed and unstable. Some types of
vegetable life, as the carnivorous sundew family, even
give out strange prophecies of the coming of still
higher forms of force. In the lower animals appear
self-consciousness, free locomotion, and the instinctive
impulse, supplemented by memory, imagination, com-
parison, the emotions, even rational thought; and so
closely do these creatures border on responsible free-
will that we are left somewhat in doubt whether they
are not accountable and destined to share with us in an
immortal life.
While in man there appear all these lower forms of
force, the chemical, the vegetable, and the animal, in
him alone we find the clear light of reason, the power
of moral discernment, full freedom of choice, a vivid
sense of accountability, and the promise of an endless
growth. Though in vast numbers of the human race
the Divine Ideal has not been attained, yet in all it is
certainly attainable. The progress of the ages is hope-
fully toward the breaking of every fetter, and the final
development, in Christ-born sons of God, of a perfected
Individuality, through the largest Liberty under Law.
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN?
IN Devonshire, overhanging the little harbor of Brix-
ham, where the Prince of Orange first stepped upon
British soil, a limestone hill lifts its head a hundred
feet above the level of the sea. From the earliest his-
toric times it has thus been standing alone in the midst
of fertile valleys, and not a single vague tradition has
floated down to us from forgotten centuries to tell of
any essential change in the features of the landscape.
But in 1858 the hand of some accident broke through
the crust of one of its steep cliffs near its summit and
laid bare what afterward proved a suite of long narrow
caverns. Their contents, before they were disturbed
by unskilled fingers, were systematically explored by a
committee of geologists appointed by the Royal Society,
and every detail of their wonderful revelations carefully
noted. After clearing away the loose debris that choked
the passages, they came first upon a firm flooring of
stalagmite, then a deposit of reddish loam, and last a
bed of clear gravel.. Pebbles of hematite with worn
surfaces were scattered through the gravel, with their
long axes in every instance parallel with the sides of
the caverns, and on a line with north-and-south outlets,
discovered as the work progressed. The loam abounded
151
152 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
in bones of mammoths, rhinoceri, cave-bears, hyenas,
lions, reindeer, and other extinct mammalia, occupying
positions similar to the oblong pebbles beneath them.
Here and there in the same deposit, generally more
deeply embedded than the bones, nearly a score of flint
knives were found lying. One of these almost touched
the hind leg of a cave-bear, not a bone of which was
wanting or misplaced. The stalagmite above held the
humerus of a bear and the antler of a reindeer. Across
the valleys, hematite and limestone were found in
quarry. The elements had decomposed the surfaces
of the lime into 'the same kind of reddish loam that
had been deposited in the hollows of the hill.
These subterranean passages, now ninety feet above
the sea, and over sixty above the adjacent plains, the
nature of whose contents has been placed by the pre-
cautions of science beyond the reach of controversy, we
may safely affirm were once the bed of a powerful and
turbid river, whose waters, checked in their flow by
their tortuous windings among the clefts in the rock,
were forced to throw down the plunder with which
they had laden themselves in their marauding course
through the country. The rounded condition of the
north-and-south entrances, the worn sides of the peb-
bles, and the direction in which they and the bones
were alike lying, together with the fact that stalagmite
crusted the bone-earth of none but' those galleries that
were in a measure removed from the main channel and
not subject to inundation except in times of freshet,
are, every one of them, unmistakable footprints of
running water. That the animals and the men whose
bones and whose flint knives were indiscriminately dis-
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 153
tributed through the caves must have been contempora-
ries, that these, their remains, were not the heteroge-
neous washings of sundry deposits of widely differing
dates, the leg of the bear and the antler of the reindeer,
it is claimed, furnish convincing proof.
During the last hundred years, five boats, one of
them containing marine shells, have been dug out of
the estuarine silt below the soil on which Glasgow
stands, and within its very precincts. They were evi-
dently shipwrecked at a time when the site of the city
was part of the bed of the sea. Under the streets of
London, whose authentic history dates back full nine-
teen centuries, there lies a deposit of gravel of broken
flints, through which have been found, widely distrib-
uted, the bones of elephants and of hippopotami, to-
gether with the rude stone implements of men. Geolo-
gists are satisfied that this is a river-drift ; yet the valley
washed by the Thames to-day sinks full forty feet be-
low. Two miles from Bedford, flint tools, elephant
teeth, and fresh-water shells were found resting on
solid beds of oolitic limestone, covered by thirteen feet
of undisturbed stratified gravel and sand.
The continent has also yielded to the industrious re-
searches of science a plentiful harvest of human relics
of great antiquity. The Danish peat-mosses rest on
northern drift and vary from ten to thirty feet in thick-
ness. Trunks of Scotch fir lie prostrate in the lowest
peat; above them are specimens of the sessile variety
of oak ; higher still, the pedunculated ; over all, the
common beech, a tree which has been through the
entire historic period, and is to-day, the prevailing
forest growth of these regions. There is no record of
8
154 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the fir ever having been indigenous, and when intro-
duced it invariably languishes. As it was once king of
the woods, radical changes must have taken place in
the climate to have thus secured its permanent banish-
ment. Since then, at least two other classes of forests
have successively skirted the borders of the bogs, and
in their turn vacated the soil for a more powerful rival.
Flint tools were buried far down in the peat under the
firs, swords and shields of bronze lay among the oaks,
while implements of iron rarely reached below em-
bedded trunks of the modern beech. Fresh- and salt-
water shells and the bones of mammalia were met with
at all depths. None were of extinct species.
The Meuse and its tributaries are bordered by high
bluffs of mountain limestone. The mouths of caverns
here and there open on their almost perpendicular
faces, often two hundred feet above the water-level.
Over forty of the chambers to which they lead have
been entered by men of science, their hard crusts of
stalagmite broken through, and the contents of the
breccia, or cemented masses beneath, thoroughly exam-
ined. The University of Liege has among the curiosi-
ties of its museum a human skull taken from one of
them. It was embedded five feet deep, in the same
mass with the tooth of a rhinoceros, and the bones of a
reindeer and of other mammalia. Near the tooth of a
mammoth, almost within touching-distance, the skull
of a child was also found, but it proved too fragile to
be removed. In another cave, in the same matrix
with the remains of a rhinoceros, was a polished needle
of bone with an eye pierced through it at the base. In
still another, two feet below the stalagmite, three pieces
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 155
of a human skull and two perfect lower jaws with
teeth were intermingled with bones of bears, elephants,
mammoths, and rhinoceri. Stone knives were also fre-
quently met with in like positions. These explorations
extended through many years, and brought to light a
multitude of facts of similar bearing. Human and
brute remains were so indiscriminately mingled in the
same cemented masses under the floors of stalagmite
that we can but reasonably conclude that they were in-
troduced into the caves by the same agency and at sub-
stantially the same time. That the different classes of
bones do not widely vary in their age is indicated, some
claim, by their bearing no marks about them of having
been previously enveloped in any dissimilar matrix,
and also by their close resemblance to each other in
color and chemical condition. A most striking corre-
spondence has been traced between many of the open-
ings on opposite banks, rendering it highly probable
that the old river-channels of which these caverns once
formed a part ran at right angles to the modern Meuse
and its feeders, and have by them been sundered one
by one, as through the centuries the waters cut their
courses deeper in the rock. Similarly engulfed rivers
still exist. In this very basin St. Hadalin and Vestre
sink suddenly from sight, to reappear a mile away,
while the torrent near MagnSe never again emerges,
but gropes its way down to some sunless sea. The
valley of the Somme, between Amiens and Abbeville,
is a mile wide, and sinks nearly three hundred feet into
an extensive table-land of white chalk. It is covered
with a growth of peat ten to thirty feet thick. Under
the peat is a thin layer of clay ; under the clay, gravel ;
156 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
under the gravel, chalk. The bones embedded in the
peat are all of living species, and the shells principally
of fresh- water origin. The peat reaches to the coast,
indeed passes under the sand dunes and below the sea-
level. Frequently the waves of the English Channel,
when lashed by the storm, will throw up compact
masses of it, enclosing trunks of trees, showing an ex-
tensive sinking of the land since the coming of the
peat. Ninety feet, more or less, above the surface of
the Somme are gravel terraces. As these contain flu-
viatile shells and abruptly end in isolated patches, they
must have been a part of the old river-bed, and have
covered the entire face of the valley before it had sunk
to its present level. These terraces, on examination,
proved to be repositories of hatchets and bones similar
to those in the Brixham and other caves, and so placed
as to corroborate their report, putting to rest objections
urged to the latter, that they were simply deserted dens
of wild beasts, used by savages as places of refuge or
burial, perhaps thousands of years after they had been
abandoned. These relics lay together under twenty feet
of gravel, in which there was not a single vertical rent,
while the overlying strata of sand and loam were equally
undisturbed. Near the bottom of one of the pits there
was discovered the leg of a rhinoceros, with every bone
in place. An elephant's tooth and a flint tool lay
within a foot of each other, the tool under the tooth.
Tusks of hippopotami were in the same-aged gravel
with knives and hatchets. Remnants of mammoth
and reindeer were also widely distributed. Along the
valley of the Seine, in the suburbs of Paris, there have
been like explorations, accompanied with like results.
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 157
In the Aurignac grotto, at the base of the Pyrenees,
there were seventeen human skeletons, more or less
complete, heaped together on a flooring of made earth,
associated with bones of entire limbs of cave-lions, wild
boars, bears, and rhinoceri, together with occasional
works of ornament and use. A slab of rock closed
the entrance. Outside, immediately in front, spread
over a considerable area, were eight inches of ashes
and cinders, mixed with gnawed bones of nineteen ex-
tinct and recent species of mammalia, fragments of heat-
colored sandstone, and a large variety of flint knives,
hatchets, and projectiles. Many of the bones, those of
the rhinoceros among the number, had been split open,
evidently by men to secure their marrow for food.
There was the bone of a cave-bear picked up, on which
the marks of fire were of such a character as to indicate
clearly that the bone still possessed its animal matter
when thrown upon the coals on the hearth. Loose
debris from the mountain had completely hidden the
relics. It is conjectured, and seemingly with reason,
that this place had been chosen as a burial-vault by
some primitive people who were accustomed to inter
mementos of the chase with the bodies of their dead
and to' conclude their obsequies with a feast. After
they had gone, hyenas probably came and gnawed the
refuse bones scattered in the ashes.
In 1819, at a place called Sodertelge, a little south of
Stockholm, the frame of a rude hut was found under
sixty feet of marine deposit. At the time of its dis-
covery it stood above the sea-level. A quantity of
charcoal still lay upon a ring of hearth -stones on the
floor. Dwarf varieties of brackish-water shells, com-
158 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
mon to the Bothnian Gulf, were interspersed through
the overlying strata.
The delta of the Tiniere, laid bare by an extensive
railroad cutting, was found to be composed in part of
three layers of vegetable soil, the surface of each of
which must, at different periods, have constituted the
surface of the land. In the first, five inches thick and
lying four feet below the present level, were found Ro-
man relics; in the second, six inches thick and ten feet
below, unvarnished pottery and tools of bronze ; in the
third, seven inches thick and nineteen feet below, rude
pottery, charcoal, and human bones. The regularity
of this river-accumulation is especially noteworthy,
evincing a uniform action of forces. The Danish shell
mounds show us that since men fished in the Baltic the
sea- water has been so freshened by the upheaval of the
floor of the ocean as to dwarf oysters and other mol-
lusks to half their former size.
Ninety-five shafts have been sunk in the mud of the
Nile, from which at all depths have been taken out
works of human skill. Yet the entire lack of strat-
ification, and the prevailing custom of the inhabitants
to surround their structures by high embankments
supported by wooden walls which in time fall away
through neglect, have together rendered it unsafe to
base upon the discoveries there made any theories of
human antiquity. It has been reported that in Mis-
sissippi and California bones of men have been found
in company with those of the mastodon ; that in New
Orleans they lay beneath four buried cypress forests,
and in Florida were deeply embedded in reefs of coral ;
yet these reports stand in too great need of scientific
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 159
confirmation to entitle them to anything more than a
passing notice.
Hundreds of earth-works, however, have been dis-
covered lining the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries,
which, their size, shape, and contents tell us, were, some
of them, temples ; some, barricades ; some, places of
sepulchre. Many have been partially undermined by
rivers whose present channels lie a full mile distant.
None are found on the lower terraces. The first his-
toric European settlers found these mounds, which when
built undoubtedly occupied a cleared country, covered
with full-grown forests of that wide variety of trees
peculiar to American soil, forests that had been used as
hunting-grounds from time immemorial by wild tribes
of Indians, among whom not a single tradition existed
of this ancient civilized people, who, in some forgotten
era, sowed fields, worked in metals, held commercial
intercourse with foreign nations, built walled cities, and
statedly assembled in houses of worship. On some of
these mounds trees have been cut down whose trunks
displayed eight hundred rings of annual growth.
These facts, every one of which has received the en-
dorsement of writers of acknowledged authority in
scientific circles, comprise the leading geological data on
which rest the more considerate theories of to-day re-
specting the antiquity of our race. It is true, there
exist wide differences of opinion on this subject, but
they are principally the outgrowths of differences in
interpretation.
On the question of time-relative, it hardly seems
possible for more than one sentiment to prevail. Since
man was first introduced upon the planet, radical changes
160 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
have been effected in the configuration of continents, the
system of natural drainage, the nature of climate, and
the character of brute tribes. Rivers that were main
arteries of life to extensive districts have disappeared
with the herds of mammoth that browsed on their banks.
Reindeer and musk-buifaloes have since then been forced
out of the temperate zone into higher latitudes, while
the only living near relations of the lions, hyenas, ele-
phants, and rhinoceri that men once hunted in European
forests have, as far back as there is any record, made
their beds in the tangled jungles of the tropics. The
present site of Glasgow, understrewn with the boats of
shipwrecked fishermen, has been lifted out of the arms
of the sea. The Thames has shifted and deeply sunk
its channel ; hippopotami have perished out of the land,
and over their old wallowing-places for many a cen-
tury have stood Westminster Abbey and the Cathedral
of St. Paul. The forces of hidden fires have thrown
up near the harbor of Brixham what were once parts
of subterraneous river-channels, transforming them into
the crests of isolated hills. Powerful streams on the
continent have become dry, and their old courses cut in
sunder by the more modern Meuse and its tributaries,
which, even in their day, have worn their way down
one and two hundred feet into mountain limestone.
Since that rude hut near Stockholm sheltered its human
inhabitants from storms and from the rigors of winter,
it has been sunk and the sea suffered to flow over it a
length of time sufficient for sixty feet of sediment to
settle on its roof, and has then again been lifted above
the water's level. All these and many other changes
equally marked have occurred within the human period,
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN?
yet in a past so remote that even tradition is silent con-
cerning them. Nineteen centuries ago, Denmark at-
tracted the attention of Julius Caesar by the magnifi-
cence of her beech forests. In this same source of
wealth she stands peerless to-day. Through such a
lengthened lapse of time, neither the character of her
trees nor their tropical luxuriance has noticeably changed,
yet we possess convincing proofs that oaks preceded the
beeches and were once as exclusive monopolists of the
soil as they. How long they lasted, or what influences
at first introduced or what at last banished them, are
matters about which we may conjecture but can never
know. Still farther back in the past than even the
dynasty of the oaks, forests of firs rooted in the same
soil and drank in the sunlight of perhaps as many cen-
turies. And when we have reached the pine woods we
have come only upon the close of the Stone Age in
Europe, for not a single bone of those extinct species of
mammalia, that were the contemporaries of man, has
been found among the buried trunks of this remote
vegetation. These relics, in fact, carry us no farther
back than the thirty feet of peat on the valley of the
Somme; yet, long before that, and still within the age
of man, this river of France had gathered, with its
current, a deposit of twenty feet of gravel, and after-
ward had cut its way down ninety feet into a bed of
chalk.
When we attempt, however, to solve the problem of
time-absolute, we encounter seemingly insuperable ob-
stacles on the very threshold of the inquiry. It would
be exceedingly hazardous for us, in constructing our
chronological tables, to assume that any one of these
8*
162 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
mentioned changes has been effected through some slow
and uniform method, or that the different processes have
been separated by long intervals of quiet. The inten-
sity with which natural forces have worked in the past
has evidently widely varied. Even if in some locali-
ties peat can be shown to have been a gradual accumu-
lation of decayed grasses and leaves, there are also
authentic instances of swamp-bogs suddenly bursting
and inundating large tracts of land with their black
contents. On our western coast, mud-volcanoes are
seen to-day in full activity. But aside from all this,
not only in different countries, but in different ages in
the same country, there may have existed decided dif-
ferences, if not actual contrasts, in the humidity of the
atmosphere, the length of the growing season, and the
character of plant-life. Yet without these data, which
it seems quite impossible to obtain, our time-estimates
can be little better than loose conjectures. So, too, the
known period the beeches have occupied Danish soil
really furnishes no reliable unit with which to measure
the age of the oak and fir forests that preceded them ;
for the conditions of growth may have materially al-
tered since then, and eaeh burial, for aught we know,
may have been the brief work of a single hour. We
have the testimony of President Harrison that the great
variety displayed in the trees growing above the Ohio
mounds is a sure sign of great antiquity, but as to how
great, even he, with his extensive experience as a back-
woodsman, thought it unwise to venture an opinion.
Again, rivers have not always been the tame currents
we see them to-day. But should we so judge, and on
their present wearing-power estimate the centuries con-
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 163
sumed by them in shifting their channels over such re-
markable distances and sinking them, as they have
done, hundreds of feet into solid rock, two or three
scores would scarce suffice, and they are but late suc-
cessors to those other streams, broken fragments of whose
abandoned beds we have seen to honeycomb isolated
hill-tops or to open far up on the faces of perpendicu-
lar cliffs. The "boulder clay/ 7 geologists unanimously
agree, is absolutely free of every relic, brute or human.
In no deposit under the clay has the latter ever been
found, yet both are abundant down to its very surface.
If this fact has any significance, it teaches us that the
glaciers had just left the valleys of Europe when man
came upon the scene. Melted fields of ice must have
recently been turned into turbid torrents sweeping to
the sea with a resistless energy, for none less powerful
ever could have left behind them beds and deltas of
such character as the explorations of science have
brought to light; and a change of climate radical
enough to unloose the frost-fetters with which a con-
tinent had been bound through an unbroken winter of
centuries must necessarily have ushered in a scene to
which the comparative quiet and order familiar to us
were entire strangers. River-washings can, in conse-
quence, furnish no certain clue to the mystery that
shrouds the birthtime of our race. Professor Guyot
claims that he has ascertained, from astronomical data,
that the last drift occurred nine or ten thousand years
ago ; but his figures yet wait proof.
Some have sought solution in those vast changes of
level effected within the human period, changes that
terminated the reign of ice, drove the firs and the oaks
164 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
from Denmark, stunted the growth of shell-fish in the
Baltic, converted ocean-beds into eligible city sites, gave
a new water-shed to Europe, and utterly exterminated
many of her animal species. But the same difficulties
still meet us, for it would be idle to affirm that the thin
crust formed over a restless central sea of fire has been
lifted and sunk through all past periods with a motion
measured as the swinging beats of a pendulum, not-
withstanding we are assured that the coasts of Scotland
have, since the Roman conquest, risen twenty-seven
feet, with a steady slowness wellnigh imperceptible, or
that at this very hour the coasts of Nova Scotia are
sinking just as gently into the arms of the sea. Earth-
quake and volcano stand grim witnesses against the
soundness of any such conclusion.
Some have hoped for an answer in the fact that since
the Stone Age an entire group of quadrupeds has be-
come extinct. Etchings on ivory, found in river-silt,
of a hairy mammoth, the fur-coated carcasses of ele-
phants and rhinoceri washed out of the frozen mud of
Siberia within the last hundred years, and the presence
of reindeer and musk-buffalo bones in the caves of
Brixham and Liege and in the gravel terraces of the
Somme, suggest that these strange species were of an
arctic nature and melted away with the glaciers and
icebergs of the drift. But further definiteness it is
folly to attempt. In New York in 1845 a mastodon's
skeleton was found possessing a remarkably fresh ap-
pearance. Within it was a quantity of half-chewed
twigs in a state of perfect preservation, the animal
having evidently mired in the bog on which he was
last feeding. Three feet of peat lay above him, a work
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 165
of but three or four thousand years on the largest esti-
mate. Jefferson, in his " Notes on Virginia," informs
us that he found traditions of the mastodon still exist-
ing among North American Indians. When, in con-
nection with these facts, we bear in mind that all of
these extinct species, whose bones are scattered through
the caves and outer river-drifts of Europe, were post-
pliocene and comprised but about a tenth of the entire
number, we feel that we have here left us a very large
liberty of belief. It is possible that we may be looking
into the sepulchre of a hundred centuries; it is also pos-
sible that these relics carry us no farther back than fifty.
Lastly, if it could be as satisfactorily proved as it is
confidently asserted in certain quarters that human im-
plements were first fashioned from stone, that bronze
succeeded the stone and iron the bronze, and that each
advance in the arts was taken at substantially the same
time the world over, it would then perhaps be within
the reach of present geological knowledge to count at
least the millenniums that the earth has been the home
of the human family. But even in this day of needle-
guns and Henry rifles the Australian lives on game
killed with stone weapons strangely resembling those
dug from the gravel-pits at Amiens and Abbeville;
and a hundred years have scarcely passed away since
powder and ball usurped the place of the Indian's flint
hatchet and arrow-head. In the early ages, as wide
contrasts as these may have marked the condition of
people separated simply by a lake, a wood, or a moun-
tain-range ; for frequent and familiar intercourse among
nations, a thing unthought of then, is the principal and
almost only equalizer in the world's life.
166 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
We turn to archaeology. The records of its dis-
coveries are full of the marvellous. They startle and
fascinate like the bold creations of Oriental romance.
A rapid review of a few of its leading facts must, how-
ever, at present suffice.
A stranger travelling in the south of England would
imagine, as he casts his eye over Salisbury Plain, that
he saw a flock of sheep quietly feeding in a distant
meadow ; but, on nearer approach, those "gray wethers,"
as they have been called, turn into monstrous blocks
of stone, one hundred and forty in number, weighing
from twelve to seventy tons, and arranged in two
widely-sweeping circles. It is claimed that they were
lying there, thus scattered and storm-beaten, nineteen
centuries ago, when Julius Caesar landed his legions on
the coast, as much of a mystery then as now. On some
of them, sharp angles, mortises, and tenons can still be
traced. It is generally conceded that these are relics of
a vast temple. At Abury are still older ruins of a far
more imposing edifice. Indeed, twenty-eight acres are
believed to have been covered by it when in its com-
pleted state. Diligent searcli has been made, and made
in vain, for the lost quarries which those primeval
builders selected with a wisdom and worked with a
skill that not only challenge our admiration but ex-
cite our wonder. How those immense rocks were
blasted from their beds, dressed into shape, transported
over the country, and finally lifted into their places on
the wall, baffles conjecture. There are evidences that
the roof of the temple was conical and rested on cen-
tral supports, its architecture widely differing from
anything Greek or Roman. Similar stone circles have
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 167
been traced across the entire continent, even into the
very heart of India. In the secluded regions of Abys-
sinia this style continues in use at the present day. It
is held that the temple of Dagon, at Gaza, against
whose middle pillars blind Samson leaned in his last
feat of strength, over eleven hundred years before the
Christian era, was constructed mainly on the principle
of a Gothic chapter-house.
There have also been discovered, in the near neigh-
borhood of these Druidic circles, very mysterious stone
sepulchres, consisting of four rough slabs, three verti-
cal, the fourth horizontal and resting upon them. The
skeletons within were uniformly in a kneeling posture,
a custom unknown to any of the monotheistic races.
No regard seems to have been paid to the points of the
compass. The graves of Jews, we know, are directed
toward Jerusalem, of the Mohammedans toward Mecca,
and of the Christians toward the sunrising. The
mounds of earth that originally covered them, frosts and
storms have long since torn away. This people, in so
securely and reverently burying their dead, have, in most
touching terms, told us of their firm faith in the other
life. These " cromlechs" can also be traced, as can the
stone circles, back to the very banks of the Euphrates.
In the presence of such facts, the question forces
itself upon us, Was the time, twenty -three and a half
centuries, usually estimated to have elapsed between
the Flood and the Roman invasion, long enough for a
single family to have so multiplied as to have com-
pelled the East, burdened with its teeming millions, to
drive out swarm after swarm until far-off Britain
throbs with its life, then this new life to grow up into
168 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
so compact a people and to develop such civilized social
wants and sources of wealth as to turn Britain's best
quarries of stone into temples of worship, then, after
all that, to waste away into such complete extinction in
a past so remote that even at Caesar's coming not a
living soul, not a vague tradition afloat among the bar-
barous Celts, not even a single name, nothing but a few
weather-beaten blocks of stone, is left to tell the story
of their stay ?
We have already alluded to a race of mound-builders
that overspread the central portions of North America
in some unknown era. They occupied the region lying
between the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, the
Great Lakes, and the Gulf. The ruins of their works
exist in immense number. Twelve thousand have been
counted in Ohio alone. Some of them form walls of
defence four times as high as a man, and miles in
length. They are strengthened and rendered service-
able by every manner of military device. Others con-
stitute extensive enclosures of various and most exact
geometric figures, containing earth-images of birds and
beasts of prey, or vast truncated pyramids designed for
purposes of sacrifice or of burial. From one of the
latter, near Newark, Ohio, fifteen hundred wagon-loads
of stones have been taken. The styles of the mounds
vary in different localities. In the region of Ohio,
squares and circles prevail ; of Wisconsin, animal forms;
and of Tennessee, parallelograms. In the States about
the Gulf, terraced pyramids, artificial lakes, and im-
posing avenues meet the eye. In Missouri and Arkan-
sas, their nature and position clearly indicate the aban-
doned sites of towns and cities. These mounds, by
WHEN DID THE HUMAN PACE BEGIN? 169
their great number, their wide distribution, their mag-
nitude, their peculiar character, and the highly-wrought
relics of ornament and use they have been found to
contain, unmistakably point to dense masses of people,
extensive agricultural enterprises, settled forms of gov-
ernment, and a most remarkable advance in the arts
and sciences. As we have previously stated, the fact
that forests are growing above them, possessing such a
variety of trees, and trees of such great age that unless
closely scrutinized they would be pronounced primeval,
the fact, too, that the skeletons they contain dissolve
at once into dust at the touch, while some found in
Europe, sepulchred in earth far less dry and compact,
have proved sound even after a burial known to have
exceeded two thousand years, and the further fact
that, without exception, they avoid the present lower
river-terraces, and in many instances have been under-
mined by streams whose beds now lie a mile away, im-
press us with the belief that many thousands of years
must have elapsed since this immense tidal wave of
human life swept over the American continent. But
these earth-works, scattered so extensively, constitute
but a small part of the ruins found here of former civ-
ilizations. Ancient mining-shafts have been uncovered
in the Lake Superior country. A half-ton mass of
pure copper, disengaged from the rock by fire and
mounted on skids, has been found under fifteen feet of
soil on which stands a forest whose trees show the
growth-marks of centuries. The pueblos of New
Mexico and vicinity, whose walls of brightly-colored
pebbles, sandwiched between slabs of gray sandstone,
appear from a distance like brilliant mosaic, are im-
170 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
mense three- and four-story structures, under some
single one of whose extensive roofs the inhabitants of
an entire village could find convenient shelter. In the
caves and fissures that open far up the faces of the
canons of Arizona and Colorado modern governmental
surveys have also brought to light ruined fortresses
whose solid masonry once formed the bulwarks of an
empire of cliff-dwellers that flourished in some for-
gotten era. These ruins occupy deserted districts.
Some assert that their history is wholly lost; others,
that they mark the site of that Aztlan of the North
mysteriously alluded to as an ancient fatherland in the
traditions of the Aztecs. The more cautious, and un-
doubtedly more correct, maintain that they were built
by the ancestors of those strange, half-civilized Indians
still occupying that territory. Whence or when they
came none know.
Cortez did well to dismantle his ships and burn them
behind him at the opening of his famed campaign, for
his followers were soon to see sights suited to cause the
bravest of them to draw back with terror. He had
not been long upon the march, when suddenly across
his path rose up, six miles of solid masonry, twenty feet
thick and nine feet high, flanked by mountains and
broken only by a narrow gateway guarded by fierce
Tlascalans. But by valor and intrigue they passed
the wall and pushed their way to the capital. The
glowing accounts they afterward carried back to Eu-
rope of the civilization which their mad greed for gold
had terminated in blood, though little credited at the
time, have since been abundantly confirmed by archaB-
ologists. The fields were well tilled. The inhabitants
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN?
were clad in cloth. Water was carried in aqueducts of
hewn stone that spanned chasms and wound about the
bases of the hills. The Mexican metropolis, reached
only by artificial causeways, seemed afloat in the lake,
upheld by some spell of enchantment. Its streets were
lined with canals, and the canals were alive with barges.
Pyramidal god-houses appeared with strange frequency
among its stone business-blocks and private residences,
their terraced sides ornamented by skilled sculptors
with hieroglyphics and bas-reliefs, and their towering
summits crowned with altar-fires that flared like me-
teors through the night down its empty avenues. Forty
thousand pyramids are estimated to have been standing
at this time within the bounds of the empire, twelve
thousand within the precincts of the capital. Of these,
the one with the most attractive surroundings was per-
haps the Temple of Mexitli, a structure of vast pro-
portions, standing in a square paved with polished stone
and enclosed by a wall covered with sculptured ser-
pents. About it clustered forty smaller temples, inter-
spersed with gardens, fountains, ponds, and priest-
houses, with room remaining for ten thousand people
to assemble inside the gates at times of religious festi-
val. That of Cholula is perhaps the largest still stand-
ing. It boasts a much broader base than any in Egypt,
and reaches a height of two hundred feet. Its crest,
now dismantled, once supported an altar and an idol.
The idol, an image of the Air, held a shield elaborately
engraved, and a sceptre set with diamonds. It wore
upon its head a plumed mitre, and about its neck and
from its ears ornaments of gold and of tortoise-shell.
That of Papantla, in the vicinity of Yera Cruz, bears
172 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
closest resemblance to the pyramids of Egypt. It is
built of massive blocks laid in mortar. It has a square
base, and as it rises it presents an outline of rare sym-
metry. A dense forest has grown up about it since it
was abandoned, so that its existence was a secret, known
only to the Indians until two centuries since, when some
hunters strayed where it was and told the world of it.
Greatly as these pyramids astonish us and set us ques-
tioning, the aqueducts, the calendar stone, and the
bound volumes of " picture-writing" equally excite
our wonder. A word on each. The aqueduct of
Chapultepec rested on nearly a thousand arches ; that
of Cempoalla crossed on a bridge half a mile long and
over one hundred feet high. The calendar stone was
cut from a single block, weighing thirty-three tons in
its finished state, and found lying full thirty miles
from its native quarry, having been in some unknown
way transported over a rough country intersected in
many places by natural and artificial water-courses.
On its face were displayed in hieroglyphics accurate
measurements of time, the signs of the zodiac, the mo-
tions of the planets, and a true explanation of the
cause of eclipses. The bound manuscripts were of
cotton cloth, agave paper, or stag-skins sewed into con-
tinuous strips, in some instances seventy feet long and
from two to three feet wide, folded together in squares
and attached at their ends to thin boards that served as
protecting covers. The three styles of hieroglyphics
found on Egyptian tombs and temples were all em-
ployed on their pages, the representative, the symbolic,
and the phonetic, although the first, which is the lowest,
was preferred. The last is but a step removed from
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 173
the alphabet. There were great quantities of these
manuscripts at the time of the Spanish invasion, but
the conquerors, in their zeal to extirpate supersti-
tion, seized and burnt them wherever found, mis-
taking them for books of magic. A few escaped.
From these and from floating traditions we learn that
the Aztecs were comparatively modern occupants of
the valley, the Toltecs, a people of far higher culture
and wider knowledge of the arts, having preceded
them. Of these, a few sparse communities still re-
mained, and it was here the Aztecs acquired what they
knew of gardening, the smelting of metals, architecture,
astronomy, and picture-writing, although proving but
indifferent learners, as appears from the fact that the
more imposing of the public works and, judging from
what were saved, the more valuable of the public ar-
chives found by the Spaniards were of Toltec origin.
It is still a puzzle with the antiquaries how so much
stone-cutting was accomplished with bronze tools, or
how such ponderous masses were mined and moved
without gunpowder, machinery, or beasts of burden.
Before the Toltecs came the Colhuas, the bearded white
men of tradition. Their more southern empire centred
about Yucatan. Humboldt seemed inclined to the opin-
ion that they were originally from the East, their ships
dropping anchor in the harbors of the New World, in
a past antedating even the rise of the Chinese or the
Hindoo races of ancient Asia. The stately ruins of
over half a hundred of their cities have been found in
the heart of the forests. Their history had already
passed into tradition, and wellnigh passed out of it,
before Cortez landed his forces on the Mexican coast.
174 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Walk down their deserted streets, and far above you,
on either side, you will see finely-finished palaces and
temples resting upon the tops of immense truncated
pyramids, their massive walls in places still standing
ninety feet above their high foundations, their facades
stretching out two and three hundred feet, elaborately
carved with hieroglyphics, whose meanings are yet
sealed secrets. Climb the staircases that lead up the
sides of the pyramids, enter the open door-ways of those
veritable castles in the air, and you will find yourselves
within some of the most unique art galleries in the
world. Here, rich mouldings and arabesques, wrought
into many a quaint device with consummate skill, will
meet your eye; there, pictures twenty-five feet wide
and from ten to fifteen high, cut into the polished faces
of the accurately fitted stones, will introduce you to the
battle-fields, the gardens, and the domestic hearths of
some mysterious Long Ago. Through Copan and
neighboring cities, you will also encounter colossal
monoliths twenty and even thirty feet high, scattered
in great profusion, having long since fallen from their
pedestals in the areas, on the stairs, and about the
open courts of the palaces.
Peru as the Spaniards saw it four centuries ago, with
its extensive aqueducts, its paved post-roads fifteen
hundred miles long, its beautiful hanging gardens that
reached far up the terraced slopes of the mountains to the
frost-line, the Oriental magnificence of its royal palaces
and temples of worship, the pages of Prescott have
made familiar to every English reader. Pizarro found
the whole country firmly cemented under one of the
most complete despotisms known to history. The
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 175
Incas were the reigning family. Their real origin they
studiously concealed from the people, proudly claiming
to be children of the sun, to have come from the South,
and to have founded Cuzco by direction of the gods,
made known through the miraculous sinking of a golden
wedge. Some authors assert that there is evidence that
they accurately measured the solar year, knew how to
write, and made paper from banana leaves, eighteen
hundred years before the Christian era. Others place
the commencement of their dynasty at a much later
date. Their consummate skill in the art of embalming
and their scrupulous care thus to preserve the bodies of
their dead, the peculiar inclination they uniformly gave
the lintels of their doors, many of the ceremonies of their
worship and the customs of their social life, strongly
suggest that possibly Egypt may have been their school-
master or scholar in some of the forgotten centuries.
At the southern extremity of Peru, on the shores of
Lake Titicaca, there may be seen to-day an artificial
mound one hundred feet high, surrounded by gigantic
angular pillars; temples six to twelve hundred feet
long, fronting the east with great exactness ; vast por-
ticos with pillars cut from single stones, covered with
carved symbols; basaltic statues adorned with half-
Egyptian bas-reliefs ; and palaces built of hewn blocks
measuring twenty-one feet by twelve and six feet in
thickness. The ruins throughout are of gigantic propor-
tions, and surpass both in grandeur and in finish any of
the works of the Incas or even the imposing structures
hidden among the forests of Yucatan. All knowl-
edge of the origin of the city had so completely perished
out of the memories of the natives, and the ruins were
176 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
held by them in such superstitious reverence because of
their' extreme antiquity, that the politic Incas saw it
both possible and profitable to connect themselves with
them by what to us is a wholly improbable myth. The
opinion now generally prevails that the city was aban-
doned before the first stone had been laid in the founda-
tions of Palenque, Quiriqua, Uxmal, or Copan.
From these and other kindred facts, which we have
not space to detail, it appears that in some long-ago era
the entire Western world was densely peopled by civ-
ilized races. The many striking resemblances which
the colossal ruins of their earth and stone works bear
to those found on the sands of Egypt and among the
mountains of Hindostan have led Humboldt and many
writers since seriously to question whether they were
not all fashioned from a common model, the American
builders carrying with them to their new home the
architectural conceptions and standards of taste that at
the time held sway in the old. Against this conclusion
it has been urged that the mounds on the Mississippi,
the teocallis in Mexico, and the temple-crowned pyra-
mids of Yucatan merely mark a particular stage in
religious development ; that they are each spontaneous
products of the human mind ; that nations wholly
ignorant of each other's existence and living in widely
different eras would, if similarly advanced in religious
life, resort to similar architectural expressions of their
ideas and aspirations. Mountains, it is claimed, have
ever been favorite places of worship ; and when they
are not easy of access, the inspiration of their presence
has become so deeply missed that Art has promptly
stepped in with her imitations. The Hindoo pantheon
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 177
was on the sacred Mount Mem, many studied tran-
scripts of which were scattered throughout India and
called its peaks ; the Persian was on Albordj ; the
Greek, on Olympus; the Scandinavian, on Asgard;
while Ararat, Horeb, Sinai, Zion, and Olivet are in-
timately associated with the Christian's faith. This
objection has strength, and perhaps would prove fatal
were not the resemblance alluded to but one of many,
among which may be mentioned that of sun-worship,
with orphic and phallic accompaniments, serpent de-
vices, hieroglyphics, extensive astronomical knowl-
edge, the practice of embalming, styles of dress and of
weapons, the offering of hecatombs of human life in
honor of distinguished dead, the mode of writing his-
tory by ingeniously knotting and braiding about a rope
as a base threads of diverse dyes, and also sundry social
customs of the people. Humboldt's surmise is further
sustained by some quite remarkable traditions. In the
Panathena3a, one of the very oldest of the Greek festi-
vals, there-is celebrated among other things an Athenian
victory over the inhabitants of Atlantis, an island in
the Atlantic counted so vast and so powerful as to be
looked upon as the crowned queen of the sea. Solon
heard a mythical story concerning this same land from
the Egyptians while visiting them over twenty-four
centuries ago. All connection with it by them, and
indeed by the entire East, had, even at that early day,
so long since ceased that not only had the fact of its
former existence become traditional, but it was thought
the waves were then rolling over the place where it had
once stood. Plato, who wrote in the fifth century
before Christ, also describes Atlantis, and in doing so
9
178 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
has, as De Bourbourg tells us, recorded many peculiar
features of the country and the government that are
strikingly analogous to those of the empire of Xibalba,
to whose stately ruins in Yucatan we have briefly re-
ferred. It can hardly be counted a coincidence that
Atlantis is spoken of as divided into ten kingdoms,
ruled by five couples of twin brothers, who together
formed a national tribunal presided over by the eldest
two, and that Xibalba was in fact, as has been found,
governed by ten kings who reigned in couples under
Hun Came and Vukub Came, and who at times also
met in grand council. Both were exceedingly fertile,
both rich in precious ores, both visited by some wide-
spread calamity, both possessed in common the name of
Atlas.
The full significance of these ancient American civ-
ilizations will more clearly appear when seen in the
light of other facts.
Five miles from Bombay harbor two rock-hills lift
their heads out of the waves. The valley between
them is heavily wooded, with here and there a rice-field,
a meadow, and an Indian hut to tell of human life.
Many years ago, when English sailors first visited the
island, there was a black stone statue of an elephant,
thirteen feet long, standing on the southern shore, and
from this circumstance it received the name of Ele-
phanta, by which it is known to us to-day. Clamber-
ing half-way up the side of one of the hills, we stand
at the entrance of a vast temple cut in the solid rock.
Its door-way is sixty feet wide and eighteen high, sup-
ported by two massive pillars and two pilasters. Look-
ing within, long lines of columns stretch away into the
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 179
darkness before us. The audience-room on measure-
ment proved to be one hundred and twenty-three feet
broad, by one hundred and thirty long. Many cham-
bers open from its sides, their walls covered with sculp-
tured mythological symbols. At its farther end is a
bust, each of whose three well-shaped heads is sixty
feet long. The hand of one of the figures clasps the
deadly cobra-de-capello. Various works of the chisel
are scattered through the apartment. Similar excava-
tions are met with on other sides of the same hill. We
are wonder-struck at the magnitude of the enterprise
and the architectural skill of the builders, when we are
told that the hill is of clay porphyry, so hard that or-
dinary steel makes little or no impression on it. These
ancient fanes are now all deserted. Who cut them out,
or at what time their congregations last broke up,
dwellers on the shore are as ignorant as we. The most
celebrated of these mysterious caverns are, however, at
Ellora, a decayed town in Central India. Here some
twenty-two of them are cut into the inner slope of a
horseshoe-shaped hill. They are ranged in a circuit
a mile and a quarter in length. The largest, called
Kailasa, or Paradise, is thought to have represented
the court of the god Siva. Inside its door a covered
colonnade, adorned with strange statuary, conducts to a
chapel supported by two mammoth elephants and by
two obelisks sixty feet high. Beyond the chapel a
pagoda rises at the centre of the room ninety-five feet
from its foundations, guarded on every side by the
couchant forms of the fierce beasts of prey that infest
the jungles of Hindostan. Farther still, lesser temples,
similarly adorned, are scattered through the ample
180 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
space. Forty-two colossal idols, each the centre of a
group, stand within the central building, forming the
Grand Pantheon of India.
It is believed, and with much reason, that these re-
markable excavations were made in an age so remote
that since their day the Sanskrit language has entered
the country and developed into vast proportions, sup-
planted the old Dravidic tongue in the sanctuary, on
the street, and at the home-circle, and finally has died
out of the mouths of the common people, to live only
in the pages of their literature ; that since then Brah-
manism has overthrown Siva- worship, has itself been
overthrown, after centuries of caste-cruelties, by Bud-
dhism, a form of religious protest that also in its turn,
after reigning upward of a thousand years, has been
forced to give way before the so-called modern Brah-
manism, which, compounded of the three religions that
preceded it, has for a period quite as long been the
ruling faith of over three hundred million people.
These caverns have been used by different sects at
different times, principally the Buddhists, who have
cut inscriptions and reliefs on the walls and set up their
own idols within them. This circumstance has misled
many as to their origin and age. We cannot enter now
into the proofs of their extreme antiquity, but there is
evidence on record that immediately after the death of
Sakhya-Muni, one of the founders of Buddhism, the
one who first gave it system and state-standing, his dis-
ciples used them as assembling-places, and there com-
piled the sacred writings of their sect, showing that
they existed at the time of, or prior to, the establish-
ment of that form of faith. There is evidence that
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN?
they were most numerous in India, far away from the
banks of the Ganges where Buddhism had its rise ;
that they existed in districts where the people were
black and savage and Buddhism was unknown ; that,
with but few exceptions, they were consecrated to Siva-
worship, the most ancient system of religion in India,
from which Hindoo Saivism was born ; and that they
must have been built, being works of such stupendous
magnitude, before Buddhism became the state religion
of Magadha and monopolized governmental resources.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sykes, the best authority on the
subject, says, "There is not anywhere a rock-temple
excavation dedicated to Brahma or Vishnu." Siva
was not a Vedic god, is not mentioned in the Rig-
Veda, the oldest of the Brahmanical compilations, and
belonged undoubtedly to the ante-Sanskrit people of
the country. * The Indo-Aryans simply incorporated
him afterward into their worship because they could
thereby strengthen themselves. It was to this Siva
that these wonderful monuments of human industry
and skill were originally dedicated. Similar construc-
tions Rameses the Great of Egypt found in Nubia
thirty-three centuries ago. Their origin was a mystery
then. He covered their walls with the records of his
conquests.
We see sun- and serpent- worship in the images of
Siva clasping in their hands the cobra-de-capello, in
the many symbols cut on the walls of the temples, and
in the Cyclopean fanes and stone circles scattered in
every province.
There is not a country in the East that does not
abound in ruins of kindred character ; but we must pass
182 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
them by with only a glance at one or two of the more
noticeable features of those in Egypt.
Although scores of authors have by their detailed
descriptions long since stripped these ruins of almost
every vestige of novelty, yet their colossal magnitude,
their wonderful displays of power, the vast lapse of
time they cover, the bold, grand thoughts and bound-
less resources of their builders, still gift them with a
resistless fascination.
Who of us in his fancies does not frequently look
into the tranquil face of that mysterious Sphinx, and
dream of those far-off times when in that sand-hidden
temple, between its spreading paws, sacrifices were
offered by its many willing worshippers ? Who does
not climb the staircases of the pyramids, and, as his
eye falls on that lonely plain, whose empty desolation
is relieved only by a few shapeless heaps of stone that
mark the long-lost site of Memphis, call back the city's
brilliant reign of thirty centuries before Alexandria
plucked off its crown, and, in fulfilment of Bible
prophecy, left it without inhabitant? Who does not
go down with his lighted torch into the hearts of the
honeycombed hills, into those wonderful picture pal-
aces cut in the rock, in whose grand saloons, enriched
with fresco and relief, depicting scenes in the lives of
the sleepers, the embalmed bodies of the dead have
been so long waiting in their sarcophagi of alabaster for
the souls that went out from them to come again after
the cycles of their transmigration are ended? Who
does not enter the open portal of the temple of Karnak,
revel in the architectural glories of its porticos with
their shafts and roofs of stone, wander through the
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 183
avenue of brute- and human -headed sphinxes that leads
to Luxor, a mile and a half away, pass by the red
granite obelisks, the gigantic statues, the pyramidal
towers, the sculptured gateway, the lofty colonnade,
until the southern limit of the vast area is reached and
Art's vast thought realized?
The naked mountain-ranges that follow the course
of the Nile furnished the ancient Egyptians, in lieu of
timber, exhaustless quarries of granite, sandstone, and
syenite, in the working of which they very soon ac-
quired a remarkable skill, the equally exhaustless
fertility of the valley securing them at once abundant
leisure and a fabulous wealth to lavish in this direction.
While their architecture presented symmetry wellnigh
without fault, permanency and magnitude were un-
doubtedly the chief ends aimed at. Their brains
brought forth Titans, and these they sought to clothe
in the enduring garments of rock. The stupendous
structures which they scattered through the valley in
such profusion they literally covered with hieroglyphi-
cal records of their religious and political history ; and,
firmly believing that their bodies would live again,
they made palaces of their tombs, and adorned their
walls with scenic and written reminiscences of their
private life. The lines on these strange record-books
are still distinct, except where they have been defaced
by war or modern vandalism, for the hand of Time
rests lightly in regions that never know rain or feel
frost. And now, ages after this people are dead and
the language of their literature has passed from men's
memories, there occurs the romance of the Rosetta Stone,
The secrets of the monuments are unsealed. A sudden
184 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
light flashes in among the shadows of fifty centuries.
The several princes of Egypt are found to have been
united into one monarchy, under Menes, as far back at
least as twenty-seven hundred years before the Chris-
tian era. Bunsen places his reign in the thirty-seventh,
and Lepsius in the thirty-ninth before, and they are
the most eminent German Egyptologists ; while native
and Greek authorities carry it still farther into the
past. The more moderate figures of Mr. Poole, of the
British Museum, are perhaps the safer, as he has with
much painstaking reconciled the different fragmentary
and full lists of dynasties given on the tablets found at
Thebes and Abydos, with those in the works of Mane-
tho. He has also discovered the luni-solar circle on
the ceiling of the Memnonium, used in connection with
the reign of the second king of the twelfth dynasty and
that of the last of the twenty-sixth, thus making it pos-
sible, by astronomical calculation, to fix these reigns
with comparative accuracy at the beginning of the
twentieth and of the fifth century before Christ. A
panegyrical year, or year of festivals, and other ancient
Egyptian divisions of time, he has also ferreted out and
brought into use in his estimates. He has furthermore
satisfactorily shown that many of the dynasties were
contemporaneous, thus materially shortening the time.
But even with his calculations we find Egypt a consoli-
dated monarchy, capable of building the vast city of
Memphis, founding Thebes, and, with consummate en-
gineering skill, turning with a dike the course of the
Nile, seven hundred years prior to Abraham's visit.
And since Menes, three hundred years had scarcely
passed before the pyramids appeared on the plain,
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 185
placed and fashioned with such precision that scientific
computations can be safely based on their lines of
shadow, and of such massive and firm masonry that
they have stood intact till now, and seem destined so to
stand till the world burns. The very oldest of the
temple-tombs known, those of Beni-Hassan on the
Lower Nile, are models of mathematical exactness, ar-
chitectural symmetry, and fine finish. They are evi-
dently the work of master-artists. Indeed, as far back
as archaeologists have been able to penetrate, they have
found dense masses of people, organized labor, a settled
government, a profound knowledge of the mechanic
and fine arts, an acquaintance with letters, even ad-
vanced notions of science. Beyond Menes, clouds of
myth and fable have settled about the centuries. All
that there is left us of value is a single tradition that
the first emigrants poured into the Nile valley from
the east. Their nationality and the date of their
coming are matters about which men still widely diifer.
We are, however, safe in saying that many hundreds
of years must have elapsed between this handful of ad-
venturers and the afterward million-peopled monarchy
of Menes.
We had designed to consider our theme from three
other stand-points, man's primal condition, the devel-
opment of race, and the growth of language ; but this
we must at present defer. A word or two in conclu-
sion on some of the new views taken of Bible chro-
nology.
Although geological time-estimates are, as we have
remarked, necessarily indefinite, yet the impression is
daily gaining ground in scientific circles that the
9*
186 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
changes effected in the earth's crust since man came
require very many more centuries than the sixty sup-
posed to be given in the Bible narrative; while the
twenty-three and a half between the Flood and Christ
are, by ruins still extant of past civilizations, most pos-
itively proved to be by far too few. Those of Egypt,
for example, we know, call for at least thirty, and
Egypt is supposed to be younger than India, and both
but colonial offspring of some still older people. The
extensive study given to development of language and
of race has also profoundly impressed scholars with the
necessity of a very much longer period to account ad-
equately for phenomena thus brought to light. This
seeming conflict between science and revelation has
been variously explained. None of the theories ad-
vanced are fully free from fault, yet none are without
suggestions of value.
It is found that the Septuagint version dates the
Flood eight hundred years farther back than the He-
brew, the one we use ; that its different statements har-
monize with themselves, while ours do not ; that it was
used by Paul in his Epistles, and it may be a transla-
tion of a much older manuscript. But the discovery
of so great an error in one or the other naturally leads
us to distrust the chronological accuracy of both. Some
maintain that the whole trouble arises from false inter-
pretations ; that Moses did not design to give family
genealogies ; that names which seem to be those of in-
dividuals are doubtless in many instances names of
tribes; and that from these occasional breaks in the
chain it has become impossible to compute the time
from Adam to Abraham. In this connection, the sug-
WHEN DID THE HUMAN RACE BEGIN? 187
gestion has been thrown out that the events have oc-
curred in the order recorded, but, as Moses was aiming
solely at portraying God's providences, he selected only
typical men and times, designedly dropping out of his
narrative whatever was not especially fitted to advance
his purpose. And in this same connection a hope has
been expressed that the translation of the Bible into
Arabic may result in unravelling the mystery that still
shrouds Oriental methods of writing history.
A third theory is, that the first chapter of Genesis
refers in general terms to the creation of Pre- Adamites,
and that an indefinite period intervenes between, that
and the chapter following. It is thought that had not
the world been thus peopled Cain would never have
expressed fear that men would kill him should he be
banished from home. It is thought, too, that other-
wise it would have been impossible for him to find
either mechanics to build his cities or families to
inhabit them, or for him to marry, except one of his
own sisters. It is also surmised that this interpre-
tation throws light on that difficult passage in which
" daughters of men" are spoken of as marrying the
" sons of God," " sons of God" being rendered " ser-
vants of gods," idolaters, the Pre- Adamites.
A still further theory is, that allegory and history
are so intimately interwoven that it is utterly useless
to attempt to separate them. Another, and the last we
will mention, is that our difficulties come from con-
fused notions of interpretation and revelation ; that so
long as we hold to plenary inspiration, this question of
time will be but one of the many problems that will
hopelessly perplex the thought and try the faith of be-
138 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
lievers; that Bible writers were all of them divinely
inspired men, but were something more than mere pas-
sive amanuenses; that they retained the free use of
every faculty, introducing into their books their indi-
vidual peculiarities of literary style and of mental tem-
perament ; that revelation extended only to the moral
and religious aspects of their themes, they being left to
their own imperfections, their own limited human
learning, when matters of simple history or science en-
tered in. This class of thinkers contend that the mo-
ment we lose sight of these two distinctions our footing
becomes insecure. Still, it would be difficult for them
to explain what some one has called " Moses's inspira-
tion of reticence/' his complete avoidance of that spe-
cies of extravagance into which every other cosmogonist
has fatally fallen. It is certainly not a little remarka-
ble that at every new advance in scientific investigation
new meanings have been ingeniously wrung out of those
first chapters, suited to each new exigency.
While these many widely differing notions witness
to the confusion in which this whole subject is yet in-
volved, they also show some reconciliation possible and
encourage Christians to still hold firm their confidence
and with patience wait.
PAET SECOND.
SATAN ANTICIPATED.
THE KEY TO SUCCESS.
SHELLEY.
THE BKONTE SISTERS.
189
SATAN ANTICIPATED.
I PROPOSE to illustrate how God, after having deter-
mined to create man in his own image, foreseeing that
sin would come and that struggle would follow sin, left
his physical, intellectual, and moral creations in the
form of germs, gifted with tendencies to growth, and
subject to such laws that their unfolding and final per-
fection should be reached through this very struggle ;
thus not only thwarting Satan in his designs, but con-
verting him into a most important, though unwitting,
instrument in the development of both the nobility and
the joy of mankind.
When the sun's heat reaches the buried seed there
ensues a struggling of forces, the germ forcing moisture
from the soil against inertia and gravity, separating
elements chemically knit together, grouping them into
new compositions, bursting their coffin-lids, and crowd-
ing up their heads for breath. Every leaf is a field
of conflict, decomposing and assimilating gases and
liquids. Trees battle with the winds, and, that they
may not be worsted, strike their roots still deeper and
bind their sinews in stronger cohesion. Thus plants
struggle through every period of their growth. When
they cease their contendings they breathe out their lives.
191
192 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
In converting vegetable into animal tissue there
appears the same phenomenon of destroying old and
forming new chemical compounds, that exists in the
growth of flower and leaf. Animal as well as vege-
table life enters through infancy and weakness, and
reaches maturity only through struggle. This fierce
chemical conflict that ceaselessly goes on while dead
matter is thus being developed into plants, and plants
into muscle, is but preparatory to a fiercer one, that of
animal with animal, developing tribal characteristics
among the brutes. * Rarely is one born, from mote to
mammoth, but comes battle-proof at birth and gifted
with instincts for fight. A microscope will reveal a
contest going on among the million occupants of a drop
of vinegar. The fish for defence have coats of mail ;
for attack, weapons of bone. The ants of Africa mar-
shal their liliputian forces with Napoleonic skill, and
endure with fortitude worthy of Greek antagonists.
From chaos until now, between bill and spur, claw and
tearing tooth, heel and horn, sting and tightening coil,
has this universal war been waging. From now until
the world burns it will continue to wage. God armed
the warriors, meant the fighting, planned the issue.
Mind, like plant and animal, commences in the germ
with no visible signs of power, and its development is
effected by giving it, to live in, act through, and pre-
serve, a strange compound of flesh and bone possessing
impulses in direct antagonism to its own. The mind,
forced to feed and clothe the body, is placed upon an
earth for the most part either hopelessly deluged by
water, piled into mountains, or spread out into long
reaches of burning desert and bleak moor. Only a
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 193
few small plats of ground are capable of bearing fruit
or are fit for habitation, while even these are governed
by laws of reproduction so hidden that only after an
apparent waste of vast energy and material, patient
experiment at last discovers them. The metals are
distributed through swamp bogs, mingled with the
shifting sands of rivers, or poured into the crevices of
metamorphic rocks. Storms beat pitilessly about the
body, frosts bite it, sunbeams scorch it, winds buffet it.
Yet the mind, thus compelled to shelter this foundling
of flesh intrusted to its keeping, finds Nature tanta-
lizingly giving building-material in the rough, trees and
quarries, without furnishing even a saw or an axe for
the hands of industry. Forced to move about this
cumbersome body, and soon tiring of its slow paces and
searching for easier and swifter modes of travel, it sees
the wild horse without a rider; but when it tries to
mount him, "Catch me," he saucily whinnies, and
bounds away over the prairie. Dangers beset it on
every hand, deserts puff simooms in its face, waves toss
their mad-caps over it, mountains belch flames at its
coming or try to crush it with the avalanche. From
this continual opposition to the mind's efforts to care
for that over which it is placed guardian, the issue is,
it becomes an Aladdin's lamp, and the elemental genii,
the slaves of the lamp. It touches forests, and they
melt -j it yokes steam-power to machinery, and trains of
carriages bear the freightage of nations through tun-
nelled mountains, and monstrous sea-gulls of commerce
flap their wings around the world. It looks through
telescopic tubes, and banks of nebulous mist are re-
solved into universes of stars. It mounts electric
194 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
steeds, and swifter than light dashes along the tele-
graphic highways of modern life.
These are but the beginnings of its trials and triumphs.
Often after it has built its cities and secured its com-
forts it finds them consumed by tongues of fire, poi-
soned with malaria, or crushed under the tread of
earthquakes. But out from this fiercer strife come in-
creased intellectual vigor, deeper knowledge of natural
law, and wider views of a ruling God. Its strivings
with these outer forces are still but faintest echoes of
those with the inner, in which the angels and devils
of human nature are desperately battling for moral
mastery.
Through struggle material beauties find origin and
unfolding. Sunbeams by forcing their way through a
semi-transparent atmosphere or drifting banks of mist
paint the golden glories of autumnal skies, and form
the twilight with its waking dreams and thronging
memories. Rainbows bend only on the clouds of pass-
ing storms and above the plunge of Niagaras. From
contests come those charmed eddyings of waters before
they leap, the windings of rivers, curlings of waves,
billowed beauties of lakes and woods, prairies and
drifting clouds. Curves come always from contests
between centripetal and centrifugal forces. By gravity
contending respectively with the force of projectiles, co-
hesion, and the upward tendencies of plants, fountains
are gifted with their graceful overflow, dews globuled,
and boughs of trees trailed in beauty.
So all the finer beauties in thought and feeling are
children of struggle. Thence came Hood's touching
plea for Christian charity, "The Bridge of Sighs,"
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 195
Whittier's " Maud Muller" voicing the " might have
been/ 7 the tenderness of Tennyson's " In Memoriam,"
" Tlie Court Lady/' that choice offering of Mrs. Brown-
ing's genius to English literature. It is through watch-
ings at the sick-bed, tears and prayers for the erring,
the fading of cherished hopes, that are developed life's
rarest graces. Unrivalled for loveliness will ever be the
smile of trust that lights the face of sorrow.
No less truly has struggle been chosen for the devel-
opment in character of the attribute of grandeur. As
its chief source in inorganic matter is the display of
power, seen in the violent commotions of the elements,
as earthquakes, volcanoes, conflagrations, lightnings, and
tenfpests, and as among brutes the highest grandeur is
found in their deadly contests, where serpents strive
with eagles, tigers with rhinoceri, where lionesses brave
dangers, suffer fatigue, or close in death-grapple in de-
fence of their young; so with more marked emphasis
human lives grow grand in dungeons, on racks and
beds of torture, at the stake and amid thunderings of
artillery, because there the greatest amount of spiritual
force is concentrated and is in greatest activity. Only
through the mighty martyr strugglings of the world's
benefactors does the Creator's image become. manifest in
his creatures.
From times of fable until now, freedom has had her
votaries. Neither arctic coldness which fetters seas in
frost, nor the enervating influence of tropical heat, can
still the heart's throbbings for freedom. This instinctive
aspiration may be found even among the savage tribes
of men. It is the very last of the nobler promptings
that dies out in the soul. The Esquimaux' huts of ice
196 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and the shifting tents of Arabs are among the strong-
holds of liberty. Pawnees defend with avenging toma-
hawks the hunting-grounds of their people, and in the
mountains of the Orient gleam in jealous guard the
drawn scimitars of the worshippers of fire. With ad-
vancing civilization this love grows stronger, and its
manifestations clothe with sublimity the records of
individual and national life.
Equally prevalent is the passion for tyranny. Desire
for glory and power, at first ennobling, when once
grown morbid holds the rights of others in light es-
teem. Red-handed War, Conflagration with his flaming
torches, and hollow-eyed Hunger are its ministers. The
halls of legislation echo with its sophisms and sordid
appeals. Thrones are filled with its minions. Its
poisons infest the avenues of trade. Art with her
hundred hands forges on her anvils the chains that
clank about the necks of commoners and kings. The
holy offices of the church itself it pollutes with the
proselyting lust of its mitred bigots.
These are of necessity deadly antagonistic passions.
Their war-cry has sounded since the first transgression,
and under their opposing banners have rallied millions
in every age. Their contests widen from individual
breasts to fields where battalions decide the destinies
of empires. But this fierce contest, thus inseparable
from liberty's life, is indispensable to its growth, gifts
it with immortal youth, and unveils the splendor of
its ideal. It is the struggle that follows sunlight on
the soul, quickening into verdure the germs lying
latent within it.
Earth is sown thick with battle-fields, Indeed,
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 197
where is the country that has not had its age of heroes,
days of aspiration, tokens of promise, whose soil has
not been made sacred by the blood of its sons ? Golden
memories are woven with the shadows that rest upon
the hearth-stones of Greece. Xerxes by Malian treach-
ery gained entrance through the pass of Thermopylae
only to become an unwilling witness to the sea-fight at
Salamis and add lasting lustre to Grecian fame by the
final discomfiture of his forces on the plains of Platsea.
Afterward in that defile a marble lion commemorated
those who loved liberty better than they loved life.
When Spanish hordes threatened the throne of the
Montezumas, thousands of Aztecs sprang to arms at
the sound of alarm in the temple of their war-god ; and
not until the noble Guatemozin was taken captive, and
his palace and people lay together in helpless ruin, could
haughty Castile claim place among the dynasties of the
New World. The Netherland provinces, drilled to
arms and taught self-reliance by frequent battle, after
eighty years of victories and defeats brought to suc-
cessful issue a revolution which for brilliant exploit
and heroic constancy stands yet without a single histor-
ical parallel. Across the Channel liberty experienced
through centuries crimsoned with blood the same pain-
ful processes of growth, slowly transforming tribes of
barbarian Britons, and bands of adventurers from the
swarming hives of Northern Europe, into a nation
whose commerce whitens every sea, and on whose West-
minster marble are chiselled the proudest names among
the world's gifted and good. Dismembered Poland
once had her Kosciusko. The lives of her citizens
grew grand in struggle and sacrifice. Hungary had
198 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
her Kossuth, and his counsel still lives in the Magyar's
memory. Switzerland, fearless and favored to-day in
the very midst of jealous despotisms, has a past of almost
unbroken conflict, reaching far back into the legendary
times of Tell's championship and victory. We Ameri-
cans fondly revert to the checkered experiences of our
own country's battle-birth. We pronounce with pride
the names of Otis and Henry, who dauntlessly threw
down the gauntlet to Europe's mightiest monarchy, and
by their eloquent denunciations of royal writs kindled
thronged assemblies and lit the fires of revolution.
We keep green the memory of the matrons who
fought monopolies with their spinning-wheels. We
speak in glowing panegyric of Washington and his
men, who finally at Yorktown secured the Common-
wealth's unchallenged entrance into the brotherhood
of nations.
In the religious world we find the same innate love
of freedom inspiring mankind, the same spirit of des-
potism seeking its overthrow, yet serving only the more
to intensify and invigorate it, developing in the struggle
wider mental range and loftier aspirations. Against
theological despotism religious freedom has struggled
into being, and to lasting permanence finally fought its
way. The pages of European history drip with the
blood of martyred multitudes of the world's best men.
But such splendor of virtue as blazed out in the six-
teenth century, rendering it forever memorable, how
rich a return for the struggle and suffering caused by
the tyranny that called it forth ! The ordeal through
which the nations were caused to pass, though thus fiery
and terrible, served to develop as none other agency
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 199
could, sustained sublimities of purpose in the hearts of
many who now walk in light.
Relentless as are these despotisms without, shadowing
with their inhumanities the domains of political and
religious belief, a sterner one seeks to rule within, to
darken with a deadlier curse the soul's inner life.
God has kindly gifted man with nerves that tingle
at touch of zephyr and sunbeam, thrill to harmonies of
sound, cool flavor of fruits, odorous incense of flowers,
colorings and curves of beauty. He has gifted him
with memory, to daguerrotype into pleasing permanence
these impressions of the senses ; with fancy, to pattern
them into new combinations of loveliness; with powers
of discrimination, to explore the laws that underlie phe-
nomena ; and with fountains of feeling whose streams
nourish his germs of thought. He has also gifted him
with moral attributes fashioned after the Divine image,
and has by the freedom of his will made him the arbiter
of his own destiny.
The different parts of man's nature are knit together
in closest ties, each aiding the other in its development,
each over the other exercising an influence from which
there is no escape. The intellect is forced into thought-
ful cognizance of messages from the senses, forced to
carry the case before the judgment-seat of conscience,
between whose decisions and the pleadings of passion
the will, though free in choice, is yet compelled to
choose and issue its decrees to the waiting muscles of
the flesh. Only the wand of a dreamless sleep can
check this interplay of forces once begun.
Constituted for mutual helpmeets, when healthfully
confederated there is no obstacle so formidable as to
200 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
successfully baffle them in their purpose, and no height
of moral grandeur beyond the reach of their attainment.
However, a prescribed sphere of influence and effort
has been assigned to each. A disregard for established
laws by any usurping appetite or faculty threatens the
overthrow of republican rule within, infringes upon
inviolable rights, and, if continued, the whole nature
through the rapidly multiplying power of habit lies
manacled by a despotism from which there is ever less-
ening hope of rescue.
Let republican rule be maintained among the ele-
ments, and the whole earth ceaselessly gladdens with
the blended smiles of spring-time and autumn. But
when among them the balance of power is lost, when
either, ruthlessly violating the laws of confederation,
usurps the throne, what was once an indispensable agent
in the processes of nature is transformed into a frenzied
Titan. Our mountain-ranges, the crystallized waves of
a troubled sea, record tyrannies of fire in the seons of
the past. For the thrones of their summits the dynas-
ties of Frost and Flame stoutly contend. For centu-
ries will Enceladus seem peacefully sleeping in the
caverns of the hills, unmindful of his chains of ice and
adamant, until in an unexpected moment he bursts
every barrier, crimsoning the sky with his breath and
melting the snows of unnumbered winters by the kin-
dled fervor of his passion. Here a Herculaneum and
there a Pompeii, with their genius-touched marble and
throngs of life, he smites in the hour of his anger, and
only after generations have flourished and fallen does
some traveller chance upon the forgotten grave of their
greatness. The arctics down whose voiceless valleys
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 201
the torpid glaciers creep, the parched deserts of the
tropics, the smitings of lightning, destructive delugings
of spring floods, the rush of tornadoes that uproot
forests and engulf the proudest navies of the seas,
miasms that dry with plagues and fever the fountains
of life, all betoken the overthrow of republican equality
among the elements, and testify to the fearful dangers
that beset the least disturbance of the balance of power.
In the first human organism these same physical
agencies, in perfect equipoise, were mysteriously linked
with spiritual. There was not a note of discord or
throb of pain. Through arterial channels flowed from
heart to finger-tips pure waters of the river of life,
while along delicately branching lines of nerves harm-
less lightnings flashed telegrams of stainless thought.
But the Creator, in order that moral worth might be
developed in his creatures, was necessitated to expose
their innocency to the possibility of taint. They must
be held amenable to fixed codes of law and at the same
time be endowed with perfect freedom of choice.
Strength must come through struggle ; liberty be twin-
born with power to enchain. A Tree of Probation
must be planted in the Garden of Delights. Had Je-
hovah never suffered Satan to hold intercourse with
mankind, or had he by his visible presence overawed
alike the tempter and the tempted ; had he at once and
forever torn away every mask of deceit and unearthed
evil from every hiding-place, rendered impossible all
attempts at sophistry by placing his intelligencies so
perfectly en rapport with each other that the inmost
recesses of the mind, emotions and motives in their
very incipiency, should lie exposed to every eye, sin
10
202 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and suffering would never have found lodgment in the
soul. But humanity, thus rendered safe, would have
been left hopelessly ignoble, occupying the low plane
of brute life without prospect of progress or vestige of
royalty. The danger was imminent, but indispensable;
for man never could have become Godlike had it not
been possible for him to degenerate into a fiend. The
permitted temptation came, man fell, and behind him,
exiled and disconsolate, commissioned cherubim closed
the gates of his lost Eden, and the flaming sword of
Providence guarded the unplucked fruit of the Tree of
Life. Since then galling manacles of guilt have fet-
tered limb and thought.
By persistent misuse of mental and physical func-
tions habit turns jailer, thrusting individuals into the
prisons of disease. There are none but have felt the
tightening chains of this tyranny, but have taken Ma-
zeppa's ride on Passion's wild courser, painfully expe-
riencing the penalties of violating the Divine command.
Laws of inheritance, social and domestic ties, the ever-
importuning necessities of daily life, all the multiform
influences that beleaguer the soul from birth, perverted
add chain to chain, until at last self-induced personal
tyrannies end in those organized evils of Church and
State which we have seen poisoning nations and per-
petuating themselves through centuries. As at the be-
ginning so now the tempter masks his designs, offering
larger gifts of freedom, wider ranges of thought, fuller
cups of pleasure, loftier seats of power, garlanding his
chains with roses and frescoing his dungeons with end-
less vistas of delight. Above every foot we find fetter-
marks; in every voice, sadness; in every life, sin.
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 203
Mastery over these inner usurping forces, freedom
from prejudices, inordinate appetites and passions, dis-
organizing thoughts that corrode within, can never be
secured except through the most persistent struggle.
Yet this fierce battle with self, thus universal as the
race, from which neither class nor age is exempt rarely
a waking hour, a battle fought often at fearful odds,
often terminating in irremediable disaster, furnishes
many signal instances of the overthrow of evil, and the
enthronement in the soul of the attributes of the true
and the good.
All of men's mental and moral greatness we thus
find to have a beginning far back in undeveloped
germs, and finally to reach perfection only by means
of long processes of growth through unremittent strug-
gle. Equally true is it that this same struggle has also
been rendered absolutely indispensable to the realiza-
tion of all of men's nobler joys. The Delectable Moun-
tains are gained only after a perilous and fatiguing
pilgrimage and a hand-to-hand encounter with some
armed Apollyon. To the illustration and proof of
this, the second division of our theme, we now direct
attention.
First, man is placed in the midst of mysteries, and
at the same time gifted with an intense desire to solve
them. But as soon as one is made to yield the thing
or thought in its keeping, the lively joy that follows
strangely proves as transient as it is lively, and the soul
is again left craving, perpetual pleasure coming thus
only through perpetual struggle. Part of the human
race God walls in with mountains ; pilgrims climb their
summits, for they must see beyond. He sends drift-
204 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
wood over the ocean, and ships plough through peril
and pain to spy out the hidden land. He hems in the
poles of the earth with ice and darkness ; hardy mari-
ners cut their path through the ice and bear the blight
of the darkness. He hides Sir John Franklin some-
where on the bleak coasts or in the frozen seas ; expe-
dition follows expedition to solve the mystery of his
fate. He lifts a teakettle's lid ; trains of thought thus
started are soon followed by trains of cars. He drops
an apple on Newton's head, shoots a meteor across the
sky, wheels the stars in their orbits ; Newton is filled
with earnest questionings ; then come years of struggle ;
then " Principia." The subtiler the mystery, the more
persistent and painstaking becomes the search for it.
Ease, money, and lives are freely given to gratify this
intense and universal passion of mankind.
Hope is a second source of pleasure whose existence
depends upon struggle. In the darkest hours, while
sorrows are busiest in their blighting, there is laid the
foundation for the most comforting and ennobling hopes.
We are apt to lose sight of the glories of immortality
when earthly schemes prosper, for we then find satis-
faction in present social excitements, in the bustle of
business, in the conscious possession of power. A state
of perfect satisfaction precludes the possibility of hope
even in matters of a worldly nature. Especially true
is it that the soul's privileged Pisgah of spiritual pros-
pect rises from the vale of tears. The preparatory
work of disappointment and sorrow, intensifying desire,
is imperatively needed to kindle and exalt the imagina-
tion. Not a worse calamity could befall us than to
have our earthly ambitions reach fruition, and have
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 205
this prove the very end we seek, for then our mental
states would never reach higher than the present low
level of this world, the other life remaining curtained
and uncared for. Religious intolerance imprisoned John
Bunyan, and his mind at once began to fill with those
grand conceptions of his " Pilgrim's Progress," which
have since then given to multitudes such solace and
such spiritual elevation. Dante conceived and wrote
his " Paradiso" while in forced exile and in deep mourn-
ing for the object of his earthly love. His desires and
anticipations all lay beyond death's river. How fre-
quently the Good Shepherd carries away the lambs in
order that the flock may follow them into greener
pastures ! Frequently, too, the very clouds of time are
golden while they float in the sky of the future, we
happily mistaking their character until the very mo-
ment they burst and deluge us with grief. The joy in
looking for their coming far exceeds the pain at the
bursting of the grief. God evidently purposed in his
kindness that we should ever people the air with bright
phantoms, and thus entice our souls into a ceaseless
singing of gladness.
This office of struggle is again seen in our love of
adventure. It is a strange phenomenon of the heart
for it to so cling to life and then find one of its greatest
pleasures in its perilling. It involves a paradox; but
note its mission. Man's highest virtues are developed
from germs by strugglings amid dangers. There are
lurking everywhere dangers of storms and billows, of
fires and earthquakes, of precipices and poisonous airs.
Dangers watch outside the door; their greedy eyes
glare in at the windows, their red tongues dart from
206 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
between the logs in the fireplace. God might have
made us tremble from morning till night for fear of
life or limb, but that would have thwarted his plans
for our development, for we should only have cowered
in the corner and died of fright. He might have made
us indifferent, but this would have resulted in equal
disaster. We should not only have lost much of the
discipline of the struggle, but have been robbed of
almost all its joy. There could never have been a
show of true courage, for it comes only from a con-
scious perilling of what we prize. So God, while he
made us value life, caused the near presence of danger
to be exhilarating. At such times we possess greater
intellectual and moral vigor. This phenomenon is one
of the evidences of our immortality, for it shows we
count many things of greater value than the present,
evincing an intuitive desire to climb some eminence
where we can get a glimpse and feel the shining of the
other life. Earth is clasping us less tightly. We get
a foretaste of the freedom that comes after the death-
pangs are over and the body is gone.
Another illustration is found in the desire of ex-
celling. This is one of our strongest passions. The
Creator designed that man should strive not only with
the elements for food and shelter, but also with his
fellow for possession and power. He crowned him
monarch over the beasts, the fowls, and the fishes, the
forces of fire and water, simply by filling him with
imperative physical wants whose satisfaction could be
secured only by such mastery, firing him with restless
curiosity to search out secrets, with love of adventure
that turns perils to pleasures, and lastly with this in-
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 207
tense passion for power. He has made us monarchs of
men in the same way by sending us forth weak and
ignorant, yet aflame with desires to know and rule, thus
bidding us search before we know, conquer before we
rule. Those sitting crowned on thrones once cried in
cradles, and those that now cry in cradles God invites to
sit crowned on thrones. His invitation is found in this
inborn passion for power. There are other than politi-
cal empires. Humboldt held a sceptre; Hugh Miller
swayed a wider province than Alexander's; John
Howard was not without dominion ; and the sick one
that patiently waits the coming of the death-angel is
wrapped about in the ermine of royalty. The desire
to rule does not necessitate a clashing of rights or true
interests. The consciousness of sovereignty may be
gratified by all, but only through that agency employed
to develop our virtues, the agency of struggle.
This principle again appears in our love of the per-
fect. Plants will fight persistently against opposing
gravitation, send out rootlets to forage for food, let no
leaf fall without supplying its place with a bud, will
endure every manner of harsh treatment, if they can
but perfect the implanted ideal. They are never
tempted to relinquish their purpose, never feel dis-
heartened or tremble with fear, and so there never
comes a single joy to gladden them in the battle or
after the battle is ended. Inexorable fate drives them
to completion. To each one of us have been intrusted
germinal ideals, instinct with growing life. We are
all created imperfect designedly. Only by surmount-
ing difficulties are we enabled to advance toward per-
fection. Unlike plants, we may become disheartened,
208 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
and so God has given us alike for incentive and reward
the love of the perfect. Instances might be cited to an
indefinite extent, illustrating the intensity of this desire
of the mind to realize its implanted ideals, and the
compensating joys that accompany and crown a work's
completion.
Memory in one characteristic of its power furnishes
a further and most apt illustration. It is a marked
fact that there never was a struggle, however painful in
the present, though it wring out blood and tears, even
though it end in bitter failure, but that, if stamped
with manly purpose, it served in retrospect greatly to
enhance and multiply man's nobler joys. The world's
sweetest memories are memories of its sorest griefs.
Now, after the pain and passion are gone, after the fire
that flamed to purify has expired in the ashes, we ex-
perience, at the recall of the nations' colossal battlings
for freedom that brighten the centuries, the most ex-
alted joy at witnessing the development of the sublime
in man.
Pleasure comes, too, from tears shed at the graves of
genius, of friendship, and of the heart's dead hopes.
The darkest passages of our own former lives, if filled
with noble endeavor, are counted by us, when freed
from the stinging of the sorrow, among the brightest,
gathering about them far pleasanter associations than
characterize the remembrance of those scenes which,
while passing, seemed so prodigal of joy. If we watch
our musings, we will find ourselves loving to linger at
the graves of our once fond hopes, at the places where
we struggled and suffered most, if for worthy ends,
where our hot tears fell and our sad hearts sighed for
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 209
rest. Often we pleasantly recall the trials of other
days, filling our talk with histories of our sorrows.
Strong upon us is the power of their fascination. In-
tense and subtle is the pleasure that thrills us looking
upon the scenes where the light of memory rests upon
the moss-grown ruins of what we once held dear.
The sadness we feel at such times is a tender sadness,
hushing into holy quiet the boisterousness of mirth.
Gone, that is the Mountain of Griefs Transfigura-
tion.
Among all our many sources of joy in undoubted
prominence ranks that of sympathy, an influence that
knits together friends, endears home circles, incites
philanthropy, fires the breasts of patriots, and conse-
crates the cross. To a consideration of its nature and
of the necessity of struggle for its birth and develop-
ment we invite special attention.
Tennyson, in his "Palace of Art," pictures with in-
imitable fancy the utter dreariness of solitude to the
soul, though it be within apartments tapestried and
hung with canvas to suit every mood, paved in skilful
mosaic, stored with sculptured graces, crimsoned with
colored light, filled with chimes of bells, looking in
upon open courts where fountains leap and murmur, or
out over wide vistas of landscape loveliness. Under
the portals of this palace for three years there never
pass any of the social ills of life, its baffled hopes or
sharp encounters, its burdens of care or death-sundered
ties of love's relationships. But when the fourth year
comes, phantom shapes people the spirit's vision. A
loathing and a longing succeed this unshared splendor
from which with all her subtle reasonings she fails to
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210 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
flee. Chill ness and stupor, the blank stare of corpses
and the heated closeness of prisons, settle with blight
and mildew upon her thought, while the distant hum
of human voices adds to the stifling stillness of her
isolation.
In " Alastor" the same conception comes glowing
from the heart of Shelley. A poet of rare gifts and
ripe culture vainly seeks in self-centred seclusion the
lasting satisfaction which noble human sympathies alone
have power to bestow. His deeply-seated social yearn-
ings, being repressed by wider travel and more absorb-
ing contemplation, finally break out into avenging
furies, dethroning those matchless powers to which is
so persistently refused companionship. Earthlier na-
tures escape insanity, but fall victims to stolid stoicism,
a far more abject and inglorious fate.
But the heart to which sympathy is of such vital
moment, responding as Memnon to morn in rich mu-
sical answer to its sunbeam's softest touch, is necessitated,
not only by the asperities that mark the world's life, but
by the nature of its own organism, to derive these its
social joys from seemingly social ills, social joys being
based on social virtues which are the names of victories
won in many a fierce encounter. That sympathy can
thus thrive only in an atmosphere of strife and sor-
row will clearly appear in an analysis of its nature,
while biography and history everywhere abound in cor-
roborative proofs. We will consider it in its separate
phases.
When death's fingers freeze love's lips to marble,
failures eclipse, foes plot, or calumnies poison the air,
under any discouraging or saddening circumstance, in
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 211
the first bursts of grief the stricken heart craves soli-
tude, but afterward the consolations of friendship never
find warmer welcome or kindle nobler joys. There is
an undoubted pleasure in the simple unburdening of
sorrow. In the woe itself, of course, there is none, but
there is in its unburdening. The novelist, cognizant of
this fascination of tears, would deem himself violating
one of the first canons of his art did he not dip his pen
in pathos. Should Eistori unclasp her robe of tragedy,
how soon would the spell of her enchantment be broken !
Powers, our great sculptor, left the ideal of his highest
inspiration chained. Strike off the Greek Slave's mar-
ble fetter, and you darken the sunlight of her beauty.
Hood's "Bridge of Sighs" and "Song of the Shirt"
outlast the flash and sparkle of his wit. Whittier's
" Maud Muller" and Burns's " Highland Mary" we
never tire of nor ever forget. Deepening interest
centres about exiled Evangeline's life-long search for
her Acadian lover, till silvered with age and broken
with sorrow she is privileged at last at his death-bed to
exchange words of parting. Minor strains in music,
pictured grief on canvas, irresistibly win their way to
the heart, eliciting an admiration that soon deepens into
love. We have witnessed the simple melody "Pass
under the Rod," a most touching epitome- of crushed
hopes, hush thronged parlors into felt quiet, the gay
revellers gladly exchanging their sunnier mirth for
more subdued and profounder pleasure. Both author
and artist clothe their fictitious personages with the gar-
ments of the world's real grief. They either transform
us by the magic wand of genius into our former selves
by revivifying the experiences of the past, or else
212 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
quicken in us a sympathetic answer to another's woe.
Voicing grief kindles joy. There is undoubted luxury
in tears. The phenomenon of this attractiveness of
gloom in literature and art can be accounted for on no
other hypothesis.
This same law operates with greater directness and
consequently fuller force in the free recital of friend to
friend of trying incidents in personal history. The
more vividly outlined past adds pungency to feeling,
arousing as by a trumpetrcall. Every trace of stupor
is gone. The soul overwhelmed with loneliness and
dependence in its rudely shaken self-trust, alert, spirit-
ualized, intensely responsive, adds to the joy of lessen-
ing its load a keen sense of gratitude, a comforting
consciousness that the trial is known, appreciated, and
generously shared by a companion spirit; a bleeding
hope revived by the oil of consolation, of encourage-
ment, of openly-avowed confidence, of undimmed faith
and proffers of needed aid. The state in which a
noble nature is left after the tempest of sorrow has
swept over it is therefore beyond doubt the most
favorable of any to the birth and growth of friendly
sympathies.
Furthermore, acquaintanceships cast into the crucible
of affliction are subjected to the most searching test ; the
dross of selfishness is burnt to cinders ; the gold of self-
forgetting love is purified and brightened by the pro-
cess. Confidence once thus firmly established, the cur-
tain is drawn from before the inner life of emotion and
motive, and guarded conventionalism gives place to a
cordial intercourse whose influence, extending beyond
the painful experiences in which it first found origin,
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 213
goes on enriching thought and feeling through all the
departments and periods of the soul's groAvth. Corre-
sponding results by additional agencies leave their im-
press also on him whose heart overflows in sympathy
to these urgent appeals. To generously share in and
thus lighten another's grief, to be admitted into confi-
dence, be an invited witness to the hidden life where
spiritual forces are evolving elements of character from
their contests, where what is grand and Godlike stands
in unveiled splendor, to be nobly conscious of one's
own potent, transforming presence there, afford delights
which only they who have felt them know. They can
come through no other channel. They are the star-
glories of Life's night. Even where congenial tastes
alone give birth to friendly feeling, to secure for it per-
manency and worth there must enter in also the ingre-
dient of nobility of motive, for unless the disclosures
necessarily resulting from intimate fellowship end in
well-founded admiration familiarity soon breeds con-
tempt, and there can be no other nobility than that
developed and proved in battle.
But even admiration of this general nature arising
from discovering in another amiable or heroic traits,
though thus vital to friendship's very existence and
often its cause, is in itself powerless to feed its fires.
The relation is continually demanding greater intimacy,
more direct declarations in word and life of self-sacri-
ficing regard. The more positively personal those dec-
larations are, the brighter will the fire burn. Again,
this sympathy is in its very nature aggressive. The
heart cannot long contentedly remain an inactive recip-
ient. It craves constantly recurring opportunities for
214 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
earnest work. It knows no higher pleasure than to do,
to dare, to suffer for the object of its devotion. Only
through suffering and sorrow can these coveted oppor-
tunities come. The thirst moreover becomes insatiate.
Past reminiscences will not suffice. Ennui ensues when
the heart's activities are dead, while the pleasures of
friendship grow nobler, more satisfying with each in-
terchange of kindness and relief, the relation more inti-
mate, the attachment stronger, the mutual revelation
and development of souls more complete. Friendly
sympathies may also be found closely interwoven with
those absorbing passions of men, already mentioned, to
solve mystery, indulge hope, seek adventure, grasp
power, realize the perfect and transfigure the past, in-
tensifying, directing, encouraging, rewarding.
To this sympathy that knits together friends, that
which endears home-circles is so closely allied that the
same arguments for the necessity of struggle to its birth
and development apply with equal force, while in every
point of variance we find additional proof. There is
between the sexes a marked difference of endowment.
Each is made possessor of gifts essential to the other,
gifts which can, in fact, become the other's only through
an intimate companionship. The wife needs the hus-
band's strength of muscle, the boldness, dash, and de-
cision of his thought, while she is peculiarly fitted to
offer in exchange sympathy, caution, refinement, and un-
faltering faith. Man is enabled to reach only by slow
processes of reasoning conclusions arrived at by woman
in the flash of her intuitions. His bravery, defective
without her fortitude, when combined with it forms an
impregnable tower of defence against every besieging
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 215
force of ill. Life's rude shocks of battle alone serve to
unfold and render useful these individual traits, to dis-
cover the indispensable necessity of each to the other,
and to open the fountains of joy which flow from their
generous interchange. Cares and trials call forth on
the one hand chivalric guardianship and devotion ; on
the other, sacrifice and stanch loyalty. Each other's
worth shines out in the acts of -each other's love. The
more herculean their tasks, if directed to the attainment
of a common benefit, the more conspicuous becomes
their devotion, the closer their union, and the more
permanent their delight.
Parents in the discharge of their trusts, while called
to pass through repeated privations of physical com-
forts and ease, to withstand social enticements, to spend
anxious nights at the sick-bed, often painfully to devise
and execute effective methods of reproof that love may
blend with law to win back to right the erring feet of
their darlings, find compensation a thousandfold for it
all in witnessing the imperishable impress of their own
thought and life in the unfolding traits of these their
second selves. He alone who can measure the true
mother's joys as she pictures the glorious possibilities
of her children can measure the worth of these privi-
leges of sacrifice granted to her affection by the seem-
ingly cruel necessities of the present life. The hunger
of her heart can nowhere else find satisfaction. It is
love's very nature to forget self: sacrifice is its vital air.
Had it been from the first impossible for her to pro-
mote the present comfort or fashion the future fortune
of her children, impossible for her ever to dry their
tears with her kisses, or plead their case before the
216 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Throne, had their character and destiny been from birth
fixed as fate and fair as heaven, she might have had
power to admire, but never could have felt those
thrills of joy that follow the acts that now grow out
of her tender solicitude, her motherly yearnings for
her offspring, exposed as they are to the world's dan-
gerous gusts of sorrow and of sin. Even were it
possible for her affections under such circumstances
to be born into life, they would soon beat out that life
against the unyielding bars of such a prison. When her
children fail of the fulfilment of her hopes, she covers
them still with the mantle of a mother's charity, still
dreams of some possible future when the long-watched-
for turn in the battle-tide of passion and pain will
surely come. Her importunate prayers at last bring
her priceless blessings of peace. Nothing can shake
her faith that Jehovah will yet reward the free out-
pouring of her wealth of love, that she will not fruit-
lessly strive to lift the objects of her devotion from
their low ambitions to those heights of goodness that
tower in the millennium of her musings. Through
the hiding veil of destiny, rent as by inspiration, she
seems to see the fulness of the splendor that is in wait-
ing. Should the frosts of death blight her buds of
promise here, she feels she will yet see them opening
in fadeless bloom in the Gardens of the Lord. How
blessed at such a time the memories of her sacrifice !
They accompany her like troops of angels. The air
about her throbs with their song. With her, earth's
attractions may fade with the fading forms of her dear
ones, but her favored feet are thereby guided to the very
border-land of the other life. On her lifted face al-
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 217
ready rests the radiance of its rising day. Only because
the world's firesides have thus been its battle-grounds,
and thereby revelators of its virtues, have they become
almoners of its benefactions, centres of its choicest
memories, prototypes of its Better Land.
The sympathy that incites philanthropy is cosmopoli-
tan. It responds to wider claims than those of friend-
ship or of family ties. It finds its birth in any scene
of sorrow, in the presence of any accomplished or
attempted wrong. Its blessings come from conscious
acts of kindness, the restoration of violated rights, the
return of sunshine into the hearts of the stricken and
the disconsolate. Few who follow its behests ever live
lives of ease or secure from society a fit recognition as
its benefactors. Stern, self-denying, dangerous, often
thankless tasks are apportioned those who worthily
worship at its shrine. It summons them to battle-
fields, to hospitals of wounded and sick soldiers, even
to lazarettos where pestilences riot in human ruin. The
fallen, those who glory in their fall, frequently become
ungrateful objects of their care. To reform the world's
abuses they must encounter its selfishness, fortified by
capital, intrenched behind perverted opinion, sheltered
under established custom, intimately allied with power-
ful parties in Church and State. Reformers must ever
be in advance of their age. Their intelligence, and
even the purity of their motives, are often made mat-
ters of question. Calumny, while it blackens their
fame, provokingly checks, if not wholly thwarts, their
enterprises of love. The desired progress is slow at
best, advancing perhaps in the face of fixed bayonets, it
may be amid the howlings of the mob whose good it
218 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
seeks. Its votaries are sometimes forced to test their
fidelity in bonds and imprisonments, sometimes they
end their careers on crosses of shame.
John Howard was comparatively purposeless until
his inhuman treatment on board of a French privateer
and afterward inside a French dungeon vividly im-
pressed him with the wide prevalence of cruelties that
had, unnoticed, already dug the graves of multitudes
of his countrymen. And doubtless he would have
rested with the righting simply of that wrong had not
death subsequently entered the circle of his home and
loosened the silver cord of life of one most passionately
loved, and had not pain from an incurable disease
finally lifted his thought by its purifying process above
every enticement of time. Not until he had been thus
schooled was he prepared, without prospect of prefer-
ment, at his own expense, upheld by no word of encour-
agement, year after year so resolutely to prosecute his
mission of mercy, to visit the prisons of Britain and the
Continent, to submit to many tedious weeks of confine-
ment in the loathsome rooms of a Venetian lazar-house,
breathing noisome and pestilential airs, going where
contagions lurked, where the bravest physicians durst
not enter, forcing himself daily into the presence of the
most appalling miseries and sins, that he might publish
them to the world and thereby, if possible, effect their
cure. His enterprises for the rescue of society's out-
casts and the cleansing of its places of plague, carried
forward by such indefatigable industry amid privations
and perils, always met the scorn of the indifferent, the
weak, contemptible pity of those at ease in Zion. He
died near the Crimea of an infectious fever contracted in
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 219
the very act of philanthropic love. We cannot over-
estimate his sacrifice. Wealth, comfort, time, safety,
life itself, were John Howard's princely gifts to the
criminal, the unfortunate, the forgotten.
After Dr. Jenner had spent twenty years of patient
thought and experiment in proving and perfecting his
discovery of the disinfections properties of vaccine,
and had issued a carefully written treatise, in which he
detailed twenty-three cases of successful vaccination,
he visited London to instruct physicians in the process,
but only met first cold contumely, afterward open and
relentless warfare. He was caricatured, accused of
malpractice, of " bestial i zing" his victims, of intro-
ducing the diseases of cattle among his kind. Some
of his patients were pelted with stones in the streets.
Pulpits hurled at him their anathemas. The whole
medical profession, incited by pride and envy, fostered
the prejudices of the populace, until, overborne by his
success, they were forced to yield. Then, adding in-
sult to injury, many of them sought, by presenting
fraudulent claims to discovery, basely to rob him of his
laurels. The doctor became an old man before he was
awarded recognition as a benefactor, though vaccine
was of such intrinsic worth to the race that to discover
it, as Cuvier has since remarked, would alone have
rendered illustrious any era. Dr. Harvey was the
same patient worker, and his theory of the circulation
of the blood met with the same inveterate hate. He
was ridiculed as a crack-brained impostor, even charged
with designs to undermine religion and public morals.
For years he was without a convert or a patient of
any sort, almost without a friend. A quarter of a cen-
220 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
tury passed before what is to us one of the plainest of
scientific truths gained credence, and wrought that rev-
olution in medicine and surgery whose streams of benefi-
cence water the world to-day. Sir Charles Bell spent
forty years studying the nature and functions of the
nerves, only to meet the same rebuffs, incredulity, and
ingratitude.
Granville Sharp, a humble ordnance clerk, by a life
of unremittent mental industry and generous self-sacri-
fice, set rolling waves of influence that swept the seas
of every English slaver and eventually broke the
shackles of every English slave. Possessed of an im-
perfect education, and absolutely without knowledge
of law, he bravely began that celebrated defence of
Jonathan Strong single-handed against the settled con-
victions of the entire English bar. By indefatigable
research through mountains of dry documents, decis-
ions of courts, and acts of parliament, he succeeded in
summoning an array of facts that overthrew every
antagonist. Case after case he carried through with
the same persistency, until Chief- Justice Mansfield was
absolutely forced by the irrefragable logic of this tire-
less advocate to declare that whoever set foot on British
soil was thenceforth forever free. Though the meagre
salary of his clerkship barely sufficed to keep him
from debt, still every leisure moment through his en-
tire life he scrupulously used to secure the rights of the
negro, studying while others slept, and that without
support from sympathy or hope of reward. Of course,
such zeal proved a destroying firebrand in the camp of
the enemy. Quickened by his example into the same
sublime purpose, Clarkson, Wilberforce, Brougham,
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 221
and Buxton, after prodigies of labor, finished the work
which he had with unconquerable courage carried for-
ward without means, without a helping hand, against
the adverse criticisms and declared wishes of an entire
kingdom.
Anti-slavery agitators in our own times and country
have not only been forced to encounter indifference and
the curled lip of scorn, but to endure privations, to feel
the relentless grasp of the law, often to perish at their
posts, stricken down by the hands of ignorance and
hate. The same incarnate evil that murdered a Love-
joy and dragged a Garrison through the streets of Bos-
ton, when finally threatened with overthrow by the
irrepressible advocates of reform, desperately clutched
at the throat of the nation and refused to let go its
grasp until driven back by thrusts of bayonets and
storms of canister.
The sympathy that incites philanthropy we thus see
calls not to diverting pastimes, but to the endurance of
incessant toil, to the discharge of the sternest duties in
the face of obloquy, of danger, sometimes of death;
for while the serpents of selfishness bruise the heels
that crush them, how frequently those snatched from
them stone their deliverers and leave their children to
garnish their tombs. Only one of the ten lepers ever
turned back to thank Christ for healing. Are then the
lives of earnest philanthropists barren of joy ? Is such
love left without requital ? Rather, we might ask, does
not a single moment of conscious likeness to Christ yield
profounder pleasure than a life of the empty worship
and Avealth of the world ? And whence can such con-
sciousness come except through just such tests of love's
222 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
loyalty ? Strip a man of every worldly incentive, let
him seek to benefit his age, not from selfish interest, not
because of any possible prospect of pecuniary return
or of social advancement, but from some deeply-seated
sympathy for suffering, some intense desire to place upon
the plane of virtue any victim of vice, and his soul's
freed pinions lift him into the very sunlight of heaven.
When misinterpreted and maligned by reason of the
bigotry and conservatism of the ignorance he seeks to
instruct and the fierce hate felt by the tyrannies he
seeks to destroy, when thus rudely driven back from
the world's broken cisterns of pleasure, then out of the
flooding fulness of his enthusiasm to render real his
conceptions of reform there well living fountains of
sweet water.
In the sympathy that fires the breasts of patriots, we
find struggle and suffering equally indispensable in the
creation of human joy. Not only are tyrannies armed
facts necessarily to be met and mastered before mankind
can be free, but unconsciously most powerful agents in
enhancing the value of the very rights they fight like
fiends to destroy, enriching freedom through the disci-
pline of the conflict with those imperishable associations
that give it worth commensurate with the sacrifice.
Freedom is a word of relative meaning, taking rank
with the interests it conserves and the capacities for
enjoyment of those over whom its influences operate.
The freedom of the bird, though perfect of its kind,
ranks as far below the angel's as the angel's thought
and feeling transcend the bird's. If man rises in the
scale of sentient intelligences through the developing
power of struggle when that struggle results from his
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 223
heroic loyalty to any of his nobler impulses, the con-
clusion follows by irresistible logic that the joy-giving
power of freedom is measured by the sacrifices and
struggles of its votaries. Intimately associated with
this conclusion, indeed inseparable from it, is a second,
the immediateness and absolute surety of the reward.
The moment an individual boldly asserts his freedom
and courageously purposes to maintain it, that moment
he is free, and so long as that high resolve is in the as-
cendant, directing and unfolding his powers, though it
lead through inquisitorial fire or the carnage of battle,
it kindles enthusiasm and lifts into ecstasy by the in-
tensified consciousness of newly developed and nobly
consecrated worth. Under such influences man seems
to be treading upon the confines of the other life, to feel
the bracings of its inspiration and to catch glimpses
of its glory. There is also generally, if not universally,
blended with this passion for personal freedom a warm
attachment for the fatherland, as under its protecting
shadow cluster the many endeared relations of our social
life, and with its honor and safety are intimately in-
volved our own. Therefore, those political conflicts
that serve at once to call out and to gratify this double
attachment become sources of double joy.
Meagre as was the freedom under the reign of the
Montezumas, yet rather than have that snatched from
them by Spanish hordes, a brave people gave to history
the scenes of that memorable night when the waters that
shut in the Island City grew crimson, and dead and
dying were heaped along causeways drenched in blood.
To fiercer ordeal Cortez afterward brought Aztec
bravery, but to no purpose. One by one fell the
22 i VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
proud and costly fabrics of their capital. Famine and
disease became rivals of fire and sword to conquer their
indomitable purpose, still they sublimely refused to ask
for quarter. There must have been a wonderfully com-
pensating joy following the promptings of this love for
liberty and country, unknown to life's more even tenor,
to have sustained the enthusiasm of the Mexican and
to have nerved him to such unflinching fortitude amid
cruelties that still live in memory a marvel and a shame.
There must have been thrills of ecstasy following that
vigorous quickening of mind and that noble mastery of
immortality over the pleading anguish of the flesh. If
a people semi-civilized and idolatrous could have found
in these smugglings pleasures commensurate with the
pain, what may not be predicated of battlings for en-
lightened freedom with wider vision and a Christ-born
promise, whose tender budding escapes the plucking
fingers of failure ?
William the Silent seemed peculiarly fitted for a life
of elegant and luxurious ease. A gifted conversation-
alist, high-born and wealthy, familiar with the teach-
ings of the schools and the refinements of courts, he
had thrown open the parlors of his Nassau palace in
genial hospitality, and at his loaded tables given daily
welcome to the titled and the learned of Europe. But
liberty's impending ruin touched the grander impulses
of his nature, awakened longings that neither society's
elegant repose nor the fascinating excitements of the feast,
neither sculpture, nor song, nor literature's lettered ease,
had power to quiet with their enchantments. After-
ward, when he saw the foreign mercenaries' cruelties
and license, the intruding espionage of the Inquisition,
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 225
the States-General ignored, the professed concessions of
the '"Joyful Entrance" a mockery and a cheat, he
promptly exchanged the most enticing political pros-
pects of any Netherland grandee for the nobler con-
sciousness of worth that recompenses the dangerous
duties of the patriot-hero. Nothing could daunt his
courage or dampen his ardor. Though the delusive
lull of tyranny that followed Granvelle's recall was
soon succeeded by the blood-council of Alva, though he
saw himself deserted, his offices given to another, his
estates confiscated, his coat of arms dishonored, his son
held prisoner, himself an exile, the last of his plate,
his furniture, and his credit turned into soldiers to end
only in fruitless forays and the stricken field of Jem-
rningen, yet with an unfaltering faith devoutly waiting
God's providence he steadfastly watched the heavens
for the gray dawn of liberty, until at last the glad
tidings came that the " Sea-Beggars," driven from
English shores, had captured Brill and on its walls
gallantly unfurled the trampled banner of the Re-
public And when a few brilliant victories again
ended in defeat, sublimely purposing to perish rather
than surrender, he uttered that memorable saying, " I
go to Holland to make my sepulchre." The subse-
quent brave defence of Haarlem and Leyden was
followed by new disasters threatening the life of the
Commonwealth, but this only so intensified the love
for freedom that it culminated in the lofty ardor of
that grand design of prince and people to give their
fatherland with all its hallowed memories back to
ocean, and, with their wives and little ones gathered
on board the remnants of their once proud fleets, set
11
226 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
sail for friendlier skies and a- brighter destiny. % But
God smote Requesens with fever, and the tide turned.
There is but one other phase of sympathy to which
I wish to direct attention. It is that which consecrates
the cross. The gospel story is so familiar that a simple
allusion to a few of its leading facts will doubtless
suffice.
Through the incarnation, which was solely designed
for the rescue of a lapsed race, w r e have revealed to us
as nowhere else the resources of an infinite love, the
tenderness, the yearning solicitude of the heart of God
toward the sinful and suffering of earth. In the mag-
nitude of this condescension and sacrifice we discover
his estimate of the worth of the soul's limitless capabil-
ities of virtue and bliss. We have also here an exam-
ple of what weak man can become through the disci-
pline of struggle when he is overshadowed, as it is ever
his privilege to be, by the Divine influence. We of
course can never solve many of the mysteries that
shroud the nature of Christ, but that he was human we
have as incontestable proofs as that he was superhuman.
In intellect, sensibility, and will, as well as in body,
his powers were at first as germinal as those of any son
of Adam, equally requiring the attrition of this world's
experiences for their expansion and maturing. Christ
passed through no mock childhood ; indeed, up to the
time of his death, every year witnessed some new
growth, revealed some new weakness against which to
contend, over which gloriously to triumph. Luke ex-
pressly states that he "increased in knowledge and
stature," thus affirming of him what is true only of
the finite. Christ would never have wept at the grave
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 227
of Lazarus had he known that in an hour he would be
seated with him at table. The nearness, almost imme-
diateness, of Lazarus's recall to life, the glorious proof
the miracle was to give of Christ's mission, the rap-
turous welcome with which Mary and Martha were
about to greet their again living brother, must necessa-
rily have precluded on the part of the Saviour, had he
then foreseen the future, the possibility either of sym-
pathetic or of personal grief. It was the man whose
voice was broken with sobs ; it was the God whose
voice afterward quickened the dulled ear of the dead.
He was also evidently full of weaknesses, of constitu-
tional besetments to sin, from whose influences he was
never exempt, and to withstand which he summoned
moral forces differing neither in nature nor in amount
from what he has vouchsafed every disciple. The
declaration that he was tempted in all points as we are,
necessitates this conclusion. The temptations in the
wilderness were possible only to a youth comparatively
inexperienced, suddenly made conscious of miraculous
gifts which seemed readily convertible into purposes of
self-seeking. Selfishness is a species of short-sighted-
ness, promptings to which can never arise in a mind of
infinite range. The prayer in Gethsemane, the cry on
the cross, betrayed a shrinking, a sense of weakness and
dependence, distinctively human. When thus once
deeply impressed with the genuine completeness of
Christ's humanity, a fact never questioned by his apos-
tles, when led to consider him as our veritable elder
brother, then his holiness, his matchless ardor of love,
more than excites admiration ; it nerves endeavor by
kindling hope of successful discipleship, it prepares for
228 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
that deep peace that accompanies and rewards the
grateful consecration of a life. To draw men thus into
sympathetic nearness with himself was also the aim
always manifest in the acts and teachings of his minis-
try. Though within his ready reach lay ease, luxury,
learned leisure, high social rank, political preferment,
the glory of arms, even the crown of kingdoms, when
he found them threatening to thwart this purpose he
promptly put from him every tempting offer, choosing
rather to be identified with the poor, the illiterate, and
the weak, there to work his miracles and there to
gather the witnesses of his Messiahship. He thereby
made men feel that humbleness of station furnished no
barrier to a welcomed and esteemed companionship
with himself; that he held in lightest regard the con-
ventional distinctions of society, the classifications which
prevailed because of accidents of birth, unequal distri-
butions of fortune, or differences of mental power ; that
with him right states of heart were the sole passports
to favor; that true dignity comported with moral
worth, ranking him first who lived the noblest, loved
the most. He consorted not only with the poor and
illiterate, but with publicans and sinners. Even those
whose lives were blackened with guilt, if repentant and
believing, were welcomed and forgiven. " Neither do
I condemn thee ; go and sin no more," were his golden
words of encouragement to an abandoned woman.
Paradise was promised the thief on the cross. " Go
and tell Peter," he especially charged the women who
came early to the sepulchre, though that same Peter
only the Friday before had denied him with bitter
blasphemy. He clothed with becoming dignity the
SATAN ANTICIPATED. 229
ever-recurring duties of daily life. He manifested pro-
foundest sympathy for those oppressed with care, filled
with weakness, apprehensive of evil, and disheartened
by frequent failure. To this intimate acquaintanceship
and sympathy he added also a superhuman power to
help, assuring his followers that he would ever live
their earnest and able advocate with the Father.
Thus by a life of generous sacrifice, possible only in
the midst of suffering and struggle, he laid the founda-
tions of a friendship broad as humanity and lasting as
the soul.
A little while before his crucifixion he gathered his
disciples about him to bid them good-by and give some
word of cheer as parting token of his love. At first
glance it seems strange he should have there said, " My
peace I leave with you," thinking thus to comfort
them, for his life had been a fierce warfare, and on his
brow had so often stood the sweat and blood of battle ;
while just behind the lifting curtains of the future lay
that night of bitter, passionate pleading, that crown of
thorns, that cross of infamy and of anguish. He, too,
at this same time, was summoning them to a life of
similar toil, privation, and shame. Bonds and im-
prisonment he knew awaited them. Yet, unless this
bequest was meant for cold irony, the hollow laugh of
despair, the jest of a man made mad through crushed
hopes, Christ's gift of peace must have been both pos-
sible and priceless. In exaltation and abiding fulness
of joy he must have gone beyond all past human expe-
riences. That joy must have been a present possession,
else he could not have bequeathed it. It must have
been secured, not despite his sufferings and struggles,
230 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
but because of them ; for had he not himself said, " He
that loveth his life shall lose it" ? That joy must have
been within the reach only of those who emulated his
sacrifice and reciprocated his devotion, consenting as
willingly to die for him as he for them, for had he not
also said, "He that loseth his life for my sake, the
same shall save it" ?
THE KEY TO SUCCESS.
THE whole universe of matter and mind is under the
absolute control of exact laws. There is no world too
ponderous, no floating mote too minute, to be beyond
the reach of these systematic methods of God's working.
Leverrier, the celebrated French astronomer, once staked
his reputation with all the implicit trust of science on
this mathematical precision of the skies. One night in
the summer of 1846, at a late hour, he might have been
seen, pencil in hand, intently studying sundry papers
lying on the desk before him. He was solving the
problem of the cause of the perturbations of Uranus.
The next morning, over his well-known signature, the
Academy of Sciences received the startling announce-
ment that if astronomers would turn the tubes of their
telescopes as he directed they would find a hitherto un-
discovered planet belonging to our solar system. The
tubes were turned, and, sure enough, there shone Nep-
tune, which had till then escaped the notice of mankind.
Even the comets that so frighten the untaught by their
seemingly wild dashing among the stars, vary not a
hair's breadth from the circuits assigned them by un-
changeable laws. The poetic fancy of the music of the
spheres rests on a fact foundation.
231
232 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Look at the liftman eye. How exact is its structure!
how exact the laws of refraction which light obeys in
giving perfectness to the image it paints on the retina !
The surfaces of its little water-lenses are curved with
such delicate nicety, and their distances fixed with such
precision, that they wholly avoid that spherical aberra-
tion which has so long troubled science and compelled
learned men, in order to effect its removal from their
instruments, to expend millions of money and months
of thought.
In the vegetable kingdom are met the workings of
alike immutable laws. A series of fractions, whose
variations in value are in accordance with the rule of
arithmetical progression, determines the position of
leaves on plant-stems; the peculiar arrangement of
wood-cells shows the veining of those leaves, and their
green pulp tells the climate where they thrive, the aver-
age moisture of the atmosphere, and the amount of sun-
light that reaches the place of their growing. By some
strange alchemy, whose secret has been intrusted to them
by Him w r ho fixed its unerring laws, those plants con-
vert invisible gases into tinted flowers, change starch to
sugar, and turn carbonic poison into wholesome food.
So exact and universal are the laws that govern in
the structure of animal organisms, that if you take to a
comparative anatomist a fossil bone he will tell the size,
weight, and form of the animal of which it once formed
part, where it lived, and on what kind of food it was
its custom to feed. Tempests and torrents that tear
oaks in such fury from the soil where they have been
rooted for centuries, volcanoes that light the heavens
with their breath and cause palaced cities to stagger like
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 233
drunken men, avalanches that rush with thunder-peal
down the mountain-sides and sweep the plains with
quick ruin, the very wildest forces in nature, im-
plicitly obey the dictates of law.
Higher in the scale of existences are found the same
systematized methods of working. Metaphysicians
give the laws of sequence that control those endless
trains of ideas that begin at birth ; of association that
govern their recall ; and of conception which fancy is
forced to follow in fashioning out of this rough lumber
of the brain its gorgeous palaces of thought. Com-
binations of colors, proportion of parts, varieties of
motion, and succession of sounds, awaken their cor-
respondent emotions with the certainty of fate. Love
and hatred that bless and blight the heart, set on fire
assemblies, hover over battle-fields to comfort and to
curse, are known to work by rule. In brief, search
where you will among creations of matter or concep-
tions of mind, you will find the same immutable laws
reaching and ruling all.
Science discovers the laws that underlie phenomena ;
art uses them. Science discovers the expansive power
of steam ; art by its cog-wheels and cross-bands com-
pels it to weave its fabrics, print its thoughts, and draw
its trains of trade. Science discovers the chemical ac-
tion of light ; art, properly preparing its canvas, seizes
a sunbeam and with single strokes of the brush paints
pictures that outvie the masterpieces of Raphael that
hang on the walls of the Vatican. Science discovers
that a compound of nitrate of potash, sulphur, and
charcoal will explode when touched by fire ; art places
the compound into the bore of a cannon and with it
11*
234 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
hurls iron balls over ramparts and into the ranks of
rebels. Science discovers the chemical affinity of oxy-
gen, zinc, and sulphuric acid ; art lays its Atlantic cables
and weaves together the continents of a world. Science
discovers the laws of beauty, of melody, and of elo-
quence ; art goes to the marble-quarry and with mallet
and chisel uncovers the Greek Slave's beauty, makes
strong men weep while Paganini draws his bow across
his violin, and by Demosthenes 7 famed Philippics
breaks the charms of subtlety and turns the tide
of war.
Effective geniuses are they who, having diligently
investigated, implicitly obey these fixed laws. They
readily dazzle the unsuspecting by their seeming mira-
cles of attainment, simply because they alone are cog-
nizant of the existence of such laws. We naturally
stand wonder-struck if, entering one of the workshops
of the world, and unacquainted with the details of the
process, we see rough bits of metal, after passing through
various machines and manipulations, changed into Elgin
watches, throbbing as if they had souls in them.
Equally marvellous is the phenomenon of odd bits of
experience, stray snatches of town gossip, neighborhood
traditions, cast-away scraps of the street, thoughts and
facts that any one can have for the asking, going into
the nicely-adjusted machinery of the busy workshop of
some trained brain, and coming out golden-orbed and
beautiful to please and polish the fascinated thousands.
But if we have explained to us the training and drudg-
ery submitted to by that brain through a long series of
years, its painful, persistent, persevering efforts, the
numberless rules and regulations it carefully sought
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 235
out and strictly obeyed, if we are allowed to follow the
process step by step, all traces of mysterious mental
witchcraft rapidly disappear; its resources of power are
found quite attainable. Relative suggestion, the great
kaleidoscope of genius, in which the little broken pieces
of ideas that are but the trampled rubbish strewing the
thoroughfares of unthinking minds are changed into
patterns of rarest symmetry, ceases to be a marvel
when we discover that its sides are lined with hidden
reflectors, and that only by its simple conformity to law
it becomes gifted with power.
How the world wondered when, for the first time, a
philosopher split a sunbeam with his prismatic knife,
and tamed lightnings into post-boys ! A gardener drops
into the soil a bulb not weighing an ounce, and with
scarcely a mark of grace : out steps a white-robed lily
whose praises are heard from the lips of the Saviour.
A genius plants a seed-thought which, under the opera-
tion of laws that never can be changed or monopolized
by him, sprouts, branches, blossoms, ripens into fruit.
To secure accurate knowledge of these hidden laws
that underlie phenomena, and effectually to practicalize
in any field their restless energies by skilled appliances,
demand frequently the unremittent industry of a life-
time. Indeed, so filled are biographies of the world's
successful workers with instances of persistent pains-
taking, so seemingly evident is it that their achieve-
ments are the requital of sleepless toil, and so uniformly
has reward ever followed such persevering effort, that
Buffon, one of the most indefatigable and brilliant ex-
plorers France ever gave to science, unhesitatingly pro-
nounced patience to be the true touchstone of genius ;
236 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
John Foster, the great English essayist, named it the
faculty of "lighting one's own fire;" and one of our
distinguished college presidents, "the power to make
efforts." The best definition, however, I have ever
found is, " common sense intensified."
On final analysis of the methods of men's working,
an enlightened and sustained enthusiasm will be discov-
ered to be that into which all the essential elements of
success can be resolved. There must be enkindled an
intense longing to realize a definitely conceived ideal ;
that ideal must appear worthy of any sacrifice; that
longing must glow with white heat. There are un-
doubtedly marked differences in mental endowment in
the same department, but those differences prove often
more nominal than real, and by serving as incentives
secure to the less gifted the more frequent victory.
Franklin affirms, " I have always thought that one
man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and
accomplish great affairs among mankind if he first
forms a good plan and, cutting off all amusements or
other employments that would divert his attention,
makes the execution of that same plan his sole study
and business." Emerson, in his "American Scholar,"
remarks, " The one thing of value is the active soul.
This every man is entitled to. This every man contains
in himself, although in nearly all men obstructed and yet
unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters
truth, or creates. In this action it is genius, not the
privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound
estate of every man." And, again, E. P. Whipple says,
" If we sharply scrutinize the lives of persons eminent
in any department of action or meditation, we shall
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 237
find that it is not so much brilliancy and fertility as
constancy and continuousness of effort which make a
man great."
Thoroughness, concentration, and courage are the
main, distinguishing traits of great men, qualities
rather of the heart than of the head, not necessarily
exclusive inheritances to be enjoyed by the few, but
possible acquisitions in reach of the many.
One of Wellington's chief sources of success was
his thorough mastery of details. While in Spain he
gave precise directions how the soldiers should prepare
their food ; in India, the miles per day the bullocks
should be driven that were provided for the army.
The equipments of his troops were cared for in all their
minutiae. The same exactness he introduced into his
administration of civil affairs. From his earliest school-
days, in every transaction this trait of thoroughness
appears. The confidence and unfaltering devotion he
thus inspired unquestionably secured him his many
and decisive victories. No great commander leaves
anything to chance, but seeks to anticipate every
emergency and to provide for it.
Gray spent seven years perfecting his " Elegy,"
which you can readily read in seven minutes. Into
it he generously poured the very ripest scholarship, an
intimate acquaintance with the rules of rhythm, and an
exhaustive study of the varied excellences of English
and Latin classics. Every syllable was submitted to
closest scrutiny, the cadence of the verse was suited to
the character of the thought, every outline was vivid,
every tint toned, every picture perfect, before he suf-
fered his poem to pass into print. This palace of
238 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
thought was no single night's work of slave-genii
obeying the behest of one holding some magical lamp
of Aladdin, but was built up, like coral-reef, particle
by particle. And this complete mastery of detail was
secured only by the most protracted concentration of
effort. By resolutely chaining his thought to his theme,
completely surrendering himself to its guidance, the
inexorable laws of suggestion irresistibly led him back
through the past's faded and forgotten scenes in the
humble lives of the sleeping cottagers until the scenery
and personages of every picture at last brightened and
breathed before his mental vision with all the sharply-
outlined vividness of real life.
This intense vividness of vision, the sure outcome of
mental concentration, is absolutely indispensable to suc-
cess. Fancv must first paint the canvas before the
brush touches it. The Greek Slave stands before us
now with no more clearly defined symmetry of form
than she did before Powers long ere with the chisel
his skilled hand threw off her rough mantle of mar-
ble. A celebrated French actor, in order that he might
on the stage successfully impersonate the dying, fre-
quented Paris hospitals and narrowly watched each
spasm of agony that passed over the faces of those that
were in the very act of dissolution, thus gaining a
vividness of conception that never left him. Macau-
lay says, " Dante is the eye-witness and the ear- witness
of that which he relates. He is the very man who has
heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second
death ; who has read the dusky characters on the por-
tal within which there is no hope ; who has hidden his
face from the terrors of the Gorgon ; who has fled from
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 239
the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Di-
aghignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy
sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the moun-
tain of expiation. His own brow has been marked by
the purifying angel." Handel, being asked about his
ideas and feelings when composing the " Hallelujah
Chorus," replied, " I did think I did see all heaven
before me, and the great God himself." It is related
of him that he would frequently burst into tears while
writing, and was once found by a visitor sobbing uncon-
trollably when in the act of setting the words, " He
was despised." Shields tells us that his servant who
brought his coffee in the morning often stood in silent
astonishment to see his master's tears mixing in the ink
as he penned his divine notes. We are informed by
the author of " Credo" that Foster used to walk the
aisles of his church at Chichester often by moonlight
and starlight, until at length he wore a path in the solid
pavements. He wrestled by the hour in prayer strug-
gling with eternity and immortality and fashioning those
mighty sentences which, says Robert Hall, " are like a
great lumber- wagon loaded with gold." He used to
kneel in charnel-houses and pray the dead to break the
silence and speak to him of the Invisible.
Inseparable from these traits of thoroughness and
concentration is that of unfaltering courage, courage
to undertake great enterprises, " to scorn delights and
live laborious days," to brave public sentiment in faithful
adhesion to conclusions of your own thinking, cour-
age that will not fail even in the hour of last extremity,
but inspire you to be lashed as was Farragut to the
mast of your battle-ship on the eve of action, or like
240 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the gallant crew of the Cumberland to pour your
heaviest broadside on the enemy and boldly flaunt the
banner of your purpose just before you go down. It
must be the courage of that Switzer of the fourteenth
century, Arnold Winkelried, who in the engagement
of Sempach gathered to his breast the spears of the
Austrian phalanx that thereby he might open a way
for the rude hammers and hatchets of his countrymen.
It must be such courage as inspired Luther to resolve
to answer the summons of the Diet at Worms though
he should meet as many devils as there were tiles on
the houses ; to hurl his inkstand at what he firmly be-
lieved to be the veritable Prince of Evil ; even to de-
liberately compose himself to sleep at a time when,
as he thought, fiends from hell had passed within his
chamber-door and were flitting threateningly about his
very bedside.
Cortez, when entering upon that series of triumphs
which finally overwhelmed with irremediable ruin the
proud throne of the Montezumas and filled Europe
with admiring wonder, first resolutely burnt every ship
behind him, keenly discerning that by lessening the
hopes of retreat he proportionately lessened the chances
of failure. Wellington conquered the armies of Napo-
leon and twice rode victor into Paris, mainly because
he was a general who durst carry out his own matured
ways of warfare despite the mad clamor of all Eng-
land, bravely trusting in the laws that governed the
temper of the French army, which inevitably fell to
pieces when not led to frequent victory ; and because
he was one who, when the time was ripe, fell like an
avalanche on the famed soldiery of France and pressed
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 241
his advantage with indomitable will through dangers
and difficulties and the most exhausting fatigue.
The quiet walks of literature demand this courage
equally with the stirring scenes of national battle-
fields. Wordsworth's sublime adoption and advocacy
of his own deliberately formed judgment of true taste
against the adverse criticism of the entire world of let-
ters, his jeopardizing every prospect of earthly prefer-
ment rather than violate his convictions of poetic
excellence, demanded as great moral bravery as is re-
quired to climb a ship's mast in a storm or face the fire
of an enemy.
These traits, thoroughness, concentration, and cour-
age, I conceive to be the three essential gifts of great-
ness. Without them, no alertness of intellect has ever
achieved a work which bears the impress of immortal-
ity ; with them, rarely need any one despair of accom-
plishing " that which the world will not willingly let
die."
These gifts I further conceive to be but different mani-
festations of some one master-passion, enkindling and
controlling every mental faculty; appearing either as an
intense love of the perfect, seeking satisfaction in some
acquired excellence, combined with a keen relish and
aptitude for the chosen work ; or as a thirst for power
and fame, akin, in the imperative nature of its calls, to
bodily thirst ; or else as the soul's nobler devotion that
grows out of its warm attachments to home, country, or
the cross of Christ. These passions, separate or com-
bined, must be the mainspring of every action; they
must be the inspiration of every thought ; they must
flood the whole life with an irresistible and perpetual
242 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
influence. Through them, unlettered and ill-balanced
minds have worked wonders in the world. Infuse
men of enlightened common sense with their deathless
fires, and obstructing walls of adamant crumble at
their touch.
The further my researches extend into the private
histories of those who have acquired eminence through
intrinsic worth, the more am I convinced that an en-
lightened and sustained enthusiasm has been their real
source of strength ; that only through its influence have
been developed the mighty mental forces that have
moulded the character and controlled the destiny of any
era ; that only intense temperaments working under the
stimulus of profound passion could ever have exhibited
such exhaustless patience, such concentration of thought,
such heroic fixedness of purpose, hunger, ignominy,
even death, proving powerless to damp their ardor.
What wonder that the world has ever persisted in calling
its geniuses its madmen ? Prescott, we are told, spent
twenty years in the libraries of Europe, collecting from
musty manuscripts and neglected letters material for his
Spanish histories, and a large portion of that time he
was stricken with blindness so that he had to make use
of the eyes of another. Gibbon rewrote his "Memoirs"
nine ; Newton, his "Chronology," fifteen ; and Addison,
his inimitable essays, twenty times.
Spinoza and Buckle each spent twenty years in care-
fully forming and maturing their judgment before they
published their systems of thought. For Spinoza,
those were years of the most intense self-study; for
Buckle, the most exhaustive research into the literatures
of all ages and peoples, embracing every conceivable
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 243
theme. Those years were by both spent in profoundest
obscurity, and bore witness to a patient confidence in
the final triumph of labor, to a self-trust and self-
mastery that were absolutely sublime.
It is related of Balzac that before he commenced
any work of fiction he wandered week after week up
and down the streets of Paris, studying phases of
character and prying into different modes of life;
then for months, excluding himself from all society,
he toiled incessantly, perfecting his plot, unfolding the
traits of his personages, and polishing his periods.
When he came from his retreat a blanched cheek told
a tale of utter exhaustion consequent upon such pro-
tracted mental struggle. But his untiring industry
by no means stopped here. The proof-sheets under-
went such thorough revision that the type had to be
reset. New sheets, subjected to like ordeal, were
blackened with fresh corrections. Again and again
this process was repeated, until his fingers were no
longer able to hold his pen, or his printer to keep
his temper. This author's first books were failures.
They either fell unheeded from the press, or were
noticed only to be decried. His friends flatly told
him he had no faculty for fiction, and attempted to
dissuade him from making any further efforts, as they
feared that each additional volume would but give
wider publicity to his deficiency of gifts. He, how-
ever, with undaunted spirit patiently plodded on
through years of deferred hope, until by persistent
painstaking his struggling genius at last found fit
expression. The French public then reversed its
verdict and made him its idol.
244 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Montesquieu, speaking of one of his own writings,
remarked to a friend, " You will read this book in a
few hours, but I assure you it has cost me so much
labor it has whitened my hair." Hugh Miller, even
while he felt his brain burn with incipient insanity,
while his imagination was conjuring up the horrid
phantoms that flit before the cursed eyes of the crazed,
was so determined to write the last page of that mar-
vellous book, " The Testimony of the Rocks/' he bent
over his manuscripts till long after midnight for weeks
together, keeping at bay a horde of insurgent thoughts
foaming to hurl reason from its throne, till the work
was complete.
Goldsmith's style, famed for its simplicity, being
clear, musical, flowing as a brooklet, seemingly artless
as a child's talk, was acquired by strict examination
of every word, every vowel-sound, every consonant.
Burke, who did not enter public life until thirty, and
who was one of the most indefatigable of students
during those years, on one occasion after holding the
Parliament of England for over two hours with one of
his masterly arguments on an important national theme,
impressively pausing an instant, for five minutes spell-
bound every heart with bursts of splendor. After
the speech a friend congratulating him remarked, " I
thought you had finished, but you extemporized such
eloquence as I never expect to hear again." "Ah,"
said Burke, " that extemporaneous passage, as you are
pleased to term it, cost me four days' hard labor, nearly
two of which were expended on the closing sentence."
Dr. Harvey spent eight, Dr. Jenner twenty, and Sir
Charles Bell forty years, maturing their three famed
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 245
discoveries in medical science. Titian painted daily
on one picture for seven years and eight on another.
Callcott drew forty sketches of his " Rochester" before
it met his ideal. Palissy before he won his laurels as
a worker in clay was counted a lunatic. So desperate
was his resolve that he reduced himself and family to
the very verge of beggary. He burnt his scanty fur-
niture, even tore up the flooring of his cottage, to feed
his furnaces, but at last out of those hungry flames
came the long-sought-for white enamel, and then the
rich and titled of the Empire were prodigal of their
praises.
Ghiberti, a Florentine artist who flourished toward
the close of the fourteenth century, executed for the
baptistery of his native city two pair of bronze doors,
the bas-reliefs in whose panels were in point of con-
ception and workmanship so masterful that Michael
Angelo, in a mood of ecstasy, pronounced them worthy
to be the very gates of Paradise. But thus to project
in thought and afterward embody in bronze these rep-
resentative scenes in Bible history consumed forty busy
years of this artist's life. His fame, however, has
proved as enduring as his works were perfect. From
Ghiberti, critics date a new epoch in Italian art.
Paganini profoundly studied the relations of sound
to emotion and disciplined his muscles to utmost nicety
of movement before lie was prepared so wondrously to
move and melt his audiences. Raphael acquired liberal
college culture, carefully examined the works of great
painters, copied hundreds of their designs, spent several
years in the study of perspective, personally dissected
human and brute organisms, accurately observed facial
246 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
expressions, postures of grace and strength, and noted
precise effects of tints and shadings on the canvas.
There were thirteen years of untiring effort, of the
free outpouring of princely fortunes, and of disastrous
failures, before the telegraphic cable, whose grand ideal
was first wrought out in the workshop of an American
brain, at last rested a signal success on the broad plateau
beneath the waters of the Atlantic, binding together the
continents of a world. Thirty-three times Field crossed
that ocean and fought with tides and tempests. All
the accumulations of a successful mercantile life went
down, until naught but an unrealized ideal, sustained
by an unconquered will, was left him. Twelve of those
years were gone. Four times he had tasted the bitter
ashes of disappointment. At the fourth trial the dis-
tant shores were joined, but the few faint throbbings of
electric life served for the succeeding death-hush only as
a prelude and a warning. The bonfires went out, and
the darkness of the night grew denser. Again he
thought at last to grasp the prize ; but the imperfect
cable parted and in an instant buried itself, and, to all
seeming, the hopes of its projector, under the sea. For
a moment hot tears fell on the deck of the Great
Eastern. "It is but a mad attempt at the impossible,"
was the judgment of mankind. One year more of
dauntless striving, and science claimed one of her proud-
est triumphs and history recorded the name of another
hero.
Though Ignatius Loyola was in the full noon of life,
without the least knowledge of books, and engaged in
a cause demanding the most thorough discipline of the
schools; though he was deeply chagrined at thirty-three
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 247
years already dissipated in aimless folly, yet, such was
his enthusiasm to realize the ideal which he had made
the bright espousal of his thought, he gave, now already
grown bald-headed, ten toilsome years to study, and
kindled in the breast of Xavier and other of his coun-
trymen the same fierce fires of devotion that burnt in
his own. Sadly mistaken as was this founder of the
Jesuits, despotic and blasting as was the hold of his
order on the souls of men, still who can fail to admire,
as he turns the pages of JesuiticaNiistory, the wellnigh
irresistibleness that lay in that singleness of aim, that
full consecration to a purpose, which characterized this
earnest man? Garibaldi, the patriot of to-day, who
has snatched glad Italy from the clutch of a despot,
whether he coasted along the shores of the Mediterra-
nean, or foot-sore and fatigued rested on his arms in the
serpent-crowded forests of South America, whether he
wept over the thinned ranks of his comrades as he des-
perately fought for the liberties of a strange people, or
fled with a dead wife in his arms before the blood-
hounds of power and dug her grave in the desolate pass
of the mountains, never in his life was known to forget
the enthusiastic vow of his youth, but rather made the
rough, rude winds of trouble fan his zeal for country
to a brighter and a purer burning.
At the opening of this nineteenth century, in the
dungeons of the First Napoleon, Toussaint, the Haytian
Liberator, lay dying. The renown of one who had
been a slave till fifty the base despoiler of nations
envied and durst not let such genius live. In former
years across the waters had come tidings of the black
warrior and his conquering bauds of serfs. When he
248 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
entered the arena five armies were in death-grapple,
without purpose or plan. Nobly determined to liberate
his people, he joined forces with Republican France.
Such was his energy in battle, the English were driven
from every stronghold ; twenty-eight Spanish forts in
four days fell before his advancing columns; he main-
tained against an allied enemy long lines of impregnable
defence, successfully besieged St. Marc, and closed the
campaign by English capitulation and the retreat of the
Spanish forces. Sqpn after, French jealousy began to
burn, kindling against him the mulatto fury, and open-
ing afresh the wounds of civil war, but with firm hand
he quelled insurrection, restored order, encouraged
industry, and with far-seeing statesmanship gave con-
stitutional guarantees to freedom.
Loyal still to France, he unwittingly sent advices to
Napoleon, then First Consul, who, fearful of the rising
splendor of the negro chieftain, and uneasy under watch-
ing eyes at court, sent against the island thirty thousand
veterans and upward of sixty men-of-war, dreaming of
easy triumphs and the re-enslavement of a free people.
His generals, long drilled in war and fresh from con-
quests on the Continent, here at last found a master.
The brave blacks at Cape Franyois defiantly burnt
the city in their faces and sounded to battle. Napoleon
sent Toussaint's unsuspecting sons from their schools in
Europe, bearing messages of mingled threat and promise,
in hope thus to unman the patriot through the tender
love of the father. Could Toussaint violate confided
trusts and betray to ruin liberty bought with blood ?
Following his sublime refusal came that conflict in
which ten thousand of Napoleon's trained soldiery
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 249
were slain and the disordered remnants of his defeated
forces fell an easy prey to the galling fire of mountain
marksmen. Outgeneralled in open fight, the French
officers, under Napoleon's express command, resorted to
cowardly intrigue, professing friendship and promising
liberal rule. The African's nobly confiding nature led
him into the hands of his captors.
They could manacle the old man's body, but not his
thought; could desolate his home, but its clustering
associations, comfort-laden, were above the reach of
their vandal fingers. Breaking the distant prison's
lonely stillness came the accents of a people's benedic-
tion ; on its darkness fell the radiance of approaching
glory. Regal powers had been developed in the con-
flict ; and none could ever rob him of the joy of their
conscious consecration to a work of love. Napoleon
was taken to St. Helena, followed by the curses of
widowed Europe. His death-bed memories wandered
vaguely to troubled battle-scenes and faded battle-glory.
He had outlived his honor, and for him no brightening
promise beckoned beyond the future's lifting curtains.
To such self-sacrificing enthusiasm for country Tous-
saint owed the development of his marvellous military
genius. None of us can know with what possibilities
we have been divinely gifted until our lives possess
this singleness of aim, this profound consecration to
a purpose. Toussaint could have truthfully said, in
the beautiful words of the Eastern fable, " I was but
common clay till roses were planted in me."
We have but touched upon the romances of enthu-
siasm with which the pages of the world's history
abound. But what need is there of further multiply-
12
250 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
ing instances of the achievements of this wonderfully
transforming power? Time would fail me to speak of
Hayden and Huber, Milton and Beethoven, who, de-
spite defects in sight and hearing sufficient to have
paralyzed any but those of unconquerable spirit, have
left acknowledged masterpieces in painting, science,
poetry, and music, the four highest departments in
human achievement. It is beyond all controversy that
it is to the enlightened, persistent, painstaking enthu-
siasts this world belongs and the fulness thereof.
Whence, then, comes this irresistible impetus of zeal?
How may it be most readily and certainly attained?
Thoroughness, concentration, and courage, the distin-
guishing traits of great men, I have in this paper
maintained to be but different manifestations of some
master-passion, appearing either as an intense love of
the perfect combined with a keen relish and aptitude
for the chosen work, or as an imperative thirst for fame
and power, or else as the soul's nobler devotion to home,
country, or the cross of Christ. At least some one of
these passions must flood the whole life with an irre-
sistible and perpetual influence. There have undoubt-
edly been effective workers who have been under the
sway of but a single one, but only from those in whom
they all coexist and co-operate can we look for the largest
results.
First, then, our natural tastes and aptitude should,
as far as circumstances permit, control us in determining
both the nature and methods of our work. There is
rarely a sea or a soil, an atmosphere or a zone, which
some forms of life do not find congenial. Water-lilies
will uncover their rich blooms above swamp-bogs and
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 251
mingle their perfume with the poisonous exhalations
that rise from fever-smitten districts. Cacti will swell
out their prickly sides and astonish us with the rich
pencillings of their petals though rooted in the hot
sand-plains of the tropics ; the lichen will grow thriftily
even on the unyielding face of a rock ; while up through
salt depths the sea-weed sends its delicate, thread-like
tracery of branch and leaf. Even into the thin, chilled
air of mountain-tops, or out of the half-frozen soil of
arctic climes, hardy plant-life pushes its way with un-
conquerable persistence.
So, too, from every available corner of this marvel-
lously peopled world, animals of every variety of struc-
ture spring into existence. Earth, air, and water swarm
with their myriad life. There is an almost endless va-
riety of conditions in which they are called to subsist,
but for each condition some organism presents itself
whose wants that condition or environment is exactly
suited to satisfy. Within its appointed habitat every
plant and animal thrives ; removed from that it droops
and dies. The cactus and sea-weed cannot change places
and live; the bluebird cannot lay its eggs, much less
hatch and rear its young, in the nest of the stickleback.
This same specialization extends to mankind, and it
becomes more marked with each new decade. The world
has been steadily progressing from the uniform to the
complex. The employments of men, their wants, their
capacities, and their tastes, have been multiplying, and
are destined still to multiply so long as the evolution of
a perfect individualism remains unattained. It is now
generally conceded that those who would command
success must consent to become specialists and must
252 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
choose those callings for which they have marked apti-
tude and relish. The increasing competitions in trade
and the broadened culture of modern times are demand-
ing with emphasis the most skilled products of hand
and brain. The consequence is that men get out of
place much more easily now than ever before, and the
mistake is much more likely to prove serious, perhaps
fatal. For plants and animals an all-wise Intelligence
and an unbending Will have predetermined their sepa-
rate vocations; and a most marvellous completeness is
noticeable in all their work. The bee, the spider, and
the ant are strict specialists under Divine instructions.
They are born experts, and their achievements excite at
once the admiration and the despair of mankind. It is
true their methods and ours not only widely but radi-
cally differ, for they require neither experience nor a
working model. The fact that they are specialists does
not make them experts, but the fact that they are di-
vinely taught. With us there is an ever-growing need
to intensify thought by concentrating it, and to train
our bodily organs by long practice on some one specific
thing. We have each been gifted with a distinct in-
dividualism, which should ever be courageously main-
tained, for only through its healthful development can
we secure that originality, or that indefinable personal
magnetism, which we all covet and before which we all
instinctively bow. If our chosen life-work is to dis-
cover truth, we must be in a receptive, suggestive, en-
tirely candid frame of mind, at the same time exercising
our individual reason and implicitly relying on its con-
clusions. The fruits of others' labor can be of benefit
only as they are thoroughly mastered and assimilated
THE KEY TO SUCCESS. 253
by us, only as they are passed through the alembic of
our own minds. They must serve simply as stimulants
to afterward independent thinking. If we ever strike
out new paths, it will be either through discoveries of
new facts or through independent courses of reasoning.
The latter can be reached only as we cultivate unobtru-
sive yet firm self-reliance in thought. This demands
both a certain self-abandonment and a certain self-as-
sertion. An abandonment, in that the attention must
be completely absorbed in the pursuit. There must be
a resolute ruling out of all extraneous and diverting
subjects, together with such a genuine heart-love for the
truth as we find it that we will joyfully become its dis-
interested, outspoken, uncompromising champions. A
certain self-assertion, in that we must habitually exer-
cise, and most positively assert, a greater reliance on
our own conclusions than on those of others, and cour-
ageously state and stand by them whatever may betide.
A precisely parallel argument could be urged in refer-
ence to the selection of one's style in oratory or author-
ship, or, if a life of action rather than meditation be
determined upon, in the planning of those campaigns
by which one hopes to win his way in the stern world
of fact. Only, then, by thus maintaining unswerving
loyalty to our inborn individuality, our natural tastes
and aptitude, and our own independent convictions of
truth and duty, can we attain unto, or permanently
possess, that impetus of zeal that becomes inspiration
and commands victory.
With this enthusiasm of individualism should also
be combined, as we have said, the zeal of emulation.
This is too axiomatic to demand any extended proof, or
254 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
even any especial emphasis of statement. It is simply
necessary to caution against any selfish or meretricious
phase of it. No personal advancement not founded
upon pronounced personal merit should ever be sought
for or accepted. And then when to these two are
added, as their crown and finish, that world -embracing
sympathy, that self-forgetting love, that "enthusiasm
of humanity," as the author of "Ecce Homo" happily
styles it, which Christ embodied in his life and sought
to enkindle in the hearts of his disciples, the soul comes
into its best estate of creative energy and accomplishes
its most enduring work.
SHELLEY.
SHELLEY was one of those strange dreamers who in
some of their idiosyncrasies resemble madmen. The
public in their opinion of him have been widely divided.
The majority of his cotemporaries pronounced him a bad
and dangerous man, while there were a few who loved
him almost to veneration ; and such was their intimate
acquaintance with the facts and fancies of his life, such
their admitted mental ability and undoubted candor,
we are forced to respect their opinion, and, if possible,
seek its reconciliation with that of the multitude. It
is no 1 wonder that such diversity of sentiment has pre-
vailed, so rare is it that in a single brief life there has
been crowded so much of wild romance ; that in a single
mind there has been linked such puerility with such
transcendent genius, such penetration with such pur-
blindness; that the same heart has been capable of
breathing out such manifest tenderness and spotless
purity of aifection, and also of abandoning, without
any outward sign of remorse, a wife and babe, and
afterward for a time openly trampling upon every civ-
ilized marriage law without shame. Is there a key to
his character, or must he forever remain to us a mental
mystery ?
255
256 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Here is a being born with both wings and club-feet.
At times he displays peerless powers of flight, striking
the stars with his strong pinions; at times he seems an
awkward imbecile, stumbling among the stones. Some,
dazed by his wings, thought him an angel ; others, hav-
ing first caught sight of his club-feet, suffered the de-
formity to inflame their imaginations until they believed
him a veritable man-monster. Both parties erred, yet
each could cite facts in its favor ; for of all the human
eccentrics that have come to the surface of society,
Shelley the most resembled an angel in ruins.
By a careful analysis of the five prime elements of
his character, idealism, individualism, enthusiasm, love,
and hope, their morbid development and their intimate
interplay, I am confident we can successfully account
for any apparent dualism either in his emotions or mo-
tives, that we will be able to discover alike in his life
and writings a consistency as complete as comports with
human frailty.
As an idealist he stands without a superior, perhaps
without an equal, in all history ; and his creative fac-
ulty was marvellous not only for its strength but its
strangeness. The phantoms of his thought were often
such weird ghosts and so sharply outlined, he fled from
them in the wildest terror, convinced that they were fixed
facts outside the brain rather than flitting fancies within
it. The earliest recollections of his boyhood are full of
this trait. The ceiling of a certain low passage in the old
homestead was riddled with holes by the stick of this
little mischief in search ofsome new chamber where the
strange folk of his fancy might find suitable apartments.
The boy used to gather his sisters about him when they
SHELLEY. 257
were but wee things, and hold them in rapt attention with
his impromptu tales of fairy wonder. They were told
that the deserted garret was the laboratory of an al-
chemist who had been living up there alone so long,
busily bending over his retort and crucible, that his
beard had turned white and the world had forgotten
him. They waited with all the confidence and keen
anticipation of young life for that promised "some day"
when they should visit him, and perhaps take a sip of
his elixir or fill their hands with gold he was then
learning to make. All the queer noises about the
premises were distinctly traced to the great tortoise in
AVarnham Pond. The myth of the old snake that
haunted the garden for upwards of three centuries till
carelessly cut in two by the scythe of the gardener re-
ceived as grave a rehearsal as if it had been an historical
fact. By the magic of grotesque costumes he would
change his sisters into ghosts' and hobgoblins, then with
them marching behind him would wave a fire-pan over
his head with flames bursting dangerously from every
crevice, himself the arch-fiend breathing forth the fire
and smoke of the pit. He was accustomed to frequent
the charnel-house of Warnham church, and await the
return of lonesome spirits to look in upon the crumbling
dust they once tenanted. These visits were by no
means without fear, but the fancy of falling in with
such strange company fairly infatuated him. When a
school-boy at Eton he was known time and again to
steal out of his boarding-house with all possible secrecy
and cross the fields at the dead hours of night until he
reached some running stream, then, standing astride it,
three times to drink of its waters out of a human skull,
258 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
in hopes through such incantations, taught him by his
glamour books, to get a glimpse of the devil and per-
haps pass a word with him.
The incredible quickness with which he mastered his
studies left him abundant leisure to give loose rein to
his unpractised fancies, and they soon whirled him along
at perilous speed. Diffidence, acute sensibility, love of
study, with lack of robust health, totally unfitting him
for social excitements, he naturally at the first attempted
to repair the loss with the haunted castles and the ban-
dits of the story-books that came within his reach. The
Terrific, in all its indefinable forms, vague hints of that
dim borderland of mystery that lies just beyond the
real and the seen, seemed to weave a spell over his tur-
bulent spirits. In his night rambles he sought out un-
frequented places, attended only by such wraiths and
apparitions of the imagination as the genius of a Cole-
ridge, a De Quincey, and a Poe has made imperishable.
The few fragments that have floated down to us of the
poems and prose fictions that he wrote in the dark days
at Eton bear unmistakable impress of the morbid in-
tensity and dangerous leanings of his mind; while
through their crudities at times break prophetic gleams
of that sublimation of thought and marvellous splendor
of diction that characterized his later works.
His brain and his nervous system were of the most
delicate texture. The microscopic machinery of that
butterfly to which Hawthorne's "Artist of the Beau-
tiful" gave a momentary mimic life was not less suited
to the world's unthinking baby-clutch. They both
ought to have been kept under glass. In one of his
letters he remarked, " My feelings at intervals are of a
SHELLEY. 259
deadly, torpid kind, or awakened to such an unnatu-
rally keen excitement that, to instance only the organ of
sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of
distant trees to present themselves to me with painful
distinctness." Grating sounds gave him positive tor-
ture. An amusing instance is related of him, illus-
trating this. Christie, an untidy Caledonian girl, was
servant in the house in which he and his first wife were
once boarding. Some of his friends, knowing his weak-
ness and fond of a joke, would draw the girl into con-
versation that they might see Shelley writhe under the
sound of her harsh voice. " Have you had any dinner
to-day ." "Yes." " And what did you get ?" "Sauget
heed and bannocks," would be her invariable piping
reply. The poet, almost distracted, would rush into
the corner and stop his ears. " Oh, Bysshe, how can
you be so absurd ? what harm does the poor girl do
you ?" " Send her away, Harriet," he would gasp ;
" oh, send her away ! for God's sake, send her away !"
How vividly these facts revive Poe's picture of that
remarkable recluse who played so tragic a part in "The
Fall of the House of Usher" ! Occasionally Shelley
fell a victim to somnambulism, and there was a sort of
waking dream in which he often lay wrapped. He
would start from its spell trembling like an aspen-leaf.
His eyes would flash and his thoughts grow strange and
spiritual. This was no nightmare. It was no ordinary
fit of abstraction. It was that dangerous ecstasy when
the impatient soul steps upon the threshold of its tene-
ment of clay and thinks of flight.
There is a prose fragment of his in which he describes
a by no means extraordinary scene. At the close he
260 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
says, "I suddenly remembered to have observed this
exact scene in some dream of long ago. Here I was
obliged to leave off, overcome with thrilling horror."
" I well remember," remarks Mrs. Shelley, " his coming
to me from writing this, pale and agitated, to seek
refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it
excited." While in Italy, near the close of his life, he
was one evening walking with his friend Williams along
the terrace, watching the play of the moonbeams on the
water. Complaining of unusual nervousness, he sud-
denly and with great violence grasped the arm of his
friend, and fixed his eyes in a wild, frantic stare on the
white surf that broke at their feet. Williams, seeing
him thus agitated, asked whether he was in pain, but
he only answered, " There it is again ! there !" After
the paroxysm had passed, he stated that a naked child
had just risen from the sea, smiling and clapping his
little hands at him. The vision of this trance was so
intensely vivid, it required no little philosophical argu-
ment on the part of his friend to convince him it was
only a dream, and to call his crazed thoughts back to the
sad reality that his dear boy lay under the daisies still.
Once Byron, Shelley, Monk Lewis, and the ladies of
their households were accustomed, under Lewis's lead-
ership, to spend their evenings in telling ghost-stories.
The fictions were not only original, but impromptu.
They were meant but for mental gymnastics, simply to
serve as wings for the hours. It was a brilliant circle,
and out of the murky atmosphere of these talks there
came to Mrs. Shelley the first hints of her famed
" Frankenstein." As might have been anticipated,
Shelley's fancy finally fired, and before its fierce heat
SHELLEY. 261
his reason melted away like wax. It is told us that on
one of these occasions he began a story, but was soon
compelled to stop and hasten from the room. One or
two of the company followed him out, and found him
in an almost complete nervous prostration. After he
had somewhat recovered, he said to them that a most
beautiful woman had appeared to him, leaning over the
balustrade of the staircase and fixing upon him four
flashing eyes. As some one has suggested, his mind
was of such exquisite delicacy it seemed throned on the
very pinnacle of genius, where but a breath might pre-
cipitate its fall.
He was doubtless the victim of hallucination when
in North Wales he thought a night tramp had fired at
him. He kept the house in an uproar until morning.
On the next day he even went so far as to furnish the
officers of the law a sworn statement of the case, gravely
detailing many particulars, and as soon as it was pos-
sible fled the country. In his correspondence with
William Godwin we find him claiming that he had
been twice expelled from Eton on account of the ad-
vocacy of his beliefs. The story was utterly false ; but
I see no reason for charging him with intentional false-
hood, as has been done, for he was proverbially truth-
loving, standing ready even to suffer martyrdom for its
sake. We have seen with what readiness and frequency
he converted his intensely vivid fancies into accredited
facts. It was perfectly natural for this strangely-gifted
boy to first imagine himself a bold defender of his
beliefs and visited with the wrath of the bigots, then
afterward to look upon his visions as memories of what
had actually occurred.
262 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
As a writer he stands without a rival in his power to
impersonate thought. The multitudinous gods of an-
cient mythology, which were the creations of long cen-
turies of misguided worship, scarcely outnumbered that
vast company of intelligences with which his fruitful
fancy peopled the universe. Everything as it passed
through the alembic of his mind was refined into a
splendid ideal. The material stood to him but as a
manifestation of the spiritual. Not only the forces in
nature, but even the most subtile metaphysical discrim-
inations, became palpable personages before him. On
every page of his principal poems, except the " Cenci,"
in almost every line, they start into life. In the
" Witch of Atlas/ 7 in " Adonais," and in the last acts
of "Prometheus Unbound," his creative powers seemed
to culminate. To the many these Alpine peaks of song
are lost in cloud. Few have ever climbed their dizzy
heights ; none have ever seemed able to live long in
their thin air. I had designed to transmit to my page
some of their marvellous creations, but on making the
attempt I found them dissolving at my touch like crys-
tals of frost-work.
Byron pronounced him the most imaginative writer
of his time, and this criticism acquires peculiar em-
phasis from the fact that Shelley was the cotemporary
of the Lake poets. Macaulay asserts that inspiration
can be more safely affirmed of him than of any other
English author. His mind, while he was engaged in
composition, boiled like a caldron. So great was the
intensity with which it wrought, his body shook as in
an ague-fit. Bayne, the Scotch critic, claimed that his
was the princeliest imagination that ever sublimed en-
SHELLEY. 263
thusiasra or personated thought. Gilfillan called him
the Eternal Child, and Mrs. Browning alluded to him
in her " Vision of the Poets/ 7 and her words are preg-
nant with meaning, as one " statue-blind with his white
ideal." Shelley lived in perpetual childhood. Its life-
like illusions seemed woven into the very texture of his
brain. Neither his face nor his faculties ever grew old.
His kingdom was cloud-land. He was a stranger, ill
at ease, in any other.
We now pass to the consideration of his second
marked characteristic, his individualism. Scientists
have discovered a single plan underlying nature, cer-
tain fundamental ideas or great types introducing order
and unity everywhere ; so that now in their text-books
they go back through individuals, species, genera, or-
ders, to the first great classes of creation. This methodic
development, this prevalence of law, they have found
even in the subtilest of human thought. But they have
further discovered that creation was not the work of an
instant, but the evolution of ages ; that an impulse or
a series of impulses toward heterogeneity has been im-
parted to all things, unfolding from this initial unity
an infinite variety, rendering life-forms continually
more complex, from the monad up to man. The vigor
of this impulse still remains unabated ; for through it
comes that individualism in whose healthful develop-
ment, and in that alone, this broad plan in nature reaches
final consummation. In the present stage of advance-
ment, although there are no two men who exactly re-
semble each other, who have no distinguishing personal
traits, yet, with the majority, points of resemblance
rather than of difference predominate. Out from these
264 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
mainly homogeneous masses, however, there now and
then appears one of overmastering individualism, break-
ing through the conventional crusts that have gathered
upon human thought. They are the revolutionists God
lets loose on the planet. They usually come with super-
abundant personal positiveness and singularity. Were
it not so, I question whether they could command a
hearing. Not only must their personal tastes and opin-
ions be unique, but there must be an implicit faith in
their soundness, an exalted view of their value, above
all an inward, irrepressible impulse to state and stand
by them at every hazard. This impulse must be of
such a character that opposing prejudices will but fan
it to fiercer heat.- Only those thus possessed have ever
met success, or ever can. Others endure for a time, but
at last sink down among the undistinguishable atoms
of the mass. With this individualism Shelley came
surcharged, so that when society used harsh means to
repress it, it found an infuriated tiger upon its track.
When a beautiful, bright boy, eager to know, sym-
pathetic, sincere, quivering with acute sensibility, his
head already in the clouds, his health by no means
firm, he was thrown in among a wild troop of school-
fellows at Eton. In English schools a pernicious cus-
tom then prevailed of forcing members of the lower
class to perform menial services for those in the higher.
Fagging, as it was called, had grown into a system of
petty tyrannies. Readers of " Tom Brown at Rugby"
will readily recall Hughes's spirited sketch of his hero's
gritty fight with an insolent chap in the fifth form, who
had presumed too much under cover of this custom.
Shelley, when called upon to fag, peremptorily refused,
SHELLEY. 265
not because he was averse to labor, nor because his
father was a baronet, but he looked upon the demand
as an invasion of his personal rights. Then they tried
what virtue lay in cuffs and taunts. Instead of break-
ing his spirit, they kindled it into fury. Those brag-
garts turned pale and grew weak with fear before his
bursts of passion. The war extended over many
months and numbered many battles ; but he conquered
at last, though the bitter experiences of those days, his
loneliness and sense of wrong, burnt into his soul like a
hot iron. His touching lines at the opening of " The
Revolt of Islam" tell us that twelve years afterward this
wound was still painful and bleeding. An old Etonian
remarks, "For years before I knew that Shelley the
boy was Shelley the poet and friend of Byron, he dwelt
in my memory as one of those strange, unearthly com-
pounds which sometimes, though rarely, appear in
human form. He was known at Eton as the mad
Shelley. Sometimes his rage at their taunts became
boundless. They fairly raised the demon in him. I
have seen him surrounded, hooted, baited, like an en-
raged bull, and at this distance of time forty years
after I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which
Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysms of anger."
When a student at Oxford, he unfortunately fell
into the hands of English and French atheists, who
stripped him of nearly every opinion of value. That
Shelley could have become a convert to creeds so cold,
so humiliating, so abandoned of hope, strikes one at
first as a mental impossibility. The natural temper of
his mind was, as we have seen, profoundly idealistic,
his thoughts revelling in the unseen. Rarely one ever
266 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
evinced such capacity for companionship ; none ever
more intensely longed for it. Dulness and brutality
had already driven him into social exile, so that almost
the only avenue to sympathy left him lay through this,
his wonderful gift of spiritual perception. In what
especial need, then, he stood of some comforting con-
sciousness of the presence of angels and the kindly
overshadowing of the Divine love ! He also had the
credit of sharp discrimination. His writings every-
where abound in delicate shades of thought. He un-
doubtedly possessed a taste for abstruse reasoning, for
he once seriously debated whether he should not adopt
metaphysics for a life-study.
Hogg, his college companion, attempting an expla-
nation, oifers two suggestions: first, that scepticism,
seemingly uncongenial to one of fervid imagination,
had attractions for him perhaps from the fact that he
took such keen pleasure in discussion and found in this
so admirable a position for defensive warfare ; second,
that destruction, if on a grand scale, is as fascinating as
creation to one loving excitement and change. I can-
not take so low a view of Shelley as to feel satisfied
with this solution. There is no doubt that he loved
disputation, and that he loved excitement and change ;
but he loved truth more. He was of too sad and earn-
est a temperament to argue against his own convictions.
His afterward life-long loyalty to them proved him no
trifler. The growth and gradual settling of his beliefs
speak volumes for his mental integrity. To lean Sam-
son-like against the pillars upon which rests the world's
religion, that he might for an instant hear the crash of
falling timbers, would indicate a curious love of excite-
SHELLEY. 267
ment in one conscious that his own hopes as well as
those of others must lie buried in the ruins.
Coleridge's thoughts went deeper. In a letter to a
friend he remarked, " I think as highly of Shelley's
genius, yes, and of his heart, as you can do. Soon after
he left Oxford he went to the Lakes, poor fellow, and
with some wish, I have understood, to see me ; but I
was absent, and Southey received him instead. Now,
the very reverse of what would have been the case in
ninety-nine instances of a hundred, I might have been
of use to him and Southey could not ; for I should have
sympathized with his poetic, metaphysical reveries,
and the very word metaphysics is an abomination to
Southey, and Shelley would have felt that I understood
him. His discussions tending toward atheism would
not have scared me ; for me it would have been a semi-
transparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through
which I should have seen the true imago, the final
metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort
of atheism the next best religion to Christianity ; nor
does the better faith I have learnt from Paul and John
interfere with the cordial reverence I feel for Benedict
Spinoza. As far as Robert Southey was concerned, I
am quite certain that his harshness arose entirely from
the frightful reports that had been made to him re-
specting Shelley's moral character and conduct, re-
ports essentially false, but, for a man of Southey's
strict regularity and habitual self-government, rendered
plausible by Shelley's own wild words and horror of
hypocrisy."
But, explain his conversion and profoundly regret it
as we may, his course afterward was not only highly
268 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
characteristic, brimful of individualism, but was
prompted by motives from which it is impossible for
us to withhold our praise. As soon as he had given
his assent to the creed of the atheists, he resolved on
the overturn of the entire Christian world, and even
hoped for it. Of course only a boy in his teens, and a
boy, too, with his peculiar combination of qualities,
could have conceived of such a Quixotic scheme, or
have entertained it for an instant. He began his work
as a propagandist with the issue of a two-paged pam-
phlet on the " Necessity of Atheism," sending a copy
with a circular letter to the twenty-five heads of colleges
at Oxford, asking their assent to its sentiments. Those
grave scholastic dignitaries replied by ordering his instant
expulsion. Perhaps they meant well, but their conduct
was certainly inexcusably inconsiderate. It was in great
part the result of that revulsion of feeling that had
swept over Europe at the close of the French Revolu-
tion. The curdling horrors of that reign of license
and irreligion had caused an indescribable dread to
creep into the public mind. A severe censorship, in
consequence, rested on platform and press. We have
since discovered that this stifling process was the very
cause of the evils it now sought to avert. Had one of
those panic-stricken professors taken the pains to visit
Shelley in private, considerately listened to his objec-
tions to Christianity, and met them with the proofs, as
Coleridge would have done, he would have found in
him an apt and candid scholar, and without much
question would have won over to his cause an earnest
and able advocate. None was ever more open to convic-
tion. He craved knowledge, was of reflective habit.
SHELLEY. 269
His intellect was marked alike for its strength, its com-
pass, and its integrity. Though of deep convictions,
his restless spirit of inquiry always saved him from
becoming opinionated. He strongly inclined to re-
ligious thinking. Indeed, what Novalis once remarked
of Spinoza, that branded atheist, who so deeply im-
pressed him with his religious fervor, I believe was
equally true of Shelley. He was " God-intoxicated."
To know truth and fearlessly to use it, had grown into
an enthusiasm ; and that very act which called down
on him such wrathful lightnings was one of its unmis-
takable signs.
To none would an appreciative sympathy have been
more welcome ; upon none would it have wrought greater
good. That his life had been singularly pure, even his
bitterest enemies durst not deny. Being still very
young, only eighteen, of slight experience, with an
immature judgment, with no fixed habits of thought,
radical changes might readily have been wrought in his
beliefs. Nothing but excessive fright could have in-
duced these learned men of Oxford to let slip this
golden opportunity. They must have adjudged him
smitten with incurable leprosy, to have thrust him
out with such cruel haste, branding him with all the
ignominy that lay within the bestowal of one of the
most powerful corporations of learning in the world.
A German university would have taken up the gaunt-
let which Shelley thus threw down, and not have suf-
fered his belief in the impregnability of his position to
become confirmed by so cowardly an answer as he here
received.
The boy, thus rudely rebuffed, sought an asylum in
270 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
his father's house, and should have found one. But
the cold formalist, mainly interested in keeping the
outside of the platter clean, sternly rebuked him, giv-
ing him to understand that unless he conformed to the
religious usages of the family he must never again step
foot on his threshold. Shelley, loyal to his convic-
tions, promptly refused, although he knew that dis-
grace and poverty would join him company. If the
doctors blundered, the father surely fell into crime.
Granting that the boy was the most impracticable of
dreamers, and that had his dreams come true the moral
world would have passed into eclipse, yet the fact
that he was a mere boy, and nobly aimed at benefiting
his age, should have summoned to his side the kind-
liest influences of home. Yet he was left upon the
streets of London, to battle single-handed as best he
could. It was a sad sight.
Shelley's individualism, already strongly marked,
now passed at once into blind frenzy. Indeed, it would
seem that he never afterward fully recovered his right
reason. "Queen Mab," begun a year and a half be-
fore as a purely imaginative poem on dreams, he at
once converted into a systematic attack on society,
doubling its length and appending to it elaborate notes,
in which whatever law or custom tended in the least
to restrain the fullest personal freedom was passion-
ately condemned as tyrannical. This delicately-nerved
dream-creature, thus trampled on by professing Chris-
tians, tortured but not tamed, learns to regard Chris-
tianity as the foster-mother of crime, an organized
oppression drenching the earth with the blood of inno-
cency. Obedience to God he pronounces the servility
SHELLEY. 271
a trembling slave pays a tyrant. As all religions
threaten punishment for disbelief, a purely involuntary
act, they, he claims, should all alike pass under con-
demnation. There is no personal Creator. Vulgar
minds had mistaken a metaphor for a real being, a
word for a thing. There is at best but an impersonal,
pervading spirit, coeternal with the universe. Ne-
cessity is mother of the world, true liberty a mere
shadow, a myth, a fable. Crime is madness, madness
a disease, disease the sole result of meat diet. Prome-
theus chained to Caucasus personates mankind, who,
having applied fire to culinary purposes, or, in other
words, having changed the character of their food,
have become the helpless victims of the vulture of
disease. Wealth is a power usurped by the few to
compel the many to labor for their benefit. The rent-
rolls of landed proprietors are pension-lists, signs of
sinecures, which reformers should no longer suffer to
exist. Laws which support this system are the result
of the conspiracy of a few, and would be swept from
the statute-book were not the masses ignorant and
credulous. Law even pretends to control the inter-
course of the sexes, in face of the fact that the very
essence of love is liberty. Marriage is utterly un-
worthy of toleration. As well bind friends together by
statute as man and wife. The present system of con-
straint makes hypocrites or open foes out of the ma-
jority of those thus bound. "In fact, religion and
morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code
of misery and servitude ; the genius of human happi-
ness must tear every leaf from the accursed Book of
God, ere man can read the inscription on his heart.
272 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and
finery, start from her own disgusting image, should
she look in the mirror of nature !"
Thus we see Shelley pouring out invectives against
every form of religious faith, against every safeguard
to property or pure morals, an indiscriminate icono-
clast, an agrarian, a free-lover, a fierce foe to all present
forms of social order.
His mind cooled somewhat in after-years, as his life
grew more tranquil. Some of his views he modified ;
some, totally changed ; some, however, he carried into
practice and tenaciously maintained until death. He
lived to advance as far as the Unitarian creed, and to
be a firm believer in immortality. Such was the drift
of his thought, such his increasing study of the Scrip-
tures and unfeigned love for them, his natural candor,
his tireless search for truth, his profound respect for the
character of Christ, it is by no means improbable that
had a few more years been spared him, and they
warmed and lighted by sympathizing hearts, his re-
spect would have turned to love, perhaps to adoration.
His opinion of marriage underwent little change.
Had he followed his own inclinations, he would have
lived with both Harriet and Mary without its sanction,
utterly regardless of the world's opinion. He con-
sented to its rites, not because he quailed before the
approaching storm of calumny, but because principally
upon them, being the weaker party, it would spend its
violence. Even as it was, he and Mary lived together
a full year without it, before Harriet's suicide secured
him the divorce refused by English law. Shelley's
idealism and individualism, originally given in such
SHELLEY. 273
large measure, now almost preternaiu rally developed,
render it possible, in my judgment, for Shelley to have
been prompted by the purest motives in both the ad-
vocacy and practice of principles which, if generally
adopted, would have corrupted and finally overturned
society.
I now pass to his third most noticeable trait, his
enthusiasm. In this, too, from the first he stood pre-
eminent ; and in this, I regret to add, there soon
appeared symptoms of disease.
The instances in his life which I have already given
under other heads equally. illustrate the intensity of his
temperament ; and so intimately is it also associated
with his capacities to love and hope, that it will again
appear when I treat those divisions of my theme. But
there are certain phases demanding a more special
notice, and to them I now briefly direct attention.
His passion for boating was very remarkable. It
was as impelling and as indestructible as any instinct
of bee or beaver. It appeared first in the making
and floating of paper boats. Whenever he approached
any little pond in his rambles, he would linger about
its margin by the hour, held as by the spell of enchant-
ment. The keen wind sweeping across the common
would cut his delicate face and hands, and cause his
frail body to tremble with the cold ; but with thoughts
undiverted he would keep on twisting his bits of paper
into tiny crafts. These as fast as finished he would
launch, watching them with absorbing interest as they
drifted away until they either capsized, or sank water-
soaked, or safely landed on the opposite shore, his ima-
gination meantime transforming the pond into a rough
13
274 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
rolling sea, and his bits of paper into stately ships
wrestling with tempests or dashing upon rocks, or safely
riding at anchor at last in the offing of some foreign
port. He always had one or more books in his pocket;
and, however expensive the volume, its fly-leaves, al-
though he never disturbed the text, were prized only
as excellent ship-timber; and it was utterly impossi-
ble to entice him from the spot so long as there was
an available scrap of paper about his person. While
residing at Bracknell he found a whimsical gratification
for this mania for navigation, secretly setting sail on
a stream near by in one of the tubs of his hostess. Its
bottom falling out, he launched a second, but, this
meeting a similar fate, a third was launched from its
ways in dry-dock, until there was not a single one left.
Washing-day came. A search was made for the missing
tubs, but in vain, for this strange mischief-maker had
disappeared as well as his strange fleet.
A large portion of his life he spent on the water.
There he found health, and freedom, and lightness of
heart, and mental exaltation. His poems abound in
river-scenes, and scenes on the sea; some of exceeding
wildness, as in "Alastor;" some, as in "The Witch of
Atlas," bathed in a beauty so ethereal it would seem that
the artist, in some privileged hour of inspiration, had
dipped his brush in the light of other worlds. " The
Revolt of Islam/' one of the most elaborate of his
poems, he composed as he floated a half-year alone in
his skiff on the Thames, reclining under alder- and
willow-fringed banks, or taking refuge at noonday on
some of the little islands that had until then nestled
unnoticed in the lap of the river. Frequently he
SHELLEY. 275
would spend whole nights in his boat. This passion,
however, proved fatal at last ; for Shelley, having set
sail from Leghorn for Lerici on his way to welcome
Leigh Hunt to Italy, accompanied only by a single
friend and a sailor-boy, was overtaken by a sudden
squall which whipped the waters into fury, and the
little skin so preciously freighted soon fell an easy prey
to the hungry sea.
In conversation he was remarked for his impetuosity.
There was a sort of contagious eagerness, an animation,
at times a wild rapture, in his talk. Among congenial
friends he knew no reserve. His inmost life lay bare
before them. Indeed, had his soul been cased in clear
crystal it could not have been less concealed. His brain
seemed on fire, for his blue eyes would flash, his cheeks
crimson, his whole body tremble with pent-up emotions
struggling impatiently for outlet, although his thoughts
at the time were flowing in headlong torrent from his
tongue. I speak without exaggeration. It is said that
man is a microcosm. If nature's volcanic eruptions,
with their earthquakes and hot, steaming lava, ever
found their human analogies, it was in some of these
impassioned outbursts of Shelley. His readiness of
speech was equalled only by its finish and fulness.
He spoke with ease and precision on the most abstruse
themes. His ordinary conversation had a poetic flavor
about it, for nothing seemed to appear to him except in
some singular and pleasing light, and his extremely
mobile face glassed his thoughts as perfectly as does the
lake the woods that border it, or the clouds and birds
that float and fly above its surface. Had he written as
he talked, he would never have lacked readers. To all
276 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
this there were added a frankness, a fearlessness, and a
forgetfulness of self rarely met with in social life, and
these are each important avenues of communication.
Such large capacity for utterance no doubt greatly
helped the combustion of his thought. Smothered
flames die. To live they must be granted access to the
oxygen of the outer air.
When in conversation, so lost was he to all surround-
ings, so under the sway of his enthusiasm, that his tea,
of which he was very fond and drank largely, would go
dripping from his shaking hand down his bosom upon
his knees, into his shoes, on the carpet, and thus cup
would follow cup in almost endless succession. It is
recorded of him that he would frequently hold his
auditors spell-bound through the entire night. Those
thus charmed by him would at daybreak start up in
perfect wonderment at the unconscious passage of the
hours ; and what is mysterious about it is, there would
be left in their memories, after the strange fascination
was ended, little else than a vague sense of extreme
delight, the whole scene having vanished like the fabric
of a dream. There was at times something wild and
unearthly in his talk, a startling abruptness in its com-
mencement and ending ; so much so that Mr. Maddocks
tells us that he was impressed by him as by the coming
and going of a spirit.
In his pursuits as a scholar his enthusiasm knew no
bounds. He always seemed to have a book in his hand,
whether at the table, on the street, in the fields, or in
bed, drinking in its contents with an avidity and a
quickness almost incredible. It is said of him that he
could read from six to eight lines at a single glance.
SHELLEY. 277
Although we cannot give credence to this report, yet it
serves to show that he seemed to others to grasp thought
as by intuition. Such was his facility as a linguist, he
would read the Greek philosophers in the original for
hours without the use of a lexicon, and with the French,
Italian, and Spanish languages he was equally conver-
sant. Homer, one of his favorite authors, he read, re-
read, and read again, no one knows how many times,
always keeping a copy within reach. Ariosto was also
to him a fountain of perpetual pleasure. He indeed
approached the works of all the master-minds of an-
tiquity with a most profound reverence ; and, however
abstruse and subtile their reasonings, his mind never
grew weary, so intense and so insatiable was.liis desire
to discover truth. From a very early age he evinced for
the study of physics great aptitude and relish, and pur-
sued it with unbounded ardor. It was not until he had
entered Oxford, had suffered from an explosion, had
taken arsenic by mistake, and wellnigh ruined his books,
his furniture, and his clothing with chemicals, that he
threw aside retort and test-tube, and set at work with
the same characteristic fervor to disentangle those end-
less gossamer threads of thought metaphysicians take
such delight in spinning. While thus engaged, he
embraced among other theories the Platonic doctrine of
pre-existence. The wild warmth with which he wel-
comed his new creed came out quaintly one day while
he was passing along Magdalen Bridge. A woman met
him with a baby in her arms. He at once dexterously
snatched it from her, greatly alarming her by his ab-
ruptness. In high tenor and with eager looks he asked,
" Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence,
278 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
madam ?" At first she made no reply, thinking him
insane; but, seeing that the queer man meant no harm,
and Shelley repeating his question with the same vehe-
mence, she said, " He can't speak." " Worse and worse !"
cried Shelley, greatly disappointed ; " but surely the babe
can speak if he will, for he is only a few weeks old.
He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a
silly whim. He cannot have forgotten entirely the use
of speech in so short a time : the thing is absolutely
impossible." After the answer of the mother that she
had never heard him speak, nor any one so young, Shel-
ley patted the boy's cheek, praised his rosy health, and
passed him back to his mother, remarking, as he walked
away, " How provokingly close these new-born babes
are ! but it is not the less certain, notwithstanding their
cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowl-
edge is reminiscence. The doctrine is far more ancient
than the times of Plato, and as old as the venerable
allegory that the Muses are the daughters of Memory ;
not one of the nine was ever said to be the child of
Invention."
But we must go to some of those poems with which
he has enriched our literature if we would see his en-
thusiasm at the flood, to that drama of " Hellas," to
those Odes to Naples and to Liberty, to the songs of
triumph which constitute the closing act in his " Pro-
metheus Unbound ;" for here there are rhapsodies, and
choral melodies, and lyric bursts, such as could have
come only from a soul in transport. A glory of trans-
figuration rests upon his thought. In such rapt moods
his face must have shone as the face of an angel. In
his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" he appears, strange
SHELLEY. 279
as it may seem, in the role of a religious enthusiast. It
is true that in his attempts to rid his conceptions con-
cerning God of all anthropomorphisms he has fallen
into vagueness, leaving us an ideal which, while whiter
than Parian marble, is also, alas ! more cold ; yet his
worship is no less devout than was Ignatius Loyola's.
His heart burns with the same fierce fires of devotion.
There is the same chivalric zeal, the same exhausting
vigils, the same importunate prayer.
We have thus far found Shelley a highly imaginative,
sensitive, positive, volatile creature, singularly unsuited
to the circumstances in which he was placed. No won-
der his enthusiasm soon became diseased. His mind
was not of a judicial cast. There was not the first
characteristic of a trimmer about him, even taking that
word in its best sense, as given by Halifax. He was
by nature a radical, an extremist. No fear restrained
him, no constitutional conservatism, not even common-
sense caution. He loved truth better than he loved
life. He fairly famished for it. Indeed, driven by his
intense hunger, he committed the grave error of over-
loading his faculties until their action became dyspeptic.
Impressionable, sincere, simple-hearted as a child, he
inconsiderately gave assent to theories that would not
for an instant bear the test of dispassionate logic, simply
because they were specious, ably argued, and apparently
tended to ameliorate society. As soon as accepted, his
imagination threw upon them its strong calcium light,
and they at once assumed a brilliancy and a coloring
not their own.
Persecution stepped in only to enhance their value
and confirm their truth. His enthusiasm ran wild.
280 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
His pursuit was too eager, and he was too elated over
what he chanced to find. His precipitancy blinded
him. Hotspurs can never become successful discoverers
in the domain of philosophy.
To this same disposition we can trace the cause of
his restless wanderings from place to place, like his
own Ahasuerus. Each locality was successively se-
lected for his permanent home. There, as he used
to phrase it, he was to live forever. But he was no
sooner settled than a new plan, suggesting itself, carried
everything before it, and he would again start on his
travels. His departures and arrivals were always pre-
cipitate, usually from excess of enthusiasm. To this
also we can trace the exceeding crudeness of his plans
for social reform, his championship and abandonment
of Irish liberty. His first marriage, which terminated
so disastrously, resulted from the sudden adoption of
the suggestions of his sympathy. It was no love-aifair.
A pretty girl came to him with a most pitiful tale,
and to help her out of trouble he gallantly, but with
fatal thoughtlessness, helped himself, and her too, more
deeply in.
Shelley's fourth most noticeable characteristic was the
strength and breadth of his sympathies. They were
cosmopolitan ; he was a born philanthropist. He pro-
foundly pitied the unfortunate, making their cause his
own. He lavished his income, sacrificed his ease, en-
dangered his health, to compass his purposes of love.
Although his name was cast out as evil, and an almost
universal social ban rested upon him, his philanthropic
zeal never abated. He set out on his last sail on the
sea that he might the sooner welcome to Italy one whom
SHELLEY. 281
he had already helped out of hopeless debt by a princely
donation. His body was washed ashore on the coast
of Tuscany, and, in conformity to quarantine regula-
tions, was by his friends reduced to ashes. These were
deposited afterward in the Protestant burial-ground at
Rome at the foot of a moss-grown tower near the remains
of poor Keats, his illustrious but ill-starred countryman,
in whose poems, a copy of* which was found open in
his pocket, he had evidently been seeking solace and
inspiration just before the storm struck him. On his
tombstone appears the simple inscription, "Cor cor-
dium." No more fitting tribute could have been paid
his memory.
His acts of benevolence beautified and brightened
almost every day of his life. It seemed impossible for
him to witness distress or hear its story without in-
stantly planning its relief. One day rambling in the
fields he met a little girl bewildered and shivering with
cold. It was not long before she was sitting on his
knee, drinking a bowl of warm milk which he had
purchased for her at a neighboring farm-house. Fre-
quently at Hampstead, in mid-winter, while on his way
to a coach-office to take passage, he would encounter
some poor unfortunate, and after listening to her pitiful
tale would empty his pockets of his last shilling and
cheerily start off on his journey afoot. Once, on his
way to a friend's residence, he noticed in the street a
woman limping with bare feet over the stones. He
quickly slipped off his shoes and pressed them upon
her acceptance. His cashier was called on to honor
order after order for small amounts issued to beggars
who had approached him after the resources of his purse
13*
282 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
had become exhausted. On a certain occasion he found
a courtesan lying helpless by the roadside, thrust out
from some brothel by the heartless wretches who had
shared her shame. Unwilling to see even this social
castaway abandoned to her fate, he carried her on his
back a considerable distance to a place of shelter. He
visited the poor lace-makers at Marlow in their damp
and fireless abodes, distributing blankets, coal, food,
and medicine according as they had need, even tenderly
nursing them in their sickness. It was while watching
in one of these hovels he caught ophthalmia, which
nearly cost him his eyes. He once walked a hospital
that he might become a more efficient nurse. He was
on one occasion spending a little time in North Wales,
where his friend Maddocks, who was then in England,
had built an embankment whereby thousands of acres
had been redeemed from the sea. Shelley discovered
that it was becoming dangerously weakened by the
waves, and, in order to raise means to repair it, he im-
mediately drew up a paper, heading it with a subscrip-
tion of five hundred pounds, a sum he could ill afford,
and then diligently circulated it among those living
near. Numerous instances are related of his active
benevolence during his short winter stay among this
people.
In London one evening about dusk he and his col-
lege mate Hogg, weary of their walk, were on their
way to the hotel for tea. As was their wont, they fell
into animated debate. While Shelley was maintaining
his opinions with great warmth, entirely unmindful of
the throng through which he was threading his way, he
suddenly stopped, then pushed his comrade unceremoni-
SHELLEY. 283
ously through a narrow door that opened into the shop
of a pawnbroker. This strange manoeuvre he briefly-
explained afterward in response to some expression from
Hogg of surprise and annoyance. On a former visit
to London, some old man, it seems, had told him his
distress, which ten pounds alone were able to relieve.
Shelley's sympathies were instantly aroused. He gave
him what he had, and then for the balance he pawned a
beautiful solar microscope upon which he had set great
value. This, as he chanced to pass this same way, it
suddenly occurred to him to redeem. Although in the
latter years of his life his annual income from his in-
herit ince was about one thousand pounds, and his
habits were as simple as a hermit's, he rarely was with
funds, so unceasing were his charities. He made no
parade of his gifts. They were bestowed with the
utmost delicacy, and those blessed by his bounty were
never afterward embarrassed by any inconsiderate al-
lusion.
But Shelley, even in this his best estate, was pitiably
weak. He lacked discretion, being touched by every
tale of trouble, without dreaming that shiftless vaga-
bonds often drive sharp bargains in tears and sighs and
tattered clothes, hawking pathos about the streets as
they would tin-ware or calico. He also sadly lacked
system in his giving, and thus greatly crippled his
power to relieve the distress whose wide prevalence so
profoundly grieved him. Though he thus betrayed an
utter ignorance of human nature, and weakly followed
the blind promptings of his heart, yet the very fact
that he believed in every one's integrity proved his
own ; and however much we may laugh at his childish
284 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
credulity, at his impetuous and ill-directed efforts, his
self-forgetfulness commands our admiration. As I have
already remarked, he was essentially a dream-creature ;
his kingdom was cloud-land. But in his wildest aber-
rations generous impulses never quit him company ;
they followed him like troops of angels.
He was of strong personal attachments. The mul-
titude, it is true, were so repelled by his beliefs that
they studiously avoided him; and such were his sensi-
tiveness and self-distrust, he instinctively shrank from
general society, and being naturally of a contemplative
habit he early became enamored with solitude. Con-
sequently very few ever knew him personally, but
those few seemed unable to allude to the magnetism of
his presence except in the words of hero-worship. He
had a fertile fancy, a fearless utterance, a contagious
enthusiasm. He was open-handed to a fault. The
resources of his genius and of his scholarship were
also at their disposal, for he not only witnessed their
increasing popularity in the world of letters without
that ugly envy of authors, but freely furnished them
facts and even loaned them the wings of his imagina-
tion. Byron was a superficial scholar, and drew largely
on the fruits of Shelley's study, his retentive memory,
his bold, free thought, Shelley parting with his men-
tal wealth to his rival without stint, simply for the
asking. The poetry Byron wrote while in Switzer-
land is more especially permeated with his refining and
elevating influence. In a letter to Moore Byron writes,
" Shelley, who is another bugbear to you and the world,
is to my knowledge the least selfish and the mildest of
men ; a man who has made more sacrifices to his for-
SHELLEY. 285
tune and his feelings than any of whom I have ever
heard." He expressed the same sentiments in conver-
sation with Lady Blessington shortly after Shelley's
death. Such was the private judgment of one who,
out of servile deference to the world's opinion, wholly
ignored his acquaintance with him when writing for
the public eye, in such low estimation was Shelley held
by the mass of his countrymen. While in Italy Shel-
ley placed himself, for the sake of his friend, on one
occasion, in most imminent peril, receiving in the affray
a sabre-stroke on the head and a fall from his horse.
His gallantry astonished Byron, for, as he remarked,
it was a mystery to him upon what principle any man
could be induced to prefer the life of another to his
own. Once a storm surprised them when out sailing,
and became so violent that they abandoned all hope
of their little boat ever reaching the shore in safety.
Byron in the emergency proposed to Shelley, who was
no swimmer, that if he would cling to an oar he would
try and pull him in ; but without a moment's hesita-
tion he refused, though he thus apparently let go his
only chance of rescue. He imagined Byron would
have a sufficiently difficult task to save himself. Such
self-forgetfulness has appeared in human history only
at the rarest intervals.
The fact that Byron was never a willing witness to
any one's merits, friendship being, as he himself con-
fessed, a propensity in which his genius was very lim-
ited, warrants us in attaching to any praise that may
have fallen from his lips or pen, or have been uncon-
sciously expressed in his life, a peculiar emphasis.
The attachment for each other of Shelley and Leigh
286 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Hunt was of the closest, and lasted till death. Hunt
says that for his part he never could mention the poet's
name without a transport of love and gratitude. Hor-
ace Smith, a prosperous stock-broker, one of the authors
of " Rejected Addresses," was warmly attached to him.
Although they were at direct issue on questions of
religion and social order, and Shelley was the object of
obloquy everywhere, Smith always reposed in him the
utmost confidence, honoring without security every draft
made upon him, feeling certain that he had some benevo-
lent scheme in mind and would not for his life know-
ingly misapply a single farthing. Shelley was, perhaps,
drawn into closer intimacy with Keats than with any
other of his acquaintances; and in some of the incidents
of their intercourse his capacity for pure, fervent, self-
sacrificing attachment conspicuously appears. They
agreed during a set six months to write competing
poems. "Endymion" and "The Revolt of Islam"
were the result of this friendly rivalship. Keats's effort
on its issue from the press was most mercilessly criticised
in the "Quarterly Review." Shelley with great magna-
nimity wrote to Southey to interfere in his favor. But
the reply he received, instead of speaking in generous
compliment of Keats, fell upon himself in cruel accu-
sation. The treachery came unawares. It stung him
like an adder. The fair fame of England's poet-lau-
reate from that day shines with a diminished lustre.
Shelley was seemingly as interested in Keats's prosperity
as in his own. The pleasure he derived from the excel-
lencies of " The Eve of St. Agnes" and Hyperion"
was never embittered by suggestions of envy. It was
upon his open page his eyes last rested. From " Adonais,"
SHELLEY. 287
that consummate flower of his genius, there exhales a
fragrance of affection that will never die out of English
literature. Love claims her own. Now at last, after
life's fitful fever, they lie peacefully sleeping side by
side.
By far the major part of his writings was conceived
in the true spirit of philanthropy. His schemes were,
many of them, Quixotic, it is true; some were absolutely
pernicious; but they everywhere bear evidences of a
most tender solicitude for the welfare of suffering and
wronged men. In " The Revolt of Islam" his verse
breaks out in hot indignation against the oppressor; in
the drama of " Hellas" and in the Odes to Naples and
to Liberty there breathes through exquisite choral melo-
dies an enthusiasm of gladness because of the oppres-
sor's overthrow, such as could have come only from the
heart of one who loved much.
We have here a picture of seemingly the most kind-
hearted and considerate of men. Yet it appears it was
possible for this man to abandon wife and babe, and so
live afterward as to call down upon him the curses of
nearly all England. I have shown how he could not
bear the sight or thought of sorrow. He emptied his
purse, he took his shoes from his feet, the bread from
his mouth, sacrificed ease, faced death, for the welfare
often of utter strangers, so profoundly the presence of
grief and pain moved him. And these acts were per-
formed not merely once or twice, but they were the
daily habit of his life; and so deeply seated, so sponta-
neous, so irresistible, were these impulses of sympathy,
even his belief that he was misinterpreted and maligned,
the fact that he had become a social outcast, seemed
288 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
powerless to check for an instant his purposes of love.
We have found his personal attachments to be intense,
to be characterized by the noblest self-sacrifices, and to
continue constant until death. Still this strange being,
without any outward sign of emotion, sundered the
most sacred and the tenderest of ties. Months passed.
He never inquired after either the wife or child whom
he had abandoned with such apparent nonchalance. He
seemed to have forgotten them. A new voice soon after
thrilled him, and he precipitately formed a new alliance
without sanction of law. At last Harriet, made des-
perate, as most thought, by care and homesickness,
threw herself into the river, and Shelley woke to find
himself arraigned at the bar of public opinion to answer
the charges of cowardice, of cold cruelty, and of an
impure life, which from every quarter were in hot
indignation preferred against him.
Is it possible to acquit Shelley of blame in this
matter? Assuredly not. This is neither hoped for
nor sought. My aim is simply to clear his life of the
appearance of inconsistency, by placing in their proper
light certain mitigating circumstances, and to call atten-
tion to certain constitutional peculiarities and defects
usually overlooked. They are briefly these. He was
a mere boy when he married Harriet, not yet out of
his teens. She told him she was in trouble. That is
about all he knew about her. His quick fancy fired.
He must relieve her, whatever the hazard. He did
exactly what an intensely sympathetic, imaginative, im-
practical, inexperienced boy would do. It is impossible
to overstate the rashness of the act, for he had neither
money, profession, nor friends. His father had already
SHELLEY. 289
driven him out of doors, made mad by his obstinate
atheism, and now this misalliance, so humbling to pa-
ternal pride, rendered reconciliation hopeless. These
two children, for they were nothing more, wandered aim-
lessly from place to place. Neither of them possessed
any faculty for self-help ; neither of them, the least con-
ception of economy ; and so it was not long before abso-
lute starvation stared them full in the face. Such des-
perate straits very naturally tended to cool their ardor,
and force into painful prominence the fact, for fact it
was, that there existed between them absolutely no com-
munity either of tastes or temperament. None will
dispute their utter unfitness for a life-intimacy with
each other. Separation was resolved upon. The agree-
ment was mutual, and entered into in apparent good
humor. He left her with her babe in her arms at the
door of her old home, where he knew there was an
abundance of material comforts. I fail to see tlte
necessity of imputing to Shelley any unkind intent.
In making up our judgment we should keep in mind
his utter dejection, his wounded pride, his crushing
sense of helplessness. We should remember that he
was essentially a dream-creature, hopelessly unfit to
push his way in the world ; that he possessed one of
the most vivid imaginations ever intrusted to mortals,
accompanied by such acute sensibility that there swept
through his brain tempests of thought of which most
men know nothing. We should recollect that, while
his benevolence was cosmopolitan, his congeniality was
limited in the extreme. His mental make being so
peculiar, his personal likes and dislikes so positive and
powerful, the wonder is he ever succeeded at all in
290 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
consorting with his fellows. To have been forced into
daily intimacy with one with whom he had little or
nothing in common would have been for him the keen-
est torture. Those outside influences that hold together
so many family circles, those prudential reasons, ques-
tions of convenience, solicitude for children, or dread
of public scandal, were with him as weak as cobwebs.
He was of too intense a temperament to be able to take
any such middle course. Marriage to him was a mat-
ter of affection, not of finance. To have continued to
feign what he had ceased to feel would have been a
living lie, a thing he loathed. I find it stated by one
of his biographers that after he had commenced living
with Mary he consulted with his lawyer in all serious-
ness whether it would not be feasible for Harriet and
her children to make their home with them. While in
this he showed his laughable ignorance of human na-
tQre, his remarkable deficiency in the plainest common
sense, he also showed that he was still friendly and felt
solicitous that they should fare well ; he showed that
he was totally unconscious that he had done them an
irreparable injury, that between them and him there
had been an impassable gulf fixed. This single cir-
cumstance throws a flood of light upon this whole
affair.
Was Harriet's suicide the result of Shelley's aban-
donment and proof of his cruelty ? There are some
strange incidents in her history which seem to contro-
vert this. Even as far back as her school-days, when
kindly used, she meditated self-murder ; and even after
that the thought came back to her at frequent inter-
vals. Many an hour at night she lay awake devising
SHELLEY. 291
plans to effect it, although in the morning her attention
would be diverted and she would quietly go about her
accustomed duties. She was in the habit of conversing
on this theme before entire strangers, with nothing ex-
traordinary in either tone or manner, making it the
subject of extended table-talks and astonishing the
guests by her coolness. Did she not dwell on this
thought until the thought mastered her ? Would she
not have destroyed herself sooner or later had there
been no separation? Her first child, lanthe, was at
one time affected with a tumor. A surgeon was sum-
moned. Few would have courted the opportunity of
watching him at his work. Harriet, though plainly
told by him that the sight would be exceedingly pain-
ful, and that she could possibly do no good, yet, young
mother though she was, not only persisted in remaining,
but narrowly watched every detail in this terrible per-
formance, without the least symptom of sympathy, to
the utter amazement of those present. This incident,
revealing as it does the sharp contrast between Harriet
and Shelley, should have no little weight in determin-
ing the causes of the separation and subsequent suicide.
Harriet's sister, Eliza, who dogged the footsteps of the
young couple like a thing of evil, persistently remind-
ing Harriet of her diseased nerves and nursing her
already too plain predilection, and gradually exciting
toward herself Shelley's deep aversion, probably played
no small part in this tragedy. Shelley once wrote in a
letter, " I certainly hate Eliza with all my soul. It is
a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of
disgust and horror to see her caress my poor little
lanthe, in whom I may hereafter find the consolation
292 VIEWS ON VEXED qVESTIONS.
of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of
checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence
for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than
a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting."
The exact cause of this aversion is unknown. It was
excessive, as were all his feelings, as indeed was his
former deference to this same lady. Harriet was held
by her under some fatal fascination ; and Shelley, in
his desperation to rid himself of the loathed presence,
may have determined on what he would have gladly
averted.
He evidently purposed to assume the care of his
children again should his means ever warrant it, and to
properly educate them. And when he attempted this
and was denied the privilege by decree in Chancery on
the ground of his having written " Queen Mab," for
no other charge was sustained against him, grief and
rage swept through him like a whirlwind. In his
" Lines to the Lord Chancellor" we gain some concep-
tion of this terrible tempest. The poem is no piece of
ambitious rhetoric prepared for the press. He never
made allusion to it, threw it into his limbo of rejected
manuscripts, and doubtless thought it destroyed. It is
idle to contend that the heart that broke out in this
awful curse ever looked upon his children coldly.
Surely from nothing but outraged paternal tenderness
could have come this wild maniac shriek. That he sel-
dom, if ever, alluded to his children is no proof of in-
difference; for it was among the eccentricities of this
strange being to speak with a mysterious air, in hushed
whispers, on subjects which to most people seemed com-
monplace. Some say that when the news of Harriet's
SHELLEY. 293
fate reached him lie was for three days beside himself;
but reason returned, and in time there came upon his
thoughts a deep peace. Such an announcement would
naturally have fallen upon one of such delicate nerves
with dangerous force, overwhelming him for the time
with self-accusation. Had he been capable of the cal-
culating, cold cruelty with which he was charged, his
feelings never would have been sufficiently intense to
thus master him ; and had he not found when he
came to himself that he had overestimated for the
instant his real guilt, that he had been less a designing
criminal than a weak, blind creature of circumstance,
overtaken in a fault at a time when hope had wellnigh
died within him, erring less in heart than in head,
he never afterward could have attained that abiding
peace.
He felt himself completely absolved from his first
marriage, though he was still undivorced, for he hon-
estly believed that law-makers in this matter meddled
with what did not rightly concern them. He saw
Mary, and on first sight was very naturally carried by
storm. In his subsequent action we see the same
thoughtless impetuosity which marks the acts of his
whole life. It so chanced he found a companion per-
fectly suited to his peculiar temperament, one who with
him could range with ease through the widest fields of
fancy, thoroughly understanding and appreciating his
marvellous gifts. In the presence of the constancy of
his affection for Mary, the acknowledged purity and
quiet contentment of their wedded life, it is impossible
for me not to acquit Shelley of those grave charges pre-
ferred against him. That he was impulsive, impracti-
294 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTJONS.
cal, sensitive, a magnifier of trifles, the slave of foolish
whims, the champion of crude and mischievous notions
about the functions of government and the demands of
social life, that he betrayed a pitiable ignorance of hu-
man nature, and a pitiable lack of power to adapt him-
self to the ever-changing circumstances of human life,
I stand ready to grant. But that to these and kindred
defects, the morbid outgrowths of the very traits of
character to which I have directed attention, called out
in an extraordinary juncture of affairs, and to these
alone, can be traced the causes of that abandonment of
family which has brought him under such condemna-
tion, I stand equally ready to maintain.
The fifth and last phase of Shelley's character to
which I direct attention is his large gift of hope. Of
him, thus viewed, we have the true type in the statue
of Mercury which, poised far in air above the site of
the old French Bastile, crowns the column of July. In
marked contrast to Egypt's Sphinx, sunk neck-deep in
sand, its placid stone face fronting the dead centuries,
we have here a winged boy at the point of taking flight,
deigning to touch the pedestal on which he stands with
but the tips of his lifted feet.
We see in this life-habit of hope a necessary result-
ant of those other powerful leanings of Shelley's mind
of which I have already attempted an analysis. The
latest thoughts of this dreamer still glisten with dew.
His faculties never lost their morning freshness. To
the very last he looked out on life with the eager ex-
pectation of childhood. The texture of his mind was
too ethereal to adequately grasp the prosaic, practical,
breathing world about him. In his passionate long-
SHELLEY. 295
ings to overthrow its tyrannies we have seen him in
full confidence put out his little baby hands to pluck
down the Gibraltars of social caste and bigotry, of old-
time prejudice and self-seeking, behind which they lay
intrenched. As he was a natural recluse, lacking the
experience of a man of affairs or any inclination to
mingle with the multitude and familiarize himself with
their methods of thought and the ground-work of their
character, a born philanthropist stung into morbid
sympathy with the wretchedness of that multitude by
his own personal wrongs, a radical, a revolutionist by
the very temper of his mind, no wonder his brain be-
came the general rendezvous of every crazed theory of
reform. His imagination, noted alike for its abstract-
ness and its intensity, gave them the definiteness and
semblance of life, even transfigured them by its witch-
craft into conquering bands of angels. Although the
opposition he encountered surprised him like the sud-
den uncovering of masked batteries, yet he never was
conscious of danger, never once questioned the sound-
ness of his views or distrusted their ultimate triumph.
We have seen him under such influences carried away
by the impulse of an outraged individualism into blind
frenzy. We have seen him too in happier moods, at
times when thrones tottered and light broke fitfully
along the world ; then the enthusiasm of his mental
frames was but a step removed from inspiration. His
spirit seemed to rend the veil of the future and catch a
glimpse of the fulness and splendor that are in waiting.
His two-paged pamphlet, that wild freak of his college
days, he looked upon as the advance guard of an army
of arguments, destined under his leadership to overturn
296 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
unfit faiths everywhere. No sooner had Oxford ban-
ished him in her paroxysm of panic than the plucky
boy set about the recasting and completion of " Queen
Mab," and we find even this chaos of destructive be-
liefs, this embodiment of bold blasphemy, bathed in
the same golden atmosphere of hope. He thought a
millennium near, even at the door. Irish exiles found
no difficulty in enlisting him in their madcap enter-
prises. The Greek patriots went from his presence to
dream new dreams of glory. A burdened people here
and there grew restive, and he burst out at once into
those rich choral melodies that ring through the drama
of "Hellas" and the Odes to Naples and to Liberty.
There is, it is true, in his " Alastor" and in one or two
of his minor poems a spirit of dejection; but these we
must remember were written at times of extreme bodily
weakness and under presentiments of death. In " Pro-
metheus Unbound" the true character of Shelley, his
strong and weak points as both man and author, the
peculiarity of his beliefs, the aspirations that stirred
within him, and the grand hopes in a world's reclaim
to which he through life so fondly clung, received, per-
haps, their most perfect expression ; and this produc-
tion consequently, while " Adonais" remains the finished
masterpiece, must take precedence of all the other
writings of the poet as the fullest representative of his
genius.
This is the poem over whose pages the enthusiasm
of Hope sheds an especial splendor. There is an
Oriental magnificence, a fervency, an exultant freedom
in its imagery, ushering us into the very presence of
the Spirit of Gladness. There seems to be entertained
SHELLEY. 297
no more doubt about the happy issue of the battle of
passions and principles still fiercely waging on the wide
field of the world than if it were already an accom-
plished fact. Indeed, we have here elaborated into a
lyrical drama the millennial day-dreams of the very
Prince of Visionists.
The argument of the poem is this. Love is the
motive power of the universe. Goodness is inherent
in men, and capable of self-development; while evil
is a usurper, destined to irremediable overthrow. In
other words, the human race both can and will re-
form by the might of its own free choice. For the
drapery of this thought Shelley has remodelled the old
Greek myth that forms the plot of one of the lost
tragedies of JEschylus. The throne of Saturn, person-
ating ignorant innocence, is usurped by Jupiter, the
spirit of evil, who, jealous of Prometheus, the humanity
in man, and wishing to extort from him a revelation
of the danger that threatens his empire, chains him to
a rock and delegates fell furies to feed upon his ever-
renewed heart. But the tyrant finds no torture that
can tame the Titan. The secret is kept; the fatal step
taken. Demogorgon, the Spirit of Oblivion, Jove's
own offspring, becomes his destroyer, and Prometheus,
freed by Hercules, re-establishes with nature his old
companionship.
Prometheus, at the opening of the drama, speaks of
his slow-dragging centuries of pain, their moments
divided by keen pangs till they seem years. Though
torture and solitude and scorn are his empire, he glories
in it as a conqueror, believing it more enviable than
that of his tormentor. Though each hour brings pain,
14
298 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
he welcomes it, for one among them is to drag forth
the cruel king to kiss his feet, which then would not
deign to trample the prostrate slave. The Titan, con-
fident of his approaching triumph, pronounces a pity
for the fallen god, not in malevolent exultation as at
first, before sorrow had lifted him into nobler thought.
He asks his former curse recalled, and Earth forces the
phantasm of the very foe against whom it was first
pronounced, to repeat it. It is filled with proud de-
fiance, bidding the torturer do his worst. While
expressing appreciation of the woes in store, presenting
a frightful picture of the agony within the gift of
omnipotent hate, he yet invokes a sufferer's curse to
clasp his tormentor like remorse, till his infinity shall
be a robe of envenomed agony, a crown of burning
gold. He waits to welcome the hour when the mask
shall be torn from the face of the tyrant, and after
" Fruitless crime
Scorn track his lagging fall through boundless space and time."
These words, thus again pronounced, Prometheus
regrets, calls them quick and vain, remarks that grief
was blind, that he wished no living thing to suffer
pain. Earth, fearing from this expression of pity that
the Titan was at last vanquished, is reassured by lone,
who is confident it is but a passing spasm. Then
Mercury arrives with a band of furies. Before they
are let loose, the messenger expostulates with the rebel,
endeavors to convince him of the hopelessness of his
rebellion, and to induce him to divulge the secret and
thus secure his release. " Let others flatter crime,"
replies the captive, "I wait the retributive hour." The
SHELLEY. 299
hell-hounds clamor for their victim. He warns Mer-
cury of the danger of delay. Still Mercury, sympa-
thizing with the grand old sufferer, says, pleadingly,
" Once more answer me,
Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power ?"
The reply comes back,
" I know but this, that it must come."
Mercury bids him plunge into eternity and see the
centuries of approaching agony ; he pictures his bliss
among the gods if he will but yield; and when at
his continued refusal he expresses wonder and pity,
there comes from the firm lips of the Titan,
"Pity the self-despising slaves of Heaven,
Not me. . . . How vain is talk !
Call up the fiends."
They come. Such pictures of mental torture as here
follow have few, if any, parallels in literature. The
ordeal ended, the air is filled with light and music from
a chorus of spirits, bright essences of human thought,
indefinable hopes, aspirations after better things, self-
forgetting love, dreams of poets, all the tokens of in-
nate nobleness in men, harbingers of brighter days.
They assure him that though Ruin is now Love's
shadow, its doom is sealed.
In the opening of the second act, Panthea and lone,
types of faith and hope, are visited with dreams that
body forth this same bright future. In succeeding
scenes they go down with Asia to the cave of Demo-
gorgon and inquire after the origin of evil, and we en-
300 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
counter in the reply some of those wild vagaries, so
common to the poet, betraying most lamentable weak-
ness. At the close of the conversation Asia demands
of Demogorgon when Prometheus shall be freed and
right again reign on the earth ; and in this reply im-
personating the hours we feel that a most consummate
artist is touching the canvas into life. The spirits ride
by in chariots drawn by winged steeds trampling the
dim winds :
" Some look behind as fiends pursued them there,
Others with burning eyes lean forth and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
' As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair ; they all
Sweep onward."
Of these one bears a dreadful countenance, a ghastly
charioteer, the shadow of a destiny whose accompanying
darkness is soon to wrap in lasting night heaven's
kingless throne. As this terrible darkness floats up
and ascends the car, the coursers fly in terror, trampling
out the stars. Another chariot stays near the verge of
the horizon. It is an ivory shell inlaid with fire. A
young spirit guides it. In his eyes is the light of hope.
He says, in announcing his coming,
" My coursers are fed with the lightning,
They drink of the whirlwind's stream.
#**#**
I desire; and their speed makes night kindle :
I fear ; they outstrip the typhoon :
Ere the clouds piled on Atlas can dwindle,
We encircle the Earth and the Moon.
SHELLEY. 301
On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their feet must be swifter than fire :
They shall drink the hot speed of desire."
After the spirits wing by, Asia's nature's future
is foretold in most delicate and impressive imagery.
In the third act Demogorgon, with tranquil might,
remands Jove down to darkness. Hercules strikes the
fetters from the limbs of the Titan, the exiled Asia
returns to the side of her lover, and the Spirit of the
Hour, as he sweeps through the air in his chariot,
heralds the dawn of the new era. The concluding act
is a series of triumphal chants, in whose wraith-like
fancies we witness one of the most ethereal- minded of
mortals in a state of wild transport. An unwonted
glory lights his thought, for it is here, where Hope by
her enchantments seemingly draws aside for him the
hiding curtains, that it may be safely said his powers of
creation culminate.
This drama, while unquestionably a work of art, is
also, and with even greater emphasis, a confession of
faith and a revelation of temperament. With it simply
as such am I at present concerned. And now, let me
ask, what is there more natural than that this fearless
devotee to truth, this dream -bewildered lover of men,
this tameless Arab child, thus firmly convinced that
the world's sufferings were due to whatever of its cus-
toms and laws restrained in the least the utmost per-
sonal freedom, and that so soon as these impediments
were removed the divinity in man would be self-assert-
ing and reign without a rival, that the present social
302 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
system was doomed to certain and swift overthrow,
what more natural than that he, led by some fatal hal-
lucination to regard himself as the great apostle of this
new, strange Gospel of Peace, should really from right
motives have openly violated in his life the common
conscience, and in his published works have become
the uncompromising advocate of principles which had
they prevailed would have hopelessly debauched it ?
I have now completed my analysis of this remark-
ably exceptional character. It has been my purpose
simply to show how Shelley, surcharged as he was with
imagination, individualism, enthusiasm, love, and hope,
while exhibiting in his life and writings many appar-
ently vital contradictions, actually maintained in the
main drift of both his thoughts and acts as strict a
self-consistency as comports with usual human frailty.
Precisely how far he was accountable for his morbid
mental moods, his dangerous doctrines and still more
dangerous modes of life, or how far he was the helpless
creature of organism and circumstance, I leave an open
question, preferring that the responsibility of its de-
cision shall rest with that higher tribunal to which he
has gone, " The Court of Final Appeal."
THE BRONTE SISTERS.
HAWORTH village sturdily clambers up the stony
sides of a Yorkshire hill, until with its kirk and par-
sonage it gains outlook over wide reaches of bleak moor.
Its inhabitants, of Norse ancestry, moulded by contests
with a most stubborn soil and forced familiarity with
the wildest scenery, combine with their curt ways and
vehement prejudices keen intellects, independent wills,
and warm hearts. Impassive stoics without, within
they burn with the fiercest fires of feeling. Their
hatreds and friendships, kindled with slow caution,
become fervid and deathless. This village of dim tra-
ditionary origin has already outlasted many generations,
and seems destined, with its solid masonry and stereo-
typed life, to outlast many more.
Fifty-nine years ago, in chill mid-winter, from across
these wild barrens a public coach slowly rolled along
the main street of this lonesome country town. As it
stopped before the door of the parsonage there alighted
a man of clerical habit, tall and slender in person and
of decisive tread. Behind him, past the gate and up
the garden-walk, followed a middle-aged, pale-faced
lady, accompanied by six very young and extremely
delicate children. The house they entered, its walls,
303
304 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
its floor, and its staircases, were of cold stone. It stood
in an isolated position. About it on three sides was
the silent city of the dead ; while in its rear lay the
unpeopled, wind-swept moors. Rev. Patrick Bronte,
thus entering upon his new Episcopal pastorate, was
one of nature's anomalies. His appearance was striking.
He would impress you at once as the very impersona-
tion of independence, alertness, and decision. He was
an Irishman of hot blood, having all that wild vehe-
mence that gives dash and vigor to the heroes of ro-
mance, yet his volcanic nature was crusted over with
rigid reticence. He was unquestionably a good man,
but his manners were cold, stern, forbidding, self-con-
tained, having in them no tender glow of sympathy.
A confirmed recluse, he sought no companionship, en-
couraged none. While scrupulously attentive to the
sick and painstaking in his pulpit performances, he
paid no further attention to his parishioners, neither
visiting their houses nor encouraging them to visit his,
thus walling in himself and his family with complete
social isolation. He not only kept himself aloof from
the neighborhood but from his own family circle,
going so far as even to habitually order his meals
to be sent to his study. So frigid was his ordinary
deportment and so methodic were his life-habits, that
one would be apt to mistake him for an automaton of
whalebone and iron. Yet now and then would come
bursts of passion, which even his marvellous might of
will could not repress. But instead of storming with
his tongue, or moodily lowering with knit brows, or
madly striking the offender, as is the common wont,
he never having been known to speak a harsh word or
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 3Q5
give a blow, he would vent his wrath by discharging
in quick succession the barrels of his revolver, burning
the hearth-rug and drinking in the odor as if it were
the sweet breath of flowers ; or by ripping the teeth of
his saw into chair-legs and tables. It was one of his
theories that a country parson's family should in their
diet and wardrobe set an example of strict simplicity.
He was no niggard, only notional. He also thought
thus to make his children bodily and mentally robust.
Regarding meat as a luxury, he placed it under ban. He
relentlessly threw into the fire some shoes that had been
sent to his children by some kind friend, thinking them
too gay. His wife once had a brightly colored silk dress
presented her, but, knowing that it would displease
him to see her with it on, she quietly laid it away in
one of her bureau-drawers. One day he espied it, and
quick as thought slit it into shreds. He had one dread,
and but one, that of fire. This was so intense that he
would allow no curtains or drapery of any kind about
the house, and forbade his daughters wearing any dress
not made of silk or wool. His own clothes were of
Quaker plainness, with a single laughable exception.
He would luxuriate in a cravat periodically covered by
himself with white lutestring silk. The stock increased
in size the longer it was worn, for its silken jacket was
never removed, until at last it became so immense that
half of the parson's head was enveloped in it. He never
indulged his children in toys, or picture-books, or play-
mates, so fearful was he of enervating their minds.
His nature seemed to have no dramatic element in it.
He had no power of putting himself in some one else's
place, firmly believing that as his style of mental life
14*
306 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
was healthful and relishable to him it must necessarily
be so to every one, no matter of what age or tempera-
ment. This his Spartan method of treatment neces-
sarily worked sad havoc on young sensitive hearts,
and it had especial power for evil from the fact that
the gentle-natured mother lay for a long while in her
sick-chamber helpless, eaten with cancer, waiting with
sweetest Christian patience the coming of the death-
angel.
Servants managed the house. The six frail little ones,
the oldest but eight years of age, thus so sadly orphaned,
nestled all the more closely together in their chill upper
room to read and talk in muffled whispers, or wander
out, hand in hand, over the desolate moors. The suf-
ferer at last found her long-coveted relief. The father
continued crusting over every kindly impulse with
more confirmed unsocial eccentricities, and hushed the
house into lonelier quiet. A twelvemonth after, a
maiden aunt came from Penzance, but her notional dis-
content brought no sunshine inside those cold stone
walls, her conscientious discharge of duty winning only
a chill respect that never melted into love. She, how-
ever, schooled the children in useful in-door industries
and established in them habits of thrift. Mr. Bronte
for a time personally attended to their scholarship, and,
as his mind was possessed of great native strength and
method, his teaching, while it lasted, was undoubtedly
faithful and efficient.
The children evinced at an early age brilliant intel-
lectual gifts and strongly-marked traits of character.
They would sit for hours listening with evident relish
to their elder sister Maria as she read the newspaper
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 3Q7
debates on local and foreign political issues of the day,
or the still more mature and close reasonings in books
from the rector's carefully-selected library.
In July, 1824, Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest
children, were taken to Cowan Bridge school, and in
September following Charlotte and Emily were destined
to join them company in that prison-house of suffering,
whose tragic incidents during their few months 7 stay
found a quarter of a century after such vivid coloring
in the story of "Jane Eyre," so deeply graven were the
impressions of those times on the memory of a girl of
eight. Under the baleful influence of damp rooms,
scant clothing, unwholesome food, and harsh discipline,
the scholars rapidly became depressed and fell an easy
prey to a low infectious fever that stretched forty on the
beds of the hospital. Though the Brontes escaped the
poisonous fangs of the typhus, Maria and Elizabeth
languished into consumption similarly induced, and
before the year ended slept with their mother in the
crowded church-yard at Ha worth.
Charlotte and Emily in the autumn following again
rejoined the sadly-broken family circle. In their little
upper room the children again rekindled their quaint
enthusiasm over the intricate themes that perplexed
politics and letters, and again hand in hand renewed
their loved rambles over the heathery moors. Their
daily animated discussions gave them readiness and pre-
cision of thought and expression, corrected misappre-
hension, developed taste, formed and confirmed opinions,
riveted attention, sharpened appetite, and developed the
native piquancy and force of individualism that lay
latent in their natures. This was not all. Cut off from
308 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the social pleasures that commonly flavor life, and thus
forced back upon their own innate resources of enjoy-
ment, their imaginations, as quantities of preserved
manuscript poems, magazines, novelettes, and dramas
abundantly testify, under the stimulus of this intimate
and uninterrupted interchange of sympathy, and the
weird dream-state consequent upon a secluded life, even
thus early gave golden promise of their afterward sus-
tained and lofty flights.
Charlotte, in 1830, when she was but fourteen years
of age, made out a catalogue of twenty-two manuscript
volumes of her own composition during the fifteen
months preceding, and each of these volumes contained
from sixty to one hundred of not only closely but almost
microscopically written pages.
It is said that Mr. Bronte, following some odd im-
pulse, would occasionally emerge from his seclusion,
seat himself at the table where these remarkably imr-
ginative children were taking their meals, and relate,
with that startling vividness and vigor of delineation
for which he seems to have had an especial gift, half-
legendary tales of rough Yorkshire life, or would recall
his own wild youth in old Ireland. A grim smile of
triumph would play over his features as, depicting scene
after scene, he saw the eyes of his little auditors dilate
with rising horror. How he dared thus trifle with their
impressible natures, or how they endured such mental
tension, may well excite our wonder.
In that circle was one listener whom no phantom
could fright, but along whose nerves ran wild ecstasy
as about her the electric air grew livid with bursting
bolts of some tempest of passion. She seemed to glory
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 3Q9
in the onrush of the storm, for she would afterward
recount to her sisters by the hour some of those scenes
whose grim grotesqueness had so fascinated her fancy.
It was she out of whose morbid musings, begun here,
sprang, years after, that man-monster, Heathcliff, which
glares out at us from the pages of " Wuthering Heights."
For six years these orphaned children thus nestled
together, forming a little world of their own, and find-
ing in each other sympathy and endearment. Then
came forced separations and poignant griefs. One after
another the sisters sallied out as governesses ; but they
were too timid and sensitive for such a life. They
looked forward with keen anticipation to their Christ-
mas reunions in the old study-room or out on the pur-
ple moors. It was their wont, after the lights were
extinguished and sleep had hushed the household, to
pace the floor arm in arm, recounting the year's expe-
riences and talking over in the freest manner their latest
efforts in verse and story. It was then they conceived
the plan of joint authorship. Their first literary ad-
venture, a little volume of poems, harvested for them,
however, only expense and chagrin. We could right-
fully expect no other issue, for, while quiet beauties
may here and there be met with, the usual tone of
thought is too depressing to interest the general reader.
Resolving then to open a private school, hoping thereby
to be able to keep together, Charlotte and Emily crossed
to the Continent, put themselves under the best training,
and pursued their studies with indefatigable zeal, but,
as far as their present scheme was concerned, all to no
purpose, for they solicited patronage earnestly but in
vain. Thus ended their second attempt at solving the
310 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
difficult problem of self-support. To darken all, their
gifted brother Branwell, the very light of their eyes,
was found fast driving, passion-blind, against the black
rocks of ruin. He was a boy of the brightest promise;
but the very brilliancy of his gifts destroyed him, for
his sunny temper, quick repartee, and fascinating narra-
tion, that made him the remark and pride of the village,
called around him a crowd of boon companions. And
so it was not long before the society of his sisters lost
its charm and the quiet of the parsonage oppressed him.
Inheriting in full measure his father's impulsiveness
and restless activity, but not his iron strength of will,
left by his father without restraint or guidance, he nat-
urally fell into deepest dissipation, that ended in moral
and physical wreck. In his last act he displayed that
peculiar Bronte trait of absolute fearlessness which had
ever characterized him. Years before, when but a speck
of a boy, he had threatened to thrash a group of burly
fellows any one of whom could have picked him up
with thumb and finger. Now when death came, at
whose summons he had every reason to start back in
wildest consternation, he promptly sprang to his feet
and with unflinching nerves continued standing until
his soul exchanged worlds.
The three sisters made a second attempt at joint
authorship, this time in the department of fiction.
"Wuthering Heights/' "Agnes Grey," and "The
Professor," were despatched to London. After re-
peated refusals, the first two at last found a publisher,
but they were wellnigh cruelly strangled at birth by
the cold condemnation of the critics.
" The Professor," after having been six times de-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 311
clined, once quite curtly, Charlotte at last laid quietly
by among her private papers. This new enterprise the
sisters went about in a very quaint way. First they
freely talked over the plots and personages, even went
so far as to fix upon the names of the principal charac-
ters. Then, gathering around the sitting-room table,
they followed silently each her own rapidly rising
fancies. Late in the evening, after all others had re-
tired, they would pace through the room, arm in arm,
as had been their former habit, reading and criticising
their work without thought of reserve or fear of offend-
ing, so perfect seemed their loving confidence. There
is a charm in this home-picture that suggests some
other brighter world than this.
" Wuthering Heights/ 7 despite its defects, is a work
of singular power. After we have once commenced to
turn its pages, we find we have pushed our skiff out
into some resistless current of thought and passion.
We may be painfully conscious of sweeping madly
toward some plunging cataract, whose distant roar
comes to us even from the first, when the wind is fair ;
yet we are in the fierce clutch of the rapids and must go
right on. Though there is scarcely a ray of sunshine, a
form of grace, a tint of beauty in the entire book; though
scene follows scene in which human nature appears at
its very worst, is absolutely damnable, devilish ; yet
such is Emily Bronte's extraordinary creative might,
such her subtile analysis of emotion and motive, such
her freshness, vividness, vigor of touch, such her bold,
untrammelled spirit, there is in all she delineates such
living reality and intensity of feeling, that we are held
till the close as bewitched as was the belated wedding
3J2 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
guest in Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner." This book is
unquestionably of morbid mood ; it lacks artistic pro-
portion ; has little or no moral perspective ; is per-
vaded with feverish unrest, with fierce relentlessness of
spirit. The whole story seems struck through with
the horrors of nightmare and distempered dream, the
deep undertone of melancholy here and there breaking
out into a perceptible wail, at times almost into a
maniac raving.
Yet this juvenile work of an untrained English girl
is in many respects a masterpiece. Its creations are
wonderful. Heathcliif, the two Catherines, and Here-
ton Earnshaw are as distinctively original, and are as
vividly, powerfully drawn, as any personages in the
plays of Shakespeare. None of her critics, not even
those most unsparing in their condemnation, have had
the hardihood to deny her rare creative genius. In
the first place she chooses for her hero one who in his
character and career discloses to us the abysmal depths
of the most hellish human personality ever conceived.
From the time when, as a nameless waif, he is tossed
ashore on that wild night, until the hour his grasp on
life and on his own dark purposes of revenge relaxes,
he signally fails in a single instance to command our
admiration or to elicit our sympathy. We grow solicit-
ous, not that he should reform, for of that we soon
abandon all hope; not that he should triumph at last
over those whose scorn and rebuff had kindled in him
the flames of hell ; not that he should win the hand of
the girl whose heart, in the fulness of its wild passion,
had long been his; but we rather grow solicitous lest,
with his consummate cunning and cruelty, through
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 313
which for a season he seems irresistible, he should to
the last devastate unchecked and encounter no Neme-
sis.
E. P. Whipple has said, " Compared with Heath-
cliff, Squeers is considerate and Quilp humane. He is
a deformed monster, whom the Mephistopheles of
Goethe would have nothing to say to, whom the Satan
of Milton would consider as an object of disgust, and
to whom Dante would hesitate in awarding the honor
of a place among those whom he has consigned to the
burning pitch. He is an epitome of brutality dis-
avowed by man and devil." He further remarks that
" the author appears to think that spiritual wickedness
is a combination of animal ferocities, and has accord-
ingly made a compendium of the most striking quali-
ties of tiger, wolf, cur, and wild-cat, in the hope of
framing out of such elements a suitable brute-demon to
serve as the hero of the novel."
In the pages of the " North American Review" of
1848 he greeted this work on its first presentation to
an American public in these and other like withering
words of scorn, adjudging the author's talents worse
than wasted. The tone of the English press was, if
possible, even more severe.
Eminent critics have differed very widely in their
decisions, one remarking that "the characters are
vivid, and if we may hope they are singular we also
feel that they are real;" another, "'Wuthering Heights'
is a literary curiosity, unmistakably the work of a strong
mind, into which the wild scenery of the north has
deeply sunken, but it shows absolutely no comprehen-
sion of human character. We are transplanted to a
314 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
dream-land, enveloped in a lurid thunderous atmosphere,
through which stalk fantastic giant beings, gloomy and
devilish in their utter wickedness. It is the production
of a powerful imagination, but of an imagination un-
restrained by any experience of the real."
This discrepancy in judgment I conceive has arisen
from a radical misconception of the principal personage.
Heath cliff was unquestionably insane, his aberration
extending as far back at least as that evening when,
from a conversation accidentally overheard, the cruel
revelation flashed upon him that Catherine, despite her
secret love, had in her proud spirit of caste discarded
him as unworthy of her social recognition. If we
study Heathcliff in the light of this suggestion we shall
find that much of the apparent extravagance of the
author's conception will disappear, that the character is
not only consistent in itself, a point which all allow, but
is in every feature human.
Heathcliff was of vigorous mind, morose temper, vol-
canic passion, supreme selfishness. He loved Cathe-
rine with all the vehemence of a strong and intense
nature. The fact of his obscure birth was to him
deeply humiliating. The slightest allusion to it stung
him to the quick. And now when the soft white hand
of his Catherine shut in his face the door of hope his
whole thought passed into eclipse. A mental and
moral madness followed the glare and shock of that
falling thunderbolt, from which he never rallied. By-
ron had in him wellnigh all the hellish possibilities of
a Heathcliff. A drop more of bitterness in the chalice
which fate and his own perverseness pressed to his lips
would have crazed him. The fierce, tiger-like impetu-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 315
osity with which Heathcliif poured out his love to
Catherine in her death-chamber, their wild fatal em-
brace, his life-long unquestioning faith in her return,
his nightly tryst in the haunted room and on the lonely
grave, his frantic reaching out to clasp her hand thrust
in at the open window, and his mental agony as he saw
it vanish again into the night, the peculiar causes of his
death, insomnia and loathing of food, are all unmis-
takable evidences of brain-lesion. Through twenty
years he thus lived in close strange converse with the
wraiths of his imagination. To him they were instinct
with breathing life. That other phase of character,
that in which is disclosed to us a deeper, blacker hell
of hate than the sombre genius of the Florentine poet
ventured to picture in his " Inferno," bears also to me
convincing proofs of a disordered mind. When pur-
poses of revenge become through one score years of
mature life so completely the dominant passion of any
individual as to destroy in its fierce heat every trace of
tenderness, of sympathy, or even of contrition, to
prompt the sundering of every social tie, to lay waste
not only every spiritual hope and aspiration, but every
earthly one, to compel the lost soul to retire within the
fearful privacy of its own accursed thought as com-
pletely and hopelessly as if shut up within the solitary
cell of a mediaeval dungeon, then we may rest assured
there has been inaugurated the iron absolutism of mono-
mania. Sucli a being is no longer a man, or even a
demon, but simply an infuriated brute-monster. He
has sunk below the level of moral motive, his acts ex-
hibiting the appalling possibilities of man's animal in-
stincts and intellectual faculties when once released
316 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
from the control of their master. Such was Heathcliff.
He spread his net and watched with fiendish grin one
victim after another struggling helplessly in its meshes.
The gaming-table, the maddening cup, deceit, bribes,
threats, imprisonment, the noblest and the basest pas-
sions, the tenderest ties, the holiest aspirations, the
fondest hopes, were all used by him with most consum-
mate adroitness and nonchalance to further his deep-
laid scheme of villany. The brother of his Catherine,
and that brother's bright and beautiful boy, Catherine's
daughter, his own wife and dying child, were regarded
by him but as so many pieces on his chess-board. The
measures he adopted had all that marvellous cunning
and relentlessness characteristic of madmen. He ut-
terly refused companionship, repelled even all neighbor-
hood civilities. His victims, whose deadly hatred for him
broke out perpetually, constituted his family circle, and
these he forced daily into his presence. This veritable
pandemonium was to him a lordly pleasure-house. He
revelled in its turbulence. The order of nature seemed
in him thus so reversed in every respect that I have
no hesitancy in pronouncing him smitten with incurable
madness.
It is possible thus to exonerate this book from the
charge of extravagance. It is also possible to free it
from a far graver charge, that of immoral tendency.
So eminent a critic as Bayne has remarked " that works
like that of Edgar Poe and this ( Wuthering Heights 7
must be plainly declared to blunt, to brutalize, and to
enervate the mind." These authors, indeed, strikingly
resembled each other in their analytic and creative gifts
and in their weird spirit of melancholy and mystery,
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 317
but in other respects they stood in marked contrast.
Poe had stunted, almost destroyed, his spiritual nature.
In his writings he studiously avoided all allusion to
moral sentiment. It was his evident purpose and pride
to excel in literary art and finesse. He was never free
from deliberate, self-conscious posing. To be an uncom-
promising advocate of any cause, to thrill through and
through with some mighty master-passion, was wholly
foreign to his nature. He was not a man in blood
earnest, had no high purpose, was simply a connoisseur,
a literary artist, a gifted trifler, studying how by tasteful
arrangement of drapery, subtile play of fancy, skilful
use of rhythm and the refrain, nice adjustment of
light and shade, to produce certain sesthetical or mys-
tical effects, and nothing more. The influence of his
genius has, indeed, been to blunt and brutalize the
mind. On the contrary, Emily Bronte's searching
glance went to the heart of things. How to delicately,
elegantly, gild some empty bauble never engaged her
powers. Even the principal canons of art she fearlessly
disregarded in her choice of a hero and in depicting
his career, so intently determined was she to speak out
the truth that was in her. Had she with prophetic ear
caught the sound of disparaging criticism that afterward
greeted her published work, she would not in the least
have faltered in her purpose. Prospects of persecution
would not have deterred her. Her thought crystallized
in obedience to certain internal mental laws wholly free
from those outside influences that generally modify,
through hopes or fears, the productions of other authors.
To breathe this atmosphere of intrepidity and utter
unworldliness would elevate, not enervate ; brace, not
318 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
blunt, the mind. But, urge her critics, it is brutalizing
to have laid bare before us so black a heart as Heath-
cliff's, to be made familiar with the details of his life of
infamy. Yet Dante has drawn pictures of the wicked-
ness and woes of the damned of such startling vivid-
ness that they will never fade out of men's memories.
Six hundred years have rolled away since those con-
ceptions of hate and horror found being in his brain,
and now our own Longfellow, whom we lovingly re-
gard as fit representative of the culture of the American
mind of the nineteenth century, has adjudged this me-
diaeval poem worthy of being presented in his graceful
and finished verse to all English-speaking people.
Milton chose Satan as the central figure in that grand
epic which he purposed should be the crowning work
of his life, which he enriched with the ripest learning
of his time, and which will ever be regarded as the
consummate flower of his genius. He is open to criti-
cism, not that he has uncapped hell, but that he has ren-
dered it dangerously possible for his readers, charmed
by the too kindly glow of his imagination, to entertain
feelings of pity, if not of admiration, for the thunder-
scarred leader of heaven's rebel hosts. And Shake-
speare, the third and brightest star in that constellation
whose silver radiance is the glory of this night of time,
has left us lago and the daughters of King Lear. Life's
voyagers sail treacherous seas. Rocks and whirlpools
and sand-bars hide their couchant forms amid tumbling
billows watching for their prey. It is well that bright
beacons lit by the torch of genius blaze out here and
there their timely warning over the waters. It is well
that a Heathcliif, at the call of a conjurer, is forced to
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 319
stalk forth in all his revolting deformity out of the
dim region of shadow and dream into the broad gaze
of the world ; for how many there are that are liable to
fall as low as he, if in some evil hour they yield them-
selves to the malign influences that lie in wait for their
souls ! We need to have our torpid, tame imaginations
kindled into juster conceptions of the appalling possi-
bilities wrapped up with the deathless powers of every
one of us. There are thrown over the misery and mean-
ness of this monster no half-hiding flowing folds of the
silken robe of sentimentality. He stands out in all his
naked ugliness, loveless and unloved, blasted and black
as the sides of volcanic gorges, lost to hope, lost even
to desire.
But, while defending this book against the charge of
extravagance by showing Heathcliff to have been de-
ranged, it may seem that I have exposed it to the criti-
cism that madmen, instead of being thus pushed into
the foreground of an exciting work of fiction, should
be remanded to the privacy of a medical asylum and
studied only by trained alienists for purposes of cure.
I must allow that ordinarily the introduction of such
heroes would be far from defensible ; but the truths that
are thus disclosed and indelibly impressed on heart and
conscience are of such transcendent moment that a writer
with a genius as peculiarly fitted as was Emily Bronte's
to perform successfully this most difficult of tasks has
unquestionably received a commission from the skies.
We need shrill clarions of alarm now and then to
awaken us to the imminent perils that threaten our
very existence.
A bar of steel smites the cold face of a flint, and a fire-
320 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
tigress bounds into being. A sunbeam glides through
the moistened walls of a buried seed, and a little fairy
wakes and works her wonders. A telegram comes
flashing in along some line of nerve, and a mysterious
mental life begins in the brain. These three distinctive
forms of force, the chemical, the vital, and the mental,
linked and subordinated in every individual, the lower
to the higher, are all servitors of the soul by God's ap-
pointing. They work only under certain fixed condi-
tions and with undeviating regularity. Their natures,
widely different, never change, but like slave-genii each
promptly obeys the behests of the one set in authority
over it. The measure of this mastery is the measure
of health ; its loss marks the inroads of disease. The
chemical forces no sooner detect the weakening of the
vital than they begin to break down the very tissues it
has been their tasks till then to build up and maintain.
The mental no sooner relax their grasp on the vital,
neglect to restrain or guide, than the propensities and
passions, the lusts and longings of the flesh rise in mad
mob and deafening clamor. And so too those ceaseless
currents of our thought, which w r e may quicken or re-
tard or direct, but can never stay, grow morbid and
mischievous without a master.
At the first over this wide empire of force the soul sat
sovereign, not a rebel in all her realm. Now there is not
a province in peace, but riots ripening into revolutions
threaten her throne. We are diseased, every one of us,
but we are apt to underestimate our maladies and de-
ceive ourselves into false security until at last no reme-
dies can reach us. What we need is to be brought,
through vivid and powerful portrayals by gifted minds,
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 321
to realize that in each department of our complex
nature there has been established a death-line ; that the
vital, the mental, and the moral forces may each tem-
porize with the insurgents in its kingdom until it be-
comes utterly impossible to quell them into quiet. The
vital will sooner or later be vanquished, our clay tene-
ments will disintegrate to dust. We may delay the
day of doom, but innumerable diseases, through vicious
indulgence and through hostile environment, subtile
poisons in earth and air, have alarmingly shortened
human generations and made the world a crowded
graveyard. Our intellectual and our moral faculties
are equally in danger, equally require the rigid sur-
veillance of our savans of science. Let the career of
Heathcliif warn us against the first uprising of preju-
dice or blind passion. Whenever any thought or emo-
tion has gained undue prominence, whenever the di-
rective power of the will is weakened, we are actually
the victims of temporary insanity ; we have, in a meas-
ure, lost our liberty; and the longer we delay asserting
our self-supremacy, the less our chances of asserting it
successfully. There was a time when Heathcliff could,
by the recuperative energy he still retained within him-
self or within the reach of earnest call, have thrown
off the incubus of disease ; when he could have ruled
out of his mind the devils of hate that at last wrecked
him. I feel persuaded here to add, and urge with
most solemn emphasis, that a thorough and candid in-
vestigation of our own condition will reveal our need
of the help of some Higher Power permanently to
free even those of us least enslaved. While I watch
the hate of Heathcliff grow to so fierce a heat that not
15
322 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
only every intellectual faculty but even every bodily
function is at last utterly consumed, I am led to con-
jecture whether the fire of madness which seems to
enwrap with its inextinguishable flame his very soul
will not only discrown and disfigure it, but by and by
consume its very substance, actually drive it out of
being.
I am led to conjecture still further whether the
slower, cooler, more phlegmatic temperaments in the
world, if over them malign influences ever gain firm
foothold in this or the other life, will not fire with
the same fierce heat and fall at the last into the same
voiceless void.
We here see that evil has its limitations in its very
tendency to derange and destroy the physical, the in-
tellectual, and perhaps even the spiritual organism of
those who surrender themselves to its sway.
The kinder fates of the other personages that appear
in the progress of the story disclose to us still further
limitations to its devastating power, for it is arrested by
the rebound toward goodness of the young in Heath-
cliff's household, whom from infancy he had sought to
develop into boors and devils, and at last, through his
dying intestate and their intermarrying, by their recov-
ery from his robber hands of their long-lost estates.
Thus this gifted writer in the peculiar fates of her
personages has impressively illustrated the working of
certain immutable laws established throughout God's
universe, setting bounds to evil not only as to its present
power, but, it may be, even as to its ultimate perpetuity.
I have already briefly enumerated some of the more
noticeable excellencies as well as defects of " Wuther-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 323
ing Heights" as a work of art. There is One prime
feature to which I wish now more especially to direct
attention. As we turn the leaves one by one and grad-
ually fall under the resistless spell of genius, we realize
when too late that we are driven by fierce winds help-
lessly over an angry sea. The heavens are curtained
with cloud. Not a speck of sky, not a ray of light.
No sound but the creak of cordage and the break of
billow. The day dies, and night and storm settle on the
deep. The hours wear wearily away with rain-beat
and wind-wail, until at last, after our hearts have well-
nigh sunk with dread and longing and dreariness, the
clouds lift and roll back from off the face of the east,
while the resplendent sun of a new day belts them with
Hope's rainbow and broiders their flowing skirts with
Love's threads of gold.
To change the figure. The writer has seen fit to con-
duct her readers through a dimly-lighted gallery of
paintings in which have been delineated, with great
elaboration, wickedness and wretchedness in all their
most revolting and harrowing phases. Each separate
canvas holds us by some weird witchery. We are in
the hands of a Dore". But there is no relief, no cheer-
ful tint, in all the room. The monotony grows oppress-
ive. We soon draw back with horror. We feel that
we have entered one of the halls of Hades, one of the
picture-galleries of the damned. But on reaching the
farther end of the room a door is suddenly thrown open,
and as we pass the threshold we are at once confronted
with a flood of glory. The sunlight is seen streaming
from above upon a canvas enlivened with the most
brilliant tints in nature. We feel now the presiding
324 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
genius of a Moran. Over the prostrate form of Evil
the spirits of the Good and the Glad are enthroned as
rightful sovereigns of human destiny. It is barely
possible, though no critic has ever suggested such a
thought, that this weary monotony of gloom was in-
tended by the artist to make ready her guests, through
the effects of contrast, for their entrance into a room
made bright by the presence of God's angels. Dante
is led by Virgil through the regions of the damned ere
by the side of his Beatrice he passes the gates of light.
These last scenes are admirable pieces of rapid sketching.
There is about them a breeziness, boldness, freshness
quite unique. What authors usually linger over with
infinite painstaking she vigorously outlines and leaves to
the imagination of her readers. There is, however, no
vagueness, no neutral tint, no uncertain touch or tone,
no air of hurry. The sentences are crisp, compact,
complete. Further elaboration would have simply
rendered the pictures less suggestive and stimulating.
While this novel as a work of art is somewhat defen-
sible on the grounds indicated, it cannot be denied that
established canons have been disregarded, and the fact
that they have been, and that, too, in a spirit of ap-
parent recklessness, demands explanation. An author
will not thoughtlessly shut out her hero thus from the
reader's sympathy, for such a course greatly jeopardizes,
and ordinarily would absolutely preclude, literary suc-
cess, since the reader's abhorrence must increase with
each new unfolding, however admirable may be the
author's skill in disentangling the threads of circum-
stance. Emily could but realize the risks she incurred.
She must have known that the reader would demand
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 325
ample compensation for the loss of that loving sympa-
thy with which he usually watches the shifting fortunes
of the heroes of story. The explanation is to be found
in the marvellous make-up of the woman herself, and
in her strange surroundings. The untamed blood of
the Titans certainly coursed through the veins of this
shy, reticent girl ; for there was in her love of nature
something more than a sweet poetic sentiment, there
was a wild ecstasy. Her spirit especially revelled in the
desolate solitude and unchecked freedom of the moors
as they stretched away before her, in purple undulations,
without a tree or confining fence or human habitation,
with only the distant horizon-line to shut them in.
This phenomenal love found expression in Catherine
Earnshaw's dream : t( I was only going to say that
heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my
heart with weeping to come back to earth, and the
angels were so angry that they flung me out into the
middle of the heath, on the top of Wuthering Heights,
where I woke sobbing with joy."
Swinburne says that " this love exhales, as a fresh
wild odor from a bleak shrewd soil, from every storm-
swept page of ' Wuthering Heights.' All the heart of
the league-long billows of rolling and breathing and
brightening heather is blown with the breath of it on
our faces as we read ; all the wind and all the sound
and all the fragrance and freedom and gloom and glory
of the high north moorland."
Her spirits rose in exultation when earth and sky
wore their sterner moods of tempest. Any fierce war-
ring of nature's mighty elemental forces she watched
in rapt attention. A thunder-burst thrilled her like
326 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
some grand organ symphony. Even in the desolate
aspects of winter she found a charm. She never sought
or craved companionship, was remarkably self-con-
tained ; even her sisters caught but occasional glimpses
of her inner life. She had been appointed to live apart.
She once sallied out as a governess, but society's con-
ventionalities were to her unyielding prison-bars. This
caged eagle sickened and would soon have died had she
not been restored again to the solitude and freedom of
the heath hills of stern old Yorkshire. Her reserve
was so intense that when dying she refused, it is said, to
admit even to her sisters that she was ill, and they had
to see her fade before their eyes without being permitted
to perform any of those offices of love which are the
heart's only consolation in such an hour.
Her spirit was of masculine mould ; nothing could
intimidate her. She had in marvellous measure the
Bronte iron nerve and strength of will. She mastered
and made her constant mate one of the most powerful,
sullen, and ferocious dogs in all that region. He was
one of the chief mourners at her grave, slept afterward
every night at the door of her old room, whined for her
return, and grew prematurely old from sense of loss.
When she on one occasion was bitten by a mad dog,
she promptly seized a red-hot iron and held it on her
arm without flinching until it had burnt itself deep into
her quivering flesh, and then she hid for months the
fearful secret in her heart until the pain and danger
were past. Death itself she finally met with the utmost
composure, with even stern defiance.
Charlotte says, " Never in all her life had she lin-
gered over any task that lay before her, and she did not
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 327
Iftiger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to
leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally
she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day
by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering,
I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love.
I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never
seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man,
simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The
awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on
herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to
the flesh ; from the trembling hand, the unnerved
limbs, the faded eyes, the same service was exacted as
they had rendered in health." She remained resolute
to the last, refused rest or medicine or stimulant, and
stoutly denied that she was ill. Mrs. Gaskell tells us
that even on that fatal December morning she arose
and dressed herself as usual, making many a pause, but
doing everything herself, even going on with her sew-
ing as at any time during the years past, until suddenly
she laid the unfinished work aside, whispered faintly to
her sister, " If you send for a doctor I will see him
now," and in two hours passed quietly away. There
was nothing in her tame, or commonplace, or affected.
She was the very embodiment of individualism, of
spontaneity, could not brook any patterning after an-
other, was most emphatically self-asserting. Her nature
was wholly unique. She was the grand original out of
which grew the character of Shirley, that brightest and
best of all Charlotte Bronte's creations. A. J. Nichols,
an English critic, remarks, " f Wuthering Heights' is,
with all its imperfections, one of the most wonderful
creations of female genius. It is a rude but colossal
328 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
monument of power ; a terrible transcript of some of
the strangest of the strange scenes which the manners
and traditions of that wild country had made familiar
to her mind. It impresses us with a remembrance of
grandeur like a granite block or a solitary moor."
Reed, in his recent volume, says, " Surely nowhere
in modern English fiction can more striking proof be
found of the possession of the creative gift in an ex-
traordinary degree than is to be obtained in ' Wuthering
Heights/ How vast the intellectual greatness displayed
in this juvenile work ! From what unfathomable re-
cesses of her intellect did this shy, nervous, untrained
girl produce such characters as those which hold the
foremost place in her story ? Mrs. Dean and Joseph
were perhaps drawn from life. But Heathcliff and the
two Catherines and Hereton Earnshaw, none of these
ever came within the ken of Emily Bronte. No per-
sons approaching them in originality or force of char-
acter were to be found in her circle of friends. Here
and there some psychologist, learned in the secrets of
morbid human nature, may have conceived the exist-
ence of such persons, evolved them from an inner
consciousness which had been enlightened by years of
studious labor. But no such slow and painful process
guided the pen of Emily Bronte in painting these weird
and wonderful portraits. They came forth with all
the vigor and freshness, the living reality and impres-
siveness, which can belong only to the spontaneous
creations of genius. They are no copies, indeed, but
living originals, owing their lives to her own travail
and suffering."
These explanations of the origin of this remarkable
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 329
work, though eloquent and appreciative, require to be
supplemented by a third, which, as it seems to me,
the few but emphatic incidents just narrated clearly
suggest. Here was the spirit of an untamable Titan
prisoned in the frail body of a girl. Temperament
and circumstances had absolutely driven her into almost
utter social isolation. Her irrepressible individualism,
her supreme fearlessness, her restless mental moods,
her unconquerable will, her eagle-plumed fancy, all
peremptorily demanded expression. Fiction was her
only resource, for God had in his inscrutable councils
barred against her every other outlet. " Wuthering
Heights" is, therefore, regarded by me with excep-
tional interest, not because of any artistic worth, but
because, despite all its imperfections, it serves to body
forth the superb soul of Emily Bronte. AVithout any
consideration of the canons of art, of personal interest
or of prevailing beliefs, following without curb or bias
the promptings of the voice within her, this mighty
conjurer summons into her mental presence that mon-
ster Heathcliif and those strange companions whose
threads of destiny seemed with his inextricably inter-
woven. What storms of devilish passion burst about
her! The very hills quake. Fathomless abysses yawn
at her feet, emitting the sulphurous odor and the hot
breath of hell. She watches with unblanched cheek,
rather with keenest interest, the fearful battling of those
elemental forces, set free in these to her now living,
throbbing human hearts. She leads Heath cliff along
down his terrible career of crime, that she may finally
grapple with the fell monster, overpower and trample
him down to ruin, palsy his arm, snatch from his burn-
15*
330 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
ing lips the last cool cup of pleasure, and then at the
close lift his life-long bleeding victims to victory. She
glories in the thought of having this strong spirit fight
desperately like one of Milton's rebel angels to defeat
and destroy all that is lovable in life, and then, when the
time is ripe, of dashing him in pieces against the thick
bosses of Jehovah's buckler. Emily Bronte stands out
on the wide plains of this world's history a solitary
mountain-peak, rock-ribbed, fire-seamed, storm-defying,
wrapped in proud, peculiar grandeur.
The character of Anne presents in many respects a
most marked contrast to that of her sister Emily. The
traveller, in descending the broken, precipitous sides of
the Jungfrau Alps and entering the vine-clad valleys
that bask at their feet, is no more impressed with a
sense of change than is he who turns his thoughts
from one to the other of these two lives that throbbed
out their brief hour amid the solitary bleak barrens of
Yorkshire. All the loving home traits were Anne's.
The delicate tendrils of her aifection twined about the
hearts of her sisters. She was of quiet, meditative
mood, full of melancholy self-distrust ; was gentle, con-
siderate, sweetly patient; of widest charity* of ten-
derest sympathy for the poor and the sick ; of unques-
tioning Christian faith ; of holiest Christian longing.
Like Emily, "a constitutional reserve and taciturnity,"
Charlotte tells us, " placed and kept her in the shade
and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with
a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted." Her
contributions to literature consisted of a few poems,
only one or two of which have any marked merit ; of
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 331
the story of "Agnes Grey" and that of "Wildfell
Hall."
" Agnes Grey" is a recital in fictitious garb of some
of the leading incidents in her life as a governess.
But it is so deficient in spirit, is so replete with tame,
faded commonplace, that it has never, from the first,
elicited the least interest from the reading public.
"Wildfell Hall," however, marks a very decided
advance, and to my mind reveals mental gifts which,
if they had been allowed further time and more favor-
ing opportunities, would have produced works of per-
manent value. Even E. P. Whipple, in the midst of
his bitter, biting criticisms in the "North American Re-
view," is forced to admit that "the characters are drawn
with great power and precision of outline, and the
scenes are as vivid as life itself." When we ascertain
its terrible realistic basis and the grand martyr-spirit
in which its young author penned its pages, we forgive
its defects as a work of art in our most profound ad-
miration for it as a work of love. Indeed, a moment's
reflection discloses that the very nature and intensity of
the purpose which prompted it necessarily produced
many of the defects which at the first we are so quick
to deplore. Anne had been completely wrapped up in
her brother Bramwell, delighted in his brilliant tal-
ents, would have sacrificed her own prospects in life to
brighten his. This attachment was the one golden
romance of her heart. How his subsequent life of
shame must have changed her life to one of profound-
est misery! Yet neither the pleadings of passionate
regard nor the warnings of disease had any power to
check him in his mad career.
332 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Month after month her sad eyes saw sin's serpentine
coils tighten about him, and the abiding presence of
this living death, instead of deadening her sensibili-
ties, deepened them. Death came, but not forgetful-
ness. Anne brooded over the terrible tragedy until it
wellnigh crazed her. Her sensitive nature had ever
instinctively shrunk from the least publicity. How
could she break silence now, and on such a theme?
How could she make public that shame whose dark
shadow had so long rested on the threshold of her home
and on her own breaking heart was even resting now ?
But such was her profound sense of duty for the living,
her Christ-like, compassionate love for the weak and
tempted, that she sublimely resolved to give to the
world, under the forms of fiction, a faithful transcript of
the wasted life of Bramwell Bronte. It was a costly sac-
crifice. It caused the heart that made it many a bitter
pang. Day after day she sat at her task, but her pen
never faltered. All the dark, repulsive features of sin
were sketched true to the life. We may look on this
as an instance of morbid conscience. Her sisters
so thought, and tried to dissuade her from her plan.
We may with them pronounce her effort futile, and
ascribe the failure to an utterly uncongenial subject
selected through a mistaken sense of duty; we may
regret the loss, thereby,, to art of her gifts of thought
and winsome grace of diction ; yet, as " Wuthering
Heights" is prized principally because it resounds with
the shrill war-cry, the grand Marseillaise of a spirit
fearless, strong, and stormy, so " Wildfell Hall,"
whose pages are fragrant with the frankincense of a
most fervid piety and self-forgetting love ; will be cher-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 333
ished, even regarded reverently, as the pure heart-
offering of one whose brief, blameless life God saw fit
to overcast with cloud. The misconception and abuse
which her book brought her never wrung from her
pained yet patient heart a single complaining word in
reply. Throughout her last illness her study seemed
to be how to fessen others' pain and hide her own.
She met death with the same calm front as had her
sister five months before; but while Emily in bleak
December, within the cold stone walls of the parsonage
she would never leave, confronted God's stern messen-
ger with the proud bearing of a plumed knight, Anne,
on a bright May day, at the sea-side, her mind in
perfect peace, confidingly fell asleep, like a tired child
in the arms of its loving mother.
In mood almost prophetic she wrote a poem just
before " she laid aside her pen and closed her desk for-
ever." Though she did not so purpose it, yet it proved
her heart's last legacy. We know no more fitting epi-
taph to be graven on the marble that marks her final
resting-place. Through its touching pathos there
breathes a submissive, holy, tranquil trust. In its
conception we discover how
" Love took up the harp of Life and smote on all its chords with
might,
Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of
sight."
Let us read it once again, and heed the lesson that it
teaches :
" I hoped that with the brave and strong
My portioned task might lie ;
To toil amid the busy throng,
With purpose pure and high.
334 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
" But God has fixed another part,
And He has fixed it well ;
I said so with my bleeding heart,
When first the anguish fell.
" Thou, God, hast taken our delight,
Our treasured hope, away ;
Thou bidd'st us now weep through the night,
And sorrow through the day.
" These weary hours will not be lost,
These days of misery,
These nights of darkness, anguish-tost,
Can I but turn to Thee,
" "With secret labor to sustain
In humble patience every blow ;
To gather fortitude from pain,
And hope and holiness from woe.
" Thus let me serve Thee from my heart,
Whate'er may be my written fate ;
Whether thus early to depart,
Or yet awhile to wait.
" If Thou shouldst bring me back to life,
More humbled I should be,
More wise, more strengthened for the strife,
More apt to lean on Thee.
" Should death be standing at the gate,
Thus should I keep my vow ;
But, Lord ! whatever be my fate,
Oh, let me serve Thee now I"
While " The Professor" was going the weary rounds
of the London publishing houses and meeting with re-
peated rebuffs, Charlotte Bronte, nothing daunted, again
put pen to paper, and it was not long ere the praises of
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 335
the unknown Currer Bell, the author of the glowing
pages of " Jane Eyre," were sounding on the lips of all
England. Two years after its appearance, in October,
1849, she published "Shirley," and in 1853, "Villette,"
the last and most elaborate of all her works. " The
Professor" was incorporated largely into " Villette,"
and remained in manuscript until long after her death.
" Jane Eyre" has been translated into nearly all the lan-
guages of Europe, and has been dramatized for both the
English and German stage. People still flock to the
playhouse to be thrilled by its pathos. Publishers have
not yet satisfied the popular demand for the book. Rarely
in any civilized country can a hamlet be found where
hearts are not still held spell-bound by this wizard of
story. The author's other works have also everywhere
been greeted with rapturous applause. It is now uni-
versally conceded that her writings possess pre-eminent
and permanent value and have placed her fair fame be-
yond any of the accidents of time. As Charlotte was
the eldest of the three sisters, and possessed by far the
firmest health, her genius was less immature and of less
morbid mood. In her are found Emily's restlessness,
her masculine force and fire, but they are found tem-
pered by a gentle loving trust, that pleasantly reminds
us of the younger Anne. Her heart carried as heavy
a load of sorrow as theirs, and carried it as bravely ;
her lyric soul as passionately longed for utterance, and
seemed by nature as peremptorily denied it in every
form but that of fiction.
The overruling Providence that thus turned into
this channel the rich magnificence of this gifted mind
served to promote two greatly-needed reforms in the
336 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
department of Belles-Lettres. To the great majority
of mankind, travelling through the arid deserts of every-
day life, how refreshing to drink from the bubbling
spring and lie under the cool shade of an oasis of fancy !
The worthy novel is an almoner of vigor to our jaded
minds. Not only does our blood bound again healthily
and our minds regain their wonted elasticity, but the
noble impulses of our souls are quickened, and we pass
into a higher, holier life, thanks to the good genius
who, remembering us in these our times of need, touches
the heart's sensibilities with the hand of a skilled ma-
gician.
It is the office of the novelist to introduce us to the
hearts and hearth-stones of private life. The grave
questions mooted at council-boards, in senate-chambers,
or in the laboratories and libraries of the learned, the
grand and stirring incidents in national history, the
pomp and circumstance of war, are introduced, if at all,
but as episodes, or as background on which to paint with
intenser vividness or more charming grace the indi-
vidualism which the story is intended to body forth.
Though the novel's theatre of action is necessarily nar-
rower, less imposing, than that of history, its very con-
centration of attention on some coming climax in per-
sonal destiny multiplies its plastic power over the lives
of the readers a thousandfold. It has the advantage
even over Biography in that it pictures only those
supreme moments, those pivotal periods when souls feel
their wings and fix their fates, and in that over the
romance of the fireside the colored calcium light of the
imagination is made to shed an especial splendor. Fic-
tion has largely superseded every other form of writing,
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 337
and has already become one of the mightiest of the
mental forces. When Charlotte Bronte began her
career the prevailing novel was little else than a trav-
esty on both nature and life, an extravaganza, a fairy-
tale. She was one of the first to introduce the spirit of
pre-Raphaelitism. This was not done with any pre-
concerted purpose of reform. She was simply a fiery,
free, and fearless spirit who had felt deeply, observed
acutely, and poured out without a scintilla of politic re-
serve, and with wondrous gift of utterance, the thoughts
that burned within her. She was honest and frank to
the core. She had passed through a furnace of fire.
Her heart overflowed. Neither gold nor glory could
swerve her a hair's breadth from her determination to
portray life precisely as she found it. Adverse criticisms,
misinterpretations, sad lack of appreciation, the earnest
entreaty of loved friends, the supposed imperative de-
mands of high art, all failed to deter her from speak-
ing out the truth as God gave her to know the truth in
her own inimitable way. Hers was a case of absolute
loyalty to nature and to self. A more faithful, a more
utterly undistorted transcript of a human soul can no-
where be found in all literature.
In a letter to Mrs. Gaskell, alluding to a novel this
eminent author was then writing, she remarks, u My
heart fails me already at the thought of the pang it will
have to undergo. And yet you must follow the im-
pulse of your own inspiration. If that commands the
slaying of the victim, no bystander has the right to
put out his hand to stay the sacrificial knife ; but I
hold you a stern priestess in these matters. 7 ' Her pri-
vate correspondence abounds in expressions that voice
338 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
this same spirit of reverent loyalty to self. " No mat-
ter whether known or unknown, misjudged or the con-
trary, I am resolved not to write otherwise. I shall
bend as my powers tend. The two human beings who
understood me and whom I understood are gone. I
have some that love me yet, and whom I love, without
expecting or having a right to expect that they shall
perfectly understand me. I am satisfied, but I must
have my own way in the matter of writing. I am
thankful to God, who gave me the faculty, and it is to
me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to
profit by its possession."
She was exceptionally dutiful and devoted to her
father, would gladly sacrifice her time, her ease, her
personal preferments in almost every regard, to lighten
his load of care and ease his pain ; but there was one
department of her life where even he must not intrude.
She would, if his interests required it, lay aside her
pen, but, if her conscience consented to her using it, no
one, not even her imperiously- willed father, was suf-
fered to infringe upon its perfect freedom. She had
determined that Paul Emanuel should never marry
Lucy Snowe, but finally perish in a storm at sea. Her
father besought her to give " Villette" a happier end-
ing. But no; in her musings the storm had gath-
ered and burst over the fated ship, and the wild waves'
requiem was ringing in her ears. Her imagination
had brooded over that last scene until it was as sharply
outlined in her thought, as intensely real, as if it had
been some haunting memory. She loved Paul Eman-
uel, for underneath his many faults and foibles, his
irascible restlessness, there was a heart grandly true
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 339
and tender. The conception and portrayal of this fer-
vid professor had been the joint work of Charlotte's
ripened genius and burdened, breaking heart. About
him her thoughts ever lingered lovingly, perhaps in
fond remembrance of certain privileged days in Belgium,
when for her the gates of heaven were left ajar. How
gladly she would have rescued him ! Her hot tears fell,
but the scene that had flashed upon her in one of those
strangely creative moods impressed her as so profoundly
real, and so profoundly true to the world's troubled
life, that she felt that to have gratified her father,
or the reading public, or the sharp-tongued critics, or
even the blind promptings of her own sympathies, she
would have proved recreant to her trusts. She con-
sented to throw over the scene a thin veil of ambiguity,
nothing more. It must stand substantially as she at
first conceived it, though it was the closing chapter, the
climax, in what she had looked upon as her master-
piece. It was in this same novel, somewhat toward its
close, after the sympathies of her readers, fallen under
the spell of her genius, had been wrought up in the
fates of her personages, that she had the hardihood to
introduce an entirely new set of characters, to change
abruptly the whole current of feeling. No romancer
had ever before thus risked success. She had clearly
foreseen the danger, as she afterward frankly confessed,
but she in a sense felt it compulsory upon her to make
the change, lest otherwise she might fail to paint to the
life, so irresistibly were the tides of her being set
toward realism. Determined to have her fancies in con-
sonance with fact, she would never trust herself to write
whenever her ideas lost their distinctness or verisimil-
340 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
itude. There were times when from this cause her
pen lay idle for weeks together. It was her wont on
these occasions to think about the subject or scene in-
tently night after night Just before retiring, to study out
as nearly as possible how it would be or what it was
like, until some morning the mists would suddenly lift
from off the face of her mental landscape and every
minutest object and outline stand revealed. Her pen
then seemed to picture what her eyes actually saw, so
rapid the strokes, so rich and realistic every touch and
tint on the canvas. This singular habit of hers she
incidentally alluded to in a conversation with an opium-
eater. He, while reading one of the scenes in " Vil-
lette," in which the effects of the drug are described,
had been so impressed with the truth and vividness of the
picture, that he ventured to ask her whether she had
ever taken the narcotic, and to his astonishment learned
that she never had. He confesses himself unable to
account for the phenomenon on any psychological
grounds, but adds, " I am sure it was so, because she
said it." It may, however, be satisfactorily explained
as the work both of what is now recognized as sympa-
thetic imagination and of some unconscious automatic
mental action. The first, Shakspeare is supposed to
have called into play in depicting as he has so master-
fully every phase of a disordered mind. The second,
Dr. Carpenter argues in a very able and learned paper,
constitutes the very basis of what is known as common
sense. Charlotte doubtless was ignorant of the men-
tal laws under which she worked, but in her heroic
determination to know the truth and with sealed lips
to wait till she found it she unconsciously fulfilled the
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 341
very conditions precedent to success. Her preternatu-
rally nervous temperament had given her hours of deep
depression and of wild ecstasy. A Coleridge or a De
Quincey had never, even in their most unnatural ex-
citements, experienced wider extremes of emotion than
this solitary, singularly abstemious woman had passed
through amid the almost unbroken quiet of that bleak
Haworth home. By combining what she had read or
what had been told her as to the effects of opium with
her own turbulent heart-history, her mind had in its
periods of unconscious working solved the problem
given it. These hidden mental processes came to her
rescue in many an emergency during the progress of
her stories, and the revelations thus obtained she tran-
scribed with strict fidelity and placed implicit trust in
their truth. Her confidence was seldom misplaced,
because her mind in these seasons worked without
trammel, and worked on material drawn largely from
her own keen, shrewd seeing and her own deeply spir-
itual life, because in her choice of subjects she, con-
scious of her limitations, firmly refused to enter fields
that were unfamiliar, however important or enticing,
or touch on topics that failed to elicit from her a genu-
ine sympathetic response.
She believed that she had no faculty to handle any
of the topics of the times or illustrate any scheme of
philanthropy, and she accordingly never attempted it,
though her many gentle unostentatious charities con-
vince us that she had deep sympathy for the burden-
bowed and sorrowing of God's children. "She volun-
tarily and sincerely veiled her face," so she writes to a
friend, " before such a mighty subject as that treated in
342 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
' Uncle Tom's Cabin/ but she believed that to manage
these great matters rightly they must be long and prac-
tically studied, their bearings known intimately and
their evils felt genuinely ; that they must not be taken
up as a trading speculation." She thought that Mrs.
Stowe must herself from childhood have sat within the
blighting shadow of American slavery; that words of
indignation at sight of its cold cruelties must have leaped
from her lips like swords from their scabbards ; that
her heart must have throbbed with profoundest pity
witnessing the sad partings at the auction-block or lis-
tening to the lash of the overseer as it wrapped its bloody
coils about the bared backs of the bondmen in the
sweltering cotton-fields of the South.
Prompted by such a spirit of stanch loyalty to self
and to truth, she naturally breathed into every page and
paragraph of her writings a peculiar personal charm ;
her thoughts grew deep and clear as wells and full of
heart-beat; her vision, while singularly narrow, was also
singularly searching. Few writers have ever discovered
for us such depths in human nature, made their plots
and personages so distinctly real, pictured passion at
such white heat, followed the guidings of their genius
with such fearless faithfulness and fervor, penned pas-
sages so incisive, direct, compact, so fresh and free, so
full of force and fire. To the great public who knew
nothing of the guiding principles of her inner thought-
life, it was rightly a matter of marvel, how out of such
narrow experiences, such scant material, she wrought
works of such transcendent value. The hiding curtain
has been partially drawn aside from before the world
of fact out of which she fashioned her world of fancies.
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 343
We now know that Wilson, the founder of the clergy-
men's daughters' school at Corwan Bridge, has with all
his defects been by her forever embedded in clear amber
under the sobriquet of Brocklehurst. The terrible ex-
periences of herself and her sisters at his institution
have been pictured with startling vividness, though, as
she always maintained, without over-coloring, in the
opening chapters of "Jane Eyre." Elsewhere, Cart-
wright, a former local celebrity of Yorkshire, reappears
in Robert Moore ; Monsieur Heger, with whom for a
time she was associated on the Continent, in Paul
Emanuel; her father's curates, in Malone, Donne, and
Sweeting; her life-long friend Ellen, in Caroline Hel-
stone ; her sister Emily, in Shirley ; and herself, in Lucy
Snowe. Her sketches of Yorkshire life and rugged
powerful character, of local manners, traditions, and
scenery, were, in " Shirley," so vivid and true that they
at last disclosed the secret of authorship, which till the
appearance of this work she had with most scrupulous
care concealed even from her publishers. By this her
firm, unswerving adhesion to truth, her faithful pic-
turing of life as she found it among the hills of York-
shire, she unconsciously uncovered to the reading public
a new world full of strange charm.
While this her intense realism saved her from be-
coming melodramatic or sensational, her most eccentric
characters impressing every one as living verities, it
exposed her for a time to the charge of coarseness. E.
P. Whipple, one of the most eminent of our American
critics, while charmed with her clear, distinct, decisive
style, her freshness, raciness, vigor of thought, strongly
animadverted in the " North American Review" against
344 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
her introduction of scenes of courtship full of displays
of mere animal appetite after the manner of kangaroos
and the heroes of Dryden's plays ; against the intro-
duction of such misanthropic profligates as Rochester,
with his profanity, brutality, and slang, giving torpedo-
shocks to the nervous system; and especially against
her dealings in moral paradox, the hardihood of her
assaults upon the prejudices of proper people, her at-
tempts to wound the delicacy of the refined, her daring
glances into regions which acknowledge the authority
of no conventional rules. He thinks the author has
made the capital mistake of supposing that an artistic
representation of character and manners is a literal imi-
tation of individual life.
How a critic so justly eminent for his analytic and
discriminating powers could have in this instance so
mistaken the writer's intent, the actual quality of her
work, or the influence it was fitted and destined to exert
over the morals of private life, it is wellnigh impossible
to conjecture, for a purer-minded woman never put pen
to paper, and, instead of her anywhere manifesting the
least sympathy for anything coarse or low, no one could
protest with more genuine earnestness against every
ignoble impulse, or present to the weak and tempted
scenes and phases of character so full of high incentive
and of sustaining hope. George William Curtis, equally
eminent with E. P. Whipple in the world of letters,
expressed an opinion seven years after directly antago-
nistic to his, and in it he has voiced the calmer and
more just judgment of to-day. He says, "Contrasted
with the splendors of De Stael and the lurid brilliancy
of George Sand, and with all the flickering fading
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 345
gleams of the female novelists, Charlotte Bronte's
light shines pure and planetary. It is by that light
that the anxious voyager will head his bark, it is to
that calm power the literature of England will long be
indebted for a truer tone and the lives of Saxon women
for a sweeter inspiration."
I have again read " Jane Eyre" for the express pur-
pose of ascertaining whether there are any just grounds
for Whipple's adverse criticisms; and I am more sur-
prised than ever at his decision. Jane's love for Roches-
ter was natural and legitimate, for it was founded on
Rochester's display of the manly qualities of decision
and strength of will, of keen intellect, of positiveness
of temperament, of depth of feeling. To her he stood
in marked contrast with his guests. Rochester, long
since surfeited with the gay, heartless masquerading of
fashionable life, loved her for her frank, free, indepen-
dent, vigorous, unconventional modes of thought and
expression. They were both of intense and positive
temperaments, and the close retiracy of her life and the
peculiar circumstances of his could but increase their
fervor. Their sentiments toward each other were un-
questionably pure and elevating, being in no sense
called out by any external attractions, but solely by in-
ternal, spiritual ones. Rochester's conduct toward Jane
was prompted by all the better impulses of his nature,
growing out of his desire to break away from his past
courses and lead a truer, higher life. There was some-
thing in each other's brain and heart deeply responsive,
which ripened at last into an abiding love. Rochester,
in concealing from Jane his domestic misfortune and
attempting to marry her while his insane wife was still
16
346 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
living, was, as I conceive, misled by a mistaken judg-
ment rather than by any unworthy motive. His sub-
sequent conduct was full of self-sacrificing heroism ; and
after fire had finally freed him, and after fiery trials
had humbled and Christianized his spirit, his little Jane
again found her way back to his heart and home, and
the evening of their lives was goldened with the glow
of fireside content.
There is one instance, and but one, it is said, in which
our artist attempted to create a character without a liv-
ing model. The delicate, petite Paulina, who figures
in " Villette" as the playmate of the boy Graham, and
afterward as the angel of his household, was purely a
creature of the imagination. In her case there was no
realistic basis, and the author seemed fearful lest there
was fatal lack of realistic warmth of color. She says
of it, " I greatly apprehend, however, that the weakest
character in the book is the one I aimed at making the
most beautiful ; and if this be the case, the fault lies
in its wanting the germ of the real. I felt that this
character lacked substance. Union with it too much
resembles the fate of Ixion, who was mated with a
cloud."
Charlotte had the merit of introducing real life into
fiction simultaneously with Thackeray, and her " Pro-
fessor" was completed before George Eliot, a disciple of
this same school, took up her pen. "Jane Eyre," it has
been remarked, " was, like ' Vanity Fair/ the initial
work of a new era." Her spirit is much more to be
commended than Thackeray's, for while he with her has
introduced into story the flesh and blood, the laughter
and tears, the loves and hates and hopes, of Earth's
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 347
living sons and daughters in place of the impossible
abstractions they found in literature galvanized into
mimic life, there was too much of heartless raillery in
his tone ; he too keenly relished pointing with the fiery
finger of scorn at the faults and foibles of the age; the
role of the satirist was evidently too much to his liking.
Charlotte looked with a kindlier eye and with a larger
hope. Her characters had in them a preponderance of
good, which it was her delight to develop and bring
uppermost at the last. Our warmest sympathies are
elicited as we see them battling for a better life, and we
are thereby inspirited for our own grim contests with
self and sin.
While she in Helen Burns drew with perfect faith-
fulness the untidy and disorderly habits of her sister
Maria, and with inexorable spirit visited her with the
sad and natural consequences of her faults, she also
caused her sterling qualities to shine through, showed
her wide acquaintance with literature, her genuine love
for it and poetic appreciation of its excellences, her
spirit of contrition, her patient uncomplaining endur-
ance, and her calm Christian faith. Although on her
little grave had already fallen the snows of twenty-five
Decembers, her love for her despite all her defects
bursts forth in undiminished ardor in that picture of
parting where Jane Eyre steals up to Helen's room at
midnight to kiss her a long good-by, and both lie
locked in each other's embrace, talking of heaven, till
they fall asleep, one to wake on earth, the other among
the angels.
Rev. Robertson, and also her own father, reappear
in Helstone with a redeeming light thrown over their
348 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
stern martial qualities. She counts them among those
many misplaced people in the world who have admira-
ble gifts for other spheres from which some uncontrol-
lable circumstance or their own mistaken judgment has
precluded them. She shows how nature designed them
for Cossacks, not priests, for the battle-field, not the
cloister. There is, too, in Rochester's nature a noble
undertone which finally asserts itself. Her works
leave in the mind no rankling bitterness, they prompt
to no railing accusation ; they lead to a Christ-like
charity, they illumine with a Christ-born hope.
George William Curtis, in 1855, in a paper already
referred to, remarked, " The English fiction of the last
fifteen years has a dignity and worth it never had be-
fore. It has acquired a seriousness, a depth, an earnest
aim which was quite unknown. It has been touched
by the tender humanity of the time. That mysterious
spirit of the age has laid its finger upon it." The
writings of Charlotte Bronte exerted no small influence
in effecting this great reform. We cannot overestimate
the good she thus unconsciously accomplished in being
thus fearlessly frank and true.
This same determination to paint life as she saw it
made her among the first of psychological novelists.
Loyal to her conception of the real matters of moment,
she seldom endowed her heroes or heroines with beauty
or wealth or high rank, the development of soul-quali-
ties being her prime purpose. This according of pre-
cedence to the inner life was a wide departure from the
prevailing method, doubtless the result of her own heart-
history, for her breast had long been the battle-ground
of fiercely contending armies. She was naturally in-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 349
tensely introspective, and upon these hidden spiritual
conflicts, so fraught with momentous issues, her interest
had so centred, she resolved that the mere accidents of
birth and of beauty should on her canvas serve, if at
all, but as background on which to paint what she knew
best, felt most deeply, and believed of vital and lasting
value. Her novels were the earnest crying out of a
grand soul shut up within a body short, thin, and plain,
full of shrinking nerves and clad in rustic garb ; of a
loving nature belied by a constrained manner and by
a quaintly precise and formal speech. Constitutional
sensitiveness and solitude, both forced and courted, to-
gether with infirm health, had largely unfitted her to
relish the excitements of the drawing-room or to carry
off any of its brilliant prizes. The attempt was once
made to lionize her in London, but she proved too plain
and unpretending for hero-worship, and although every
kind attention was paid her during her brief visit to
the " Big Babylon," she pined for her lonely Haworth
home. Conscious that there were other such imprisoned
souls, she sought to unveil their worth, to disclose to the
multitude those spiritual excellencies that far transcend
all others. Carrying out this purpose, she has accom-
plished what few have ever dared attempt: she has
denied many of her principal personages nearly every
personal grace, nearly every advantageous circumstance,
yet by the magic of her genius has drawn all hearts
unto them, and made them in very deed the loved and
laurelled heroes and heroines of the hour.
Charlotte Bronte, while thus singularly true to life
and to nature, was by no means a mere daguerro typist,
contenting herself with penning the plain annals of
350 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
a neighborhood or slavishly copying such aspects of
hill and field and sky as attracted her attention in her
rambles over the moors. Her material, while realistic,
was moulded by a hand that was creative. She took
pains to select the germs of her characters and of her
descriptions from the world of fact ; she took equal
pains to develop those germs in strict accordance with
established law. In " Shirley," for example, she incor-
porated the cardinal characteristics of her sister Emily,
but in giving to her temperament, her circumstances
and destiny, a summer aspect, she necessarily introduced
a wide circle of change, departing thus from fact, yet
not in a single particular from essential truth. On
this, her favorite conception, she so freely poured the
rich magnificence of her genius, that "Shirley" stands to
this day one of the most masterly pen-portraitures in
the range of English fiction. She felt a genuine and
even a passionate love for the scenery about her. She
had studied with patient accuracy and had noted with
keenest sense every changing mood of earth and sky.
She dealt in specifics, summoning cloud and wind and
rock to enforce and vivify her thought. Her allusions
to nature were always felicitous. Her "atmospheric
susceptibility" was phenomenal ; it was one of the
prominent features of her genius. Yet over all her
descriptions of nature she threw the robe of her fancy ;
over some the transforming might of her imagination ;
for she was not alone an original and acute observer,
she also regrouped into new scenes the lights and
shades, the lines and tints, which she reverently re-
ceived as suggestions sketched by the pencil of a Di-
vine artist.
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 351
" She/' as Bayne has remarked, " takes features here
and there, and, by combination, new-creates pieces of
poetic conception distinct not only from the general
texture of her composition, but, so far as we know,
from anything in the English language."
Swinburne says of one of the passages in Louis
Moore's diary, as given in " Shirley," " Nothing can
beat that ; no man can match it ; it is the first and last
absolute and sufficient and triumphant word ever to be
said on the subject. It paints wind like David Cox
and light like Turner. To find anything like it in
verse, we must go to the highest springs of all, to Pin-
dar, or to Shelley, or to Hugo." Miss Bronte's person-
ifications of thought, though not equal to Shelley's, yet
stand pre-eminent in the province of story as does his
in the higher province of song. The most striking of
these is where Shirley sees Nature a woman-Titan
kneeling before the red hills in evening prayer. The
Mermaid, Temptress-terror of the Northern seas; the
demon of loveless marriage, masked Death ; the foam-
women wantoning in the rocks, white, evanescent
daughters of Nereus ; the uncared-for orphan, Human-
ity, weeping in the lone wood, pitied, soothed, won by
the voice of Genius, an unseen seraph of the sky, who,
after centuries shadowed with sin, led his spouse, re-
deemed, to upper bridal chambers ; these pictures, and
others such as these, scattered throughout Miss Bronte's
writings, mark an imagination marvellous in creative
power, Grecian in the chaste beauty of its conceptions,
at times fiery and terrible as that of the poet JEschylus.
In " Jane Eyre," too, and also in " Villette," we
chance upon lakelets of thought, nestling here and
352 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
there amid the earth -shadows, on whose waters, tossed
with passion, there rests the glimmering splendor of
starlight.
Charlotte Bronte, by her stanch individualism and
loyalty to truth, her fearless freedom of thought and
utterance, became not only one of the founders of the
schools of realistic and of psychological romance, but a
most strenuous advocate of the doctrine that natural
affection should be an absolutely indispensable pre-
requisite to marriage. She dwelt upon this theme
until its importance became, in her judgment, para-
mount to all others, and she felt that it was the one
gospel of duty and of privilege she had been commis-
sioned to proclaim. She had all that unquestioning
conviction and consuming zeal that fire the hearts of
the world's reformers and are so necessary to carry
them through to victory ; and, in consequence, she
apparently fell into their characteristic error of over-
statement ; she certainly met their common fate of mis-
interpretation and of hope deferred. She doubtless
was oppressed with a sense of the momentous issues at
stake in entering upon the relation of husband and
wife. This union, unless love cement it, soon becomes
a bondage most abject and galling. Without affection
the family circle is broken, the atmosphere is shot
through with the chill of death. Without its sweeten-
ing influences estrangements inevitably arise as per-
sonal defects and weaknesses come to light during years
of hourly intimacy, through the many petty provoca-
tions of e very-day life. The children, those tenderest
of sensitive plants, are quick to feel any subtile change
in the spiritual forces constantly emanating from the
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 353
hearts of the household, however painstaking and per-
sistent the efforts at repression and concealment ; and
irreparable loss is by them incurred when they are de-
prived of the ennobling presence of affectionate self-
sacrifice. There is withal most imminent peril of
transmitting at birth to their immortal natures tenden-
cies that may at the last scald their cheeks with tears
or freeze their hearts to ice. In the Scriptures a pecu-
liar sacredness is ascribed to this relationship. Je-
hovah institutes and hallows it. It is even selected
as a fitting symbol of Christ's mystic union with His
Church, a union cemented by a love divine.
Charlotte, while profoundly meditating on these
issues, temporal and eternal, involved in it and its sol-
emn consecration in God's word, was doubtless equally
oppressed with a sense of the unthinking, reckless haste,
the nonchalance, the cold, calculating selfishness, the
mistaken though often well-meant purpose, with some
one of which young and old, rich and poor, wise and
ignorant, saint and sinner, the world over, assume the
awful responsibilities of the married state. She knew,
alas ! too well, that multitudes wed comparative stran-
gers, without care of consequences, multitudes more
marry from motives of gain, or of pride, or of ambi-
tion. She knew some were coaxed, some driven, some
beguiled into wedlock to build up others' interests on
the ruins of their own. She knew that many by false
casuistry choose life-partners solely to further plans of
philanthropy or to promote the cause of Christ. And
this last misuse she felt no hesitancy in denouncing as
downright desecration.
Against this almost universal trespassing upon the
16*
354 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
sacred prerogatives of the heart she entered a brave
and burning protest. The thought that she, a little
lone woman, in this act placed a lance in rest to tilt
against a whole world in arms, instead of affrighting her
spirit, fired it till her words were tipped with lambent
flame. She sought to expose the self-blinding and joy-
destroying sophistry of the religious zealot, the purse-
proud parent, the thrifty-minded lover, and the dazed
admirer burning his moth- wings in the blaze of beauty
or of brilliant gifts. She was the pronounced foe of
society's empty conventionalities, sought to break their
chains, longed for love to burn through custom, cant, and
caste and hallow with its holy fire the inmates of every
human home. She shuddered at the terrible awakening
of those who discover when too late that there exists be-
tween them and their life-comrades no constitutional con-
geniality, no genuine soul-sympathy, but rather such
discordance in temperament, in tastes, and in talents,
that only mutual forbearance will prevent antipathy ;
that not even the most exceptional grace will render pos-
sible anything better than chill sentiments of respect.
We can never be too thankful that she turned the full
splendor of her genius upon this almost universal social
evil of marriage without love, for even the best-inten-
tioned among us are in danger of falling under its curse
through an unwitting acceptance of the fatal fallacy that
there are no special conditions under which alone love
lives. Over the human heart the human will does not
sit sovereign. Even in the realm of feeling there is
the reign of law. The enactments of the Almighty we
can no more abrogate in this department than in any
other of his wide domain. The conditions which we
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 355
are forced to fulfil to cause wood to burst into flame are
no more definite and fixed than those under which our
hearts are fired with affection. Chemists and psychol-
ogists have each discovered in their respective fields
that the elements in the one of matter, in the other of
mind, absolutely refuse to unite except in accordance
with laws of affinity and of proportion that are alike
immutable and mathematically precise. Musicians,
painters, and sculptors in producing their masterpieces
obey laws of harmony in sound, color, and form no
more rigid than those that prevail over human hearts
in the exercise of their social functions. In only one
particular have we the gift of spontaneity. In motives
of conduct we have perfect freedom of choice, and on
this fact is based our moral accountability. Within
a certain prescribed sphere the will is not only free, but
is also an original fountain of force ; without that sphere
it is shorn of both its sovereignty and its strength.
An opinion widely prevails that persons toward
whom we entertain sentiments simply of respect or of
admiration are certain to become, if we so order it, ob-
jects Of tender and lasting love. This is an error as
radical as it is disastrous. Love is awakened only after
thrilling, spiritual harmonies are sounded during some
intimate interchange of thought and feeling. Few are
sufficiently reflective or metaphysical to search for the
source of that sweet, strange music ; none possess the
prescience to divine who among their acquaintances
have tastes, temperaments, and talents sufficiently com-
plemental to their own to awaken those subtile soul-
symphonies without which love is impossible. That
each party is in every way worthy of the other's re-
356 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
specr, or even of admiration, will by no means suffice.
An incident in Charlotte Bronte's personal history is a
case in point, and doubtless we can each of us furnish
corroborative evidence in incidents from our own. She
remarks in a letter, " Could I ever feel enough for
to accept of him as a husband? Friendship, gratitude,
esteem, I have; but each moment he came near me and
I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice.
Now that he is away I feel far more gently toward him ;
it is only close by I grow rigid, stiffening with a strange
mixture of apprehension and anger which nothing soft-
ens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of his manner.
I did not want to be proud, nor intend to be, but I was
forced to be so. Most true it is that we are overruled
by One above us, that in his hands our very will is as
clay in the hands of the potter."
Grating discords may come from a union based on
bare respect; a studied kindness may, possibly a passion-
ate love ; but which of these will be the issue only God
can foresee. To enter into such a marriage is to make
a leap into the dark with the chances overwhelmingly
against us. What shall be said of the prospects of
those who even neglect this precaution and follow the
promptings of pride, of avarice, or of ambition?
So vital is this truth which our author teaches, so far-
reaching in its effects, and, to our shame be it spoken,
so almost universally disregarded, no wonder that to
her earnest soul it became the one absorbing subject,
that solely on its illustration and enforcement she was
willing to spend her life and rest her fame.
Charlotte in her teachings had more especial refer-
ence to English homes, and her experiences convinced
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 357
her that only the most vivid and vehement utterances
ever could break through that tough armor of native
phlegm and of self-satisfied, obstinate conservatism
which so encases English hearts.
When to the foregoing considerations we add another,
and perhaps the most important of them all, that be-
hind the shy and reticent deportment of this lonely
and suffering woman were concealed a capacity and a
craving for affection which would have ended either in
insanity or, what is worse, in stolid stoicism, had there
not been present an exalted sense of duty and a granite
will, we are prepared not only to fully comprehend her
course but to award it our highest commendation.
Yet these volumes of hers, which we, reading as we
now can between the lines, know to be veritable his-
tories of intensest heart-hunger, encountered many a
stinging criticism from the press. Even Harriet Mar-
tineau, one of Charlotte's most trusted friends, caused
her deep pain directly after the publication of "Vil-
lette," by pointing out with sharp pen as a notable blem-
ish that all the author's female characters in all their
thoughts were represented as being full of the one thing
love, which should not be held up as the be-all and
the end-all of a woman's life. Perhaps, as another has
suggested, she would have less readily and rudely con-
demned had she known with what self-sacrifice Char-
lotte had but a few weeks before set aside her own
preferences and inclinations and submitted her lot to
her father's angry will. This strange parent, on his
daughter's telling out of her full heart the story of the
attachment for her of Mr. Nicholls, his curate, and of
his offer of marriage, fell into a towering rage, " the
358 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
veins on his forehead," as she afterward related in a
letter, "starting up like whip-cord and his eyes sud-
denly becoming bloodshot." She, apprehensive of the
effects of his passion, not on herself but on him, made
haste to promise that on the morrow Mr. Nicholls
should have from her a distinct refusal. We know
how faithfully she kept her pledge; but at what untold
sacrifice of feeling she performed her filial duty, we can
never know. The substantial soundness of Miss Mar-
tineau's criticism, considered in itself, it would be idle
to controvert. Even Bayne, one of the most admiring
and sympathetic of all Charlotte's reviewers, is con-
strained to pronounce her works an ovation of one re-
lentless and tyrannizing passion. Though this is in a
measure true, yet it seems to me that these writers give
to the defect an undue prominence and present it in a
false light by failing to account for its origin. The
author is thus not only robbed of her just meed of
praise, but her readers are needlessly left exposed to
mischievous influences which no one would more pro-
foundly regret than she. In order to understand
rightly and be profited by any great original work of
fiction it is wellnigh imperative that we know both by
what manner of person and under what peculiar stress
of circumstances its pages were penned. If ever there
was a genius sent to this planet with a Divine commis-
sion to electrify society by the promulgation of a prin-
ciple of transcendent moment, it can be safely claimed
that Charlotte Bronte was thus sent. She possessed those
wondrous gifts of vision and of expression, that depth of
conviction, that consuming zeal, that downright candor
and all-conquering courage, that devotion to truth and
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 359
to duty, which so distinguished those grand old Hebrew
prophets who durst warn kings and people of coming
retribution, whose voices yet ring down the centuries.
I also detect in her their marked limitations, their lack
of mental equipoise, of philosophic calm, of breadth of
view ; and I am led to question whether, when God
selects his special messengers, he does not designedly
choose from among those very ones all whose tides of
being flow vehemently and with resistless strength
through a single straitened channel. From them come
the world's reformers and martyrs, its devotees to art
and science, its specialists in every department of thought
and action. It is only by combining the different-
colored rays that stream from minds of different trans-
mitting power that we are able to secure the stainless
white light of God's truth. Such is our finiteness that
when once we begin to concentrate our attention and our
sympathies upon any one object it grows daily in our
esteem until every other is unduly dwarfed before it or
lost sight of altogether ; and I believe this wisely or-
dered ; for not until the apparent value of the object is
thus disproportionately enhanced do we become willing
to suffer for it, and, if need be, to die for it. Charlotte
was by constitution of pronounced predilection, of posi-
tive opinion, of passionate zeal, of penetrating glance,
of powerful will. It was thus God made her ; it was
thus he kept her to the last by a series of most remark-
able providences, causing her to pass through ordeal
after ordeal of purifying fire. Consequently, as this
really vital social question attracted her attention, it ab-
solutely absorbed it. She was a born enthusiast. We
should welcome her as such, and give God thanks, re-
3(JO VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
garding her faults simply as those of her class, such as
uniformly, and I may say necessarily, accompany those
commanding qualities that render their possessor one
of the great agitating and reforming forces so indis-
pensable to the world's life. While we regret that she
but incidentally pictured any of the higher forms of
love, that she gave undue prominence to the blessings
dispensed by the love she depicts, and gave to that love
an undue fervor, we should also keep in mind that the
passion is always pure, and that her characters are, with
rare exceptions, of the sinewy and ardent Yorkshire
type, fitted for mightiest stress of emotion ; and we
should especially remember those incomparable scenes,
in one of which Jane with blanched cheek and lacerated
heart, yet with steadfast front, turns away from the
tempting sophistry and wild pleading of Rochester, in
another from the still subtiler sophistry of the Rev.
St. John Rivers. " The epic heroism of little Jane,"
says an able critic, " while it reaches the climax of its
grandeur, reaches also the height of its practical value.
In the hour of sorest need the figure of that invincible
girl may rise with a look of real and potent encourage-
ment to steel many a heart to defy the devil to the
last."
It has been urged against Charlotte that she not only
has failed to give any representation of that pure and
lofty love that allies us to God and man, " illuminating
the universe with the mingled lights of heaven and
home," but has in St. John Rivers presented " a carica-
ture which, while wondrous in execution, is utterly
false."
To the first part of this accusation I reply that she
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 361
has, on the contrary, left us in the pages of " Shirley"
an admirable illustration of this highest love in the
person of Cecyl Hall, although, I regret to add, he is
but incidentally introduced, hurriedly and imperfectly
sketched, and assigned an unimportant part in the plot;
to the second I would say that St. John was no more
designed than were the famous three curates in the
opening chapter of this same book to illustrate the
transforming power of Christ's love, but meant to stand
merely for that class of religionists who have in their
experiences advanced no farther than the seventh of
Romans' bondage to the law, having yet to learn of the
eighth of Komans' liberty of love. Just such a char-
acter was needed by her to enforce that important truth
that even a Christian's most sacred consecrations can
never properly include a consent to marriage without
love, that there are no exigencies or interests in Christ's
kingdom demanding it, but that rather the Bible's
plainest teachings pointedly condemn such infringe-
ment on the heart's prerogatives. St. John deservedly
went away "joyless and marble-cold on his high mis-
sion ;" for whatever of love-passion burned within him
had been, under a mistaken judgment and by might of
will, as effectually walled in against all human approach
with desolate fields of arctic ice as is to-day the open
Polar Sea.
Bayne, in an addendum to his paper, called out by
the issuance of Mrs. Gaskell's Biography, makes the
grave charge that Charlotte, when she ceased to be artist
and became woman, consented to marry one toward
whom, according to her own express declaration, she
entertained simply sentiments of respect. This is so
362 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
utterly inconsistent with all she taught, so humiliating
a confession of weakness, so improbable in view of her
strength and straightforwardness of character, I am not
willing to let it pass unchallenged. I have gone care-
fully through Mrs. Gaskell's work for the express pur-
pose of finding the paragraph upon which this charge
is based, and, I am glad to say, without success ; and
now I ask, can it be that she whose keenly sensitive
nature grew rigid with mingled apprehension and anger
at the too near approach of some acquaintance "for
whom," she acknowledges in a letter already quoted,
she "felt both friendship, gratitude, and esteem,"
actually underwent such radical change in tastes and
temperament, and also in principles cherished and ad-
vocated for a lifetime, as to consent to wed one she did
not love, one of wingless mind, painfully practical,
prosaic, and plodding?
Some time after her wedding-day she writes to a friend,
" My life is different from what it used to be. May
God make me thankful for it ! I have a good, kind,
attached husband, and every day my own attachment
to him grows stronger." Her marriage-days, though
few, were cloudless and full of the quiet charm of fire-
side content. Her sky, so long curtained and storm-
swept, was for one brief hour, just before the nightfall
of death, lit with a glorious golden glow. To help her
husband in his humble parochial duties, she with cheer-
ful promptness laid by her pen, though to her it had
been such source of solace since her sisters died ; and
he, after she had been called to join those sisters com-
pany, prompted by the same spirit of affectionate self-
sacrifice, remained in the lonely parsonage through
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 363
many long sad years in order that her aged father in
his last days might not be left companionless.
The fact of Charlotte's thus voluntarily laying aside
her literary work out of pure wifely devotion is, to me,
peculiarly impressive. An inscrutable Providence has
stricken with the palsy of death the hand and brain of
many an inspired genius while in the very midst of
some inimitable work. To Shakspeare and Shelley, to
Dickens, Prescott, and Buckle, to Macaulay and Mot-
ley, precisely thus the summons came. The loss seems
irreparable, for their last productions, like the won-
drous palace left at day-dawn by the slave-genii of
Aladdin in their precipitate flight to the under-world,
stand now and must stand always, despite the skilled
attempts of literary adepts to complete them, as frag-
mentary as they were left by their great projectors.
God might thus have called our author hence ; but he
chose rather to grant her the high privilege, of her
own free will, in obedience to the joint behests of love
and duty, to devote that hand and brain, which could
give outline and tint as by angelic touch, to routine
parish duties, a class of work for which she was by
temperament and habit alike unfit, and for which, in
place of that gladdening consciousness of the exercise
of singular creative might that had thus far carried her
through, she must now depend on the conscious nobility
of her heart's intent and on the sympathetic apprecia-
tion of him she loved. It was left to Thackeray,, as
editor of "Cornhill," to place on its pedestal her aban-
doned, half-chiselled statue. With the opening chap-
ters of " Emma" the artist disappears, but in her stead
comes a noble type of woman. Deeply as we miss the
364 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
uncompleted portion of that fiction, we find full com-
pensation for its loss in this unique attestation of a
wife's love.
With what an array of plausible arguments she
might have defended herself had she decided differ-
ently ! " These ignorant, uncouth Yorkshire artisans
and their families," she might have urged, "are of too
stern stuff to be moulded by my ethereal powers, while
my extremely sensitive, shrinking nerves will but be
torn and bruised by their rough handling. I cannot
understand them, nor they me. It will be suicidal to
defer to my husband's wish or judgment in so vital a
concern. He, it is true, has a high sense of duty,
but he is not in the least imaginative, esteems but
lightly the rare gifts of a writer. My ideal world is
all a blank to him. He would feel no loss, nor does
he suppose any one else w r ould, should I close down
my desk forever. I can do infinitely more good in the
sphere of the imagination than in any other. He is
intellectually my inferior, and should defer to me, not
I to him. I will follow the star of my destiny."
Such specious reasoning did not swerve her from her
better purpose. She was true in this last crisis, as she
had been in all others through her terribly tempted
life. However we may question the wisdom of such a
sacrifice, we cannot but recognize and reverence even
that self-forgetfulness of love that prompted her to
make it.
I have called attention to Charlotte's stanch loyalty
to her own individuality and her profound love of
truth. I have endeavored to show how, through this
loyalty and love, her works of fiction were naturally
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 365
and necessarily both realistic and psychological ; and,
lastly, how they led her to earnestly advocate love's
liberty, and still more earnestly to condemn any nup-
tial bonds not formed of love's links. There were two
other phases of her character as marked as these, and
which gave to the productions of her genius and to the
record of her life a priceless value: they were the
spirit of unflinching fortitude and of uncompromising
devotion to duty. Her pea seemed never to tire of
illustrating and urging the cultivation of these virtues.
Her characters and incidents, her scenery and her re-
flections, seem to be ever permeated by their warmth,
to be vitalized by them, and often rendered strangely
luminous. Her works are written in a minor key.
Through the richest melodies of her thought there
blend tones of touching sadness. Her conceptions,
though always brilliant and telling, are rarely born of
bright and buoyant mood. Indeed, "Villette" ex-
cepted, there is rarely a flash or sparkle, rarely even a
quiet, humorous smile. Her readers often complain of
this. Yet there is no weak repining ; no faltering or
turning back on the Plains of Indecision to catch one
more glimpse of a beloved Sodom; no sinking under
life's burdens ; no bitter, burning, blinding tears over
the graves of life's dead hopes. There is, instead, a
patient submission, a devotion to duty, a victorious
faith. " I disapprove everything Utopian," such are
her brave words. " Look life in its iron face, stare
reality out of its brassy countenance. ... I believe, I
daily find it proved, that we can get nothing in this
world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a
conviction, except out of purifying flame or through
366 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
strengthening peril. We err, we fall, we are humbled ;
then we walk more carefully. We greedily eat and
drink poison out of the gilded cup of vice or from the
beggar's wallet of avarice ; we are sickened, degraded ;
everything good in us rebels against us ; our souls rise
bitterly indignant against our bodies ; there is a period
of civil war ; if the soul has strength, it conquers and
rules thereafter. . . . Submission, courage, exertion
when feasible, these seem to be the weapons with which
we must fight life's long battle."
What more practical lessons taught, what healthier
tone found, in all literature? These convictions were
thrown into spirited drama in that parting scene be-
tween Jane Eyre and Rochester, and in succeeding
events, and afterward in that between the same little
Jane and St. John Rivers. The memory of her signal
victories will be a pole-star, a beckoning hand, a voice
of cheer to many of life's lost mariners. In the career
of Lucy Snowe, as pictured in " Yillette," these same
sentiments are presented so repeatedly and so vigor-
ously that it would seem impossible to overestimate the
value attached to them by the earnest Charlotte. These
features are especially interesting and significant from
the fact that this book is largely autobiographic, the
author having in Lucy sketched with singular fidelity
her own temperamental and intellectual idiosyncrasies,
and in Lucy's tempestuous career having disclosed one
of the most perilous periods in her own personal his-
tory. In fact, we need to go to the life of Charlotte
Bronte, rather than to the products of her pen, marvel-
lous and masterful though they be, to find the best em-
bodiment of those grand stalwart virtues of fortitude
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 367
and fidelity. While she is watching anxiously her
Loved Emily each day growing feebler with fatal dis-
ease, while her father is threatened with blindness and
undergoing a painful and tedious treatment, while her
bright brother Bramwell is sinking deeper into dis-
sipation and disgrace, while "The Professor," her
first work of fiction, is meeting only with repeated re-
buff, she, with unflinching nerves, without a moment's
repining, resolutely toils away over the pages of " Jane
Eyre." Between the completion of the one and the
commencement of the other of these two productions
not a day is suffered to intervene as a respite from labor.
How, in the face of these facts, can we have the heart
to criticise the sombre hues on her canvas? The won-
der is she can write at all. The glory is that in her
brave heart there is the same self-mastery, the same
grand triumphing over trial, which, with fertile fancy
and with burning words, she impersonates in her pages.
This instance by no means stands solitary. Her
history presents frequent parallel. The first half of
" Shirley," the brightest and healthiest of all her worl^,
the most charming of love-stories, is written while
Emily and Anne are fading before her eyes ; the last
half, after the grave has forever closed over them and
she is left alone. It is written in that same cold stone
parsonage, now so still. It is written in that same
room, the old try sting-place of the sisters, now so full
of mournful memories, with the same window-outlook
over weather-beaten marble that has stood so long in
sad sentinel over the sleeping forms of the village dead.
It is written despite the affectionate and frequent solici-
tations of friends to visit them and leave the pestilential
368 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
air and harrowing associations of Ha worth. Her father,
old and feeble and bereaved, needs, as she thinks, a
daughter's constant care. Here is her post of duty.
Here she shall stay till the Great Captain of the Guard
comes with his relief. Passages in her letters clearly
suggest that this her resolution was not reached without
desperate battle against all her natural inclinations, and
was not maintained except through the sterling temper
of her mind and through her steadfast sense of duty.
" I can hardly tell you," she writes, " how time gets on
at Haworth. There is no event to mark its progress.
One day resembles another, and all have heavy lifeless
physiognomies. I feel as if we were all buried here.
I long to travel, to work, to live a life of action. . . .
The evils that now and then wring a groan from my
heart lie in my position, not that I am a single woman
and likely to remain one, but that I am a lonely woman
and likely to be lonely. But it cannot be helped, and,
therefore, imperatively must be borne, and borne, too,
with as few words about it as may be."
-Constancy and devotion never find home in a human
heart without richly blessing it. Through those long
weary months that came and went leaving their impress
on the destinies of the inmates of the old parsonage,
Charlotte in the hush of the evening, after the lights
were out in the house, while she paced to and fro over
the stone flagging, rested her frail form, I am privileged
to believe, in the sweetly comforting illusions of fancy,
against those of her dear ones pillowed in a dreamless
sleep. Could the veil have been lifted during those
night vigils, she would not have been found companion-
less. We can have but faint conception of the exalted
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 369
enthusiasm of her joy, composing in those privileged
hours of thought those touching tributes of affection
that adorn her pages. To be enabled through the en-
chantments of fancy to place her sisters under more
favoring circumstances than befell their earthly lot; to
unfold their noble traits of character and their rare in-
tellectual gifts, which were but closely-folded buds when
the frosts of death fell on them, into perfect flower under
more propitious skies, and at last to extort from the
world for them its tardy praise, was a high privilege,
which her large nature well knew how to prize, in-
creasing a thousandfold the keen delight that the free
play and the conscious magnetism of the imagination
ever award to true genius. While thus about her heart
twined the tendrils of old loves and before her rapt
vision passed transfigured memories in shining apparel,
she gained fresh courage to wait her summons to join
the company of her sisters on moors where no chill
winds blow nor black frosts blight the heather's purple
bloom.
Two years elapse after the publication of "Shirley/ 7
and Charlotte again places a canvas on her easel, this
time to paint, with many a heart-pang, yet with most
conscientious faithfulness, a portrait of herself, and to
sketch in the background, with all her characteristic,
graphic power, those spiritual battle-scenes through
which, while a resident of Brussels, she was called to
pass. This covered the darkest period of her history.
Her soul here was brought to crucial test, received its
baptism of fire, passed the turning-point in its destiny,
grew through suffering and struggle into the fulness of
the stature of Christ. It must have been a terrible
17
370 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
trial to her to revert thus to those tempest-tost days,
to live them over again, as she must have done to be
able with such condensed passion to picture them with
her pen. Had the storm spent its fury and been
swept away, or even had bits of blue sky brightened
in the cloud-rifts, or the bird-songs of some new hope
burst out above the distant mutterings of the thun-
der, there might have been a sacred, subdued pleasure
in the retrospect; but such were not the circum-
stances under which Charlotte now wrote. During the
two past years she had visited the " Big Babylon,"
and found its gayeties, excitements, and publicity ill
suited to her shy soul, so long schooled by sorrow
and seclusion. She had gone back to her desolated
Haworth home oppressed with the thought that the
gates of the bright and busy world were shut behind
her and she would never again raise her hand to thrust
back the bolt.
Her three sole companions after her sisters' death
were, as she writes a friend, Solitude, Remembrance,
and Longing. She takes from her desk the rejected
manuscript, whose leaves, grown yellow during the
long neglect, are still covered by the same soiled wrap-
per on which six publishers set six black seals of con-
demnation. She opens it with a convulsive sob, so
vividly does it recall and place in sharp contrast to her
present loneliness the scene of herself and her sisters
sitting around the table, each busily penning her own
rapidly-rising fancies, and in the succeeding evening's
hush reading and criticising what they have written.
She, however, has made up her mind to build out of
the old story a new one, to lift the veil, for the encour-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 371
agement and guidance of earth's foot-sore and fainting
pilgrims, from some of the most sacred secrets of her
inner life, disclosing the severe discipline, the painful
processes of growth, through which Providence has
called her soul to pass.
To fully measure her fortitude and fidelity to duty
we should keep in mind how shy and reticent were her
ways, how acutely sensitive and despondent her tem-
perament, how seriously shattered at this time her gen-
eral health. We should also note with what unsparing
and probably undue criticism she exposed the negative
weaknesses as well as more positive faults of Lucy
Snowe, her second self, with what keen analysis she
dissects her peculiarities of disposition and her intel-
lectual and moral traits.
There remains to us the pleasant task of showing to
her the charity she refused to show herself, of believing
that in her anxiety to paint faithfully every deformity
she has given to defects of temperament a coloring due
only to perversities of will. That scene in which Lucy
visits the confessional of an alien faith is a chapter out
of her own personal history, disclosing to us what emo-
tional intensity lay hidden under a formal deportment,
and how resistless and fraught with danger became her
heart's stress when driven by months of rigorous re-
pression into a fit of blind frenzy. Out of just such
ill-adjusted lives, full of yearning and unrest, out of
just such imprisoned souls, come those great thoughts
that never die.
We should note further with what conscientious
thoroughness she handles the character of the erratic,
irascible, flashing-eyed Paul Emanuel, at heart so sym-
372 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
pathetic and constant, though she still with tearful ten-
derness recalls his prototype as one who despite all his
defects had finally commanded her esteem and won her
love, only to be parted from her forever by the hand
of some cruel fate. The temptation to throw over the
delinquencies and defects of Paul and Lucy a hiding
mantle she resolutely withstood, adhering to her pur-
pose of showing how rude, drossy ore was finally refined
through fiercest fires into finest gold.
Charlotte's unswerving devotion to duty appears also
in the perfection of her work. No pressure of physical
or of mental pain could induce her to leave a sketch or
a metaphor without subjecting it to closest scrutiny.
There is not a slovenly or immature line to be found
in all her works. Though every sentence of this last
book " was wrung from her as if it had been a drop of
blood, though its chapters were built up, bit by bit,
amid paroxysms of both physical and spiritual anguish,"
yet such was her supreme triumph over every discour-
agement, such her persistent, painstaking thorough-
ness, such her wondrous might of mind, her gifts of
endurance and of utterance, that " Villette" has justly
been pronounced "a great masterpiece, destined to hold
its own among the ripest and finest fruits of English
genius."
Charlotte's fortitude and fidelity are especially con-
spicuous from the fact that there was in her nature so
little of the element of hope. Though the gloom that
pervades " Villette" and other of her novels is deep, it
is never despairing : while it marks a life of sorrow, it
marks also a triumph of will and of the sense of duty,
imparting to all she wrote a noble grandeur. While
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 373
her thoughts are seldom bright, they are never bitter.
Her conceptions abound in vigorous masculinity. Her
sentences are dauntless battle-cries. She knew no sur-
render, but with firm front she met life's ills and mas-
tered them. She proved herself competent to bear
without flinching even the scowl of death, there was
in her mental frame- work so much of the Bronte iron
and adamant. One of her late biographers tells us
that Mrs. Gaskell widely mistook her disposition in
this respect when she asserted that she was a victim of
secret terrors and of superstitious fancies. It is related
of her that when a school-girl of fifteen, at Roehead,
she one evening resolutely left her mates shivering in
fright about the fire, and, without any light, mounted
unhesitatingly to a distant garret which a general belief
had peopled with ghosts.
Her style is stamped with this spirit.' It is rarely,
if ever, buoyant, yet is always strong, straightforward,
intrepid, determined, impassioned, outspoken. It im-
presses us with the idea of one that has the hardihood
to break through the trammels of form and fashion,
that dares think aloud and plainly tell unpleasant
truths, that solemnly, sternly looks at life. Never
was style so moulded by the embodied thought, never
was thought so burnt into the brain. She quickens us
into new life by her fiery, direct declarations, by her
impressive presentations of the possible achievements
of purpose and .will. While we are filled with wonder
at her remarkable powers, her almost miracles of
thought, are touched with sympathy by the sorrow of
her life, we are more especially impressed by the hal-
lowed victories of her unflinching, all-conquering will.
374 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
Sometimes the wish comes to us that her heart, always
so tender and true, had been less tried and more tri-
umphant; that her cheek, which had never blanched
with fear, had flushed with hope ; that her eye, with
glance so deep, so full of love and longing, had kindled
with more of glad sunlight, had oftener caught the
glory of the coming of the Lord. But no ; Providence
had appointed that she should develop u through puri-
fying flame and through strengthening peril." That
she accepted her lot without a murmur is the more
praiseworthy from the fact that she had amid it all so
little of the sustaining power of hope.
That she was also so shy and sensitive and nervous
adds greatly to the fortitude and fidelity she displayed.
These weaknesses were so deeply ingrained that they sur-
vived the desperate battlings of a lifetime. They were a
source of great humiliation, at times of absolute torture.
Although in her visits to London she was thrown into
the society of various people, she never met strangers
without a nervous tremor to be succeeded the next day
by severe headache. In striving to overcome it she is
said to have suffered acutely. To illustrate : at a house
where she was once visiting, two sisters were invited to
spend the evening : Charlotte sat silent and constrained
until these guests commenced singing some Scotch bal-
lads, when with kindling eye and quivering lip in utter
self-forgetful ness she rose, crossed the room to the piano,
and eagerly asked for song after song. The sisters
begged her to come and see them the next morning and
they would gladly sing for her as long as she liked.
She thanked them heartily, and seemed delighted at the
prospect, but, on reaching the house, the one who accom-
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 375
panied her tells us that Charlotte's courage utterly gave
way, and that they walked some time up and down the
street, she upbraiding herself all the while for her folly,
and trying to dwell on the sweet echoes in her memory
rather than on the thought of a third sister who would
have to be faced if they went in. On another occasion
while visiting a friend in Manchester she unexpectedly
met a young lady in the parlor. Although she was
gentle and sensible, the sight of her threw her into a
nervous chill. Her frame fairly shivered with the
shock.
That she was extremely sensitive we learn from a
passage in one of her letters. " You have been very
kind to me of late/' she writes, " and have spared me
those little sallies of ridicule which, owing to my mis-
erable and wretched touchiness of character, used for-
merly to make me wince as if I had been touched by a
hot iron : things that nobody else cares for enter into
my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these
feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them,
but they only sting the deeper for concealment." Yet
this solitary, delicately-nerved woman never shrank
from criticism, rather insisted on reading all adverse
reviews of her works, though they would sometimes
wring out tears ; and she thus insisted simply because
she thought they would do her good. Her life was a
constant martyrdom, as she would not accept any means
of escape which in the least jarred her moral sense.
Harriet Martineau, who was never accused of indulg-
ing in fulsome eulogy, remarked that " Charlotte
Bronte in her vocation had, in addition to the deep
intuitions of a gifted woman, the strength of a man,
376 VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS.
the patience of a hero, and the conscientiousness of a
saint."
Her fortitude lifted her not only above weak re-
pining and bitterness, but even above a spirit of stern
stoicism into glad sunlight, into love's largest liberty.
Like sainted Stephen,
" Looking upward, full of grace,
She prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote her on the face."
Paulina, unique among all the author's personages
for her ethereal, wraith-like qualities and for her being
purely a product of the imagination, could have been
born only out of a courage that had conquered calm.
It is because there is here revealed in letters of living
light the holy quiet and content, the even glad expec-
tancy, which this Christian woman at the last attained,
I love to recall the character and career of the petite
Paulina. She is surrounded by the kindliest influ-
ences, for they are essential to her development.
Fierce heats or driving storms would have withered or
crushed her. She is one of those spiritual sensitive-
plants, one of those tender exotics brought to this
planet by some visiting angel from the celestial gardens
fed by dews and fanned by gentlest breezes. She needed
and found a sheltered nook, a softened sky. Nature
and society sometimes give these, and are repaid by a
tender grace of form and by a delicacy of tint and
fragrance. Such people are as essential to society as
flowers to the landscape. The mountain-peak, the
tameless torrent, the oak on whose bole are the scars
of centuries, God in his wisdom has associated with
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 377
gently undulating meadow-land and purling brook and
waving grass-blade and silvery floating flecks of cloud.
Charlotte recognized this, and so ordered that Paulina's
lines should fall in pleasant places. The artist who
conceived a Rochester proved competent also to con-
ceive a Paulina, a boulder and a blue-bell, such was
her width of glance, such her world-embracing sym-
pathy.
Her sense of duty was so strong it made her deaf to
every suggestion of envy and keenly alive to every call
of friendship. She requested her publishers to delay
the issue of " Villette" till "Ruth," written by Mrs.
Gaskell, had fully found its way into the channels of
trade. Such magnanimity is sadly rare among authors.
She wrote to one of her intimate friends, " I should
grieve to neglect or oppose your advice, and yet I do
not feel it would be right to give Miss Martineau up
entirely. There is in her nature much that is very
noble; hundreds have forsaken her, more, I fear, in
the apprehension that their fair names may suffer if
seen in connection with hers than from any pure con-
victions, such as you suggest, of harm consequent on
her fatal tenets. With these fair-weather friends I can-
not bear to rank ; and for her sin, is it not one of those
of which God, and not man, must judge?" This is
that liberal-mindedness, that heaven-born charity, which
so often fell from the lips and was always carried out
in the life of our Saviour.
Such was her sense of duty, the absorbing labors of
authorship never betrayed her into untidy or disorderly
habits or led her to neglect any of her home-cares. It
is said of her that after she had entered upon an active
378 VIEWS ON VEXED qUESTIONS.
literary career, after " Jane Eyre" had met success, she
did not lessen in the least her scrupulous oversight of
her person or of the parsonage. Even on those days
when her brain was on fire, when her thoughts flowed
fast and free, she suffered the appointments of the
household to fall into no neglect, and this is especially
noteworthy from the fact that her creative impulse was,
as she had declared in her description of Lucy Snowe,
"the most intractable, the most capricious, the most
maddening of masters, yielding its significance sordidly
as though each word were a drop of the dark ichor of
its own deathless veins."
It was her supreme sense of duty working in unison
with the promptings of her new love that determined
her to devote, as we have already noted, to humble pa-
rochial cares the closing months of her life. We can-
not measure her temptation, her sacrifice, her glorious
triumph, unless our own thoughts, too, are eagle-
winged, unless our own souls have thrilled with the
stirring trumpet-call of masterful, creative genius. That
she discharged this final trust with saintly fervor and
fidelity, we have eloquently evidenced to us in the re-
markable circumstances that attended her funeral. Not
quite one short year had flown since with glad heart-beat
she had stood at the church altar. Now, with stilled
pulse and ash'en cheek, she, borne by loving hands,
within the altar-rail passed again, robed in wedding
dress, the bride of Death. It is told us that, as but
one out of each family in the parish was bidden to the
parsonage, it became an act of great self-denial in many
a household to give up to another the precious privilege
of walking behind her bier to her burial. Those who
THE BRONTE SISTERS. 379
had been necessarily excluded thronged the church and
the cemetery to catch one more glance of her whom
they had learned to love. There was in that company
that day, grieving as if her heart would break, a youth-
ful Mary Magdalen, more sinned against than sinning,
who had found in Charlotte a sympathizing and a help-
ing sister. It is said of her she never ceased to mourn.
There was also a blind girl, who, prompted by the ten-
derest attachment, had -besought those about her, though
she lived four miles away, to lead her along the roads
and over the moor-paths that she might hear "Earth to
earth, dust to dust/' as they laid to rest one who so
many times in her distress had been to her God's angel.
In this my attempted character-analysis I have en-
deavored to gather under the four cardinal characteris-
tics of supreme love of truth, of a pure and pronounced
individuality, of an unshaken fortitude, and, lastly, of
an unswerving devotion to duty, the incidents and the
ideas which must ever remain associated with the name
of Charlotte Bronte.
It is to me a very sad reflection that after the plucky
parson, whom, despite all his eccentricities and short-
comings, we can but admire as one of nature's stalwarts,
had entered that silent city which he had so often looked
out upon from his study- window, his* patient armor-
bearer, the husband of Charlotte, should think best to
go back to Ireland, that the incumbency of Ha worth
should be given to a stranger, and that new faces and
new modes of life should break in upon the many tender
associations that cluster about those rooms in which once
so closely nestled the little motherless children, kindling
380 VIEWS ON VEXED QU POTIONS.
their quaint enthusiasm and pluming their wings for
flight, and in which in after-years the three sisters
wrote their first stories, and in the evening hush arm
in arm paced to and fro in unchecked interchange of
love and longing.
It is to me a reflection still more sad that latterly
there should be so little of sympathetic appreciation of
the hero-worship which has made of Haworth a world's
Mecca, that in order to check the troublesome tide of
pilgrims there should be a studied removal of every
Bronte memento save the moors, the old kirk and par-
sonage, and the group of graves. But the boorishness
or piqued pride of a few obscure village vandals is
happily powerless to check the world's enthusiasm, to
dim its remembrance, or in the least to lessen its painful
sense of loss. Indeed, I predict that after time has
torn down into shapeless ruin the solid stone walls
within which the Bronte sisters once battled so bravely,
and has levelled and hidden with heath bloom their
last resting-place, in the world's imperishable palace of
thought the Bronte apartment will take rank as one of
memory's privileged presence-chambers ; and that in
seasons when faith falters and friends fail, when cares
oppress and disappointments and disasters come with
crushing weight, pilgrims will throng its threshold that
they may stand in the presence and feel the thrilling
power of its grand impersonations of Christian daunt-
lessness and constancy.
THE END.
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