The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

by Frances Power Cobbe

Then the habits of the owners of such old seats are sure to fall into a sort of rhyme. There are the lesser beats at intervals through the long day, when the early laborer’s bell, and the gong at nine o’clock, and one o’clock, and seven o’clock, sound the call to prayers and to meals. And there are the weekly beats, when Sunday makes the beautiful refrain of the psalm of life. And yet again there are the half-yearly summer strophe and winter antistrophe of habits of each season, taken up and laid down with unfailing punctuality, while the family life oscillates like a pendulum between the first of May, which sees the domestic exodus into the fresh, vast old drawing-room, and the first of November, which brings the return into the warm, oak-panelled library. To violate or alter these long-established rules and precedents scarcely enters into the head of any one, and the child hears the old servants (themselves the most dear and permanent institutions of all) speak of them almost as if they were so many laws of nature. Thus he finds life from the very beginning set for him to a kind of music, simple and beautiful in its way; and he learns to think that “Order is Heaven’s first law,” and that change will never come over the placid tenor of existence. The difficulty to him is to realize in after years that any vicissitudes have really taken place in the old home, that it has changed owners, or that the old order has given place to new. He almost feels—thinking perhaps of his mother in her wonted seat—that Shelley’s dreamy philosophy must be true

“That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all bright shapes and odors there,

In truth have never passed away:

’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”

The anticipation of perpetual variety and change which is the lesson commonly taught to children by town life,—the Micawber-like expectation of “something turning up,” to amuse or distract them, and for which they are constantly in a waiting frame of mind, is precisely reversed for the little scion of the old country family. For him nothing is ever likely to turn up beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of fair weather and foul, the sickness of his pony, the death of his old dog or the arrival of his new gun. All that is to be made out of life he invents for himself in his sports and in his rambles, till the hour arrives when he is sent to school. And when the epochs of school and college are over, when he returns as heir or master, life lays all spread out before him in a long, straight, honorable road, all his duties and his pleasures lying by the wayside, ready for his acceptance. For the girl there is often even longer and more unbroken monotony, lasting (unless she marry) into early womanhood and beyond it. Nothing can exceed the eventlessness of many a young lady’s life in such a home. Her walks to her village school, or to visit her cottage friends in their sicknesses and disasters; her rides and drives along the familiar roads which she has ridden and driven over five hundred times already; the arrival of a new book, or of some old friend (more often her parent’s contemporary than her own),—make up the sum of her excitements, or even expectations of excitement, perhaps, through all the years when youth is most eager for novelty, and the outer world seems an enchanted place. The effects on the character of this extreme regularity and monotony, this life at Low Pressure, vary, of course, in different individuals. Upon a dull mind without motu proprio or spring of original ideas, it is, naturally, depressing enough; but it is far from equally injurious to those possessed of some force of character, provided they meet the affection and reasonable indulgence of liberty without which the heart and intellect can no more develop healthfully than a baby can thrive without milk, or a child’s limbs grow agile in swaddling clothes. The young mind slowly working out its problems for itself, unwarped by the influence (so enormous in youth) of thoughtless companions, and devouring the great books of the world, ferreted out of a miscellaneous library by its own eager appetite and self-guided taste, is perhaps ripening in a healthier way than the best taught town child, with endless “classes” and masters for every accomplishment under the sun. Even the imagination is better cultivated in loneliness, when the child, through its solitary rambles by wood and shore, spins its gossamer webs of fancy, and invents tales of heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or pantomime ever yet brought to the town child’s exhausted brain. Then the affections of the country child are concentrated on their few objects with a passionate warmth of which the feelings of the town child, dissipated amidst scores of friends and admirers, affords no measure whatever. The admiration amounting to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to some older woman who represents to her all of grace and goodness she has yet dreamed, and who descends every now and then from some far-off Elysium to be a guest in her home, is one of the least read and yet surely one of the prettiest chapters of innocent human sentiment. As to the graver and more durable affections nourished in the old home,—the fond attachment of brothers and sisters, the reverence for the father, the love, purest and deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child and child for mother,—there can be little doubt that their growth in the calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can well be elsewhere.

And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful and solitary youth soon enters the deeper waters of the moral and spiritual life, and breathes religious aspirations which have in them, in those early years, the freshness and the holiness of the morning. Happy and good must, indeed, be that later life from the heights of which any man or woman can dare to look back on one of these lonely childhoods without a covering of the face. Talk of hermitages or monasteries! The real nursery of religion is one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy, beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other; and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all the ground his love-tokens of flowers. The happy child dwelling in such a home, with a father and mother who speak to it sometimes of God and the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude into that Holy of Holies, a young soul’s love and penitence and resolution, is the place on earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame of religion. Of the cruelty and wickedness and meanness of the world the child hears only as of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who may roam or crawl in African deserts. They are too far off to force themselves on the attention as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved on pain of moral death. Even sickness, poverty, and death appear oftenest as occasions for the kindly and helpful sympathy of parents and guides.

To turn to lighter matters. Of course among the first recognized pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather bathing in, Nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object or another which attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, without being interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us en masse. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own lullaby. Probably, on the whole, country folks admire each separate view and scrap of landscape less than their visitors from the town, and criticise it as little as school-boys do their mother’s dress. But they love Nature as a whole, and her real influence appears in their genial characters, their healthy nervous systems, and their optimistic opinions. Nor is it by any means only inanimate nature wherewith they are concerned. Not to speak of their poorer neighbors (of whom they know much more, and with whom they usually live in far more kindly relations than townsfolk with theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes and birds. How much, to some of us, the leisurely watching of stately cattle, gentle sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driving of generous, kindly-natured horses and the companionship of loving dogs, add to the sum of the day’s pleasures and tune the mind to its happiest key-note, it would be difficult to define. For my own part, I have never ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture Heaven and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on and not a single animal to caress,—even those which Mahomet promised his followers,—his own camel, Balaam’s ass, and Tobit’s dog,—would, I think, be a very incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!

It has often been said that the passion of Englishmen for field sports is really due to this love of Nature and of animals; that, like sheepdogs (who, when they are not trained to guard sheep, will, by an irresistible impulse, follow and harry them), they feel compelled to have something to do with hares and foxes and partridges and grouse, and salmon; and they find that the only thing to be done is to course and hunt and shoot and angle for them. Into this mystery I cannot dive. The propensity which can make kind-hearted men (as many sportsmen unquestionably are) not merely endure to kill, but actually take pleasure in killing, innocent living things, and changing what is so beautiful in life and joy into what is so ineffably sad and piteous, wounded and dying, remains always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it is simply a fact that lads trained from boyhood to take pleasure in such “sports,” and having, I doubt not, an “hereditary set of the brain” towards them, like so many greyhounds or pointers, never feel the ribrezzo, or the remorse, of the bird or beast murderer, but, escaping all reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at the same time enjoy the woods and fields and river-sides where their quarry leads them. To do them justice,—as against many efforts lately made to confound them with torturers of a very different class,—they know little of the pain they inflict, and they endeavor eagerly to make that pain as brief as possible. Nevertheless, Sport is an inexplicable passion to the non-sporting mind; and, moreover, one not very easy to contemplate with philosophical forbearance, much less with admiration.

A larger source of wonder is it to reflect that this same unaccountable passion for killing pheasants and pursuing foxes has so deep a root in English life that its arrest and disappointment by such a change of the Game laws as would lead to the abolition of game would practically revolutionize all our manners. The attraction of the towns already preponderates over that of the country; but till lately the grouse have had the honor of proroguing annually the British Senate, and the partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks, and the foxes induce pretty nearly every man who can afford to shoot or hunt them to bring his family to the country during the season wherein they are to be pursued. Of course women, left to themselves, would mostly choose to spend their winters in town, and their summers from May till November in the country. But Sport determines the Session of Parliament, and the Session determines the season; and, as women love the London Season quite as much as men like foxhunting, both parties are equally bound to the same unfortunate division of time, and year after year passes, and the lilacs and laburnums and hawthorns and limes in the old country homes waste their loveliness and their sweetness unseen, while the little children pine in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions when they ought to be romping among their father’s hay-fields and galloping their ponies about his park. All these arrangements, and, further, the vast establishments of horses and hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns and game-keepers and beaters and game-preserving,—the sole business of thousands of workingmen, and the principal occupation and interest of half the gentlemen in the country,—would be swept away by a stroke.