By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many a happiness, pure, stable, dignified, and blameless, such as it will be hard to parallel in any of the novel types of high pressure modern life.
And, on the other hand, there is nothing so mournful as the life of an old ancestral home in the country! Everything reminds us of the lost, the dead who once called these stately chambers their habitations, whose voices once echoed through the halls, and for whose familiar tread we seem yet to wait; whose entrance, as of yore, through one of the lofty doors would scarcely surprise us; whom we almost expect, when we return after long absence, to see rising from their accustomed seats with open arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by. The trees they planted, the walks and flower-beds they designed; the sword which the father brought back from his early service; the tapestry the mother wrought through her long years of declining health; the dog grown blind and old, the companion of walks which shall never be taken again; the instrument which once answered to a sweet touch forever still,—these things make us feel Death and change as we never feel them amid the instability and eager interests of town existence. All things remain as of old “since the fathers fell asleep.” The leaves of the woods come afresh and then fade; the rooks come cawing home; the church bells ring, and the old clock strikes the hour. Only there is one chair pushed a little aside from its wonted place, an old horse turned out to graze in peace for his latter days; a bedroom upstairs into which no one goes, save in silent hours, unwatched and furtively.
As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain, and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when all this comes to pass, then the sense of the tragedy of life becomes too strong for us. The dear home, loved so tenderly, is for us little better than the cenotaph of the lost and dead; the warning to ourselves that over all our busy schemes and hopes the pall will soon come down,—“the night cometh when no man can work.”
I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all that is most sad and most awful in our mortal lot, a sense which we escape amid the rushing to and fro of London, but which settles down on our souls in such a home as I have pictured, which makes the country unendurable to many, as the shadows of the evening lengthen. To accept it, and look straight at the grave towards which they are walking down the shortened vista of their years, taxes men’s courage and faith beyond their strength, and they fly back to the business and the pleasures wherein such solemn thoughts are forgotten and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice there is the longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal Home.
[1]. Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the “Scientific Spirit of the Age” when it appeared in the Contemporary Review for July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp. [6], [7], [34]) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed multitude of her followers.
[2]. “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.”—Darwin’s Life, vol. i. p. 101.
[3]. Darwin’s Life, vol. i. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin.
[4]. That organ of the Scientific party, the British Medical Journal, eulogizing this address, remarked that “Sir James is a master of English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language.” To the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to leave something to be desired on the score of “elegance.”
[5]. Speaking of this latter book, the Manchester Guardian (March 17) remarked that “the charges in ‘St Bernard’s’ were supported by details of cases reported in medical journals and by statements made by lecturers of distinction. The quotations are precise and easily verified. The hospitals will do well to take some notice of a medical man who avers that the healing of patients is subordinated to the professional advantages of the staff and the students, that cures are retarded for clinical study, that new drugs are tried upon hospital patients, who are needlessly examined and made to undergo unnecessary operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement that the dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blunders of students are covered by their teachers for the credit of the hospital.” Every one of these offences against justice and humanity is directly due to the inspiration of the Scientific Spirit.