THE TRUE STORY OF WAT TYLER.
BY S. G. G.One of the most noteworthy objects in the great pageant that passed through the crowds of London on the 10th of last November was an effigy of Wat Tyler, upon a lofty platform, lying prostrate, as if slain, at the feet of Walworth, the Mayor, who stood with drawn sword beside the seeming corpse. The suggestion was that of hero and miscreant—rebellion defeated—the City saved! Many there were in the line of procession who showed, by unexpected hisses and groans, that they did not so read history; and it seems worth while to ask, especially while the greatest contemporary of the Mayor and the Tyler is freshly brought to our remembrance by the Wycliffe quincentenary commemoration, what that scene in Smithfield really meant and what was its issue.
In reading the old chronicles we have to remember the fable of the Lion and the Man. Monks like Knighton of Leicester, and Walsingham of St. Albans, or courtiers like Jean Froissart, with great simplicity betray their bias, and we must often “read between the lines.” It is useful also to recollect that the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution turns very much upon the fact of success. Had Wat Tyler won the day, and secured the charter which seemed so nearly within the people’s reach, his name would have come down to us in better company than that of Jack Cade and other vulgar insurgents and rioters. A second Magna Charta would have become memorable in English history, and its chief promoter might have been known to posterity as Sir Walter Tyler, or perhaps the Earl of Kent.
We all know the story of the poll-tax—that intolerable impost[4] which followed the “glorious wars” and the sumptuous extravagance of Edward III., and which awakened such bitter resistance in the early days of Richard II. The monkish historians themselves tell us how harshly and brutally the tax was levied, especially by one John Legg, the farmer of the tax for Essex and Kent; and if this part of the history stood alone we might pause before we wholly condemned the hasty blow by which the Dartford bricklayer or “tiler” avenged the insulted modesty of his child.[5] Why should we give all our admiration to William Tell—with his second arrow for the heart of Gessler had his first sped too fatally[6]—and not recognise in this man of Kent also the honorable indignation of an outraged father? But this may pass, as it is plainly impossible that the great insurrection could have been wholly due to such a cause. Sixty thousand men from Kent, Essex, Sussex, Bedford, would never have been roused to revolt even by the news of this Dartford tragedy. The deed, no doubt, gave impulse to the movement; but the causes of disaffection had been at work long before the levy of the poll-tax; and the “peasant revolt” becomes most deeply interesting, as well as important, when regarded as the first passionate claim of the “lower classes” in England for freedom and their rights as men.
The courtly Froissart informs us that there was in the county of Kent[7] “a crazy priest,” one John Ball, who had long been testifying against the serfdom in which the peasantry were held, “Why,” he asked, “should we be slaves? Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? By what title do our masters hold us in bondage?” Froissart declares that Ball preached absolute communism, but there is no evidence that he went beyond the vigorous assertion of the equal right of all to freedom. “Every Sunday after mass,” writes the chronicler, “as the people came out of church, he would preach to them in the market-place (he had been excommunicated), and assemble a crowd round him ... and he was much beloved by the people.” As a consequence “the evil-disposed in these districts began to rise, saying they were too severely oppressed, that at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one ought to be treated as such, unless he had committed treason against his lord, as Lucifer had done against God; but they had done no such thing, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men, formed after the same likeness with their lords, who treated them as beasts. This they would no longer bear, but had determined to be free, and if they labored or did any other work for their lords they would be paid for it.”
Such words of the “crazy priest” and his “evil-disposed” hearers seem to us reasonable enough. Their chief fault, perhaps, is that they belong to the nineteenth century, rather than to the fourteenth. Never was a man more emphatically before his time than this same John Ball. The usual result followed. For these and the like “foolish words” he was arrested and imprisoned by Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. But those words could not die, although the first attempt to realise them in deed was—like many a first effort for justice, truth and freedom—premature and a little blind.
At the beginning of 1831, then, John Ball was lying in the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone. Yet it was not in Kent that the rising actually began. Five thousand men of Essex, according to Walsingham, took the first step to revolt. The monkish chronicler makes merry with their equipment. “Sticks, rusty swords, hatchets, smoke-dried bows the color of old ivory, some with but an arrow apiece, and many arrows with but one feather!” “Think of this ragged regiment,” he contemptuously writes, “aspiring to become masters of the realm!”
Placards and flysheets of a quaint and grotesque rather than of an inflammatory character, called upon the people to assert their rights. Knighton of Leicester gives some remarkable specimens, transcribed from the old black-letter manuscripts, purporting to be issued by “Jack the Miller,” “Jack the Carter,” “Jack Trueman,” and “Jack Straw.”[8] For the most part they are written in a kind of doggerel rhyme, as in the Miller’s appeal: “With right and with might; with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill before will; and might before right, then goeth our mill aright.” “In the rude jingle of these lines,” writes the late Mr. Green, “began for England the literature of political controversy. They are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants; their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; the scorn of the immorality of the nobles, and the infamy of the Court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.”
A leader of this motley band was one Baker, of Fobbing, in Essex, of whom a story is told similar to that of the Dartford Tyler. The Essex men sent messengers to Kent, and a great company, doubtless of John Ball’s hearers, speedily assembled. They roamed the country. Broke open the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, and liberated the popular champion. They stopped several companies of Canterbury pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Becket, not to maltreat or to pillage them, but to impose an oath “to be loyal to King Richard, to accept no king of the name of John”—a clause aimed at the deservedly hated John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster—“and, for the rest, to stir up their fellow-citizens to resist all taxes except the ‘fifteenths,’ which their fathers and predecessors had acknowledged and paid.” Wat Tyler of Maidstone—a different person evidently from the man who had slain the tax-collector at Dartford—was chosen as their leader. Hollinshed, after Walsingham, describes him as “a verie craftie fellow and indued with much wit[9] (if he had well applied it).”
A march upon London was now planned, for the purpose of meeting King Richard face to face, and demanding a redress of the people’s grievances. Sir John Newton, one of the king’s knights, was led, by persuasion or force, to act as envoy for the insurgents. The king shut himself up in the Tower of his Court, but was invited to meet the peasant army, now mustered at Blackheath. Perhaps had he done so, much that followed might have been avoided; but the messengers sent to reconnoitre dissuaded him. His majesty had taken boat and had descended the Thames to Rotherhithe, a detachment from Blackheath having come to the riverside to meet him. At this point Richard was advised by Sudbury the archbishop, and Robert Hales the treasurer, to hold no parley. “Have nothing to do,” they said, “with a set of shoeless ribalds.” For a little time, the royal lad—he was but sixteen—was rowed up and down the river in his barge, pitiably irresolute; but at last he returned to the Tower, and an advance upon the City was resolved upon by the peasant army, after a sermon by Ball, on Blackheath, from the text—
“When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Wo was thanne a gentilman?”
The mayor and aldermen were for shutting the City gates, but the mass of the citizens effectually protested against excluding those whom they owned as “friends and neighbors.” The gates were accordingly left open all night, and an immense multitude went in and out, as yet comparatively orderly, and certainly honest. They stole nothing, not even food; everything they took they paid for at a fair price; any robber amongst them they put to death on the spot. As far as in them lay, these rude undisciplined masses wished to make fair war on those whom they regarded as their oppressors.[10] The Duke of Lancaster was the first object of their animosity. His sumptuous palace in the Savoy was ruthlessly destroyed, but the chronicler is careful to relate that the rioters did not appropriate the spoils. His jewels and other valuables he flung into the river, and one man detected in secreting a silver cup was thrown in after it. The records of the kingdom and other State papers were burned, the peasantry in some dim confused way connecting these documents with the oppressions to which they had been subject. Other acts of violence followed, notably the destruction of great part of the Temple, of which Robert Hales was Master. The insurgents, to whom drink had been freely served by many of the citizens, soon became infuriated and uncontrollable. A wild, half-drunken mob raged through the City, and deplorable excesses were committed.
In this way the Thursday was passed—Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381. The City was panic stricken. Walworth, the mayor, proposed, according to Froissart, that an onslaught should be made upon the insurgents during the night, when many of them, lying in drunken sleep, could easily be killed “like flies.” But the atrocious counsel was rejected, and on the Friday morning the king came to parley, chiefly, as it appears, with the Essex contingent, gathered at Mile End, “in a fair meadow,” writes Froissart, “where in the summer time people go to amuse themselves.” The interview was a peaceful one. Nothing could be more simple and reasonable than the demand of the people: “We wish that thou wouldst make us free forever, us, our heirs, and our lands, and that we should no longer be called slaves, nor held in bondage.” Richard II. at once acceded to the petition, promised four things: first, that they and their children after them should be free; secondly that they should not be attached to the soil for service, but should be at liberty to rent lands of their own at a moderate fixed price; thirdly, that they should have access, free of toll, to all markets and fairs, cities, burghs, and mercantile towns, to buy and sell; and, fourthly, that they should be forgiven for the present insurrection. The king further prepared to send letters to every town confirming these articles of agreement. Two persons from each locality were to remain to carry back these precious documents; “thirty secretaries” were instantly set to work; and the multitude cheerfully dispersed.
But the men of Kent had meanwhile enacted a terrible scene at the Tower. Taking forcible possession of the place and frightening the six hundred yeomen on guard almost out of their wits in a way which the chroniclers graphically describe, they sought out the archbishop and treasurer who had called them “shoeless ribalds,” with Richard Lyons the merchant, chief commissioner for levying the poll-tax, and John Legg, the man who had taken the most prominent part in the collection of the impot, also two of Legg’s satellites and an obnoxious friar. These men they beheaded, carrying their heads on long pikes through the streets of London. It was a terrible revenge, and must have steeled the hearts of well-meaning citizens at once against the movement. The King’s mother (the Princess Joan, widow of the Black Prince) was in the Tower, half dead with terror. Some of the insurgents had penetrated into her room and thrust their swords into the mattress of her bed in search for the “traitors,” but beyond the murder of the archbishop and his companions they seemed to have committed no outrage. The princess herself, on being recognised, was treated with honor, and was conveyed to the Wardrobe, Carter Lane, in the vicinity of Blackfriars, where the king found her when his business at Mile End was done—a royal day’s work that might have been one of the best and brightest in the annals of England!
The next morning Richard heard mass in Westminster Abbey, and, on his return with sixty knights, encountered Wat Tyler and his men in Smithfield “before the Abbey of St. Bartholomew.” As it appears, Tyler had some further demands to make, not being altogether satisfied with the charter of Mile End.[11] Sir John Newton rode up to invite him to approach the king. According to some accounts the knight was received insolently. “I shall come,” said Tyler, “when I please. If you are in a hurry you can go back to your master now!” Another narrator tells us that Wat began to abuse Sir John Newton for coming to him on horseback, being met with the courteous reply, “You are mounted, why should not I be so likewise?” In a third chronicle we read that Tyler was approaching Richard covered, and was ordered by Walworth, the mayor, to remove his cap, but roughly refused. There was, at any rate, a brief dialogue between Richard II. and the peasant leader, in which the latter insisted on the immediate issue of letters of manumission to all, and added his new demand, to the effect that “all warrens, waters, parks, and woods should be common, so that the poor as well as the rich might freely fish in all waters, hunt the deer in forests and parks, and the hare in the field.” This cry for the repeal of the game and forest laws went to the heart of one of the chief grievances of the people. What reply the king gave is not recorded, nor is it easy to disentangle from the conflicting accounts any clear details. One chronicler says that Tyler came too near the king’s horse, as if intending some mischief against his majesty; others that he was simply insolent, tossing his dagger from hand to hand as he parleyed; others that blows were actually interchanged between Wat and Sir John Newton. This much at any rate is clear, that the Mayor Walworth—John Walworth, as Knighton calls him; William, as in the other authorities—aimed a sudden blow at the bold demagogue, who fell at once from his horse, and was dispatched by one of the king’s squires, named Sandwich or Cavendish.
With Wat Tyler died also the insurrection, and the hopes of English liberty for many a dreary year. “As he fell from his horse to the earth,” writes Walsingham, “he first gave hope to the English soldiery, who had been half dead, that the Commons could be resisted.” There was, no doubt, a touch of chivalry in the first words of the young king, “Follow me!” he cried to the people infuriated by their leader’s assassination; “I will be your captain!” They were startled, and obeyed, the king preceding them to Islington, where he was met by a large body of soldiers. There was no conflict, and the multitude slowly dispersed, being threatened with death if found in the streets after nightfall.
As soon as the king was safe it was found that his pledges had meant nothing. The promises of enfranchisement, the “letters” about which the “thirty secretaries” had been busy all the night of that memorable fourteenth of June, were treated as void. “Villeins you are,” said the king, when asked by the men of Essex to confirm his promises, “and villeins you shall remain. You shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom, we shall use our sense, our strength and our property, so to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, and as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you, and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.” In the spirit of this royal message, commissions were sent into the country to bring those who had taken part in the insurrection to condign punishment. John Ball, the preacher, Jack Straw with the Millers, Truemans, and a host of others, were mercilessly put to death; and in that terrible autumn the scaffold and the gallows had no fewer than seven thousand victims![12] Nothing could more clearly show the panic into which this wild rough outcry for freedom had thrown the constituted authorities in Church and State. One good result, however, of the insurrection was in the vanishing of the poll-tax. Of that impost, at least, we do not hear again. And more—the people had learned their power, a lesson which in the darkest times was never forgotten.
We believe in freedom now. Almost all that John Ball and Wat Tyler demanded is the heritage of every Englishman. They might have sought it, perhaps, by “constitutional methods.” Yet we must remember their times. They did but imitate in their rough way during those three days of terror the course which their masters pursued for more than three hundred years! The stroke that laid Wat Tyler low—and made Richard II., that worthless lad, the master of the situation—whatever it was, was not a blow for liberty!
Some partisan writers have associated the teachings of John Ball with the principles maintained by Wycliffe, especially in his treatise “On Dominion.” The dates, however, are against this. Ball is said to have been a preacher for more than twenty years before the insurrection. This carries us back to about 1360, an earlier date than we can assign to Wycliffe’s treatise, or to his institution of “Poor Preachers.” In fact, the chronicler Knighton takes a diametrically opposite view, and regards Ball as a forerunner of Wycliffe—the John the Baptist to this false Messiah! In his fervid imagination the Leicester canon sees the apocalyptic visions fulfilled—the catastrophe of the last days! Such events can mean nothing else than the end of the world! “Much has happened since then,” and the signs of the times may perhaps be read as fallaciously by seers of to-day. There can, however, be no doubt that before the insurrection, Ball had been an adherent of Wycliffe. The demand for spiritual freedom fell in, at least, with the thoughts and impulses that had prompted the serfs of their wild irregular cry for social and political rights.
“In memory of Sir William Walworth’s valor,” writes Thomas Fuller in his “Church History of Great Britain,” “the arms of London, formerly a plain cross, were augmented by the addition of a dagger, to make the coat in all points complete.” This is still a popular mistake. That dagger, or short sword, has nothing whatever to do with Walworth, or Tyler, or Richard II., or any of the personages, good or evil, of that era. In fact, it was a relic or “survival” of the sword in the hand of the Apostle Paul, formerly engraven on the City seal.[13] St. Paul anciently figured as patron saint of London, and when in Reformation times his effigy disappeared from the City arms his sword remained. We know that in Christian art, from about the tenth century, the sword was a familiar symbol of St. Paul, the primary intention no doubt being to denote the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
M. JULES FERRY AND HIS FRIENDS.
The history of the Republic up to this time has been such a course of surprises, that any forecast as to the future must be made with a large reckoning for accidents; but this much may be said, that the Republic owes its present appearance of stability to the want of commanding talents among her ruling men. The outlook could not have been so peaceful had Gambetta been alive. Gambetta had a vast ambition, and a leonine, roaring energy, which provoked furious opposition. The men who have parted his influence among them may be as ambitious as he was; but they are so for personal objects, and as there is nothing great in their characters or their policy, nothing imperious in their manner, nothing stirring or seducing in their eloquence, they are less feared than the man who wished to be a master, and said so. Nobody could denounce M. Jules Ferry as aspiring to become a dictator; yet during the past year he has held more effective power than was ever wielded by Gambetta. He is a faithful party-servant who has been allowed to exercise authority, because his employers have felt that they could dismiss him at a moment’s notice. We bear more from a humble, useful domestic, than from a self-asserting master. Louis XIV., who broke the tyranny of Mazarin, and could not brook the arrogance of Fouquet, submitted to the management of the quiet, astute Colbert.
In his novel “Numa Roumestan,” written while Gambetta was alive, Alphonse Daudet showed “the North being conquered by the South,” that is, the blustering, bragging, blarneying blagueurs of Provence and Gascony enthralling the democracy with their charlatanism, and seizing upon all the public offices. Sardou had worked out the same idea in “Rabagas;” but it must be noticed that the holders of the four most important posts in France at this moment—the four Presidents, of the Republic, of the Senate, of the Chamber of Deputies, and of the Cabinet—are conspicuously exempt from the usual attributes of demagogues. They are cold-headed men, plain of speech, dry in manner; they are not Southerners, and, in fact, they are by no means representative of the French as a nation.
M. Grévy comes from the Jura, on the borders of Switzerland, a department which has for the last half century been more advanced in public instruction than all the others, and where the bourgeoisie are something like the Scotch in their puritanism.
M. le Royer, President of the Senate, a hard, sententious little man, with solemn eyes peering through gold-rimmed spectacles, and a voice like the drone of a Lenten preacher—M. le Royer is a Genevan Protestant, whose father became French by naturalisation. M. Brisson was born and educated at Bourges, in the old province of Berry. He is a trim, mathematically-minded lawyer and logician, creaseless in his morals as in his dress, one of those Frenchmen to whom all the levities of French life—light literature, music, gossip, and even cuisine—are distasteful. M. Jules Ferry is a Lorrainer, born in the mountainous Vosges; and, like M. le Royer, a Protestant—at least so far as he confesses to any religion at all.
A nation must be turned upside down before a man like M. Jules Ferry can become Prime Minister. It makes one smile to think that the French have demolished three dynasties, and that countless thousands of enthusiastic revolutionists have let themselves be shot behind barricades, in order that the country may now be ruled by a Cabinet containing three second-rate journalists, and three barristers who have no names at the Bar. “No more revolutions: I have become a Minister,” wrote the late M. Garnier Pagēs to his constituents in 1848.[14] M. Ferry, to do him justice, did not conclude that progress reached its zenith on the day when he took Cabinet office; he has rather shown modest thankfulness at his own elevation, while feeling privately, no doubt, some astonishment. Now that he has been in place some time, the astonishment must have worn off, for he has learnt to know men, and to perceive that circumstances do more for most successful rulers than these accomplish for themselves. An inexperienced man at the helm soon gets accustomed to see the big ship obey the propulsion of his rudder, and if he be steering in calm weather, he may do as well as the skilled pilot. M. Ferry became Prime Minister faute de mieux, and he may remain so (with occasional displacements) crainte de pire. The course of French Republicanism is always downward, and the constant preoccupation of men’s minds under that happy régime, is the fear of worse.
Jules Ferry owed the beginning of his political fortune to his luck in writing for a newspaper which had a witty editor. Just twenty years ago (1865), being then thirty-three years old, he joined the staff of the Temps, and after contributing leaders for three years, undertook in 1868 a series of papers attacking the administration of Baron Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine. Baron Haussmann had rebuilt Paris and made it a city unique in the world for beauty and sanitation. M. Ferry could not have performed such a task, but he was able to criticise the Prefect’s work, to array long columns of figures showing how much it had cost, and to ask whether it would not have been far better if all these millions had been given to the poor. Baron Haussmann sent communiques to the Temps impugning the accuracy of M. Ferry’s figures; but the journalist of course stuck to his multiplication, and, as spirited opposition always made a man popular under the Empire, the Vosgian’s articles obtained more success than is usual with statistical essays. It was proposed that they should be rebound in pamphlet form and circulated among Parisian householders in view of the general election of 1869. M. Neffzer, editor of the Temps, then suggested that the pamphlet should be called, “Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann.”[15]
The title took, and Jules Ferry got the reputation of being a comical fellow. Resolving to make the most of this character while it lasted, he came forward as a candidate for Paris at the elections of 1869—calling himself a Radical for this purpose. He was no more Radical than comical, but if he had not taken up extreme views he could have offered no reason for opposing the moderate Liberal (M. Guéroult, editor of the Opinion Nationale), who was the sitting member of the sixth Parisian ward. M. Ferry defeated his brother-journalist; and in the following year, when the Empire collapsed at Sedan, he became ex-officio a member of the Government of National Defence. It will be remembered that this Government was composed of the nine members for Paris, because M. Grévy and some other leading Republicans refused to accept power unless it were lawfully conferred upon them by a national assembly.
M. Ferry was of course installed in Baron Haussmann’s post; but during the siege of Paris he was very nearly lynched by some of those excellent working-men who had formerly hailed him as a friend and brother. On the 31st October, 1870, an insurrection broke out in the beleaguered city, and a vigorous attempt was made to overthrow the Government. M. Ferry fell into the hands of the insurgents, and for six mortal hours these rude men subjected him to every species of indignity. They pulled his luxuriant black whiskers, they taunted him with eating white bread and beefsteak, while his proletarian brethren had to content themselves with rations of brown bread and horseflesh, and when dinner-time came they offered him his choice between a grilled rat and some cold boiled dog. Happily the Breton Mobiles were at hand and delivered him; but from that day M. Ferry’s Radicalism perceptibly cooled, and when the Communal rebellion occurred, he took good care not to let himself be kidnapped again by the once-idolised working-man. Decamping to Versailles he remained there throughout the second siege, and did not return to take possession of his post as Prefect of the Seine until the rebellion had been crushed. It was on this occasion that alighting from his brougham near the still-smouldering Hôtel de Ville, and seeing a convoy of Communist prisoners pass, he shook his nicely-gloved fist and exclaimed: “Ah! tas de canaille!”
The exclamation was pardonable, for these Communists had shot M. Ferry’s friend and former Secretary, Gustave Chaudey, and the new-fledged Prefect must have imagined bullets whistling by his own sleek ears as he looked at them. However, M. Ferry’s vindictiveness went no further than words, for he exerted himself charitably to save some old journalistic comrades who had taken the wrong side during the civil war. He is believed to have secreted several of these in his private lodgings and to have covered them with his official protection while the police were hunting for them. What is more, he honorably connived at the escape of one of his vilest detractors, Félix Pyat. This charming person, always the first to preach sedition and regicide, and the first to fly in the hour of danger, had been unable to get clear away from Paris when the Commune fell. He took refuge in a convent, where the nuns harbored him for six weeks, though these poor women were quite aware that he was the Pyat who had been clamoring for the demolition of churches and the shooting of hostages. Jules Ferry happened to hear of Pyat’s whereabouts, but instead of delivering up the wretched men to a court-martial, he caused a passport to be privately given him.
Good nature abounds in M. Ferry’s character, and this quality, in combination with perseverance and a quiet talent for picking up other people’s ideas, has been the secret of his success. During the last years of the Empire while he wrote for the Temps, he was a daily frequenter of the Café de Madrid, and there he was appreciated as an attentive listener to no matter whose stories. He had then, as he has now, a face such as is only to be seen on the shoulders of old-fashioned French barristers and Belgravian footmen. The judges of the Second Empire did not allow avocats to wear beards, so M. Ferry shaved his upper lip and chin, but his whiskers were of stupendous size. Add to these a Roman nose, a fine forehead, shrewd playful eyes, a well shaped smiling mouth, and a certain plumpness of girth which removed him altogether out of the category of those lean men whom Shakespeare thought dangerous. He always shook men’s hands with a hearty grip; he could laugh loud and long even when not amused; if conversation flagged he could light it up suddenly with a few crackling jokes, but he generally preferred to sit silent, smoking penny cigars (for he was not rich), sipping absinthe, and taking mental notes of what was being said around him. Now and then, especially if a talker appealed to him, he would nod approval with a grave closing of the eyes, which is the supreme politeness in the art of listening.
He never squandered his knowledge in small talk, so that his public speeches always took his most intimate friends aback. Gambetta once said to him: “You are the most secretive of chatter-boxes,”[16] the truth being that Ferry used commonplace ideas in private intercourse, just as some men keep half-pence for beggars. To stake gold in conversational games over a café table was more than his intellectual means could afford. A blagueur himself in a small way, he knew the destructive power of that light chaff which can be thrown upon a good idea while it has the bloom of novelty on it. Then he was not combative. Gambetta, a millionaire in talents, could scatter his best thoughts broadcast without ever impoverishing himself. At the Café Procope, at Brébant’s, and in the dining-room of his friend, Clément Laurier, he would pound his fists on the table and thunder out long passages of the speeches which he intended to deliver, and this without caring whether political opponents heard him. “You are showing your hand,” Laurier[17] and the still more prudent Arthur Ranc used to say. But Gambetta could win without hiding his trumps, or he could win without trumps.
Ferry always went into political action with his powder dry, chose his ground carefully and picked out an antagonist whom he was sure to worst. Gambetta would rush at the strongest enemy, Ferry fired at the weakest; but this system had the advantage of leaving him after every combat victorious and unwounded. It was a great triumph to him, when, coming back among his friends, he heard their self-astonished bravos as they slapped him on the back. There is much slapping on the back in French political assemblies. Many a time has Gambetta’s broad hand descended upon Ferry’s stalwart shoulders with the shout, ”C’est bien fait, mon petit!”
The two were capital friends from the first, and remained so till nearly the end. It was not till within two years of Gambetta’s death, that the chief began to find his protégé a little too independent. Mutinous Ferry never was, but a time arrived when, from one cause and another, he found himself second in influence to Gambetta among the Republican party. He was but Addington to Gambetta’s Pitt: nevertheless he got tired of hearing people say that he was only allowed to hold office as a stopgap; and with a proper dignity he resented Gambetta’s pretensions to act as occult Prime Minister without assuming the responsibilities of the premiership. Gambetta, as we know, wanted to become President of the Republic, or else Prime Minister with a secure majority to be obtained by scrutin de liste. Until he could compass one or other of these ends, he preferred to play the Agamemnon sitting in the Presidential chair of the Chamber of Deputies. M. de Freycinet and M. Ferry each humored this whim so long as it was possible, and indeed nothing could have been more amicably subservient than M. Ferry’s conduct while Prime Minister in 1881. He not only dispensed his patronage by Gambetta’s directions, but framed all Government measures according to the Dictator’s tastes, and even agreed to the performance of little Parliamentary comedies, in which Gambetta pretended to attack the Cabinet in order to dispel the notion that M. Ferry was not a free agent. This state of things, however, could not continue after the general election of 1881, when a strong Republican majority was returned—not to support the Ferry Cabinet, but to set up something better. Gambetta forgot that in putting on the gloves with his friend Ferry, simply pour amuser la galerie, he was apt to give knock-down blows which made Ferry look small. The cautious Lorrainer felt that he had had enough of these sparring-matches, and he had the sharpness to see that if he accepted a portfolio in the “Grand Ministère,” which Gambetta formed in November 1881, he would confirm the general opinion that throughout his premiership he had only been the great man’s puppet. For all this, it was a very brave thing he did in refusing to sit in Gambetta’s Cabinet. Gambetta was deeply offended and doubtless as much surprised as Richelieu would have been if Brother Joseph had declined to “act any longer with him for the present.” Happily the Dictator could not punish Brother Jules as the Cardinal would have chastised Brother Joseph.
He sent twice to Ferry to offer him a portfolio, wrote to him once, and ended by proposing to get him elected life-senator and President of the Upper House. But when all these favors were declined with thanks, he shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: “Mais c’est absurde!” meaning that his friend Ferry had come to think a little too much of himself.
Two months after this the “Grand Ministère” had fallen. Jules Ferry had given the Scrutin de Liste Bill his vote, but he had refrained from exerting any influence on behalf of the Cabinet. “C’est un coup de Ferry!” ejaculated Gambetta, when the numbers of the division were announced,[18] and upon somebody’s remarking that Ferry had voted aright, “Bah, you should have seen him in the smoking-room,” growled the angry chief. “But he was speaking up loudly for you in the smoking-room.” “The song is in the tune,” answered Gambetta, “and Jules was singing flat.”[19]
The fact is that the fate of the Scrutin Bill had turned wholly on the question as to whether Gambetta could be trusted. The measure establishing election by caucus would have placed absolute power in his hands for years, and the Left Centre were naturally afraid of this prospect, which was tantamount to the destruction of regular Parliamentary government. But before committing themselves to a coalition with Radicals and Monarchists, many of these moderate Liberals came and sounded Ferry. He would only answer that he was sure Gambetta meant well, and so forth; but of course this was not enough, and the Moderates marched over to M. Clémenceau. The day after this vote M. Ferry was back in office with the portfolio of Public Instruction, and thirteen months later he was Prime Minister once more, but this time under conditions very different from those which had chequered his first Administration. Gambetta was dead, three Cabinets had been overthrown within eight months, and M. Ferry was actually able to make a favor of accepting a post in which M. de Freycinet, M. Duclerc and M. Fallières had wretchedly failed. Things had come to such a pass that if M. Ferry had objected to form a Government, M. Grévy would have resigned.
Thus M. Ferry was truly on a certain day the Deus ex machinâ. His advance to a position so powerful can only be explained by comparing him to the winner of an obstacle race. Nine years ago, any politician contemplating the possibility of Gambetta’s death, would have named at least six Republicans now living as more likely than M. Ferry to succeed him as leader of the party. He would have named Jules Simon, Léon Say, William Waddington, Charles de Freycinet, Challemel-Lacour, or Eugène Clémenceau; and supposing all these runners had started with M. Ferry over a flat course, it may be questioned, to keep up the racing metaphor, whether Ferry would have been so much as placed. But in an obstacle race, one man comes to grief at the “hanging-tub,” one at the crawling, another at the water-jump, and the winner is often the man who, having scrambled through every thing in a haphazard fashion, comes in alone—all the others having dropped off.
No man ever spoilt a fine chance so sadly as Jules Simon—the first to “drop off”—and this all for want of a little spirit at the right moment. The author of many learned and entertaining works on political economy, a bright scholar, charming causeur, persuasive debater, a man of handsome face and lordly bearing, infinitely respectable in his private life, full of diplomatic tact and with a genuine aptitude for administration—M. Simon had all the qualifications of a party-leader. Under the Empire he was an Orleanist, but he let himself be converted to Republicanism by M. Thiers after the war, and he was the only Minister whom Thiers trusted to the extent of never meddling with the business of his department. He was Minister of Public Instruction and Worship for more than two years, and acquitted himself of his functions in a manner to please both Catholics and Freethinkers, cardinals and vivisecting professors. He was perhaps a little too unctuous in his phrases; he had a suspicious facility for weeping, and he scattered compliments and promises about him, as a beadle sprinkles holy water in a May-day procession. But these are the little arts of diplomacy: M. Simon could be quite firm in dismissing a Bonapartist professor, even while shedding tears over the poor man’s appeal to be suffered to earn his bread in peace; and when he was sent as High Commissioner of the Government to visit the pontoons and prisons in which Coummunists were confined, all his tender pity for political offenders in general (he recognised many of his quondam electors in bonds) did not prevent him from investigating each individual case with unemotional acumen. He had power to liberate whom he pleased, but he used it sparingly. At Brest he was much pained by the rudeness of a prisoner to whom he had said kindly: “Why are you here, my friend?” “For having too much studied your books,“ was the sniggering answer.[20] He had another disagreeable shock at the prison of Versailles, where Louise Michel called him ”Vieux farceur.”
But Jules Simon rendered some very great service to the Republican cause. The office-holders of to-day often talk as if they had founded the Republic—which shows that they have defective memories. The Comte de Chambord was the real “Father of the Republic,” as even Senator Wallon must acknowledge in his meditative moments.[21] If the Bourbon prince had been anything better than a Quaker, Monarchy would have been restored after the Commune—in fact, during the five years that followed the civil war, the Republic merely lived under respite of a death-sentence, so to say, until its enemies agreed as to how it should be exterminated. But they could not agree, and Jules Simon was in a large measure the cause of this. He went about among the Orleanists, coaxing over this one and that one to the idea that Republicanism was the only practical thing for the moment. His favorite argument was this, that Socialists and other such people could be put down much more summarily by a Republican Government than by a King. Under a Bourbon Sovereign, Liberals and Socialists would make common cause, and there would inevitably be another revolution before long; but if the Orleanists would only take the Republic under their patronage they might rule the country according to their doctrines, just as the English Whigs had long ruled England, keeping their Radical tail in subjection. With these words, Jules Simon wiled away many; and the trophies of success thickened upon him. He was elected to the French Academy; in 1875 he was nominated a life-senator, and in 1876, some months after the first general election under the new Constitution, he became Prime Minister.
He kept his post for about eight months, and then one memorable morning he allowed Marshal Mac Mahon to dismiss him from it like a lacquey. The Spaniards, by way of expressing their disbelief in the consistency of courage at all times and in all circumstances, are accustomed to say that a man was brave “on a certain day.” One may assert then, without any imputation on M. Simon’s general valor, that on the 16th May, 1877, he showed an utter want of pluck. The reason for this appears to have been that he was out of health at the time—worn out by two or three sleepless nights, and disgusted with the worries of office. He had gone to bed on the 15th May without any suspicion that the Marshal President intended to dismiss him and his Liberal Cabinet, and he was therefore astounded when, as he was dressing, a messenger brought him a letter in which the Marshal cavalierly told him that, as he had been unable to manage the Republican majority, he must make way for stronger men.
Now it was quite true that the Republicans under Gambetta had behaved very factiously towards Jules Simon. Parties were so divided in the Lower House that no Minister could govern, and it was manifest that the only way out of the death-lock would be through a dissolution. But M. Simon was cashiered at the instigation of a Royalist Palace Cabal, who wanted the next elections to be held under the auspices of a Reactionary Cabinet, and he should have had the boldness to denounce this intrigue. Instead of doing that he sat down in his dressing-gown, it is said, and wrote a tame, self-exculpatory letter to the Marshal. He did not see that Mac Mahon had played into his hands by enabling him to take his stand as champion of the entire Republican party. A few brave words of defiance to the Cabal, a dignified reproof to the Marshal himself, and an appeal to the whole nation to rouse itself for a grand battle at the polls, this is what Jules Simon’s letter should have contained, and an epistle couched in these terms would have made him immensely popular.
But the ejected Premier’s abject, doleful apology appearing in the papers on the same day as the Marshal’s letter, spread consternation and disgust through the Republican party. It was a whine at the moment when a trumpet blast was expected. Simon had missed the opportunity of being great. The Republicans were ashamed of him, and spurned him with a positive yell of execration. In the course of the morning he hurried to M. Thiers’s house, and began in a lachrymose style to descant upon his wrongs, saying that he had never been the Marshal’s effective adviser, that the Duc de Broglie had all along been guiding Mac Mahon, &c. “Why on earth didn’t you say that in your letter?” screamed Thiers; and the lugubrious M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, lifting up his long arms in woe, repeated like his chief, “Why was not that said in the letter?”
Why indeed? If Jules Simon had shown spirit he would have been accounted the foremost man of the Republican party after Thiers’s death, and he might eventually have been President of the Republic in place of M. Grévy. As it was, the Republicans, after their victory at the general election of 1877,[22] refused to rank him as one of their number, and he has ever since been in the humiliating position of a pariah. His speeches in the Senate are always applauded, but not by the Republicans. It has become the fashion among his former allies to speak of him as a renegade, and facetious party-newspapers have not scrupled to play practical jokes upon him. One of these pleasantries was rather funny. A paper announced that M. Simon had inherited a large sum of money, and that, in the excess of his philanthropy, he had taken to distributing twenty ‘napoleons’ every morning among the first five score beggars (being true Republicans) who knocked at his door. For days the Place de la Madeleine, where the unhappy statesman lived was infested by hordes of vagabonds, howling “Vive la République,” and the police found it difficult to disperse these believers in M. Simon’s munificence.
M. Léon Say has been mentioned among the politicians who once seemed destined to do great things. He may do some of these things yet, for he has not lost the confidence of his party, but he is such a rider of hobbies, that he can never be expected to fall into the swing trot of any party cavalcade, even though he be suffered to caper at its head. He has been Prefect of the Seine, Minister of Finance, Ambassador to London, and President of the Senate. He is a jovial man, with a plump waist, face and moustache, not quite sixty, the proprietor of the Journal des Débats, a millionaire, and the highest French authority on finance. He writes as well as he speaks, and he speaks like a clever book. The Bourse has so much confidence in him that this return to the Ministry of Finance would at any time make the funds rise, and for this reason every Premier has been anxious to have him in the Cabinet. If M. Say would only confine himself to finance as M. Cochéry does to postal matters,[23] he might abide comfortably in office for years; but he is a political Sybarite who chafes at rose leaves. He has no sooner accepted a post than he begins to see reasons for throwing it up. Hours are wasted at every change of Cabinet in trying to persuade M. Say to join this or that combination; but either his Free Trade principles stand in the way, or he cannot sit with so and so, or he insists upon having such and such a man to be his colleague. The curious thing is that, while in opposition, M. Say takes immense trouble to get the offer of one of those places, which he rejects when they have been given him. He is not the dog biting at shadows, but the dog who snatches substantial bones, and then turns up his nose at them.
Very different is M. de Freycinet, who has neither snatched at the bones of office, nor surrendered them willingly when they fell in his way. How came this able and active politician to fail so egregiously as Prime Minister? About his talents there is no dispute, and he entered public life under Gambetta’s special and most admiring patronage. A distinguished civil engineer, he was almost unknown to the political world, when, at the senatorial elections of 1876, Gambetta brought him forward as candidate for Paris. De Freycinet was elected, and all of a sudden he got talked of as the coming man—that is, the man who was to be Gambetta’s factotum. He had dedicated a book on military tactics, with some academical compliments to his patrons; and it was remembered that he had been Gambetta’s military secretary and adviser during the war. He was supposed to be full of new ideas about army reorganisation, railway management, tax-assessment, and colonial extension. The first time he spoke in the Senate there was a hush of curiosity, and though he delivered himself in a small, piping voice, the lucidity of his reasoning, and his business-like exposition of statistics, produced a favorable impression. He was not much cheered, for applause would have drowned his voice. “Nous n’applaudissions pas pour mieux écouter,” said Léon Say politely to him.
Unfortunately, De Freycinet too soon forgot that Gambetta had singled him out as an assistant and not as a rival. He did fairly well as Minister of Public Works in M. Waddington’s Cabinet, but the rapid using up of men in parliamentary warfare forced him out of his turn into the front rank. His total and often amusing ignorance of foreign countries made him unfit for the post of Foreign Secretary, whilst his want of suppleness rendered him incapable of managing a party by means of easy social intercourse with its most prominent members. He is a politician of self-asserting conscientiousness, with a smileless face, a distant manner, and a captious tone of saying, or rather speaking, “no” to every proposal which he does not approve on a first hearing. At the Quai d’Orsay he always seemed to Ambassadors to be in a hurry; but, though he would draw out his watch two or three times in ten minutes and repeat, “Venons au fait,” he generally wasted half the time in every interview by telling his hearers that which he did not mean to do, “because my conscience forbids it.” At the time when the rewards for the Exhibition of 1878 were distributed, he told an English attaché that as the French Government had allotted 150 crosses of the Legion of Honor to exhibitors, he thought that the Queen of England would do a popular thing by awarding “twenty Garters.” When the constitution of the Order of the Garter was explained to him, he said: “Ah well, then twenty Victoria crosses.” He once remarked to Lord Lyons that he was afraid it was only an antiquated insular prejudice which prevented the English from adopting the French decimal system of coinage; and he maintained in the hearing of Prince Orloff, the Russian Ambassador, that “every Russian peasant speaks French.”
Respecting M. de Freycinet’s trick of pulling out his watch, a droll story is told. M. Tirard, now Minister of Finance, who made his fortune in the jewelry trade, once gave his colleague a gold watch as a New Year’s present, the reason of this gift being that De Freycinet had lately lost a watch. Next time the Foreign Secretary pulled out his timepiece in the Senate, a facetious member observed in a stage whisper: “He wants to make sure that Tirard’s present isn’t pinchbeck.” “I am sure it is not,” answered the unjocular Freycinet, turning round quite gravely in his place; “you are quite mistaken in ascribing any such suspicions to me, sir.”
De Freycinet and Gambetta soon quarrelled, because the former as Prime Minister wanted to follow out a policy of his own or else compel Gambetta to take the reins. “I’ll be coachman or passenger,” he said with his love of logical arrangements: “but I won’t sit on the box and let you drive from the inside.” He had to resign, and the next time he came to office, after the fall of the “Grand Ministère,” it was as Gambetta’s declared opponent. But Gambetta at once set himself to show that, although he had been unable himself to command a majority, no Cabinet could live without his support, and M. de Freycinet was made the first victim of this demonstration. He was overthrown on the Egyptian question, and as M. Ferry did not care to be bowled over in the same style, the veteran M. Duclerc was asked to form an emergency Cabinet. But this gentleman and his successor M. Fallières, nick-named “le Gambetta blond,” were mere nonentities.
M. Duclerc’s Cabinet was called the Long Vacation Ministry, because it was too obviously predestined to collapse at the first contact with Parliament. M. Fallières’s Administration lasted but ten days, owing to the excessive modesty of its chief in recognising that he had been placed on a pinnacle too high for his nerves. On the strength of his sobriquet —though his only resemblance to Gambetta consisted in his being fat and hearty—he had been giving himself some airs as a pretender to office, but his sudden accession to the Premiership in the trying period that followed Gambetta’s death, made him so giddy that he was smitten with gastric derangement and had to pen a resignation in his bedroom. It was then that Jules Ferry, laughing quietly in his sleeve at the discomfiture of his various competitors, came back to the helm as already described.
We have said nothing about M. Waddington and M. Challemel-Lacour, who were once thought superior to him in their prospects because M. Jules Ferry has really always had advantages over these two rivals. M. Challemel-Lacour, who is now shelved, has been a much over-rated man, and M. Waddington is an Englishman. If it had not been for M. Waddington’s nationality, which has estranged him a little from French thought and made the French people somewhat suspicious of him, his talents would possibly have enabled him to keep the leadership of the Moderate Republicans; but then it has to be borne in mind that if he were not English—a Rugbeian, a Cantab, a scholar and athlete—his talents would not be what they are. M. Waddington may remain a valued servant of the Republic and hold all sorts of high posts except the highest; but the greatest destinies perhaps await Eugène Clémenceau—the sixth on our list of men who were once preferred to M. Ferry, as “favorites” for the first place.
M. Clémenceau is another of those Northerners whose ascendency disproves M. Daudet’s theory. He is a Breton, a doctor by profession, a keen, cold man with a cutting tongue, and something of military peremptoriness in his manner. He began his political career by opening a free dispensary in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and giving advice gratis to the poor on politics as well as medicine. He was elected mayor for one of the wards of Paris during the siege, and performed his administrative business splendidly, at a time when almost all the other mayors were blundering. He and Gambetta hated each other so thoroughly that it is a wonder they never came to duelling. The Breton Doctor, who loathes “gush,” despised the Southerner’s rhodomontade; and Gambetta used to bound and roar like a stung lion at the contemptuous thrusts which Clémenceau made at him both from the tribune and from the columns of his newspaper, the Justice. This paper is not pleasant reading, for its editor appears always to write as if he meant to provoke his enemies into personal quarrels. He is a brilliant swordsman, most dangerous because left-handed, and a capital shot with pistols. Even the doughty Paul de Cassagnac once declined a meeting with him.
M. Clémenceau has been patiently biding his time—which does not mean that he has been spending his time to good purpose, for he has attacked every Government during the last eight years with an utter disregard of the dangers which might accrue to the Republic through the continual overthrow of Ministries. This must lead one to doubt whether there is not more of personal ambition than of public spirit in his tactics, for the only alternative would be to suppose him stupid, and that he certainly is not. He has now transferred to Jules Ferry the scorn which he formerly poured upon Gambetta, and the two men must be regarded as exponents of two completely antagonistic schools of Republicanism. Jules Ferry used not to be an Opportunist, but in succeeding to the leadership of Gambetta’s party, he has had to take up its programme—colonial extension, little wars for glory, Protection, temporisation in Home affairs, and in particular as regards the relations between Church and State. M. Clémenceau, on the contrary, is a Free-trader, non-interventionist, decentraliser and disestablisher. He is more in harmony with the Manchester school than any other French politician. That huge system of administrative centralisation, which Napoleon created, is to him abhorrent, and he is a partisan of local self-government on the largest scale. He is fond of relating how a certain village mayor, receiving in 1852 a copy of the new Imperial Constitution with orders to post it up, wrote to M. de Morny, saying that he had done as requested, and would be happy to post up as many more Constitutions as might be sent him thereafter.
M. Clémenceau’s Church policy may be summed up in the word Destruction; he goes much further than a mere abrogation of the Concordat. He looks to the day when Notre-Dame shall be a museum, and the Madeleine a scientific institute. He holds that the Republic should repudiate the Catholic Church and treat all ecclesiastical buildings as State property. He would not object to a Gallican Church being afterwards constituted, nor forbid members of that communion from buying back some of the churches if they could afford to do so; but he would apply to Roman Catholics the law against secret societies, and absolutely prohibit French priests, under pain of banishment, to acknowledge the authority of Rome. When people arguing with him about this scheme, remark that “persecution never succeeds,” he answers: “Nonsense, it is half-hearted persecution that does not succeed. Protestantism was thoroughly well stamped out of Spain, and Romanism out of England. I should not expect to get rid of our French Romanists within a few years—two or three generations would be required to complete the extirpation. But if the work is to be done fully, it must be commenced with vigor.”
M. Clémenceau will never do much when he comes to office, because he wants the power of moving masses. He has already been yelled at in Montmartre as a backslider because he has refused to espouse the economic fallacies of the Socialists. The multitude is not to be swayed by pure reason, and no man can be a successful revolutionist unless he have a dash of the fanatic about him. Events are nevertheless preparing to bring M. Clémenceau to the Premiership, and this consummation will be important because it will involve the incursion of an entirely new set of men into all the public offices. M. Clémenceau’s influence comes, not from his doctrines, but simply from his combativeness which has made him the captain of a fine hungry host of young men who see no chance of turning the Opportunists out of their snug places under Government except by banding together as a new party.
If M. Ferry could bring the China and Tonquin wars to a brilliant ending, could manage to create a Budget surplus, reduce taxation, relieve the military burdens of the country, and put an end to the agricultural and commercial stagnation—he might become a People’s man for some years. Indeed he might consolidate his popularity by carrying out half of the programme just sketched. The least success on his part in war or diplomacy would be inflated by his Opportunist supporters into a great triumph, because it is indispensable for the existence of a party that its leader should be a man of reputation. Political ideas must be incarnated in a man before democratic electorates can understand them. Gambetta’s death took the Opportunists by surprise, and they were not prepared with a man to put in his place. “Jouons au Ferry,” said M. Arthur Ranc, and M. Ferry had the great luck of coming to power just at the moment when the Opportunists had begun to perceive that there must be no more overthrowing of Cabinets for some time.—Temple Bar.
ORGANIC NATURE’S RIDDLE.
BY ST. GEORGE MIVART.II.
A thoroughly mechanical conception of nature is the scientific ideal of a very large and a very influential school of thinkers.[24] and the goal towards which they strive. In so striving they follow the lead of the earliest of modern philosophers, Descartes, who would probably have felt no small satisfaction could he have foreseen that the doctrine of animal automatism would be so eloquently advocated in the nineteenth century, as well as that of a mechanical evolution of new species of animals and plants.
Evidently the last-mentioned conception was necessary to render the mechanical theory complete. As long as men believed in the action of any mysterious intelligence hidden in nature, and working through it in specific evolution towards foreseen and intended ends, a mechanical conception of nature was obviously impossible. But no less impossible was the acceptance of such a mechanical hypothesis as long as any belief remained in the existence, in individual animals, of an innate and mysterious instinctive power directing their actions in ways beneficial to them or to their race, yet unintended and unforeseen by the creatures which performed those actions. A denial of the existence of any true “instinct,” as well as of any unmechanical action in specific evolution, was then necessary for the maintenance of the mechanical theory, and accordingly such denials have been confidently made, as we have already seen.
While, however, this current of thought has been gaining in volume and velocity, another contrary current has no less made itself manifest, and amongst its exponents Edward Von Hartmann[25] is an eloquent advocate of the manifest action of intelligence in nature, and of what may thus be called an “intellectual” as opposed to a “mechanical” conception of the universe. He lays much stress upon instinct, and is as earnest in asserting its distinct existence and nature, as are the mechanicians in denying its existence.
As was said at the beginning of the former article, the great interest just now of the study of instinct, lies in its bearings on the Darwinian hypothesis, or rather on the philosophy therewith connected. Let us then proceed to examine whether or not the analogies before pointed out between instinct and other forms of vital activity can be carried further. Let us especially examine whether the consideration of instinct in the widest sense of that term, throws any glimmerings of light upon that most recondite and still most mysterious process, the genesis of new species.
We may be encouraged to hope that such a result is possible from the words of one of those twin biologists who on the same night put forth their independently-arrived-at views as to what we are all agreed to regard as at least an important factor in the origin of species. No less a person than Mr. Wallace has written the following significant words:—
“No thoughtful person can contemplate without amazement the phenomena presented by the development of animals. We see the most diverse forms—a mollusk, a frog, and a mammal—arising from apparently identical primitive cells, and progressing for a time by very similar initial changes, but thereafter each pursuing its highly complex and often circuitous course of development with unerring certainty, by means of laws and forces of which we are totally ignorant. It is surely a not improbable supposition that the unknown power which determines and regulates this marvellous process may also determine the initiation of these more important changes of structure, and those developments of new parts and organs which characterise the successive stages of the evolutions of animal forms.”
These words advocate and confirm what I have elsewhere antecedently urged. Many influences doubtless may come into play in the origin of new species; but let us look a little narrowly at certain influences which must come into play therein, and the action of which no man can deny.
One of these influences (which no one has more richly illustrated than has the late Mr. Darwin) is that of heredity; but what is heredity?
In the first place it is obviously a property, not of new individuals, not of offspring, but of parental forms. As every one knows, it is the innate tendency which each organism possesses to reproduce its like. If any living creature, x, was self-impregnating and the outcome of a long line of self-impregnating predecessors, all existing in the midst of one uniform and continuously unvarying environment, then x would produce offspring completely like itself. This fundamental biological law of reproduction may be compared with the physical first law of motion, according to which any body in motion will continue to move on uniformly at the same rate and in the same direction until some other force or motion is impressed upon it.
The fact that new individual organisms arise from both a paternal and a maternal influence, and from a line of ancestors every one of which had a similar bifold origin, modifies this first law of heredity only so far as to produce a more or less complex compound of hereditary reproductive tendencies in every individual, the effect of which must be analogous to that mechanical law of the composition of forces resulting in the production of a new creature resembling its immediate and more remote progenitors in varying degrees, according to (1) the amount of force springing from each ancestral strain, and (2) the compatibility or incompatibility[26] of the prevailing tendencies, resulting in an intensification, perpetuation, modification, or neutralisation of ancestral characters, as the case may be.
All such action is but “heredity” acting in one or other mode; but there is another and fundamentally different action which has to be considered, and that is the action of the environment upon nascent organisms—an action exercised either directly upon them, or indirectly upon them through its direct action upon their parents. That such actions produce unmistakable effects is notorious. It will be, I think, sufficient here to advert to such cases as the well-known brood-mare covered by a quagga, and the peculiar effects of a well-bred bitch being lined by a mongrel. These show how an action exercised upon the female parent (but with no direct action on the immediate offspring) may act indirectly upon her subsequent progeny.
As a rule, modifications accidentally or artificially induced in parents are not transmitted to their offspring, as is well shown by the need of the repetition of circumcision, and of pressure of Indian children’s heads and Chinese girls’ feet, in each generation. Yet there is good evidence that such changes are occasionally inherited. The epileptic offspring of injured guinea-pigs is a case often referred to. Haëckel speaks of a bull which had lost its tail by accident, and which begot entirely tailless calves. With respect to cats,[27] I am indebted to Mr. John Birkett for the knowledge of an instance in which a female with an injured tail produced some stump-tailed kittens in two litters.
There is evidence that certain variations are more apt to be inherited than others. Amongst those very apt to be inherited are skin affections, affections of the nervous system and of the generative organs, e.g. hypospadias and absence of the uterus. The last case is one especially interesting, because it can only be propagated indirectly.
Changes in the environment notoriously produce changes in certain cases, even in adults. The modifications which may result from the action of unusual agencies on the embryo have been well shown by M. C. Dareste.[28] As has been already remarked, processes of repair take place the more readily the younger the age of the subject. Similarly, it is probable that the action of the environment generally acts more promptly and intensely on the embryo than in the older young. That the same organism will sometimes assume very different forms has been observed by Professor Lankester in the case of Bacterium rufescens.[29]
The effects of changed conditions is often very striking. Ficus stipulata grown on a wall has small, thin leaves, and clings to the surface like a large moss or a miniature ivy. Planted out, it forms a shrub, with large, coarse, leathery leaves.
Mr. Wallace has pointed out some of the curious direct effects of external conditions on organisms. He tells us[30] that in the small island of Amboina the butterflies (twelve species, of nine different genera) are larger than those of any of the more considerable islands about it, and that this is an effect probably due to some local influence. In Celebes a whole series of butterflies are not only of a larger size, but have the same peculiar form of wing. The Duke of York’s Island seems, he tells us, to have a tendency to make birds and insects white, or at least pale, and the Philippines to develop metallic colors; while the Moluccas and New Guinea seem to favor blackness and redness in parrots and pigeons. Species of butterflies which in India are provided with a tail to the wing, begin to lose that appendage in the islands, and retain no trace of it on the borders of the Pacific. The Æneas group of papilios never have tails in the equatorial region of the Amazon Valley, but gradually acquire tails, in many cases, as they range towards the northern and southern tropics. Mr. Gould says that birds are more highly colored under a clear atmosphere than in islands or on coasts—a condition which also seems to affect insects, while it is notorious that many shore plants have fleshy leaves. We need but refer to the English oysters mentioned by Costa, which, when transported to the Mediterranean, grew rapidly like the true Mediterranean oyster, and to the twenty different kinds of American trees said by Mr. Meehan to differ in the same manner from their nearest American allies, as well as to the dogs, cats, and rabbits which have been proved to undergo modifications directly induced by climatic change. But still more strange and striking changes have been recorded as due to external conditions. Thus it is said[31] that certain branchiopodous creatures of the crab and lobster class (certain crustacea) have been changed from the form characteristic of one genus (Artemia salina) into that of quite another (Branchipus), by having been introduced in large numbers by accident into very salt water. The latter form is not only larger than the former, but has an additional abdominal segment and a differently formed tail. Such changes tell strongly in favor of the existence in creatures of positive, innate tendencies to change in definite directions under special conditions.
It is also obvious that the very same influences (e.g. amounts of light, heat, moisture, &c.) will produce different effects in different species, as also that the nature of some species is more stubborn and less prone to variation than that of others. Such, for example, is the case with the ass, the guinea-fowl, and the goose, as compared with the dog, the horse, the domestic fowl, and the pigeon. Thus both the amount and the kind of variability differ in different races, and such constitutional capacities or incapacities tend to be inherited by their derivative forms, and so every kind of animal must have its own inherent powers of modifiability or resistance, so that no organism or race of organisms can vary in an absolutely indefinite manner; and if so, then unlimited variability must be a thing absolutely impossible.
The foregoing considerations tend to show that every variation is a function[32] of “heredity” and “external influence”—i.e. is the result of the reaction of the special nature of each organism upon the stimuli of its environment.
In addition to the action of heredity and the action of the environment, there is also a peculiar kind of action due to an internal force which has brought about so many interesting cases of what is called “serial and lateral homology” which cannot be due to descent, but which demonstrate the existence of an intra-organic activity, the laws of which have yet to be investigated. Comparative anatomy, pathology, and teratology combine to point out the action of this internal force.
“Lateral homology” refers to the production of similar structures on either side of the body, as in the similarity of our right and left hands and feet. “Serial homology” refers to the production of similar structures one behind the other, as in the series of similar segments in the body of a worm or a centipede, and the similar series of limbs in the latter animal.
These tendencies to lateral and serial repetition show themselves in ways which cannot be accounted for by inheritance from ancestral forms, but loudly proclaim the presence and action of some internal force tending to produce such homologous repetitions in organisms in different animals.
Thus even in ourselves, when we compare our leg and foot with our arm and hand, we find that they have homologous features which cannot be accounted for as being inheritances from supposed ancestral animals. Our extremities resemble each other in the texture of the skin, the shape of the nails, and other points, and these resemblances are not due to external conditions, but exist in spite of them; and comparative anatomy reveals to us countless similar examples in the animal kingdom. Limbs can hardly be more unlike in form and position than are the arms and legs of birds, and yet we meet with breeds of fowls and pigeons the feet of which are furnished with what are called “boots,” that is, with long feathers which grow on the side of the foot, serially corresponding with that of the hand, which grow the feathers of the wing.
Again, in disease, and in cases of monstrosity or congenital malformation, nothing is more common than to find precisely similarly diseased conditions, or similar abnormalities of structure, affecting serially or laterally homologous parts, such as corresponding parts of the two arms or two legs, or of the right (or left) arm and hand and leg and foot respectively.
Altogether it seems then to be undeniable that the characters and the variations of species[33] are due to the combined action of internal and external agencies acting in a direct, positive, and constructive manner.
It is obvious, however, that no character very prejudicial to a species could ever be established, owing to the perpetual action of all the destructive forces of nature which destructive forces, considered as one whole, have been personified under the name “natural selection.”
Its action, of course, is, and must be, destructive and negative. The evolution of a new species is as necessarily a process which is constructive and positive, and, as all must admit, is one due to those variations upon which natural selection acts. Variation, which thus lies at the origin of every new species, is (as we have seen) the reaction of the nature of the varying animal upon all the multitudinous agencies which environ it. Thus “the nature of the animal” must be taken as the cause, “the environment” being the stimulus which sets that cause in action, and “natural selection” the agency which restrains it within the bounds of physiological propriety.
We may compare the production of a new species to the production of a statue. We have (1) the marble material responding to the matter of the organism; (2) the intelligent active force of the sculptor, directing his arm, responding to the psychic nature of the organism, which reacts according to law as surely as in the case of reflex action in healing, or in any other vital action; (3) the various conceptions of the artist, which stimulate him to model, responding to the environing agencies which evoke variation; and (4) the blows of the smiting chisel, corresponding to the action of natural selection. No one would call the mere blows of the chisel—apart from both the active force of the artist and the ideal conceptions which direct that force—the cause of the production of the statue. They are a cause—they help to produce it and are absolutely necessary for its production. They are a material cause, but not the primary cause. This distinction runs through all spheres of activity. Thus the inadequacy of “natural selection” to explain the origin of species runs parallel with its inadequacy to explain the origin of instinct, as before pointed out.
The formal discoverer of a new fossil is the naturalist who first sees it with an instructed eye, appreciates and describes it, not the laborer who accidentally uncovers but ignores it, and who cannot be accounted to be, any more than the spade he handles, other than a mere material cause of its discovery. So we must regard the sum of the destructive agencies of nature, as a material cause of the origin of new species, their formal cause being the reaction of the nature of their parent organisms upon the sum of the multitudinous influences of their environment. This kind of action of “the organism”—this formal cause—has been compared by Mr. Alfred Wallace, and by me, with the action of the organism in its embryonic development; and this, I have further urged, is to be likened to the processes of repair and reproduction of parts of the individual after injury, and this, again, to reflex action, and, finally, this last to instinct as manifested in ourselves and in other animals also.
The phenomena, then, exhibited in the various processes which have been passed in review—nutrition, growth, repair, reflex action, instinct, the evolution of the individual and of the species—will, I think, abundantly serve to convince him who carefully considers them, that a mechanical conception of nature is inadequate and untenable. For it cannot be denied that in all these various natural processes, performed by creatures devoid of self-conscious intellect, there is somehow and somewhere a latent rationality, by the imminent existence of which their various admirably calculated activities are alone explicable. We are compelled to admit that the merely animal and vegetable worlds which we regard as irrational, possess a certain rationality. This innate mysterious rationality blindly executes the most elaborately contrived actions in order to effect necessary or useful ends not consciously in view. We have here to consider the question, “How is this blind rationality, this practical but unconscious intelligence, explicable?”
Edward Von Hartmann, the eloquent prophet of the unconscious intelligence of nature, teaches us that such intelligence is the attribute of the very animals and plants themselves.
But can we limit the manifestations of intelligence and quasi-instinctive purpose to the organic world? By no means. The phenomena of crystallisation, the repair in due form of the broken angle of a crystal, the inherent tendencies of chemical substances to combine in definite proportions, and other laws of the inorganic world, speak to us of unconscious intelligence and volition latent in it also.
A perception of this truth has led to the conception of the universal presence of true intelligence, as it were in a rudimentary form, throughout the whole material universe—the universal diffusion of what the late Professor Clifford called “mind-stuff” in every particle of matter.
Such a belief can, however, be entertained only by those who neglect to note the differences of objects presented to the senses, attending solely to their resemblances, and describing them by inadequate and misleading terms. The habit of perverting language in this manner, has been lately well spoken of as using intellectual false coin. By such an abuse of language and disregard of points of unlikeness, all diversities may easily be reduced to identity. Against such abuse the scientific biologist must energetically protest. The expression “life” refers to definite phenomena which are not found but in animals and plants. The crystal is not really alive, because it does not undergo the cycle of changes characteristic of life. It does not sustain itself by alimentation, reproduce its kind, and die. Anyone choosing to stretch terms may say that molecules of inorganic matter live, because molecules exist. But in that case we shall have to create a new term to denote what we now call life. We might as well say a lamp-post “feels” because we can make an impression on it, or that crystals “calculate” because of their geometrical proportions, or that oxygen “lusts” after that which it rusts. As the late Mr. G. H. Lewes has said: “We deny that a crystal has sensibility; we deny it on the ground that crystals exhibit no more signs of sensibility than plants exhibit signs of civilisation, and we deny it on the ground that among the conditions of sensibility there are some positively known to us, and these are demonstrably absent from the crystal. We have full evidence that it is only special kinds of molecular change that exhibit the special signs called sentient; we have as good evidence that only special aggregations of molecules are vital, and that sensibility never appears except in a living organism, disappearing with the vital activities, as we know that banks and trades-unions are specifically human institutions.”
The considerations which are here applied to vital activity, may be paralleled by others applied to intelligence. They will show us that however profoundly rational may be that world which is commonly spoken of as irrational, yet that its rationality is not truly the attribute of the various animals which perform such admirably calculated actions, but truly belongs to what is the ultimate and common cause of them all, and to that only.
There is, indeed, a logic in mere “feeling,” there is a logic even in insentient nature; but that logic is not the logic of the crystal nor of the brute; its true position must be sought elsewhere. It is in them, but it is not of them.
However, let us patiently consider a little this hypothesis of an innate, unconscious intelligence as the cause of the various strictly, or analogically, instinctive actions of animals.
It is in the first place plain that no intelligence could exist so as to adjust “means” to “ends,” except by the aid of memory; and “memory” has therefore been freely attributed even to the lower animals. Let us see, then, what the term “memory” really denotes. Now we cannot be said to remember anything unless we are conscious that what is again made present to our mind has been present to our mind before. An image might recur to our imagination a hundred times, but if at each recurrence it was for us something altogether new and unconnected with the past, we could not be said to remember it. It would rather be an example of extreme “forgetfulness” than of “memory.” In “memory,” then, there are and must be two distinct elements. The first is the reproduction before the mind of what has been before the mind previously, and the second element is the recognition of what is so reproduced as being connected with the past.
There is yet a further distinction which may be drawn between acts of true recollection.
We are all aware that every now and then we direct our attention to try and recall something which we know we have for the moment forgotten, and which we instantly recognise when we have recalled it. But besides this voluntary memory we are sometimes startled by the flashing into consciousness of something we had forgotten, and which we were so far from trying to recollect that we were thinking of something entirely different.
There are, then, two kinds of true memory—one in which the will intervenes, and which may be spoken of as recollection, and the other in which it does not, and which may be termed reminiscence. Neither of these can exist in a creature destitute of true self-consciousness. There are, however, two other kinds of repeated action which take place even in ourselves, and which should be carefully distinguished.
The first of these are practically automatic actions, which are repeated unconsciously after having been learned, as in walking, reading, speaking, and often in playing some musical instrument. In a certain vague and improper sense we may be said—having learned how to do these things—to recollect how to do them; but unless the mind recognises the past in the present while performing them they are not instances of memory, but merely a form of habit in which consciousness may or may not intervene.
The second class of repeated actions just referred to are, on the other hand, those in which consciousness cannot be made to intervene, and are mere acts of organic habit. Thus a man wrecked on an island inhabited by savages, and long dwelling there, may at first have the due action of his digestive organs impeded by the unwonted food on which he may have to live. After a little while, however, the evil diminishes, and in time his organism may have “learnt” how to correspond perfectly with the new conditions. Then with each fresh meal the alimentary canal and glands must practically “recognise” a return of the recently obtained experience, and repeat its freshly acquired power of healthy response thereto. Can “memory” be properly predicated of such actions of the alimentary glands? It can be so predicated only by a perversion of language. It is not memory, because not only is it divorced from consciousness as it occurs, but it cannot anyhow be made present to consciousness. Again, a boy at school has had a kick at football, which has left a deep scar on his leg. That boy, now become an old man, still bears the same scar, though all his tissues have been again and again transformed in the course of seventy years. Can the constant reproduction of the mark, in any reasonable sense, be said to be an act of, or due to, memory? Evidently it cannot, and neither can it be reasonably predicated of any of the actions of plants or of the lowest animals.
As, then, “memory” cannot be predicated, except by an abuse of language, of the lower forms of life, it would appear that neither intelligence nor rationality can truly exist in them, so as to preside over all those actions of nutrition, repair, reproduction, and instinct which we have examined and distinguished.
Nevertheless, Hartmann and his followers do not on this account hesitate to ascribe true intelligence to unconscious nature, and though such ascription may seem too absurd to deserve serious consideration, it would nevertheless be a great mistake to despise such opinions. For, as Mr. Lewes truly says,[34] “As there are many truths which cease to be appreciated because they are never disputed,” so there are many errors which are best exposed by allowing them to run to a head. Mr. Butler, who carries this hypothesis of unconscious intelligence to its last consequences, asks,[35] “What is to know how to do a thing?” His answer is, “Surely, to do it.” And he represents how, when many things have been perfectly learnt, they may be performed unconsciously. In a very amusing chapter on “Conscious and unconscious knowers,” he says, “Whenever we find people knowing they know this or that ... they do not yet know it perfectly.” In another place he says,[36] “We say of the chicken that it knows how to run about as soon as it is hatched ... but had it no knowledge before it was hatched? It grew eyes, feathers, and bones; yet we say it knew nothing about all this.... What, then, does it know? Whatever it knows so well as to be unconscious of knowing it. Knowledge dwells on the confines of uncertainty. When we are very certain we do not know that we know. When we will very strongly, we do not know that we will.”
Now the fact is that there is great ambiguity in the use of the word know. Just as before with the term memory, so also here, certain distinctions must be drawn if we would think coherently.
A. To “know,” in the highest sense which we give to the word, is to be aware (by a reflex act) that we really have a certain given perception. It is a voluntary, intelligent, self-conscious act, parallel to that kind of memory which we before distinguished as “recollection.”
B. We also say we “know” when we do not use a reflex act, but yet have a true perception—a perception accompanied by consciousness—as when we teach, and in most of our ordinary intellectual acts.
C. When we so “know” a thing that it can be done with perfect unconsciousness, we cannot be said to “know” it intellectually, although in doing that thing our nervous and motor mechanism acts (in response to sensational stimuli) as perfectly as, or more perfectly than, in our conscious activity. The “knowledge” which accompanies such “unconscious action” is improperly so called, except in so far as we may be able to direct our minds to its perception, and so render it worthy of the name—as we have seen we may direct attention to our unconscious reminiscences, and so make them conscious ones. In the same way then in which we have already distinguished such acts of memory (while unconscious) as sensuous memory, so we may distinguish such acts of apprehension (while unconscious) as sensuous cognition. By it we can understand, to a certain extent, what may be the “knowledge” or “sensuous cognition” of mere animals.
D. Besides the above three kinds of apprehensions, we may distinguish others which can be only very remotely, if at all, compared with knowledge, since they can never, by any effort, be brought within the sphere of consciousness. Such are the actions of our organism by which it responds to impressions in an orderly and appropriate but unfelt manner—the intimate actions of our visceral organs, which can be modified, within limits, according to the influence brought to bear on them, as we may see in the oarsman’s hand, the blacksmith’s arm, and the ballet-dancer’s leg.
If such actions could be spoken of as in any sense apprehensive, they would have to be spoken of as “organic cognitions,” but they may be best distinguished as “organic response” or “organic correspondence.”
That the inorganic world, no less than the organic, is instinct with reason, and that we find in it objective conditions which correspond with our subjective conceptions, is perfectly true; but when once the profound difference between mere organic habit and intellectual memory is apprehended, there will be little difficulty in recognising the yet greater difference between “organic correspondence” and the faithfulness of inorganic matter to the laws of its being.
That the absence of consciousness in actions which are perfectly performed, does not make such actions into acts of “perfect knowledge,” is demonstrated by every calculating machine. No sane person can say that such a machine “possesses” knowledge, though it is true that it “exhibits” it. Similarly we must refuse to apply the terms “memory” and “intelligence” to the merely organic activity of animals and plants.
The assertion that in the vegetal and lowest animal forms of life there is an innate but unconscious intelligence, is an assertion which contains an inherent contradiction, and is therefore fundamentally irrational. Anyone who says that blind actions (in which no end is perceived or intended) are truly intelligent ones, abuses language. The meaning of words is due to convention, and anyone who calls such actions truly intelligent, divides himself from the rest of mankind by refusing to speak their language.
What experience have we which can justify such a conception as that of “unconscious intelligence?” We are indeed aware of a multitude of actions which are evidently the outcome of intelligence, but which (like the analogous action of a calculating machine) are performed by creatures really unconscious, though they may possess consentience. But consciousness is the accompaniment of all those actions which we know to be intellectual and rational. Our experience then contradicts the hypothesis of the existence of any such thing as “unconscious intelligence.” Such a thing is indeed no true concept, for it is incapable not only of being imagined but also of being really conceived of. It resembles such unmeaning expressions as “a square pentagon” or a “pitch-dark luminosity.”
Nevertheless, our experience is in favor of the existence of an intelligence which can implant in and elicit from unconscious bodies activities which are intelligent in appearance and result. Thus we can construct calculating machines and train animals to perform many actions which have a delusive semblance of rationality.
“Truly intelligent action” we know as being intelligent and rational in its foresight, and therefore as necessarily conscious in the very principle of its being.
“Unconsciously intelligent action,” improperly called “intelligent” or “wise,” is that which is intelligent and wise only as to its results, and not in the innermost principle of the creatures (whether living or mere machines) which perform such action. To speak technically, we have “formal” and “material” intelligence, as we have “formal” and “material” vice and virtue.[37] We have already distinguished between the “formal” and the merely “material” discoverer of a new fossil, and this distinction is one which it is most important to bear in mind. It is the failure to apprehend this distinction which is the root of a vast number of modern philosophical errors, and the error which consists in asserting the reality of “unconscious intelligence” is one of them.
In fact “intelligence” exists very truly, in a certain sense, in the admirably directed actions blindly performed by living beings. It is not, however, “formally” in them, but exists formally in their ultimate cause. Nevertheless that intelligence is so implanted within them that it truly exists in them “materially” though it is not “formally” in them.
We have here, then, the answer to the question, “What is the rationality of the irrational?” It is a rationality which is very really, though not materially, present in the irrational world, while it is formally present in that world’s cause and origin.
To every Theist this answer will be a satisfactory one. To him who is not a Theist there is no really satisfactory answer possible. This is a question not of theology but of pure reason antecedent to all theology. To reason, and to reason only, I appeal when I affirm that the existence of a constant, pervading, sustaining, directing, and all-controlling but unfathomable Intelligence which is not the intelligence of irrational creatures themselves, is the supreme truth which nature eloquently proclaims to him who with unprejudiced reason and loving sympathy will carefully consider her ways. He can hardly fail to discover, immanent in the material universe, “an action the results of which harmonize with man’s reason; an action which is orderly, and disaccords with blind chance, or ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ but which ever eludes his grasp, and which acts in modes different from those by which we should attempt to accomplish similar ends.”[38] For myself, I am bound humbly to confess that the more I study nature the more I am convinced that in the action of this all-pervading but inscrutable and unimaginable intelligence, of which self-conscious human rationality is the utterly inadequate image, though the image attainable by us, is to be sought the sole possible explanation of the mysterious but undeniable presence in nature of a rationality in that which is in itself irrational.—Fortnightly Review.
CONCERNING EYES.
BY WILLIAM H. HUDSON.White, crimson, emerald green, shining golden yellow, are amongst the colors seen in the eyes of birds. In owls, herons, cormorants, and many other tribes, the brightly-tinted eye is incomparably the finest feature and chief glory. It fixes the attention at once, appearing like a splendid gem, for which the airy bird-body with its graceful curves and soft tints forms an appropriate setting. When the eye closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere bundle of dead feathers: crystal globes may be put into the empty sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed specimen; but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like flames, the “passion and the fire whose fountains are within” have vanished, and the best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to his bastard art, produces in the mind only sensations of irritation and disgust. In museums, where limited space stands in the way of any abortive attempts at copying nature too closely, the stuffer’s work is endurable because useful; but in a drawing-room, who does not close his eyes or turn aside to avoid seeing a case of stuffed birds—those unlovely mementoes of death in their gay plumes? who does not shudder, albeit not with fear, to see the wild cat, filled with straw, yawning horribly, and trying to frighten the spectator with its crockery glare? I shall never forget the first sight I had of the late Mr. Gould’s collection of humming-birds (now in the National Museum), shown to me by the naturalist himself, who evidently took considerable pride in the work of his hands. I had just left tropical nature behind me across the Atlantic, and the unexpected meeting with a transcript of it in a dusty room in Bedford Square gave me quite a shock. Those pellets of dead feathers, which had long ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck with wires—not invisible—over blossoming cloth and tinsel bushes, how melancholy they made me feel!
Considering the bright color and great splendor of some eyes, particularly in birds, it seems probable that in these cases the organ has a twofold use: first and chiefly, to see; secondly, to intimidate an adversary with those luminous mirrors, in which all the dangerous fury of a creature brought to bay is best depicted. Throughout nature the dark eye predominates; and there is certainly a great depth of fierceness in the dark eye of a bird of prey; but its effect is less than that produced by the vividly-colored eye, or even of the white eye of some raptorial species, as, for instance, of the Asturina pucherani. Violent emotions are associated in our minds—possibly, also, in the minds of other species—with certain colors. Bright red seems the appropriate hue of anger: the poet Herbert even calls the rose “angrie and brave” on account of its hue: and the red or orange certainly expresses resentment better than the dark eye. Even a very slight spontaneous variation in the coloring of the irides might give an advantage to an individual for natural selection to act on; for we can see in almost any living creature that not only in its perpetual metaphorical struggle for existence is its life safeguarded in many ways; but when protective resemblances, flight, and instincts of concealment all fail, and it is compelled to engage in a real struggle with a living adversary, it is provided for such occasions with another set of defences. Language and attitudes of defiance come into play; feathers or hairs are erected; beaks snap and strike, or teeth are gnashed, and the mouth foams or spits; the body puffs out; wings are waved or feet stamped on the ground, and many other gestures of rage are practised. It is not possible to believe that the coloring of the crystal globes, towards which an opponent’s sight is first directed, and which most vividly exhibit the raging emotions within, can have been entirely neglected as a means of defence by the principle of selection in nature. For all these reasons I believe the bright-colored eye is an improvement on the dark eye.
Man has been very little improved in this direction, the dark eye, except in the north of Europe, having been, until recent times, almost or quite universal. The blue eye does not seem to have any advantage for man in a state of nature, being mild where fierceness of expression is required; it is almost unknown amongst the inferior creatures; and only on the supposition that the appearance of the eye is less important to man’s welfare than it is to that of other species can we account for its survival in a branch of the human race. Little, however, as the human eye has changed, assuming it to have been dark originally, there is a great deal of spontaneous variation in individuals, light hazel and blue-grey being apparently the most variable. I have found curiously marked and spotted eyes not uncommon; in some instances the spots being so black, round, and large as to produce the appearance of eyes with clusters of pupils on them. I have known one person with large brown spots on light blue-grey eyes, whose children all inherited the peculiarity; also another with reddish hazel irides thickly marked with fine characters resembling Greek letters. This person was an Argentine of Spanish blood, and was called by his neighbors ojos escritos, or written eyes. It struck me as a very curious circumstance that these eyes, both in their ground color and the form and disposition of the markings traced on them, were precisely like the eyes of a common species of grebe, Podiceps rollandi. But we look in vain amongst men for the splendid crimson, flaming yellow, or startling white orbs which would have made the dark-skinned brave inspired by violent emotions a being terrible to see. Nature has neglected man in this respect, and it is to remedy the omission that he stains his face with bright pigments and crowns his head with eagles’ barred plumes.
Bright-colored eyes in many species are probably due, like ornaments and gaudy plumage, to sexual selection. The quality of shining in the dark, however, possessed by many nocturnal and semi-nocturnal species, has always, I believe, a hostile purpose. When found in inoffensive species, as, for instance, in the lemurs, it can only be attributed to mimicry, and this would be a parallel case with butterflies mimicking the brilliant “warning colors” of other species on which birds do not prey. Cats amongst mammals, and owls amongst birds, have been most highly favored; but to the owls the palm must be given. The feline eyes, as of a puma or wild cat, blazing with wrath, are wonderful to see; sometimes the sight of them affects one like an electric shock; but for intense brilliance and quick changes, the dark orbs kindling with the startling suddenness of a cloud illuminated by flashes of lightning, the yellow globes of the owl are unparalleled. Some readers might think my language exaggerated. Descriptions of bright sunsets and of storms with thunder and lightning would, no doubt, sound extravagant to one who had never witnessed these phenomena. Those only who spend years “conversing with wild animals in desert places,” to quote Azara’s words, know that, as with the atmosphere, so with animal life, there are special moments; and that a creature presenting a very sorry appearance dead in a museum, or living in captivity, may, when hard pressed and fighting for life in its own fastness, be sublimed by its fury into a weird and terrible object.
Nature has many surprises for those who wait on her: one of the greatest she ever favored me with was the sight of a wounded Magellanic eagle-owl I shot on the Rio Negro in Patagonia. The haunt of this bird was an island in the river, overgrown with giant grasses and tall willows, leafless now, for it was in the middle of winter. Here I sought for and found him waiting on his perch for the sun to set. He eyed me so calmly when I aimed my gun, I scarcely had the heart to pull the trigger. He had reigned there so long, the feudal tyrant of that remote wilderness? Many a water-rat, stealing like a shadow along the margin between the deep stream and the giant rushes, he had snatched away to death; many a spotted wild pigeon had woke on its perch at night with his cruel crooked talons piercing its flesh; and beyond the valley on the bushy uplands many a crested tinamou had been slain on her nest and her beautiful glossy dark green eggs left to grow pale in the sun and wind, the little lives that were in them dead because of their mother’s death. But I wanted that bird badly, and hardened my heart: the “demoniacal laughter” with which he had so often answered the rushing sound of the swift black river at eventide would be heard no more. I fired: he swerved on his perch, remained suspended for a few moments, then slowly fluttered down. Behind the spot where he had fallen was a great mass of tangled dark-green grass, out of which rose the tall, slender boles of the trees; overhead through the fretwork of leafless twigs the sky was flushed with tender roseate tints, for the sun had now gone down and the surface of the earth was in shadow. There, in such a scene, and with the wintry quiet of the desert over it all, I found my victim stung by his wounds to fury and prepared for the last supreme effort. Even in repose he is a big eagle-like bird: now his appearance was quite altered, and in the dim, uncertain light he looked gigantic in size—a monster of strange form and terrible aspect. Each particular feather stood out on end, the tawny barred tail spread out like a fan, the immense tiger-colored wings wide open and rigid, so that as the bird, that had clutched the grass with his great feathered claws, swayed his body slowly from side to side—just as a snake about to strike sways its head, or as an angry watchful cat moves its tail—first the tip of one, then of the other wing touched the ground. The black horns stood erect, while in the centre of the wheel-shaped head the beak snapped incessantly, producing a sound resembling the clicking of a sewing-machine. This was a suitable setting for the pair of magnificent furious eyes, on which I gazed with a kind of fascination, not unmixed with fear when I remembered the agony of pain suffered on former occasions from sharp, crooked talons driven into me to the bone. The irides were of a bright orange color, but every time I attempted to approach the bird they kindled into great globes of quivering yellow flame, the black pupils being surrounded by a scintillating crimson light which threw out minute yellow sparks into the air. When I retired from the bird this preternatural fiery aspect would instantly vanish.
The dragon eyes of that Magellanic owl haunt me till now, and when I remember them, the bird’s death still weighs on my conscience, albeit by killing it I bestowed on it that dusty immortality which is the portion of stuffed specimens in a museum.
The question as to the cause of this fiery scintillating appearance is, doubtless, one very hard to answer, but it will force itself on the mind. When experimenting on the bird, I particularly noticed that every time I retired the nictitating membrane would immediately cover the eyes and obscure them for some time, as they will when an owl is confronted with strong sunlight; and this gave me the impression that the fiery, flashing appearance was accompanied with, or followed by, a burning or smarting sensation. I will here quote a very suggestive passage from a letter on this subject written to me by a gentleman of great attainments in science: “Eyes certainly do shine in the dark—some eyes, e.g. those of cats and owls; and the scintillation you speak of is probably another form of the phenomenon. It probably depends upon some extra-sensibility of the retina analogous to what exists in the molecular constitution of sulphide of calcium and other phosphorescent substances. The difficulty is in the scintillation. We know that light of this character has its source in the heat vibrations of molecules at the temperature of incandescence, and the electric light is no exception to the rule. A possible explanation is that supra-sensitive retinæ in times of excitement become increasedly phosphorescent, and the same excitement causes a change in the curvature of the lens, so that the light is focussed, and pro tanto brightened into sparks. Seeing how little we know of natural forces, it may be that what we call light in such a case is eye speaking to eye—an emanation from the window of one brain into the window of another.”
The theory here suggested that the fiery appearance is only another form of the phosphorescent light found in some eyes, if correct, would go far towards disposing of all those cases one hears and reads about—some historical ones—of human eyes flashing fire and blazing with wrath. Probably all such descriptions are merely poetic exaggerations. One would not look for these fiery eyes amongst the peaceful children of civilization, who, when they make war, do so without anger, and kill their enemies by machinery, without even seeing them; but amongst savage or semi-savage men, carnivorous in their diet, fierce in disposition, and extremely violent in their passions. It is precisely amongst people of this description that I have lived a great deal. I have often seen them frenzied with excitement, their faces white as ashes, hair erect, and eyes dropping great tears of rage, but I have never seen anything in them even approaching to that fiery appearance described in the owl.
Nature has done comparatively little for the human eye, not only in denying it the terrifying splendors found in some other species, but also in the minor merit of beauty; yet here, when we consider how much sexual selection concerns itself with the eye, a great deal might have been expected. When going about the world one cannot help thinking that the various races and tribes of men, differing in the color of their skins and in the climates and conditions they live in, ought to have differently colored eyes. In Brazil, I was greatly struck with the magnificent appearance of many of the negro women I saw there: well-formed, tall, majestic creatures, often appropriately clothed in loose white gowns and white turban-like headdresses; while on their round polished blue-black arms they wore silver armlets. It seemed to me that the pale golden irides, as in the intensely black tyrant-bird Lichenops, would have given a finishing glory to these sable beauties, completing their strange unique loveliness. Again, in that exquisite type of female beauty which we see in the white girl with a slight infusion of negro blood, giving the graceful frizzle to the hair, the purple-red hue to the lips, and the dusky terra-cotta tinge to the skin, an eye more suitable than the dark dull brown would have been the intense orange brown seen in the lemur’s eye. For many very dark-skinned tribes nothing more beautiful than the ruby-red iris could be imagined; while sea-green eyes would have best suited dusky-pale Polynesians and languid peaceful tribes like that one described in Tennyson’s poem:—
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Since we cannot have the eyes we should like best to have, let us consider those that nature has given us. The incomparable beauty of the “emerald eye” has been greatly praised by the poets, particularly by those of Spain. Emerald eyes, if they only existed, would certainly be beautiful beyond all others, especially if set off with dark or black hair and that dim pensive creamy pallor of the skin frequently seen in warm climates, and which is more beautiful than the rosy complexion prevalent in northern regions, though not so lasting. But either they do not exist or else I have been very unfortunate, for after long seeking I am compelled to confess that never yet have I been gratified by the sight of emerald eyes. I have seen eyes called green, that is, eyes with a greenish tinge or light in them, but they were not the eyes I sought. One can easily forgive the poets their misleading descriptions, since they are not trustworthy guides, and very often, like Humpty Dumpty in “Through the Looking Glass,” make words do “extra work.” For sober fact one is accustomed to look to men of science; yet, strange to say, while these complain that we—the unscientific ones—are without any settled and correct ideas about the color of our own eyes, they have endorsed the poet’s fable, and have even taken considerable pains to persuade the world of its truth. Dr. Paul Broca is their greatest authority. In his “Manual for Anthropologists” he divides human eyes into four distinct types—orange, green, blue, grey; and these four again into five varieties each. The symmetry of such a classification suggests at once that it is an arbitrary one. Why orange, for instance? Light hazel, clay color, red, dull brown, cannot properly be called orange; but the division requires the five supposed varieties of the dark pigmented eye to be grouped under one name, and because there is yellow pigment in some dark eyes they are all called orange. Again, to make the five grey varieties the lightest grey is made so light that only when placed on a sheet of white paper does it show grey at all: but there is always some color in the human skin, so that Broca’s eye would appear absolutely white by contrast—a thing unheard of in nature. Then we have green, beginning with the palest sage green, and up through grass green and emerald green, to the deepest sea green and the green of the holly leaf. Do such eyes exist in nature? In theory they do. The blue eye is blue, and the grey grey, because in such eyes there is no yellow or brown pigment on the outer surface of the iris to prevent the dark purple pigment—the uvea—on the inner surface from being seen through the membrane, which has different degrees of opacity, making the eye appear grey, light or dark blue, or purple, as the case may be. When yellow pigment is deposited in small quantity on the outer membrane, then it should, according to the theory, blend with the inner blue and make green. Unfortunately for the anthropologists, it doesn’t. It only gives in some cases the greenish variable tinge I have mentioned, but nothing approaching to the decided greens of Broca’s tables. Given an eye with the right degree of translucency in the membrane and a very thin deposit of yellow pigment spread equally over the surface; the result would be a perfectly green iris. Nature, however, does not proceed quite in this way. The yellow pigment varies greatly in hue; it is muddy yellow, brown, or earthy color, and it never spreads itself uniformly over the surface, but occurs in patches grouped about the pupil and spreads in dull rays or lines and spots, so that the eye which science says “ought to be called green” is usually a very dull blue-grey or brownish-blue, or clay color, and in some rare instances shows a changeable greenish hue.
In the remarks accompanying the report of the Anthropomentric Committee of the British Association for 1881 and 1883, it is said that green eyes are more common than the tables indicate, and that eyes that should properly be called green, owing to the popular prejudice against that term, have been recorded as grey or some other color.
Does any such prejudice exist? or is it necessary to go about with the open manual in our hands to know a green eye when we see one? No doubt the “popular prejudice” is supposed to have its origin in Shakespeare’s description of jealousy as a green-eyed monster; but if Shakespeare has any great weight with the popular mind the prejudice ought to be the other way, since he is one of those who sing the splendors of the green eye.
Thus, in Romeo and Juliet:—
The eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath.
The lines are, however, nonsense, as green-eyed eagles have no existence; and perhaps the question of the popular prejudice is not worth arguing about.
If we could leave out the mixed or neutral eyes, which are in a transitional state—blue eyes with some dark pigment obscuring their blueness, and making them quite unclassifiable, as no two pairs of eyes are found alike—then all eyes might be divided into two great natural orders, those with and those without pigment on the outer surface of the membrane. They could not be called light and dark eyes, since many hazel eyes are really lighter than purple and dark grey eyes. They might, however, be simply called brown and blue eyes, for in all eyes with the outer pigment there is brown, or something scarcely distinguishable from brown; and all eyes without pigment, even the purest greys, have some blueness.
Brown eyes express animal passions rather than intellect, and the higher moral feelings. They are frequently equalled in their own peculiar kind of eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in civilised dogs. In animals there is, in fact, often an exaggerated eloquence of expression. To judge from their eyes, caged cats and eagles in the Zoological Gardens are all furred and feathered Bonnivards. Even in the most intellectual of men the brown eye speaks more of the heart than of the head. In the inferior creatures the black eye is always keen and cunning or else soft and mild, as in fawns, doves, aquatic birds, etc.; and it is remarkable that in man also the black eye—dark brown iris with large pupil—generally has one or the other of these predominant expressions. Of course, in highly-civilised communities, individual exceptions are extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the cunning weasel-like eye is common everywhere, especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste Orientals the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted to an expression of marvellous subtlety—the finest expression of which the black eye is capable.
The blue eye—all blues and greys being here included—is, par excellence, the eye of intellectual man; that outer warm-colored pigment hanging like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite blown away are we able to look into the soul, forgetting man’s kinship with the brutes. When one is unaccustomed to it from always living with dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, if not a positive blunder; for its power of expressing the lower and commonest instincts and passions of our race is comparatively limited; and in cases where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems vacant and meaningless. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is associated in the mind with atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid matter, inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless sky; of shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of water under certain conditions of the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer haze,
Whose margin fades
Forever and forever as I move.
In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely used in the quickly-perishing flowers of some frail plants; while a few living things of free and buoyant motions, like birds and butterflies, have been touched on the wings with the celestial tint only to make them more aërial in appearance. Only in man, removed from the gross materialism of nature, and in whom has been developed the highest faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty and significance of the blue eye—the eye, that is, without the interposing cloud of dark pigment covering it. In the recently-published biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author says of him: “His eyes were large, dark blue, brilliant, and full of varied expression. Bayard Taylor used to say that they were the only eyes he ever knew to flash fire.... While he was yet at college, an old gypsy woman, meeting him suddenly in a woodland path, gazed at him and asked, ‘Are you a man or an angel?’” Mrs. Hawthorne says in one of her letters quoted in the book: “The flame of his eyes consumed compliment, cant, sham, and falsehood; while the most wretched sinners—so many of whom came to confess to him—met in his glance such a pity and sympathy that they ceased to be afraid of God and began to return to him.... I never dared gaze at him, even I, unless his lids were down.”
I think we have, most of us, seen eyes like these—eyes which one rather avoids meeting, because when met one is startled by the sight of a naked human soul brought so near. One person, at least, I have known to whom the above description would apply in every particular; a man whose intellectual and moral nature was of the highest order, and who perished at the age of thirty, a martyr, like the late Dr. Rabbeth, in the cause of science and humanity.
How very strange, then, that savage man should have been endowed with this eye unsuited to express the instincts and passions of savages, but able to express that intelligent and high moral feeling which a humane civilisation was, long ages after, to develop in his torpid brain! A fact like this seems to fit in with that flattering, fascinating, ingenious hypothesis invented by Mr. Wallace to account for facts which, according to the theory of natural selection, ought not to exist. But, alas! that beautiful hypothesis fails to convince. Even the most degraded races existing on the earth possess a language and the social state, religion, a moral code, laws, and a species of civilisation; so that there is a great gulf between them and the highest ape that lives in the woods. And as far back as we can go this has been the condition of the human race, the real primitive man having left no writing on the rocks. In the far dim past he still appears, naked, standing erect, and with a brain “larger than it need be,” according to the theory; so that of the oldest pre-historic skull yet discovered Professor Huxley is able to say that it is a skull which might have contained the brains of a philosopher or of a savage. We can only conclude that we are divided by a very thin partition from those we call savages in our pride; and that if man has continued on the earth, changing but little, for so vast a period of time, the reason is, that while the goddess Elaboration has held him by one hand, endeavoring ever to lead him onwards, the other hand has been clasped by Degeneration, which may be personified as a beauteous and guileful nymph whose fascinations have had as much weight with him as the wisdom of the goddess.—Gentleman’s Magazine.
BIG ANIMALS.
“The Atlantosaurus,” said I, pointing affectionately with a wave of my left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile, “is estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet, and was probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in Western America, where his earthly remains were first disinhumed by an enthusiastic explorer,”
“Yes, yes,” my friend answered abstractedly. “Of course, of course; things were all so very big in those days, you know, my dear fellow.”
“Excuse me,” I replied with polite incredulity; “I really don’t know to what particular period of time the phrase ‘in those days’ may be supposed precisely to refer.”
My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit that I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial lecture in private life, especially when followed by a strict examination, is quite undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.) “Well,” he said, in a crusty voice, after a moment’s hesitation, “I mean, you know, in geological times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used all to be so very big in those days, usedn’t they?”
I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. “You’ve had enough of the museum,” I said with magnanimous self-denial. “The Atlantosaurus has broken the camel’s back. Let’s go and have a quiet cigarette in the park outside.”
But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can’t easily tell a man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the authors delicate susceptibilities.
The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the conventional sermon, into two heads—the precise date of “geological times,” and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very outset; first, that “those days” never existed at all; and secondly, that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down one more universal and cherished belief: everybody considers that “geological animals” were ever so much bigger than their modern representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount, and if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with popular delusions as this erring planet.
What, then, is the ordinary idea of “geological time” in the minds of people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa hob-an’-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespere and Molière, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of Napoleon’s reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors, Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast laps of geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.
We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of æons, each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events narrated in this evening’s Pall Mall, is less than a second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabæus of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from the geological point of view, described as “recent.” A shell embedded in a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the irruption of the “Ancient Britons” of our inadequate school-books, is, in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.
But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene, immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary æons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott’s mystic head, “Time was, Time is, Time will be.” The time we know affords us no measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes, into its dimmest and earliest recesses.
These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one’s head swim; let us hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our earthly animals, living or extinct.
If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial, we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too, each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has ever preceded it. Every age has its own spécialité in the way of bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our “Alerts” and “Challengers,” but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our razor-backs, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, “Things used all to be so very big in those days, usedn’t they?”
Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of “geological” animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate, equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known inferentially to geological science. Indeed, when we consider the extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, in propria persona. I doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping casually about, like Alice’s Gryphon in Tenniel’s famous sketch, or like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in the details for himself as well as he is able.
If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our own existing human period as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the “recent” period.
I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, “from the evidence before us,” because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid down under conditions unfavorable to the preservation of the remains of large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami. Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.
In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big reptiles. “A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth. For him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran, And he felt himself in his pride to be nature’s crowning race.” There was the ichthyosaurus, a fishlike marine lizard, familiar to us all from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement, the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and carried weight not exceeding three tons; but his rival Ceteosaurus stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species which could very favorably compete with the whole lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right whale could easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.
The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock; but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and buffaloes; but taking the group as a group, I don’t think there is any reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of this present age.
For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our bottle-heads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four, our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans. The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity, would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our modern Carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for Rhinodon, a gigantic shark of the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own colossal forms of animal life.
Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about everything having been so very much bigger “in those days” have become extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological point of view, quite recent.
For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still living—at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbor, the mastodon. That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene—our day before yesterday—and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint weapons of the Abbé Bourgeois’ Miocene men. The period that separates him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.
Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu, as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little time before the first white settlements in the great southern archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are still discovered, with the ashes of the fire-place even now unscattered, and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too, with the big sharks. Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before noted) to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two inches long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two bites of the able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of the “Challenger” expedition dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to which they originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a hundred feet in length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing shark, the rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific is a quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really nothing astonishing in the discovery that some representatives of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swimming about at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of the South Sea Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr. Günther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed by merely saying: “As we have no record of living individuals of that bulk having been observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth belonged must probably have become extinct within a comparatively recent period.”
If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself: Why should certain types of animals have attained their greatest size at certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by equally big animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this: Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of battle, but by irresistible competition for food and prey. The great saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by the human species.
Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the geological remains.
The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe, what is otherwise quite probable; that life on our planet began with very small forms—that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and other simple, primitive types of life. There were as yet no vertebrates of any sort, not even fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals. The veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the crustaceans, and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite is some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say that this was really the largest form of animal life then existing, owing to the extremely broken nature of the geological record, we have at least no evidence that anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters. The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to speak very popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating point in the Silurian, wandered in the Devonian, and died out utterly in the Carboniferous seas.
It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (teste Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once to be the dominant creatures of the primæval ocean in which they swam. There were as yet no saurians or whales to dispute the dominion with these rapacious cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the time all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian epoch, according to that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into no less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop so enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense success in life; and it also argues a vast lapse of time during which the different species were gradually demarcated from one another.
Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish group, soon attained a very considerable size; but a shell known as the orthoceras (I wish my subject didn’t compel me to use such very long words, but I am not personally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total length. At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first began to make their appearance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies are so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a fossil state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr. Gabriel, of Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length, including the long arms.
These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so far as colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that here the largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the largest fossil form of the same type. I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time—on the contrary, I believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is all in favor of our own period.
The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of fishes, towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of the great geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have been small, elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the lampreys in structure; but they rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon became the ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary saurians. Even then, in spite of the severe competition thus introduced, and still later, in spite of the struggle for life against the huge modern cetaceans (the true monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued to hold their own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in the whole range of animated nature. There seems no reason to doubt that modern fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the piscine fauna of any previous geological age.
It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group, the amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs, the toads, the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly with shame confess that the amphibians of old greatly surpassed their degenerate descendants in our modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in length from snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once more) of the Carboniferous epoch must have reached at least seven or eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is not far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote period first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly on the dry land, under the shadow of the ancient tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were the only terrestrial vertebrates then existing, and they had the field (or, rather, the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts’ content in the marshy lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed away, and new improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival of the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand with them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so that this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely restricted to its one adapted seat, the pools and ditches that dry up in summer.
The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern forms are simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species. First appearing on the earth at the very close of the vast primary periods—in the Permian age—they attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions, and have certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms of life in whatever direction. But one must remember that during the heyday of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had their day in the secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.
During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense shades of the neighboring forests which was destined at last to oust the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day. Throughout the long lapse of the secondary ages, across the lias, the oolite, the wealden, and the chalk, we find the mammalian race slowly developing into opossums and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and antiquated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for the coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and keenness of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last, towards the close of the secondary ages, to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic saurians. With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurus we get the huge cetaceans; in place of the dinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man himself.
The history of the great birds has been somewhat more singular. Unlike the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as if on purpose to contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have had their day. Unfortunately for them, or at least for their chance of producing colossal species, their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with that of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals; so that wherever the mammalian type had once firmly established itself, the birds were compelled to limit their aspirations to a very modest and humble standard. Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so in isolated regions such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds had things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no indigenous quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained to dimensions almost equalling those of the giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was small and of low grade, so the gigantic æpyornis became the very biggest of all known birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner, when a pigeon found its way to Mauritius, it developed into the practically wingless dodo; while in the northern penguins, on their icy perches, the forelimbs have been gradually modified into swimming organs exactly analogous to the flippers of the seal.
Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no representatives of their greatness to future ages? On land at least that is very probable. Man, diminutive man, who, if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger than a silly sheep, and who only partially disguises his native smallness by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought to be his hind legs—man has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores, his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrub-wood. Hence it seems not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever came out of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions, seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and mind has gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath has shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our “Minotaurs” and “Warriors” that are the real leviathans and behemoths of the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually into huge proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires, which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent mitrailleuses and torpedoes of incredible ferocity for their mutual destruction. The dragons of the prime that tore each other in their slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armor-plated turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming geologist of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken “Captain,” or the plated scales of the “Comte de Grasse,” firmly embedded in the upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.—Cornhill Magazine.
A DAY OF STORM.
‘Twas a day of storm, for the giant Atlantic, rolling in pride,
Drawn by the full moon, driven by the fierce wind, tide upon tide.
Flooded our poor little Channel. A hundred anxious eyes
Were watching a breach new broken—when suddenly some one cries,
“A boat coming in!”—and, rounding the pierhead that hid her before.
There, sure enough, was a stranger smack, head straight for the shore.
How will she land, where each wave is a mountain? Too late for how!
Run up a flag there to show her the right place! She must land now!
She is close—with a rush on the galloping wavetop—a stand,
As the water sinks from beneath her—her nose just touches the land.
And then (as rude hands, sacking a city, greedy of prey,
Toss, in some littered chamber, a child’s toy lightly away),
A great wave rose from behind, and lifting her, towered, and broke,
And flung her headlong, down on the hard beach, close to the folk.
Crash!... But ’tis only her bowsprit gone—she is saved somehow
And a cheer broke out, for a hundred hands have hold of her now.
And they say ’twas her bowsprit saved her, or she must have gone over then;
Her bowsprit it was that saved her; and little they think, those men,
Of one weak woman that prayed, as she watched them tempest-driven!
They say ’twas her bowsprit saved her! I say, ’twas that prayer, and Heaven!
—The Spectator.
SOME TURKISH PROVERBS.
If the Turk has been qualified as “unspeakable,” he is very far from being inarticulate. Strange as it may seem to those who have formed their opinion of him from hearsay, it is not the less true that he is commonly a good conversationalist, and can say well and pointedly what he has got to say, with a wealth of illustration in anecdote, quotation, and proverb. The latter form commends itself especially to the sententious Turkish mind. The synthetic form of the language, too, secures brevity and conciseness, and opportunities are afforded for those constant assonances or rhyming-vowels which are so dear to the Oriental.
On looking over a note-book containing several hundred Turkish proverbs, taken down in the course of reading and conversation, or borrowed from a collection made at the Oriental Academy at Vienna, the writer has amused himself by grouping them roughly under certain heads, so as to illustrate some aspects of the national character and surroundings.
But first it may be interesting to remark how many well-known English and other European proverbs have their exact counterpart in Turkish. How far are these to be accounted for by contact with, or conquest of, Indo-European races? Or has it been a case of “les beaux esprits se rencontrent”? For instance, we find “You should not look a gift-horse in the mouth,” in exactly the same words, as well as “He that is born to be hanged will never be drowned,” the Turkish version having the advantage of being expressed in two words! The change of words is but slight in “Troubled waters suit the fisher,” “One flower does not make summer,” and “The robe does not make the dervish;” while in Turkey it is not pot that says to kettle, but negro to negro, that his face is black. We are disposed to prefer “The nail saved the shoe, the shoe the horse, the horse the man, the man the kingdom,” to our somewhat lumbering “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” &c. “Wake not the sleeping dog,” has as a corollary “Step not on the sleeping serpent;” and we are warned that there is “No rose without a thorn, nor love without a rival.”
One instance in which our proverbial wisdom is opposed to the Turkish is to be found in the expression “to kill two birds with one stone.” The attempt to do this is condemned by sundry proverbs such as “One arrow does not bring down two birds,” and “You cannot knock down nine walnuts with one stone.”
Often we are reminded of Scriptural proverbs and aphorisms. “Nothing unheard of in the world” sounds Solomonian enough; while “Out with the eye that profits me not,” “The negro does not whiten with washing,” and “That which thou sowest, that also shalt thou reap,” are strikingly like New Testament teaching. Again and again we find expressed in other words lessons of charity, considerateness, and justice, that would not be unworthy of a Christian teacher, as, “The stranger’s prayer is heard;” “The heart’s testimony is stronger than a thousand witnesses;” “Among the blind, close your eyes;” “In truth is right;” “Justice is half religion;” “Neighbor’s right, God’s right.”
The heading under which, perhaps, the largest number of proverbs can be grouped, is that of opportune speech and silence. If the Turk, as has been said, talks well, he also knows how to hold his tongue. He looks down with the greatest contempt on the idle chatterer, and does not even think that good-manners require him to make small-talk when he has nothing to say. In fact, when on a visit to a well-bred Turk, with whom you have no common subjects of interest to discuss, after exhausting those suggested by politeness—his health, your own, that of your family, the weather, and the water (a most interesting topic in the East)—you may safely fall back upon that golden silence which their proverb, like ours, rates above silver speech. Hear his comments on the chatterer:—“There is no ass but brays;” “The dog barks, the caravan passes;” “Fool is he who alone talks, and is his only listener;” “The fool wears his heart on his tongue, the wise man keeps his tongue in his heart;” and “Many words, an unsound heart.” He warns us of the mischief of evil-speaking,—“The knife’s wound heals, the tongue’s never;” “The tongue slays more than the sword;” and “The tongue is boneless, but it breaks bones.” Again, he feels keenly the danger of free speech under a corrupt and despotic rule; while he extols honesty and good-faith, and generally condemns lying. The latter is condoned in certain cases, for “Some lies are better than truth,” and we may “Lie, but with measure.” The suppressio veri is even strongly recommended, for is not the “truth-teller banished out of nine cities?” while “He who holds his tongue saves his head,” and “There is no better answer than this, ‘I know not, I saw not.’”
But to turn to something pleasanter, we will quote a few sayings still familiar in our Turk’s mouth, which have survived the corruption of the Palace and official Kings, and seem still to breathe the hardy and independent spirit of the old days, when courage and enterprise were the only passports to the highest places in a conquering empire. Then it could be said that “The horse is to him who mounts, the sword to him who girds it on,” “The brave man’s word is a coat of mail,” “Fortune is not far from the brave man’s head,” “The hero is known on the battle-field,” and “Fear not to-morrow’s mischance.” Who but a conquering race could have produced such a proverb as “Power on my head, or the raven on my corpse;” and who can fail to hear a true ring in “Peasant erect is taller than noble on bended knee,” or “I am the slave of him who regards me; the king of him who disregards me?”
Almsgiving is creditable, for “The hand which gives is above that which takes;” and it offers temporal advantages as well as spiritual. In this world “No one cuts the hand that gives,” and “What thou givest that shalt thou take with thee” [to the next]. But beware of accepting alms or favors if you would keep your self-respect, and “Accept the largess of thy friend as if thou wert an enemy.”
Great is the power of wealth; “Even the mountains fear the rich man.” It covers a multitude of failings, and averts many ills. “If a man’s money is white, no matter if his face be black.” “The knife cuts not hand of gold.” But then the disadvantages and dangers of it in a land where empty treasuries are filled by the suppression of a few rich men, and the confiscation of their property! Truly the vacuus viator has the better part where brigands swarm. “Not even a thousand men in armor can strip a naked man.” Our Turk is a man of few wants,—pilaff, coffee, and tobacco are enough for him, and so he will rest contented in the “Health that is better than fortune,” sagely reflecting that “A big head has a big ache,” that “He who has many vineyards has many cares,” and congratulating himself if he can say, “My money is little, my head without strife.” He is not likely to make a fortune in business, being destitute of the enterprise, as well as of the sharpness and hardness, necessary to success. “The bazaar knows neither father nor mother,” and our easy-going friend has a great regard for these domestic ties. Besides, his religion forbids him either to speculate or to put out money at interest, although he sometimes avoids this prohibition by the clumsy expedient of a fictitious sale, or a “present” taken by the lender.
It is a pity that his rulers should not have profited by his experiences of debt. “Poor without debts is better than Prince,” “A thousand cares do not pay one debt,” and “Creditors have better memories than debtors,” are explicit enough, but, perhaps, were not supposed to apply to Government loans.
We find some sound advice on the subject of friendship. Do not expect your friend to be a paragon,—“Who seeks a faultless friend, rests friendless.” But when you have found him, keep him,—“Old friend, old bath,” you will do better to change neither; and if he is “a true friend, he is better than a relation.” On the other hand, avoid the British error of underrating your foe; he is always dangerous. “Water sleeps, the enemy wakes,” and “Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant,” for “A thousand friends are few, one foe many.”
The references to woman are as ungallant as they are unjust. She is to be treated as a child, and as such contemptuously pardoned for her shortcomings. “You should lecture neither child nor woman;” it would be waste of time. Her intelligence, too, is underrated, “her hair is long, her wits short!” It is she who as a mother “makes the house, and mars it,” and she is classed with good wine as “a sweet poison.” But it must be admitted that in this want of gallantry the Turk is far surpassed by the Persian, who says “The dog is faithful, woman never.”
The lover is regarded as a lunatic, unfit for the society of his fellows. “If you are in love, fly to the mountains,” for “Lover and king brook no companion.” He is “blind,” and distance is nothing to him; for him, “Bagdad is not far,” and the only cures for his malady are “travel and patience.”
A word of advice to those about to marry. “Marry below you, but do not marry your daughter above you;” and “Choose cloth by its edge, and a wife by her mother.” It is natural that we should find many references to that submission which is at the root of Islam. Sometimes we find the idea without reference to the Deity, as in the cases, “When fate comes the eye of wisdom is blind,” “No one eats another’s destined portion,” and “What will come, will come, willy nilly;” but more often he is directly invoked. His will is fate, “Whom he slays not, man slays not,” “Who calls on Him is not abandoned,” “He delays, but neglects not,” provides for the helpless and “builds the blind bird’s nest;” and so we should address ourselves to Him, “asking God for what we want, not his servant.” If you apply to the latter, you may be disappointed. Even the minister of religion is chary of his assistance. “Food from the Imam’s house, tears from the dead man’s eye,”—you are as likely to get one as the other. Sometimes, too, we meet with a small touch of scepticism, as when we are told, “First tie-up your donkey, then recommend him to God;” and sometimes a cry of black despair, “Happiest he who dies in the cradle.”
Let us conclude this hasty sketch with a few miscellaneous proverbs, remarkable for point or picturesqueness. “The fish stinks from the head” is often quoted in these days of Ottoman decay, in allusion to the bad example which comes from above. We have heard the incapacity for action which is engendered in Turkish rulers by the enforced seclusion of their youth commented on with “Who stays at home, loses his cap in the crowd.” The difficulties of equality,—“You are master, and I am master; who will groom the horse?” On an impostor,—“The empty sack won’t stand upright.” “Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint,” is rendered by “Two water-melons won’t fit under one arm.” “Old brooms are thrown on the roof,” may be taken to apply to the promotion of superannuated fogies. Your hangers-on profit by your success,—“When you climb a tree your shoes go up too.” The higher you are the worse you fall, for “There is a cure for him who falls from horse or donkey-back, but a pick-axe (to dig his grave) for him who falls from a camel.” Let us hope that this proverb, in its literal sense, may never be justified in the persons of our gallant Camel Corps in the Soudan. Three proverbs on the donkey, exemplifying—the useful guest, “They asked the donkey to the wedding, water or wood was wanting;” the power of hope, “Die not, my donkey; summer is coming and clover will grow;” and the folly of exposing oneself to needless criticism, “Don’t cut your donkey’s tail in public; some will say, ‘It is too long;’ others, ‘It is too short.’” And, lastly, as an instance in which the jingle of the original may be reproduced in English,—“The mannerly man learns manners of the mannerless.”—The Spectator.
MACPHERSON’S LOVE STORY.
BY C. H. D. STOCKER.It was on a summer Sunday morning that the story began—or let me rather say, that I take up the story, for who shall mark the real beginning of those events that mightily color and disturb, and even turn the course of our lives?
In the early sunshine, while the dew was still heavy on the grass, Ian Macpherson had been away three miles up the valley with a dying shepherd. Following the course of the broad, brawling, shallow Riach river; now clambering along steep slate-colored banks of shifting flakes and chips of stone, that looked as if they had swept in avalanches down the abrupt hillside; now springing with the sure, agile step of a born Highlander from one boulder to another as he crossed a streamlet or took a short cut across a bend of the river; now walking quickly over narrow, level reaches of meadow-ground, or amongst springy heather under the birches that overhung the broken gravel banks above the water,—his whole heart was overflowing with that exultation which breathes in the very early hours of morning when the days are long. The earth in that hour was very Paradise, not for anything it had given or ever could give him, but because it was so beautiful, and in its glorious undesecrated solitude seemed still fresh from the hand of God.
The home of the dying man was a mere hovel of peat-sods covered with moss-grown thatch, built on one of those fertile reaches of soil brought down and left here and there in these wild Scotch valleys by floods of long ago. It stood just above the river—all too perilously near in time of storm and flood, you would have thought—and round it towered the rugged hills, echoing unceasingly the murmur of the water and the wind—a murmur, at least, in summer. In winter many a wild storm raged up there, darkening the air with heavy snow and sleet, bowing and breaking and uprooting whole tracts of pines and larch; raving down the shrouded peaks and narrow, dim ravines, and making to tremble the little peat hut and the stout hearts within. And then, when the storm was spent, would be a silence as of death; snowy steeps and glittering peaks rising up on all sides motionless against a motionless sky, and down below the dark water creeping slow and quiet under masses of ice.
Macpherson could see it all in memory even as he stepped across the summer flowers, for the poor shepherds in the lone huts scattered here and there in the long valley needed him in winter as well as in summer, in foul weather no less than in fair. But to-day, as he grew accustomed to the half-light in the hut, and the wan face of the dying man became clearer in the shadow of the berth in the wall where he was lying, the minister saw well enough that he would know no more an earthly winter, nor ever see the snow come down upon the hills again. There was only one window in the hut, a single unmovable pane a foot square, let into the sod wall at one end, and rendered even less useful by a strip of rag pinned across it by way of a blind. Most of the light came in dusty beams down the wide chimney, slanting across the background of smoke-blackened wall and rafter, and lying in patches on the uneven mud floor.
As the day was warm the minister set the door wide open, and the dim, dying eyes looked out wistfully at the sunny summer weather and the beautiful wooded slopes where the foot of the opposite hill came down to the river. But he was tired now; all this was passing from him, and his eyes came back to Ian Macpherson’s face, where, as he dimly felt, dwelt something that could not pass away—something that death itself would have no power to disturb or change. Light kindled faintly on his rugged, wasted features when Macpherson came and took the toil-worn hand—so powerless now—in his, for in the young minister’s life this poor shepherd had seen and understood what no words could have brought home to him—the reality and power of love. He knew that Macpherson counted not his life his own, nor any of the things that he possessed. Year by year he had felt the subtle influence deepening, and had seen the spirit burning clearer in the eyes, so that to meet him—to the ignorant, simple shepherd—was like meeting an angel. In Macpherson he saw and knew a man in the very prime of manhood, clever, as those said who knew best, and with the world before him; who yet could let the world go by; who sought no preferment, whose whole life and soul and energy were devoted to his people without a thought for himself, and who had ever a kind word and a happy smile for one and all.
These poor people could perhaps not have explained what their young minister was to them; what he really was beyond what they saw they could never know; and yet they did feel that he had sacrificed himself for their sake in staying there, that this sacrifice was no grudging martyrdom, but a glad free-will offering to the Lord he loved and to them. It shed more light upon their hearts than a thousand sermons; it had power to draw aside for them now and again the gross veil of material aims, and to give them as in a mirror a glimpse of eternal love.
This dying man could believe in the great love of the Lord who died for him when he had seen its living power in his minister’s life; and, though the comparison is but as of a spark to the sun itself, the selfless brotherhood of one whom he knew very far above him in ways which he could not understand brought home to him the brotherhood of Christ. With his hand in Macpherson’s, listening with fast-closing ears to his earnest words, following his childlike, simple prayers, it seemed as if earth and its soul-chains of sin and sorrow faded and fell away; as if the gates of heaven opened wide and wider, and the light shone out more and more perfect, till at last the call came down, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord;” and then the spirit went up out of the darkness and ignorance and poverty of the hard shepherd life, and Macpherson was kneeling alone on the mud floor in the dim hovel beside the dead.
An hour later the solitary bell of the kirk on the wooded knoll overlooking Loch Riach was ringing thin and clear across lake and meadow for morning prayer, and Macpherson hurried up the steep footpath that wound upwards to the kirk between Scotch firs from the flat grass land about the water.
A group of strangers stood at the kirkyard gate, a young fellow of two or three-and-twenty, a lady who looked about the same age, tall and very fair, and a lad in an Eton jacket with a top hat and broad white collar. No doubt they belonged to the English family who had been expected at the villa near the railway station and the store—the only villa within half a dozen miles.
Macpherson, with the courtesy that is natural to even the shyest Highlander, lifted his hat to them as a matter of course, and would have passed on, but the young man stepped forward and asked if they might go into the church, and whether it mattered where they sat.
“Oh! There’s only too much room,” he said, when he understood what they wanted, which was not all at once, for the Gaelic was his native tongue and his ears were utterly unfamiliar with English as spoken by English people. He led the way through long rank grass and nettles, across sunken graves and flat tombstones where the inscriptions were worn away, more, surely, by wild winter storms than by church-going feet, for there was no trace of any path from the gate to the door.
“Rummiest hole ’t ever I saw, Lily,” poor Macpherson heard the boy say in an undertone, as he ushered the strangers into as curious a place of worship as perhaps this nineteenth century can show.
The floor was all uneven and rudely paved with round cobble stones, glistening and dark with perpetual damp; a gallery, sagging rather alarmingly towards the middle, ran across either end; on the front panel of the eastern one was branded in irregular characters,
“I. M. Fecit. Aug. 17, 1771,”
and these were certainly the very newest part of the interior. Along under the north wall was a row of little wooden pews, some with broken doors, others with no doors at all; their flooring consisted merely of earth, with a few rough planks thrown down here and there to help to keep the feet of the congregation more or less dry. The once whitewashed walls were stained and blotted with great seas of green and red mould, and the atmosphere was as that of a subterranean dungeon—chill, damp, and smelling of ancient decay. Macpherson opened a pew for them, and they took their places while he walked, just as he was, up the crazy pulpit stair, hung his hat on a nail above him, and knelt down. There were two women in one of the rickety galleries, and not more than half a dozen people in the pews below: a farmer’s daughter in very gay attire, two or three laboring men in ill-fitting suits of Sunday black; a keeper in his master’s former shooting-coat and knickerbockers, and a couple of shepherds in kilt and plaid.
The bell ceased, and the bell-ringer, sexton, precentor, beadle—whatever he was—having made the rope fast where it hung on the gable outside, came in and took his place at the desk under the pulpit, and the Psalm was given out—