I have twice seen people so unmistakably like Beethoven (just as Madame Patey is unmistakably like Handel and only wants dressing in costume to be the image of him not in features only but in figure and air and manner) that I always think of them as Beethoven.
Once, at Faido in the Val Leventina, in 1876 or 1877, when the engineers were there surveying for the tunnel, there was among them a rather fine-looking young German with wild, ginger hair that rang out to the wild sky like the bells inIn Memoriam, and a strong Edmund Gurney cut,[263]who played Wagner and was great upon the overture toLohengrin; as for Handel—he was not worth consideration, etc. Well, this young man rather took a fancy to me and I did not dislike him, but one day, to tease him, I told him that a little insignificant-looking engineer, the most commonplace mortal imaginable, who was sitting at the head of the table, was like Beethoven. He was very like him indeed, and Müller saw it, smiled and flushed at the same time. He was short, getting on in years and was a little thick, though not fat. A few days afterwards he went away and Müller and I happened to meet his box—an enormous cube of a trunk—coming down the stairs.
“That’s Beethoven’s box,” said Müller to me.
“Oh,” I said, and, looking at it curiously for a moment, asked gravely, “And is he inside it?” It seemed to fit him and to correspond so perfectly with him in every way that one felt as though if he were not inside it he ought to be.
The second time was at Boulogne this spring. There were three Germans at the Hôtel de Paris who sat together, went in and out together, smoked together and did everything as though they were a unity in trinity and a trinity in unity. We settled that they must be the Heckmann Quartet, minus Heckmann: we had not the smallest reason for thinking this but we settled it at once. The middle one of these was like Beethoven also. On Easter Sunday, after dinner, when he was a little—well, it was after dinner and his hair went rather mad—Jones said to me:
“Do you see that Beethoven has got into the posthumous quartet stage?” [1885.]
In the autumn of1884,Butler spent some time at Promontogno and Soglio in the Val Bregaglia,sketching and making notes.Among the children of the Italian families in the albergo was Silvio,a boy of ten or twelve.He knew a little English and was very fond of poetry.He could repeat, “How doth the little buzzy bee.”The poem which pleased him best,however,was:
Hey diddle diddle,The Cat and the Fiddle,The Cow jumped over the Moon.
They had nothing,he said,in Italian literature so good as this.Silvio used to talk to Butler while he was sketching.
“And you shall read Longfellow much in England?”
“No,” I replied, “I don’t think we read him very much.”
“But how is that? He is a very pretty poet.”
“Oh yes, but I don’t greatly like poetry myself.”
“Why don’t you like poetry?”
“You see, poetry resembles metaphysics, one does not mind one’s own, but one does not like any one else’s.”
“Oh! And what you call metaphysic?”
This was too much. It was like the lady who attributed the decline of the Italian opera to the fact that singers would no longer “podge” their voices.
“And what, pray, is ‘podging’?” enquired my informant of the lady.
“Why, don’t you understand what ‘podging’ is? Well, I don’t know that I can exactly tell you, but I am sure Edith and Blanche podge beautifully.”
However, I said that metaphysics werela filosofiaand this quieted him. He left poetry and turned to prose.
“Then you shall like much the works of Washington Irving?”
I was grieved to say that I did not; but I dislike Washington Irving so cordially that I determined to chance another “No.”
“Then you shall like better Fenimore Cooper?”
I was becoming reckless. I could not go on saying “No” after “No,” and yet to ask me to be ever so little enthusiastic about Fenimore Cooper was laying a burden upon me heavier than I could bear, so I said I did not like him.
“Oh, I see,” said the boy; “then it isUncle Tom’s Cabinthat you shall like?”
Here I gave in. More “Noes” I could not say, so, thinking I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a mutton chop, I said that I thoughtUncle Tom’s Cabinone of the most wonderful and beautiful books that ever were written.
Having got at a writer whom I admired, he was satisfied, but not for long.
“And you think very much of the theories of Darwin in England, do you not?”
I groaned inwardly and said we did.
“And what are the theories of Darwin?”
Imagine what followed!
After which:
“Why do you not like poetry?—You shall have a very good university in London?” and so on.
The quarantine men sat on the wall, dangling their legs over the parapet and singing the same old tune over and over again and the same old words over and over again. “Fu tradito, fu tradito da una donna.” To them it was a holiday.
Two gnomes came along and looked at me. I asked the first how old it was; it said fourteen. They both looked about eight. I said that the flies and the fowls ought to be put into quarantine, and the gnomes grinned and showed their teeth till the corners of their mouths met at the backs of their heads.
The skeleton of a bird was nailed up against a barn, and I said to a man: “Aquila?”
He replied: “Aquila,” and I passed on.
The village boys came round me and sighed while they watched me sketching. And the women came and exclaimed: “Oh! che testa, che testa!”
And the bells in the windows of the campanile began, and I turned and looked up at their beautiful lolling and watched their fitful tumble-aboutiness. They swung open-mouthed like elephants with uplifted trunks, and I wished I could have fed them with buns. They were not like English bells, and yet they rang more all ’Inglese than bells mostly do in Italy—they had got it, but they had not got it right.
There used to be two crows, and when one disappeared the other came to the house where it had not been for a month. While I was sketching it played with a woman who was weeding; it got on her back and tried to bite her hat; then it got down and pecked at the nails in her boots and tried to steal them. It let her catch it, and then made a little fuss, but it did not fly away when she let it go, it continued playing with her. Then it came to exploit me but would not come close up. Signor Scartazzini says it will play with all the women of the place but not with men or boys, except with him.
Then there came a monk and passed by me, and I knew I had seen him before but could not think where till, of a sudden, it flashed across me that he was Valoroso XXIV, King of Paphlagonia, no doubt expiating his offences.
And I watched the ants that were busy near my feet, and listened to them as they talked about me and discussed whether man has instinct.
“What is he doing here?” they said; “he wasn’t here yesterday. Certainly they have no instinct. They may have a low kind of reason, but nothing approaching to instinct. Some of the London houses show signs of instinct—Gower Street, for example, does really seem to suggest instinct; but it is all delusive. It is curious that these cities of theirs should always exist in places where there are no ants. They certainly anthropomorphise too freely. Or is it perhaps that we formicomorphise more than we should?”
And Silvio came by on his way to church. It was he who taught all the boys in Soglio to make a noise. Before he came up there was no sound to be heard in the streets, except the fountains and the bells. I asked him whether the curate was good to him.
“Si,” he replied, “è abbastanza buono.”
I should think Auld Robin Gray was “abbastanza buono” to Mrs. Gray.
One of the little girls told me that Silvio had so many centesimi and she had none. I said at once:
“You don’t want any centesimi.”
As soon as these words fell from my lips, I knew I must be getting old.
And presently the Devil came up to me. He was a nice, clean old man, but he dropped his h’s, and that was where he spoiled himself—or perhaps it was just this that threw me off my guard, for I had always heard that the Prince of Darkness was a perfect gentleman. He whispered to me that in the winter the monks of St. Bernard sometimes say matins overnight.
The blue of the mountains looks bluer through the chestnuts than through the pines. The river is snowy against the “Verdi prati e selve amene.” The great fat tobacco plant agrees with itself if not with us; I never saw any plant look in better health. The briar knows perfectly well what it wants to do and that it does not want to be disturbed; it knows, in fact, all that it cares to know. The question is how and why it got to care to know just these things and no others. Two cheeky goats came tumbling down upon me and demanded salt, and the man came from the saw-mill and, with his great brown hands, scooped the mud from the dams of the rills that watered his meadow, for the hour had come when it was his turn to use the stream.
There were cow-bells, mountain elder-berries and lots of flowers in the grass. There was the glacier, the roar of the river and a plaintive little chapel on a green knoll under the great cliff of ice which cut the sky. There was a fat, crumby woman making hay. She said:
“Buon giorno.”
And the “i o r” of the “giorno” came out like oil and honey. I saw she wanted a gossip. She and her husband tuned their scythes in two-part, note-against-note counterpoint; but I could hear that it was she who was the canto fermo and he who was the counterpoint. I peered down over the edge of the steep slippery slope which all had to be mown from top to bottom; if hay grew on the dome of St. Paul’s these dreadful traders would gather it in, and presently the autumn crocuses would begin to push up their delicate, naked snouts through the closely shaven surface. I expressed my wonder.
“Siamo esatti,” said the fat, crumby woman.
For what little things will not people risk their lives? So Smith and I crossed the Rangitata. So Esau sold his birthright.
It was noon, and I was so sheer above the floor of the valley and the sun was so sheer above me that the chestnuts in the meadow of Bondo squatted upon their own shadows and the gardens were as though the valley had been paved with bricks of various colours. The old grass-grown road ran below, nearer the river, where many a good man had gone up and down on his journey to that larger road where the reader and the writer shall alike join him.
I know a man, and one whom people generally call a very clever one, who, when his eye catches mine, if I meet him at an at home or an evening party, beams upon me from afar with the expression of an intellectual rattlesnake on having espied an intellectual rabbit. Through any crowd that man will come sidling towards me, ruthless and irresistible as fate; while I, foreknowing my doom, sidle also him-wards, and flatter myself that no sign of my inward apprehension has escaped me.
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions. I knew of an old gentleman who insisted on having the original polka played to him as he lay upon his death-bed. In the only well-authenticated words I have ever met with as spoken by a man who knew he was going to be murdered, there is a commonness which may almost be called Shakespearean. There had been many murders on or near some gold-fields in New Zealand about the years 1863 or 1864, I forget where but I think near the Nelson gold-fields, and at last the murderers were taken. One was allowed to turn Queen’s evidence and gave an account of the circumstances of each murder. One of the victims, it appeared, on being told they were about to kill him, said:
“If you murder me, I shall be foully murdered.”
Whereupon they murdered him and he was foully murdered. It is a mistake to expect people to rise to the occasion unless the occasion is only a little above their ordinary limit. People seldom rise to their greater occasions, they almost always fall to them. It is only supreme men who are supreme at supreme moments. They differ from the rest of us in this that, when the moment for rising comes, they rise at once and instinctively.
I saw one once in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence off the island of Anticosti. We were in the middle of it, and seemed to be looking up through a great cone of light millions and millions of miles into the sky. Then we saw it farther off and the pillars of fire stalked up and down the face of heaven like one of Handel’s great basses.
In front of my room at Montreal there was a verandah from which a rope was stretched across a small yard to a chimney on a stable roof over the way. Clothes were hung to dry on this rope. As I lay in bed of a morning I could see the shadows and reflected lights from these clothes moving on the ceiling as the clothes were blown about by the wind. The movement of these shadows and reflected lights was exactly that of the rays of an Aurora Borealis, minus colour. I can conceive no resemblance more perfect. They stalked across the ceiling with the same kind of movement absolutely.
The three occasions when I have seen a really tragic expression upon a face were as follows:—
(1) When Mrs. Inglis in my room at Montreal heard my sausages frying, as she thought, too furiously in the kitchen, she left me hurriedly with a glance, and the folds of her dress as she swept out of the room were Niobean.
(2) Once at dinner I sat opposite a certain lady who had a tureen of soup before her and also a plate of the same to which she had just helped herself. There was meat in the soup and I suppose she got a bit she did not like; instead of leaving it, she swiftly, stealthily, picked it up from her plate when she thought no one was looking and, with an expression which Mrs. Siddons might have studied for a performance of Clytemnestra, popped it back into the tureen.
(3) There was an alarm of fire on an emigrant ship in mid-ocean when I was going to New Zealand and the women rushed aft with faces as in a Massacre of the Innocents.
On the Monte Generoso a lady who sat next me at the table-d’hôte was complaining of a man in the hotel. She said he was a nuisance because he practised on the violin. I excused him by saying that I supposed some one had warned him to fly from the wrath to come, meaning that he had conceptions of an ideal world and was trying to get into it. (I heard a man say something like this many years ago and it stuck by me.)
A man told me that at some Swiss hotel he had been speaking enthusiastically about the beauty of the scenery to a Frenchman who said to him:
“Aimez-vous donc les beautés de la nature? Pour moi je les abborre.”
Cavaliere Negri, at Casale-Monferrato, told me not long since that when he was a child, during the troubles of 1848 and 1849, the King was lunching with his (Cav. Negri’s) father who had provided the best possible luncheon in honour of his guest. The King said:
“I can eat no such luncheon in times like these—give me some garlic.”
The garlic being brought, he ate it along with a great hunch of bread, but would touch nothing else.
When I was at Faido in the Val Leventina last summer there was a lady there who remembered me in New Zealand; she had brought her children to Switzerland for their holiday; good people, all of them. They had friends coming to them, a certain canon and his sister, and there was a talk that the Bishop of Chichester might possibly come too. In course of time the canon and his sister came. At first the sister, who was put to sit next me at dinner, was below zero and her brother opposite was hardly less freezing; but as dinner wore on they thawed and, from regarding me as the monster which in the first instance they clearly did, began to see that I agreed with them in much more than they had thought possible. By and by they were reassured, became cordial and proved on acquaintance to be most kind and good. They soon saw that I liked them, and the canon let me take him where I chose. I took him to the place where the Woodsias grow and we found some splendid specimens. I took him to Mairengo and showed him the double chancel. Coming back he said I had promised to show him some Alternifolium. I stopped him and said:
“Here is some,” for there happened to be a bit in the wall by the side of the path.
This quite finished the conquest, and before long I was given to understand that the bishop really would come and we were to take him pretty near the Woodsias and not tell him, and he was to find them out for himself. I have no doubt that the bishop had meant coming with the canon, but then the canon had heard from the New Zealand lady that I was there, and this would not do at all for the bishop. Anyhow the canon had better exploit me by going first and seeing how bad I was. So the canon came, said I was all right and in a couple of days or so the bishop and his daughters arrived.
The bishop did not speak to me at dinner, but after dinner, in the salon, he made an advance in the matter of the newspaper and, I replying, he began a conversation which lasted the best part of an hour, and during which I trust I behaved discreetly. Then I bade him “Good-night” and left the room.
Next morning I saw him eating his breakfast and said “Good-morning” to him. He was quite ready to talk. We discussed the Woodsia Ilvensis and agreed that it was a mythical species. It was said in botany books to grow near Guildford. We dismissed this assertion. But he remarked that it was extraordinary in what odd places we sometimes do find plants; he knew a single plant of Asplenium Trichomanes which had no other within thirty miles of it; it was growing on a tombstone which had come from a long distance and from a Trichomanes country. It almost seemed as if the seeds and germs were always going about in the air and grew wherever they found a suitable environment. I said it was the same with our thoughts; the germs of all manner of thoughts and ideas are always floating about unperceived in our minds and it was astonishing sometimes in what strange places they found the soil which enabled them to take root and grow into perceived thought and action. The bishop looked up from his egg and said:
“That is a very striking remark,” and then he went on with his egg as though if I were going to talk like that he should not play any more.
Thinking I was not likely to do better than this, I retreated immediately and went away down to Claro where there was a confirmation and so on to Bellinzona.
In the morning I had asked the waitress how she liked the bishop.
“Oh! beaucoup, beaucoup,” she exclaimed, “et je trouve son nez vraiment noble.” [1886.]
I am confident that I have written the following note in one or other of the earlier of these volumes, but I have searched my precious indexes in vain to find it. No doubt as soon as I have retold the story I shall stumble upon it.
One day in the autumn of 1886 I walked up to Piora from Airolo, returning the same day. At Piora I met a very nice quiet man whose name I presently discovered, and who, I have since learned, is a well-known and most liberal employer of labour somewhere in the north of England. He told me that he had been induced to visit Piora by a book which had made a great impression upon him. He could not recollect its title, but it had made a great impression upon him; nor yet could he recollect the author’s name, but the book had made a great impression upon him; he could not remember even what else there was in the book; the only thing he knew was that it had made a great impression upon him.
This is a good example of what is called a residuary impression. Whether or no I told him that the book which had made such a great impression upon him was calledAlps and Sanctuaries(see Chap. VI), and that it had been written by the person he was addressing, I cannot tell. It would be very like me to have blurted it all out and given him to understand how fortunate he had been in meeting me; this would be so fatally like me that the chances are ten to one that I did it; but I have, thank Heaven, no recollection of sin in this respect, and have rather a strong impression that, for once in my life, I smiled to myself and said nothing.
After dinner I ordered a coffee; the landlord, who also had had his dinner, asked me to be good enough to defer it for another year and I assented. I then asked him which was the best inn at Segni. He replied that it did not matter, that when a man had quattrini one albergo was as good as another. I said, No; that more depended on what kind of blood was running about inside the albergatore than on how many quattrini the guest had in his pocket. He smiled and offered me a pinch of the most delicious snuff. His wife came and cleared the table, having done which she shed the water bottle over the floor to keep the dust down. I am sure she did it all to all the blessed gods that live in heaven, though she did not say so.
There was one at a country house in Sicily where I was staying. She had been lent to my host for change of air by his friend the marchese. She dined at table with us and we all liked her very much. She was extremely pretty and not less amiable than pretty. In order to reach the dining-room we had to go through her bedroom as also through my host’s. When the monsignore came, she dined with us just the same, and the old priest evidently did not mind at all. In Sicily they do not bring the scent of the incense across the dining-room table. And one would hardly expect the attempt to be made by people who use the oath “Santo Diavolo.”
At Siena last spring, prowling round outside the cathedral, we saw an English ecclesiastic in a stringed, sub-shovel hat. He had a young lady with him, presumably a daughter or niece. He eyed us with much the same incurious curiosity as that with which we eyed him. We passed them and went inside the duomo. How far less impressive is the interior (indeed I had almost said also the exterior) than that of San Domenico! Nothing palls so soon as over-ornamentation.
A few minutes afterwards my Lord and the young lady came in too. It was Sunday and mass was being celebrated. The pair passed us and, when they reached the fringe of the kneeling folk, the bishop knelt down too on the bare floor, kneeling bolt upright from the knees, a few feet in front of where we stood. We saw him and I am sure he knew we were looking at him. The lady seemed to hesitate but, after a minute or so, she knuckled down by his side and we left them kneeling bolt upright from the knees on the hard floor.
I always cross myself and genuflect when I go into a Roman Catholic church, as a mark of respect, but Jones and Gogin say that any one can see I am not an old hand at it. How rudimentary is the action of an old priest! I saw one once at Venice in the dining-room of the Hotel la Luna who crossed himself by a rapid motion of his fork just before he began to eat, and Miss Bertha Thomas told me she saw an Italian lady at Varallo at the table-d’hôte cross herself with her fan. I do not cross myself before eating nor do I think it incumbent upon me to kneel down on the hard floor in church—perhaps because I am not an English bishop. We were sorry for this one and for his young lady, but it was their own doing.
We then went into the Libreria to see the frescoes by Pinturicchio—which we did not like—and spent some little time in attending to them. On leaving we were told to sign our names in a book and did so. As we were going out we met the bishop and his lady coming in; whether they had been kneeling all the time, or whether they had got up as soon we were gone and had spent the time in looking round I cannot say, but, when they had seen the frescoes, they would be told to sign their names and, when they signed, they would see ours and, I flatter myself, know who we were.
On returning to our hotel we were able to collect enough information to settle in our own minds which particular bishop he was.
A day or two later we went to Poggibonsi, which must have been an important place once; nothing but the walls remain now, the city within them having been razed by Charles V. At the station we took a carriage, and our driver, Ulisse Pogni, was a delightful person, second baritone at the Poggibonsi Opera and principal fly-owner of the town. He drove us up to S. Gimignano and told us that the people still hold the figures in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes to be portraits of themselves and say: “That’s me,” and “That’s so and so.”
Of course we went to see the frescoes, and as we were coming down the main street, from the Piazza on which the Municipio stands, who should be mounting the incline but our bishop and his lady. The moment he saw us, he looked cross, stood still and began inspecting the tops of the houses on the other side of the street; so also did the lady. There was nothing of the smallest interest in these and we neither of us had the smallest doubt that he was embarrassed at meeting us and was pretending not to notice us. I have seldom seen any like attempt more clumsily and fatuously done. Whether he was saying to himself, “Good Lord! that wretch will be putting my kneeling down into anotherAlps and SanctuariesorEx Voto”; or whether it was only that we were a couple of blackguard atheists who contaminated the air all round us, I cannot tell; but on venturing to look back a second or two after we had passed them, the bishop and the lady had got a considerable distance away.
As we returned our driver took us about 4 kilometres outside Poggibonsi to San Lucchese, a church of the 12th or 13th century, greatly decayed, but still very beautiful and containing a few naïf frescoes. He told us he had sung the Sanctus here at the festa on the preceding Sunday. In a room adjoining the church, formerly, we were told, a refectory, there is a very good fresco representing the “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” by Gerino da Pistoja (I think, but one forgets these names at once unless one writes them down then and there). It is dated—I think (again!)—about 1509, betrays the influence of Perugino but is more lively and interesting than anything I know by that painter, for I cannot call him master. It is in good preservation and deserves to be better, though perhaps not very much better, known than it is. Our driver pointed out that the baskets in which the fishes are being collected are portraits of the baskets still in use in the neighbourhood.
After we had returned to London we found, in the Royal Academy Exhibition, a portrait of our bishop which, though not good, was quite good enough to assure us that we had not been mistaken as to his diocese.
As regards the way in which the Etruscan artists kept to a few stock subjects, this has been so in all times and countries.
When Christianity convulsed the world and displaced the older mythology, she did but introduce new subjects of her own, to which her artists kept as closely as their pagan ancestors had kept to their heathen gods and goddesses. We now make believe to have freed ourselves from these trammels, but the departure is more apparent than real. Our works of art fall into a few well-marked groups and the pictures of each group, though differing in detail, present the same general characters. We have, however, broken much new ground, whereas until the last three or four hundred years it almost seems either as if artists had thought subject a detail beneath their notice, or publics had insisted on being told only what they knew already.
The principle of living only to see and to hear some new thing, and the other principle of avoiding everything with which we are not perfectly familiar are equally old, equally universal, equally useful. They are the principles of conservation and accumulation on the one hand, and of adventure, speculation and progress on the other, each equally indispensable. The money has been, and will probably always be more persistently in the hands of the first of these two groups. But, after all, is not money an art? Nay, is it not the most difficult on earth and the parent of all? And if life is short and art long, is not money still longer? And are not works of art, for the most part, more or less works of money also? In so far as a work of art is a work of money, it must not complain of being bound by the laws of money; in so far as it is a work of art, it has nothing to do with money and, again, cannot complain.
It is a great help to the spectator to know the subject of a picture and not to be bothered with having to find out all about the story. Subjects should be such as either tell their own story instantly on the face of them, or things with which all spectators may be supposed familiar. It must not be forgotten that a work exposed to public view is addressed to a great many people and should accordingly consider many people rather than one. I saw an English family not long since looking at a fine collection of the coins of all nations. They hardly pretended even to take a languid interest in the French, German, Dutch and Italian coins, but brightened up at once on being shown a shilling, a florin and a half-crown. So children do not want new stories; they look for old ones.
“Mamma dear, will you please tell us the story of ‘The Three Bears’?”
“No, my love, not to-day, I have told it you very often lately and I am busy.”
“Very well, Mamma dear, then we will tell you the story of ‘The Three Bears.’”
TheIliadand theOdysseyare only “The Three Bears” upon a larger scale. Just as the life of a man is only the fission of two amœbas on a larger scale.Cui non dictus Hylas puer et Latonia Delos? That was no argument against telling it again, but rather for repeating it. So people look out in the newspapers for what they know rather than for what they do not know, and the better they know it the more interested they are to see it in print and, as a general rule, unless they get what they expect—or think they know already—they are angry. This tendency of our nature culminates in the well-known lines repeated for ever and ever:
The battle of the NileI was there all the while;I was there all the whileAt the battle of the Nile.The battle of . . .
And so on ad lib. Even this will please very young children. As they grow older they want to hear about nothing but “The Three Bears.” As they mature still further they want the greater invention and freer play of fancy manifested by such people as Homer and our west-end upholsterers, beyond which there is no liberty, but only eccentricity and extravagance.
So it is with all fashion. Fashions change, but not radically except after convulsion and, even then, the change is more apparent than real, the older fashions continually coming back as new ones.
So it is not only as regards choice of subject but also as regards treatment of subject within the limits of the work itself, after the subject is chosen. No matter whether the utterance of a man’s inner mind is attempted by way of words, painting, or music, the same principle underlies all these three arts and, of course, also those arts that are akin to them. In each case a man should have but one subject easily recognisable as the main motive, and in each case he must develop, treat and illustrate this by means of episodes and details that are neither so alien to the subject as to appear lugged in by the heels, nor yet so germane to it as to be identical. The treatment grows out of the subject as the family from the parents and the race from the family—each new-born member being the same and yet not the same with those that have preceded him. So it is with all the arts and all the sciences—they flourish best by the addition of but little new at a time in comparison with the old.
And so, lastly, it is with thears artiumitself, that art of arts and science of sciences, that guild of arts and crafts which is comprised within each one of us, I mean our bodies. In the detail they are nourished from day to day by food which must not be too alien from past food or from the body itself, nor yet too germane to either; and in the gross, that is to say, in the history of the development of a race or species, the evolution is admittedly for the most part exceedingly gradual, by means of many generations, as it were, of episodes that are kindred to and yet not identical with the subject.
And when we come to think of it, we find in the evolution of bodily form (which along with modification involves persistence of type) the explanation why persistence of type in subjects chosen for treatment in works of art should be so universal. It is because we are so averse to great changes and at the same time so averse to no change at all, that we have a bodily form, in the main, persistent and yet, at the same time, capable of modifications. Without a strong aversion to change its habits and, with its habits, the pabulum of its mind, there would be no fixity of type in any species and, indeed, there would be no life at all, as we are accustomed to think of life, for organs would disappear before they could be developed, and to try to build life on such a shifting foundation would be as hopeless as it would be to try and build a material building on an actual quicksand. Hence the habits, cries, abodes, food, hopes and fears of each species (and what are these but the realities of which human arts are as the shadow?) tell the same old tales in the same old ways from generation to generation, and it is only because they do so that they appear to us as species at all.
Returning now to the Etruscan cinerary urns—I have no doubt that, perhaps three or four thousand years hence, a collection of the tombstones from some of our suburban cemeteries will be thought exceedingly interesting, but I confess to having found the urns in the Museum at Volterra a little monotonous and, after looking at about three urns, I hurried over the remaining 397 as fast as I could. [1889.]
The walls of the houses [in an Italian village] are built of brick and the roofs are covered with stone. They call the stone “vivo.” It is as though they thought bricks were like veal or mutton and stones like bits out of the living calf or sheep.[279]
When the water of a place is bad, it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.
Giacomo Bertoli of Varallo-Sesia keeps a watch and clock shop in the street. He is a cheery little old gentleman, though I do not see why I should call him old for I doubt his being so old as I am. He and I have been very good friends for years and he is always among the first to welcome me when I go to Varallo.
He is one of the most famous bee-masters in Europe. He keeps some of his bees during the winter at Camasco not very far from Varallo, others in other places near and moves them up to Alagna, at the head of the Val Sesia, towards the end of May that they may make their honey from the spring flowers—and excellent honey they make.
About a fortnight ago I happened to meet him bringing down ten of his hives. He was walking in front and was immediately followed by two women each with crates on their backs, and each carrying five hives. They seemed to me to be ordinary deal boxes, open at the top, but covered over with gauze which would keep the bees in but not exclude air. I asked him if the bees minded the journey, and he replied that they were very angry and had a great deal to say about it; he was sure to be stung when he let them out. He said it was “un lavoro improbo,” and cost him a great deal of anxiety.
It should be “The Lost Progression,” for the young lady was mistaken in supposing she had ever heard any single chord “like the sound of a great Amen.” Unless we are to suppose that she had already found the chord of C Major for the final syllable of the word and was seeking the chord for the first syllable; and there she is on the walls of a Milanese restaurant arpeggioing experimental harmonies in a transport of delight to advertise Somebody and Someone’s pianos and holding the loud pedal solidly down all the time. Her family had always been unsympathetic about her music. They said it was like a loose bundle of fire-wood which you never can get across the room without dropping sticks; they said she would have been so much better employed doing anything else.
Fancy being in the room with her while she was strumming about and hunting after her chord! Fancy being in heaven with her when she had found it!
I have brought back this year some mountain auriculas and the seed of some salvia and Fusio tiger-lily, and mean to plant the auriculas and to sow the seeds in Epping Forest and elsewhere round about London. I wish people would more generally bring back the seeds of pleasing foreign plants and introduce them broadcast, sowing them by our waysides and in our fields, or in whatever situation is most likely to suit them. It is true, this would puzzle botanists, but there is no reason why botanists should not be puzzled. A botanist is a person whose aim is to uproot, kill and exterminate every plant that is at all remarkable for rarity or any special virtue, and the rarer it is the more bitterly he will hunt it down.
Sano di Pietro shows us a heartless practical joke played by these two very naughty saints, both medical men, who should be uncanonised immediately. It seems they laid their heads together and for some reason, best known to themselves, resolved to cut a leg off a dead negro and put it on to a white man. In the one compartment they are seen in high glee cutting the negro’s leg off. In the next they have gone to the white man who is in bed, obviously asleep, and are substituting the black leg for his own. Then, no doubt, they will stand behind the door and see what he does when he wakes. They must be saints because they have glories on, but it looks as though a glory is not much more to be relied on than a gig as a test of respectability. [1889.]
At Pienza, after having seen the Museum with a custode whom I photoed as being more like death, though in excellent health and spirits, than any one I ever saw, I was taken to the leading college for young ladies, the Conservatorio di S. Carlo, under the direction of Signora (or Signorina, I do not know which) Cesira Carletti, to see the wonderful Viale of the twelfth or thirteenth century given to Pienza by Pope Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II) and stolen a few years since, but recovered. Signora Carletti was copying parts of it in needlework, nor can I think that the original was ever better than the parts which she had already done. The work would take weeks or even months to examine with any fullness, and volumes to describe. It is as prodigal of labour, design and colour as nature herself is. In fact it is one of those things that nature has a right to do but not art. It fatigues one to look at it or think upon it and, bathos though it be to say so, it won the first prize at the Exhibitions of Ecclesiastical Art Work held a few years ago at Rome and at Siena. It has taken Signora Carletti months to do even the little she has done, but that little must be seen to be believed, for no words can do justice to it.
Having seen the Viale, I was shown round the whole establishment, and can imagine nothing better ordered. I was taken over the dormitories—very nice and comfortable—and, finally, not without being much abashed, into the room where the young ladies were engaged upon needlework. It reminded me of nothing so much as of the Education of the Virgin Chapel at Oropa.[282]I was taken to each young lady and did my best to acquit myself properly in praising her beautiful work but, beautiful as the work of one and all was, it could not compare with that of Signora Carletti. I asked her if she could not get some of the young ladies to help her in the less important parts of her work, but she said she preferred doing it all herself. They all looked well and happy and as though they were well cared for, as I am sure they are.
Then Signora Carletti took me to the top of the house to show me the meteorological room of which she is superintendent, and which is in connection with the main meteorological observatory at Rome. Again I found everything in admirable order, and left the house not a little pleased and impressed with everything I had seen. [1889.]
The following extract is taken from a memorandum Butler made of a visit he paid to Greece and the Troad in the spring of1895.In theIliad (xxii.145)Homer mentions hot and cold springs where the Trojan women used to wash their clothes.There are no such springs near Hissarlik,where they ought to be,but the American Consul at the Dardanelles told Butler there was something of the kind on Mount Ida,at the sources of the Scamander,and he determined to see them after visiting Hissarlik.He was provided with an interpreter,Yakoub,an attendant,Ahmed,an escort of one soldier and a horse.He went first to the Consul’s farm at Thymbra,about five miles from Hissarlik,where he spent the night and found it“all very like a first-class New Zealand sheep-station.”The next day he went to Hissarlik and saw no reason for disagreeing with the received opinion that it is the site of Troy.He then proceeded to Bunarbashi and so to Bairemitch,passing on the way a saw-mill where there was a Government official with twenty soldiers under him.This official was much interested in the traveller and directed his men to take carpets and a dish of trout,caught that morning in the Scamander,and carry them up to the hot and cold springs while he himself accompanied Butler.So they set off and the official,Ismail,showed him the way and pointed out the springs,and there is a long note about the hot and cold water.
And now let me return to Ismail Gusbashi, the excellent Turkish official who, by the way, was with me during all my examination of the springs, and whose assurances of their twofold temperature I should have found it impossible to doubt, even though I had not caught one warmer cupful myself. His men, while we were at the springs, had spread a large Turkey carpet on the flower-bespangled grass under the trees, and there were three smaller rugs at three of the corners. On these Ismail and Yakoub and I took our places. The other two were cross-legged, but I reclining anyhow. The sun shimmered through the spring foliage. I saw two hoopoes and many beautiful birds whose names I knew not. Through the trees I could see the snow-fields of Ida far above me, but it was hopeless to think of reaching them. The soldiers and Ahmed cooked the trout and the eggs all together; then we had boiled eggs, bread and cheese and, of course, more lamb’s liver done on skewers like cats’ meat. I ate with my pocket-knife, the others using their fingers in true Homeric fashion.
When we had put from us “the desire of meat and drink,” Ismail began to talk to me. He said he had now for the first time in his life found himself in familiar conversation with Wisdom from the West (that was me), and that, as he greatly doubted whether such another opportunity would be ever vouchsafed to him, he should wish to consult me upon a matter which had greatly exercised him. He was now fifty years old and had never married. Sometimes he thought he had done a wise thing, and sometimes it seemed to him that he had been very foolish. Would I kindly tell him which it was and advise him as to the future? I said he was addressing one who was in much the same condition as himself, only that I was some ten years older. We had a saying in England that if a man marries he will regret it, and that if he does not marry he will regret it.
“Ah!” said Ismail, who was leaning towards me and trying to catch every word I spoke, though he could not understand a syllable till Yakoub interpreted my Italian into Turkish. “Ah!” he said, “that is a true word.”
In my younger days, I said (may Heaven forgive me!), I had been passionately in love with a most beautiful young lady, but—and here my voice faltered, and I looked very sad, waiting for Yakoub to interpret what I had said—but it had been the will of Allah that she should marry another gentleman, and this had broken my heart for many years. After a time, however, I concluded that these things were all settled for us by a higher Power.
“Ah! that is a true word.”
“And so, my dear sir, in your case I should reflect that if Allah” (and I raised my hand to Heaven) “had desired your being married, he would have signified his will to you in some way that you could hardly mistake. As he does not appear to have done so, I should recommend you to remain single until you receive some distinct intimation that you are to marry.”
“Ah! that is a true word.”
“Besides,” I continued, “suppose you marry a woman with whom you think you are in love and then find out, after you have been married to her for three months, that you do not like her. This would be a very painful situation.”
“Ah, yes, indeed! that is a true word.”
“And if you had children who were good and dutiful, it would be delightful; but suppose they turned out disobedient and ungrateful—and I have known many such cases—could anything be more distressing to a parent in his declining years?”
“Ah! that is a true word that you have spoken.”
“We have a great Imaum,” I continued, “in England; he is called the Archbishop of Canterbury and gives answers to people who are in any kind of doubt or difficulty. I knew one gentleman who asked his advice upon the very question that you have done me the honour of propounding to myself.”
“Ah! and what was his answer?”
“He told him,” said I, “that it was cheaper to buy the milk than to keep a cow.”
“Ah! ah! that is a most true word.”
Here I closed the conversation, and we began packing up to make a start. When we were about to mount, I said to him, hat in hand:
“Sir, it occurs to me with great sadness that, though you will, no doubt, often revisit this lovely spot, yet it is most certain that I shall never do so. Promise me that when you come here you will sometimes think of the stupid old Englishman who has had the pleasure of lunching with you to-day, and I promise that I will often think of you when I am at home again in London.”
He was much touched, and we started. After we had gone about a mile, I suddenly missed my knife. I knew I should want it badly many a time before we got to the Dardanelles, and I knew perfectly well where I should find it: so I stopped the cavalcade and said I must ride back for it. I did so, found it immediately and returned. Then I said to Ismail:
“Sir, I understand now why I was led to leave my knife behind me. I had said it was certain I should never see that enchanting spot again, but I spoke presumptuously, forgetting that if Allah” (and I raised my hand to Heaven) “willed it I should assuredly do so. I am corrected, and with great leniency.”
Ismail was much affected. The good fellow immediately took off his watch-chain (happily of brass and of no intrinsic value) and gave it me, assuring me that it was given him by a very dear friend, that he had worn it for many years, and valued it greatly—would I keep it as a memorial of himself? Fortunately I had with me a little silver match-box which Alfred had given me and which had my name engraved on it. I gave it to him, but had some difficulty in making him accept it. Then we rode on till we came to the saw-mills. I ordered two lambs for the ten soldiers who had accompanied us, having understood from Yakoub that this would be an acceptable present. And so I parted from this most kind and friendly gentleman with every warm expression of cordiality on both sides.
I sent him his photograph which I had taken, and I sent his soldiers their groups also—one for each man—and in due course I received the following letter of thanks. Alas! I have never written in answer. I knew not how to do it. I knew, however, that I could not keep up a correspondence, even though I wrote once. But few unanswered letters more often rise up and smite me. How the Post Office people ever read “Bueter, Ciforzin St.” into “Butler, Clifford’s Inn” I cannot tell. What splendid emendators of a corrupt text they ought to make! But I could almost wish that they had failed, for it has pained me not a little that I have not replied.
Mr. Samuel Bueter,No. 15 Ciforzin St. London, England.
Dardanelles,August 4/95.
Mr. Samuel. England.
My dear Friend,
Many thanks for the phothograph you have send me. It was very kind of you to think of me to send me this token of your remembrance. I certainly, appreciate it, and shall think of you whenever I look at it. Ah My Dear Brother, it is impossible for me to forget you. under favorable circumstance I confess I must prefer you. I have a grate desire to have the beautifull chance to meet you. Ah then with the tears of gladness to be the result of the great love of our friendness A my Sir what pen can describe the meeting that shall be come with your second visit if it please God.
It is my pray to Our Lord God to protect you and to keep you glad and happy for ever.
Though we are far from each other yet we can speak with letters.
Thank God to have your love of friendness with me and mine with your noble person.
Hopeing to hear from you,
Yours truly,
Ismayel, fromByramich hizar memuerue iuse bashi.
Apologisefor the names inErewhon. I was an unpractised writer and had no idea the names could matter so much.
Give a map showing the geography of Erewhon in so far as the entrance into the country goes, and explain somewhere, if possible, about Butler’s stones.
Up as far as the top of the pass, where the statues are, keeps to the actual geography of the upper Rangitata district except that I have doubled the gorge. There was no gorge up above my place [Mesopotamia] and I wanted one, so I took the gorge some 10 or a dozen miles lower down and repeated it and then came upon my own country again, but made it bare of grass and useless instead of (as it actually was) excellent country. Baker and I went up the last saddle we tried and thought it was a pass to the West Coast, but found it looked down on to the headwaters of the Rakaia: however we saw a true pass opposite, just as I have described inErewhon, only that there were no clouds and we never went straight down as I said I did, but took two days going round by Lake Heron. And there is no lake at the top of the true pass. This is the pass over which, in consequence of our report, Whitcombe was sent and got drowned on the other side. We went up to the top of the pass but found it too rough to go down without more help than we had. I rather think I have told this inA First Year in Canterbury Settlement, but am so much ashamed of that book that I dare not look to see. I don’t mean to say that the later books are much better; still they are better.
They show a lot of stones on the Hokitika pass, so Mr. Slade told me, which they call mine and say I intended them inErewhon[for the statues]. I never saw them and knew nothing about them.
Refer to the agony and settled melancholy with which unborn children in the womb regard birth as the extinction of their being, and how some declare that there is a world beyond the womb and others deny this. “We must all one day be born,” “Birth is certain” and so on, just as we say of death. Birth involves with it an original sin. It must be sin, for the wages of sin is death (what else, I should like to know, is the wages of virtue?) and assuredly the wages of birth is death.
They consider “wilful procreation,” as they call it, much as we do murder and will not allow it to be a moral ailment at all. Sometimes a jury will recommend to mercy and sometimes they bring in a verdict of “justifiable baby-getting,” but they treat these cases as a rule with great severity.
Every baby has a month of heaven and a month of hell before birth, so that it may make its choice with its eyes open.
The hour of birth should be prayed for in the litany as well as that of death, and so it would be if we could remember the agony of horror which, no doubt, we felt at birth—surpassing, no doubt, the utmost agony of apprehension that can be felt on death.
Let automata increase in variety and ingenuity till at last they present so many of the phenomena of life that the religious world declares they were designed and created by God as an independent species. The scientific world, on the other hand, denies that there is any design in connection with them, and holds that if any slight variation happened to arise by which a fortuitous combination of atoms occurred which was more suitable for advertising purposes (the automata were chiefly used for advertising) it was seized upon and preserved by natural selection.
They have schools where they teach the arts of forgetting and of not seeing. Young ladies are taught the art of proposing. Lists of successful matches are advertised with the prospectuses of all the girls’ schools.
They have professors of all the languages of the principal beasts and birds. I stayed with the Professor of Feline Languages who had invented a kind of Ollendorffian system for teaching the Art of Polite Conversation among cats.
They have an art-class in which the first thing insisted on is that the pupils should know the price of all the leading modern pictures that have been sold during the last twenty years at Christie’s, and the fluctuations in their values. Give an examination paper on this subject. The artist being a picture-dealer, the first thing he must do is to know how to sell his pictures, and therefore how to adapt them to the market. What is the use of being able to paint a picture unless one can sell it when one has painted it?
Add that the secret of the success of modern French art lies in its recognition of values.
Let there be monks who have taken vows of modest competency (about £1000 a year, derived from consols), who spurn popularity as medieval monks spurned money—and with about as much sincerity. Their great object is to try and find out what they like and then get it. They do not live in one building, and there are no vows of celibacy, but, in practice, when any member marries he drifts away from the society. They have no profession of faith or articles of association, but, as they who hunted for the Holy Grail, so do these hunt in all things, whether of art or science, for that which commends itself to them as comfortable and worthy to be accepted. Their liberty of thought and speech and their reasonable enjoyment of the good things of this life are what they alone live for.
Let the Erewhonians have Westminster Abbeys of the first, second and third class, and in one of these let them raise monuments to dead theories which were once celebrated.
Let them study those arts whereby the opinions of a minority may be made to seem those of a majority.
Introduce an Erewhonian sermon to the effect that if people are wicked they may perhaps have to go to heaven when they die.
Let them have a Regius Professor of Studied Ambiguity.
Let the Professor of Worldly Wisdom pluck a man for want of sufficient vagueness in his saving-clauses paper.
Another poor fellow may be floored for having written an article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use of the words “patiently” and “carefully,” and for having shown too obvious signs of thinking for himself.
Let them attach disgrace to any who do not rapidly become obscure after death.
Let them have a Professor of Mischief. They found that people always did harm when they meant well and that all the professorships founded with an avowedly laudable object failed, so they aim at mischief in the hope that they may miss the mark here as when they aimed at what they thought advantageous.
The Professor of Worldly Wisdom plucked a man for buying an egg that had a date stamped upon it. And another for being too often and too seriously in the right. And another for telling people what they did not want to know. He plucked several for insufficient mistrust in printed matter. It appeared that the Professor had written an article teeming with plausible blunders, and had had it inserted in a leading weekly. He then set his paper so that the men were sure to tumble into these blunders themselves; then he plucked them. This occasioned a good deal of comment at the time.
One man who entered for the Chancellor’s medal declined to answer any of the questions set. He said he saw they were intended more to show off the ingenuity of the examiner than either to assist or test the judgment of the examined. He observed, moreover, that the view taken of his answers would in great measure depend upon what the examiner had had for dinner and, since it was not in his power to control this, he was not going to waste time where the result was, at best, so much a matter of chance. Briefly, his view of life was that the longer you lived and the less you thought or talked about it the better. He should go pretty straight in the main himself because it saved trouble on the whole, and he should be guided mainly by a sense of humour in deciding when to deviate from the path of technical honesty, and he would take care that his errors, if any, should be rather on the side of excess than of asceticism
This man won the Chancellor’s medal.
They have a review class in which the pupils are taught not to mind what is written in newspapers. As a natural result they grow up more keenly sensitive than ever.
Round the margin of the newspapers sentences are printed cautioning the readers against believing the criticisms they see, inasmuch as personal motives will underlie the greater number.
They defend the universities and academic bodies on the ground that, but for them, good work would be so universal that the world would become clogged with masterpieces to an extent that would reduce it to an absurdity. Good sense would rule over all, and merely smart or clever people would be unable to earn a living.
They assume that truth is best got at by the falling out of thieves. “Well then, there must be thieves, or how can they fall out? Our business is to produce the raw material from which truth may be elicited.”
“And you succeed, sir,” I replied, “in a way that is beyond all praise, and it seems as though there would be no limit to the supply of truth that ought to be available. But, considering the number of your thieves, they show less alacrity in flying at each other’s throats than might have been expected.”
They live their lives backwards, beginning, as old men and women, with little more knowledge of the past than we have of the future, and foreseeing the future about as clearly as we see the past, winding up by entering into the womb as though being buried. But delicacy forbids me to pursue this subject further: the upshot is that it comes to much the same thing, provided one is used to it.
Paying debts is a luxury which we cannot all of us afford.
“It is not every one, my dear, who can reach such a counsel of perfection as murder.”
There was no more space for the chronicles and, what was worse, there was no more space in which anything could happen at all, the whole land had become one vast cancerous growth of chronicles, chronicles, chronicles, nothing but chronicles.
The catalogue of the Browne medals alone will in time come to occupy several hundreds of pages in theUniversity Calendar.
There was a professor who was looked upon as such a valuable man because he had done more than any other living person to suppress any kind of originality.
“It is not our business,” he used to say, “to help students to think for themselves—surely this is the very last thing that one who wishes them well would do by them. Our business to make them think as we do, or at any rate as we consider expedient to say we do.”
He was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge and for the Complete Obliteration of the Past.
They have professional mind-dressers, as we have hair-dressers, and before going out to dinner or fashionable At-homes, people go and get themselves primed with smart sayings or moral reflections according to the style which they think will be most becoming to them in the kind of company they expect.
They deify as God something which I can only translate by a word as underivable as God—I mean Gumption. But it is part of their religion that there should be no temple to Gumption, nor are there priests or professors of Gumption—Gumption being too ineffable to hit the sense of human definition and analysis.
They hold that the function of universities is to make learning repellent and thus to prevent its becoming dangerously common. And they discharge this beneficent function all the more efficiently because they do it unconsciously and automatically. The professors think they are advancing healthy intellectual assimilation and digestion when they are in reality little better than cancer on the stomach.
Let them be afflicted by an epidemic of the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease. Enumerate its symptoms. There is a new discovery whereby the invisible rays that emanate from the soul can be caught and all the details of a man’s spiritual nature, his character, disposition, principles, &c. be photographed on a plate as easily as his face or the bones of his hands, but no cure for the f. o. g. th. a. disease has yet been discovered.
They have a company for ameliorating the condition of those who are in a future state, and for improving the future state itself.
People are buried alive for a week before they are married so that their offspring may know something about the grave, of which, otherwise, heredity could teach it nothing.
It has long been held that those constitutions are best which promote most effectually the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Now the greatest number are none too wise and none too honest, and to arrange our systems with a view to the greater happiness of sensible straightforward people—indeed to give these people a chance at all if it can be avoided—is to interfere with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Dull, slovenly and arrogant people do not like those who are quick, painstaking and unassuming; how can we then consistently with the first principles of either morality or political economy encourage such people when we can bring sincerity and modesty fairly home to them?
Much we have to tolerate, partly because we cannot always discover in time who are really insincere and who are only masking sincerity under a garb of flippancy, and partly also because we wish to err on the side of letting the guilty escape rather than of punishing the innocent. Thus many people who are perfectly well known to belong to the straightforward class are allowed to remain at large and may even be seen hobnobbing and on the best of possible terms with the guardians of public immorality. We all feel, as indeed has been said in other nations, that the poor abuses of the time want countenance, and this moreover in the interests of the uses themselves, for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity acts as a wholesome stimulant and irritant to the prevailing spirit of academicism; moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or indeed even thinking, anything that shall not be to their immediate and palpable advantage with the greatest number.
It is a point of good breeding with the Erewhonians to keep their opinions as far as possible in the background in all cases where controversy is even remotely possible, that is to say whenever conversation gets beyond the discussion of the weather. It is found necessary, however, to recognise some means of ventilating points on which differences of opinion may exist, and the convention adopted is that whenever a man finds occasion to speak strongly he should express himself by dwelling as forcibly as he can on the views most opposed to his own; even this, however, is tolerated rather than approved, for it is counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding not to express, and much more not even to have a definite opinion upon any subject whatsoever.
Thus their “yea” is “nay” and their “nay,” “yea,” but it comes to the same thing in the end, for it does not matter whether “yea” is called “yea” or “nay” so long as it is understood as “yea.” They go a long way round only to find themselves at the point from which they started, but there is no accounting for tastes. With us such tactics are inconceivable, but so far do the Erewhonians carry them that it is common for them to write whole reviews and articles between the lines of which a practised reader will detect a sense exactly contrary to that ostensibly put forward; nor is a man held to be more than a tyro in the arts of polite society unless he instinctively suspects a hidden sense in every proposition that meets him. I was more than once misled by these plover-like tactics, and on one occasion was near getting into a serious scrape. It happened thus:—
A man of venerable aspect was maintaining that pain was a sad thing and should not be permitted under any circumstances. People ought not even to be allowed to suffer for the consequences of their own folly, and should be punished for it severely if they did. If they could only be kept from making fools of themselves by the loss of freedom or, if necessary, by some polite and painless method of extinction—which meant hanging—then they ought to be extinguished. If permanent improvement can only be won through ages of mistake and suffering, which must be all begunde novofor every fresh improvement, let us be content to forego improvement, and let those who suffer their lawless thoughts to stray in this direction be improved from off the face of the earth as fast as possible. No remedy can be too drastic for such a disease as the pain felt by another person. We find we can generally bear the pain ourselves when we have to do so, but it is intolerable that we should know it is being borne by any one else. The mere sight of pain unfits people for ordinary life, the wear and tear of which would be very much reduced if we would be at any trouble to restrain the present almost unbounded licence in the matter of suffering—a licence that people take advantage of to make themselves as miserable as they please, without so much as a thought for the feelings of others. Hence, he maintained, the practice of putting dupes in the same category as the physically diseased or the unlucky was founded on the eternal and inherent nature of things, and could no more be interfered with than the revolution of the earth on its axis.
He said a good deal more to the same effect, and I was beginning to wonder how much longer he would think it necessary to insist on what was so obvious, when his hearers began to differ from him. One dilated on the correlation between pain and pleasure which ensured that neither could be extinguished without the extinguishing along with it of the other. Another said that throughout the animal and vegetable worlds there was found what might be counted as a system of rewards and punishments; this, he contended, must cease to exist (and hence virtue must cease) if the pain attaching to misconduct were less notoriously advertised. Another maintained that the horror so freely expressed by many at the sight of pain was as much selfish as not—and so on.
Let Erewhon be revisited by the son of the original writer—let him hint that his father used to write the advertisements for Mother Seigel’s Syrup. He gradually worked his way up to this from being a mere writer of penny tracts. [Dec. 1896.]
On reaching the country he finds that divine honours are being paid him, churches erected to him, and a copious mythology daily swelling, with accounts of the miracles he had worked and all his sayings and doings. If any child got hurt he used to kiss the place and it would get well at once.