Chapter 10

“Whatever brawls disturb the home,Let peace be in the street.”

“Whatever brawls disturb the home,

Let peace be in the street.”

The Club is the shelter of henpecked man; a friend’s house, or Marshall and Snellgrove’s, the refuge of a cockpecked woman. On the stormiest domestic debate, the advent of a visitor intervenes, throwing temporary oil on the waters, and compelling the belligerents to put off their quarrels and put on their smiles; and, when the unconscious peacemaker has departed, it is often found difficult, if not impossible, to take up the squabble just where it was left off. But there is no such luck for cross-grained people in country houses. Humboldt’s “Cosmos” contains several references to certain observations made by two gentlemen who passed a winter together on the inhospitablenorthern shores of Asia, and one of whom bore the alarming name of Wrangle. It is difficult to imagine any trial more severe than that of spending the six dark months of the year with Wrangle on the Siberian coast of the Polar Sea. But this is a mere fancy sketch, whereas hundreds of unlucky English men and women spend their winters every year in country houses, limited, practically, to the society of a Mr. or a Mrs. Wrangle who makes life a burden by everlasting fault-finding, squabbling, worry, suspicion, jar, and jolt. As regards children or dependent people or the wives of despotic husbands, the case is often worse than this. By a terrible law of our nature, an unkindness, harshness, or injustice done once to any one has a frightful tendency to produce hatred of the victim (I have elsewhere called the passionheteropathy) and a restlessness to heap wrong on wrong, and accusation upon accusation, to justify the first fault. Woe to the hapless stepchild or orphan nephew or penniless cousin, or helpless and aged mother-in-law, who falls under this terrible destiny in a country house where there are few eyes to witness the cruelty and no tongue bold enough to denounce it! The misery endured by such beings, the poor young souls which wither under the blight of the perpetualunmerited blame, and the older sufferers mortified and humiliated in their age, must be quite indescribable. Perhaps by no human act can truer charity be done than by resolutely affording moral support, if we can do no more, to such butts and victims; and, if it be possible, to take them altogether away out of their ill-omened conditions, and “deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary.” It is astonishing how much may be done by very humble spectators to put a check to evils like these, even by merely showing their own surprise and distress in witnessing them; and, on the contrary, how deplorably ready are nine people out of ten to fall in with the established prejudices and unkindnesses of every house they enter.

Very little of this kind of thing goes on in towns. People are too busy about their own affairs and pleasures, and their feelings of all kinds are too much diffused among the innumerable men and women with whom they come in contact, to permit of concentrated dislike settling down on any inmate of their homes in the thick cloud it is apt to do in the country.

Here we touch, indeed, on one great secret of the difference of Town and Country life.All sentiments, amiable and unamiable, are more are less dissipated in town, and concentrated and deepened in the country. Even a very trifling annoyance, an arrangement of hours of meals too late or too early for our health, a smoky chimney, a bad coachman, a door below stairs perpetually banged, assumes a degree of importance when multiplied by the infinite number of times we expect to endure it in the limitless monotony of country life. Our nerves become in advance irritated by all we expect to go through in the future, and the consequence is that a degree of heat enters into family disputes about such matters which greatly amazes the parties concerned to remember when the wear and tear of travel or of town life have made the whole mode of existence in a country home seem a placid stream, with scarcely a pebble to stir a ripple.

And now, at last, let us begin to seek out wherein lie the more hidden delights of the country life; the violets under the hedge which sweeten all the air, but remain half-unobserved even by those who would fain gather up the flowers. We return in thought to one of those old homes, bosomed in its ancestral trees and with the work-day world far enough away behind the park palings so that the sound ofwheels is never heard save when some friend approaches by the smooth-rolled avenue. What is the key-note of the life led by the men and women who have grown from childhood to manhood and womanhood in such a place, and then drop slowly down the long years which will lead them surely at last to that bed in the green churchyard close by, where they shall “sleep with their fathers”? That “note” seems to me to be a peculiar sense—exceeding that of mere calmness—ofstability, of a repose of which neither beginning nor end is in sight. Instead of a “changeful world,” this is to them a world where no change comes, or comes so slowly as to be imperceptible. Almost everything which the eye rests upon in such a home is already old, and will endure for years to come, probably long after its present occupants are under the sod. The house itself was built generations since, and its thick walls look as if they would defy the inroads of time. The rooms were furnished, one, perhaps, at the father’s marriage; another, tradition tells us, by a famous great-grandmother; the halls—no one remembers by whom or how long ago. The old trees bear on their boles the initials of many a name which has been inscribed long years also on the churchyard stones. The garden,with its luxuriant old-fashioned flowers and clipped box borders and quaint sun-dial, has been a garden so long that the rich soil bears blossoms with twice the perfume of other flowers; and, as we pace along the broad terraced walks in the twilight, the odors of the well-remembered bushes of lavender and jessamine and cistus (each growing where it has stood since we were born) fall on our senses like the familiar note of some dear old tune. The very sounds of the landrail in the grass, the herons shrieking among their nests, the rooks darkening the evening sky, the cattle driven in to milking and lowing as they go, all in some way suggest the sense, not of restlessness and turmoil like the noises of the town, but of calm and repose and the unchanging order of an “abode of ancient Peace.”

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

“That garden sweet, that lady fair,And all bright shapes and odors there,In truth have never passed away:’Tis we, ’tis ours, have changed, not they.”

“That garden sweet, that lady fair,

And all bright shapes and odors there,

In truth have never passed away:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized on earth. Certainly, it has offered to many ahappiness, pure, stable, dignified, and blameless, such as it will be hard to parallel in any of the novel types of high pressure modern life.

And, on the other hand, there is nothing so mournful as the life of an old ancestral home in the country! Everything reminds us of the lost, the dead who once called these stately chambers their habitations, whose voices once echoed through the halls, and for whose familiar tread we seem yet to wait; whose entrance, as of yore, through one of the lofty doors would scarcely surprise us; whom we almost expect, when we return after long absence, to see rising from their accustomed seats with open arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by. The trees they planted, the walks and flower-beds they designed; the sword which the father brought back from his early service; the tapestry the mother wrought through her long years of declining health; the dog grown blind and old, the companion of walks which shall never be taken again; the instrument which once answered to a sweet touch forever still,—these things make us feel Death and change as we never feel them amid the instability and eager interests of town existence. All things remain as of old “since the fathers fell asleep.” Theleaves of the woods come afresh and then fade; the rooks come cawing home; the church bells ring, and the old clock strikes the hour. Only there is one chair pushed a little aside from its wonted place, an old horse turned out to graze in peace for his latter days; a bedroom upstairs into which no one goes, save in silent hours, unwatched and furtively.

As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain, and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when all this comes to pass, then the sense of thetragedyof life becomes too strong for us. The dear home, loved so tenderly, is for us little better than the cenotaph of the lost and dead; the warning to ourselves that over all our busy schemes and hopes the pall will soon come down,—“the night cometh when no man can work.”

I believe it is this deep, sorrowful sense of all that is most sad and most awful in our mortal lot, a sense which we escape amid the rushing to and fro of London, but which settlesdown on our souls in such a home as I have pictured, which makes the country unendurable to many, as the shadows of the evening lengthen. To accept it, and look straight at the grave towards which they are walking down the shortened vista of their years, taxes men’s courage and faith beyond their strength, and they fly back to the business and the pleasures wherein such solemn thoughts are forgotten and drowned. And yet beneath our cowardice there is the longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal Home.

1. Several such critics, writing of the essay in this book on the “Scientific Spirit of the Age” when it appeared in theContemporary Reviewfor July, condemned me for failing to do adequate justice to Science, quite regardless of my reiterated assertions (see pp.6,7,34) that I was writing exclusively on the adverse side, and left the glorification of the modern Diana of the Ephesians to the mixed multitude of her followers.

2. “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great delight, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.”—Darwin’sLife, vol. i. p. 101.

3. Darwin’sLife, vol. i. p. 101. Said of himself by Darwin.

4. That organ of the Scientific party, theBritish Medical Journal, eulogizing this address, remarked that “Sir James is a master of English, clothing all his thoughts in the most elegant language.” To the mere literary mind the above definitions may be thought to leave something to be desired on the score of “elegance.”

5. Speaking of this latter book, the ManchesterGuardian(March 17) remarked that “the charges in ‘St Bernard’s’ were supported by details of cases reported in medical journals and by statements made by lecturers of distinction. The quotations are precise and easily verified. The hospitals will do well to take some notice of a medical man who avers that the healing of patients is subordinated to the professional advantages of the staff and the students, that cures are retarded for clinical study, that new drugs are tried upon hospital patients, who are needlessly examined and made to undergo unnecessary operations. They cannot afford to pass over the statement that the dying are tortured by useless operations, and that the blunders of students are covered by their teachers for the credit of the hospital.” Every one of these offences against justice and humanity is directly due to the inspiration of the Scientific Spirit.

6. It was long before Science acquired her natural voice. For more than a thousand years she submitted servilely to Aristotle and his interpreters. But the Science of the Dark Ages was only a branch of learning of which a Picus of Mirandola or an Admirable Crichton could master the whole, along with the classics and mathematics of the period. The genuine Scientific Spirit was not yet born; and when it woke at last in Galileo and Kepler, and down to our own day, the Religious spirit was still paramount over the Scientific. It is only in the present generation that we witness at once the evolution of the true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance.

7. While I am writing these pages, theGlobeinforms us that there reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and surgical operations. “It has become the right thing to get up early and hurry off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the scalpel. The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a thoroughly realistic manner on the stage.”

8. In the very noteworthy paper by Mr. Myers in theNineteenth Centuryfor May on the “Disenchantment of France,” there occurs this remark: “In that country where the pure dicta of Science reign in the intellectual classes with less interference from custom, sentiment, or tradition, than even in Germany itself, we should find that Science, at her present point, is a depressing disintegrating energy” (p. 663). Elsewhere he says that France “makes M. Pasteur her nationalhero”!

9. I have heard a pitiful example of this kind of prejudice. An orphan boy and his ugly mongrel dog were the objects of universal dislike and ridicule in the house of his uncle, a Scotch farmer. The lad always sat of an evening far back from the circle by the fireside, with his crouching dog under his stool lest it should be kicked. One day the little son of the house, of whom the farmer and his wife were dotingly fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm coming on, they were all lost on the hills. Next morning the dog returned to the farm, making wild signs that the farmer should follow him, which he and his wife did at once, in great anxiety. At last, the dog brought them to a spot where they found the boy stiff and cold, but their child still alive. The boy had taken off his own coat and wrapped it round the child, whom he laid on his breast, and then, lying under him on the snow, had died. Let us hope that at least the dog reaped some tardy fruits of the farmer’s repentance.

10. I will cite an example from my own experience, which may help to make parents realize the subtle peril of which I speak. Twenty-five years ago I was engaged in an effort to help Mary Carpenter in the care of the Red Lodge Reformatory for girl-thieves at Bristol. Our poor little charges had all been convicted of larceny, or some kindred offence, but they were not technically “fallen” girls: another establishment received young women of this “unfortunate” class. Twice, however, it happened, during my residence with Miss Carpenter, that girls who had been on the streets were by mistake sent to us when convicted of theft, and were of course received and placed with the others, all being under the most careful surveillance both in the school-rooms, playgrounds, and dormitory. Nevertheless, in each case, before the “unfortunate” had been three days in the Lodge, by some inexplicable contagion the whole school of fifty girls were demoralized so completely that the aspect of the children and change in their behavior gave warning to their experienced janitress to trace the history of the new-comer more exactly, and, as the result proved, to detect where the infection had come in.

11. In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came into.”—Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”

12. Readers of that singular book, “St. Bernard’s” (Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, “Dying Scientifically,” may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.

13. “C’est pourquoi, seul dans mon siècle, j’ai sû comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise.”—M. Renan.

14. The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi Nathan Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who hold a kind of Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The principal synagogue of this party (to which the Rothschild family hereditarily belongs, also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great Portland Street. TheEglise mèreis in the City, and there are many other synagogues belonging to it scattered over London and England. The Portuguese branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Orthodox of all), to which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief synagogue in Bevis Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom, brother of Cavour’s private secretary, was minister of this synagogue.

15. The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr. F. D. Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in London, that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and important congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, differing chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, is in use in this synagogue.

16. Professor Goldwin Smith, in theNineteenth Century.

17. It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these ideas of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George Eliot in “Daniel Deronda.” Equally remote are they from the crude endeavor to return to a supposed primitive Judaism through the “worship of the letter” of the Old Testament, which was hailed some years ago with premature satisfaction by a certain school of Protestant Christians. See the interesting “History of the Karaite Jews,” by the Rev. W. H. Rule, D.D., 1870.

18. As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All the Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all the newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And why? It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance, nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This “clandestine manipulation of the press,” and tribe-union for purposes disconnected with tribal interests, constitutes acabal, and necessarily creates antagonism and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door of English Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would expostulate with their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad.

19. I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly under the influence of the modern mania for “heredity,” of the exceptional character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are a most remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to colonize either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of Ghetto existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-mongers) the healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their multifarious gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admirable. But their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched. Not to speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more singular spectacle; for their members have always been a handful compared to the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during the ten ages of their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession towards the customs of their neighbors which has left the actual dogmas of their religion the sole bond of their national integrity. They worshipped the One good God under the law of Zoroaster three, perhaps four, millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully still, though a mere remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of idolaters, and with no distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty disdain of “Gentile” nations, no hope of a restoration to their own land. Their priests have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and honored rabbis. Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in language, and incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their Prophet has faded into an abstraction. But their faith in Ahura-Mazda, the “Wise Creator,” the “Rich in Love,” remains as clear to-day among them as when it first rose upon the Bactrian plains in the morning of the world. The virtues of truth, chastity, industry, and beneficence inculcated by the Zend-Avesta, and attributed by the Greek historians to their ancestors of the age of Cyrus, are still noticeable among them in marked contrast to their Hindu neighbors; as are likewise their muscular strength and hardy frames. Even as regards their commercial aptitudes, the Parsees offer a singular parallel to the Jews. TheTimesremarked some years ago that out of the 150,000 Parsees there were an incredible number of very wealthy men, and six were actual millionaires. One of the last, Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy, gave away in his lifetime the sum of £700,000 sterling in charities to men of every religion.

20. The congregations use Prayer-books with the vernacular in parallel columns.

21. I refer especially to the magnificent services for the Day of Atonement as used in the Reformed Synagogue. There are also many noble prayers in the collection of Sabbath and other services for various festivals. The whole liturgy is majestic, though somewhat deficient as regards the expression of spiritual aspiration.

22. So rapidly moves the world that, since this Essay was first published, a whole systematic work of charity of this specially Christian character has been established by benevolent Jewish ladies in London. I have before me the “Report of the Jewish Ladies’ Association for Prevention and Rescue Work” for 1886–87, printed for private circulation. The president of the association is Lady Rothschild; the honorable secretaries, Mrs. Cyril Flower and Mrs. J. L. Jacobs. Nothing can seem more wisely kind and merciful than the whole scheme as here detailed. We are told that the poor Jewish girls reclaimed from a life of vice (into which only of late years have many been known to fall) “are taught not only to follow the observances of their faith, but also to lead pure and useful lives; and no pains will be spared to make them better women as well as capable earners of their own livelihood.... The committee feel convinced they will not be allowed to fail in their strenuous endeavor to bring back those who are, as it were, sunk in moral death, to anew life.”

23. See this affectingly brought out in that charming book, “The Jews of Barnow.”

24. A clever book, exhibiting great acquaintance with current phases of opinion, appeared a few years ago, offering by its title some promise of dealing with the case of the Christian Theists of whom I am speaking. The author proposes to discuss “Natural Religion,” but he shortly proceeds to describe a great many things which, in the common language of mankind, are notreligiousat all,—scientific ardor, artistic taste, or mere recognition of the physical order of the universe,—and to urge that these, or nothing, must constitute the religion of the future. The Israelites who had gazed up in awe and wonder at the rolling clouds on Sinai, from whence came the thunders and voices, and the stern and holy Law, and were immediately afterwards called on to worship a miserable little image of a calf, and told, “These be Thy Gods, O Israel!” might, one would think, have felt the same sense of bathos which we experience when we are solemnly assured that these sciences and artsarehenceforth our “Religion.” A drowning man proverbially catches at straws, and people who feel themselves sinking in the ocean of Atheism seize on every spar which comes under their hands, and cry, “We may float yet awhile by this.” No one can blame them for trying to do so; but it is rather hard to expect all the world to recognize as an ironclad the hencoop on which they sit astride.Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean,notthe recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and righteousPerson,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God “mainly above Nature,”not, as the author of this book says must henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160). For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,” finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.

Among the “Natural Religions,” as he is pleased to call them, of which he has brought us intelligence (some of which are not natural, and none of which are properly Religions), the author of this book has disdained to mention that ancient but ever new form of opinion which in former days went by the name of Natural Religion. The words were not happily selected, and belong indeed to an archaic theological terminology. But they were understood by everybody to mean,notthe recognition of the virtues of physical science, nor admiration of fine scenery, nor enthusiasm for art, nor recognition of natural laws; for all these things had names of their own. But it was understood to mean the recognition and worship of a super-mundane, intelligent, and righteousPerson,—in other words, of GOD. It contemplated God “mainly above Nature,”not, as the author of this book says must henceforward be done, “mainly in Nature” (“Natural Religion,” p. 160). For admirable pictures, however, of the modern Artist, who would rather have painted a good picture than have done his duty, and of the modern Man of Science who, “consumed by the passion of research,” finds “right and wrong become meaningless words,” see p. 120.

25. A Chief of the Police Force has informed me that arrests of desperadoes are always made, if practicable, at about fourA.M.; that hour being found by experience to be the one when animal courage is at its lowest ebb and resistance to be least apprehended.

26. I have heard this peculiar but common form of feminine affliction classified as the “Bad Husband Headache.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSilently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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