Evidently there are some creatures too bright if not too good for human nature"s daily food. They are like the pudding that was all raisins, because the cook had forgotten to put in the suet. Sensible people put in the suet pretty thick, and they find it fortifying. Here in England, for instance, it has been the standing sneer of upstart pertness that ordinary men and women always set out upon their conversations with the weather. Well, and why on earth should they not? In every part of the world the weather is the most important subject. India may suffer from unrest, but the Indian"s first thought is whether she suffers from drought. Russia may seethe with revolution, but ninety-nine per cent. of Russians are thinking of the crops. France may be disturbed about Germany, but Frenchmen know the sun promises such a vintage as never was. War may threaten Russia, but the outbreak depends upon the harvest.
Certainly, in our barren wildernesses of city it does not much matter whether it rains or shines, except to the top hats and long skirts of the inhabitants. But mankind cannot live on s.m.u.ts and sulphur, and our discussions on the weather keep us in touch with the kindly fruits of the earth; we show we are not weaned from Nature, but still remember the cornfields and orchards by which we live. Every cloud and wind, every ray of sunshine comes filled with unconscious memories, and secret influences extend to our very souls with every change in weather. Like fishes, we do not bite when the east wind blows; like ducks and eels, we sicken or go mad in thunder.
Why should we fuddle our conversation with paradoxes and intellectual interests when nature presents us with this sempiternal theme? Ruskin observed that Pusey never seemed to know what sort of a day it was. That showed a mind too absent from terrestrial things, too much occupied with immortality. Here in England the variety of the weather affords a special incitement to discussion. It is like a fellow-creature or a race-meeting; the sporting element is added, and you never know what a single day may bring forth. Shallow wits may laugh at such talk, but neither the publishers" lists nor the Cowes Regatta, neither the Veto nor the Insurance Act can compare for a moment with the question whether it will rain this week. Why, then, should we not talk about rain, and leave plays and books and pictures and politics and scandal to narrow and abnormal minds? To adapt a Baconian phrase, the weather is the one subject that you cannot dull by jading it too far.
Nor does it arouse the evil pa.s.sions of imparting information or contradicting opinions. When someone says, "It is a fine day," or "It"s good weather for ducks," he does not wish to convey a new fact. I have known only one man who desired to contradict such statements, and, looking up at the sky, would have liked to order the sun in or out rather than agree; and he was a Territorial officer, so that command was in his nature. But mention the Lords, or the Church, or the Suffrage, and what a turmoil and tearing of hair! What sandstorms of information, what semi-courteous contradiction! Whither has the sweet gregariousness of human converse strayed? Black looks flash from the miracle of a seeing eye; bad blood rushes to thinking foreheads; the bonds of h.e.l.l are loosed; pale G.o.ds sit trembling in their twilight. "O sons of Adam, the sun still shines, and a spell of fair weather never did no harm, as we heard tell on; but don"t you think a drop of rain to-night would favour the roots? You"ll excuse a farmer"s grumbling."
People do not a.s.sociate in order to receive epigrammatic shocks, nor to be fed up with information and have their views put right. They a.s.sociate for society. They feel more secure, more open-hearted and cheerful, when together. Sheep know in their hearts that numbers are no protection against the dog, who is so much cleverer and more terrible than they; but still they like to keep in the flock. It is always comfortable to sit beside a man as foolish as oneself and hear him say that East is East and West is West; or that men are men, and women are women; or that the world is a small place after all, truth is stranger than fiction, listeners never hear any good of themselves, and a true friend is known in adversity. That gives the sense of perfect comradeship. There is here no tiresome rivalry of wits, no plaguy intellectual effort. One feels one"s proper level at once, and needs no longer go scrambling up the heights with banners of strange devices. At such moments of pleasant and unadventurous intercourse, it will be found very soothing to reply that cold hands show a warm heart, that only town-dwellers really love the country, that night is darkest before the dawn, that there are always faults on both sides, that an Englishman"s home is his castle, but travel expands the mind, and marriage is a lottery.
Such sentences, delivered alternately, will supply all the requisites of intercourse. The philosopher rightly esteemed no knowledge of value unless it was known already, and all these things have been known a very long time. Sometimes, it is true, a conversation may become more directly informative and yet remain amicable, as when the man on the steamer acquaints you with the facts that lettuce contains opium, that Lincoln"s Inn Fields is the size of the Great Pyramid"s base, that Mr.
Gladstone took sixty bites to the mouthful, that hot tea is a cooling drink, that a Frenchwoman knows how to put on her clothes, that the engineer on board is sure to be a Scotsman, that fish is good for the brain because it contains phosphorus, that cheese will digest everything but itself, that there are more acres in England than words in the Bible, and that the cigars smoked in a year would go ten thousand and a quarter times round the earth if placed end to end. These facts are also familiar to everyone beforehand, and they present a solid basis for gregarious conversation. They put the merest stranger at his ease. They make one feel at home.
Some of the trades and professions secure the same object by special phrases. When you hear that the horses are fat as b.u.t.ter, the men keen as mustard, and everything right as rain, you know you are back to the army again. The kindly mention of the Great Lexicographer, the Wizard of the North, the Sage of Chelsea, and London"s Particular calls up the vision of a street descending into the vale of St. Paul"s. But such phrases are fleeting. They hardly last four generations of mankind, and already they wither to decay. "Every cloud has a silver lining," "It"s a poor heart that never rejoices," "There are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught"--those are the observations that give stability and permanence to the intercourse of man. They are not clever; they contain no paradox; like the Ugly Duckling, they cannot emit sparks. But one"s heart leaps up at hearing them, as at the sight of a rainbow. For, like the rainbow, they are an a.s.surance that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall never cease.
XXIX
THE PRIEST OF NEMI
Here it is cool under thick alders, close to the water"s edge, where frogs are doing their very best to sing. Hidden in some depth of the sky, the Dog Star rages, and overhead the mid-day sun marches across his blazing barrack-square. Far away the heathen violently rage; the world is full of rumours of war, and the kings of the earth take counsel together against liberty and peace. But here under thick alders it is cool, and the deep water of the lake that lies brooding within the silent crater of these Alban hills, stretches before us an unruffled surface of green and indigo profoundly mingled. Wandering about among overgrown and indistinguishable gardens under the woods, women and girls are gathering strawberries and loading them up in great wicker baskets for the market of Rome. The sound of sawing comes from a few old houses by the lake-side, that once were mills turned by the nymph Egeria"s stream, where Ovid drank. Opposite, across the lake, on the top of the old crater"s edge, stands a brown village--the church tower, unoccupied "palace," huddled walls and roofs piled up the steep, as Italian villages are made. That is Genzano. On the precipitous crag high above our heads stands a more ancient village, with fortress tower, unoccupied castle, crumbling gates, and the walls and roofs of dwellings huddled around them. That is Nemi, the village of the sacred wood.
Except where the rock is too steep for growth, the slopes of the deep hollow are covered with trees and bushes on every side. But the trees are thickest where the slope falls most gently--so gently that from the foot of the crater to the water"s edge the ground for a few hundred yards might almost be called a bit of plain. Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites. Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries there to be seen:
"The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain."
No one can tell in what prehistoric age the succession of murdering and murdered priests first began that vigil for their lives. It continued with recurrent slaughter through Rome"s greatest years. About the time when Virgil was still alive, or perhaps just after Christ himself was born, the geographer Strabo appears actually to have seen that living a.s.sa.s.sin and victim lurking in the wood; for he vividly describes him "with sword always drawn, turning his eyes on every side, ready to defend himself against an onslaught." Possibly the priest suspected Strabo himself for his outlandish look and tongue, for only a runaway slave might murder and succeed him. Possibly it was that self-same priest whom Caligula, a few years after Christ"s death, hired a stalwart ruffian to finish off, because he was growing old and decrepit, having defended himself from onslaughts too long. Upon the lake the Emperor constructed two fine house-boats, devoted to the habits that house-boats generally induce (you may still fish up bits of their splendour from the bottom, if you have luck), and very likely it was annoying to watch the old man still doddering round his tree with drawn sword. One would like to ask whether the crazy tyrant was aware how well he was fulfilling the ancient rite by ordaining the slaughter of decrepitude. And one would like to ask also whether the stalwart ruffian himself took up the line of consecrated and ghastly succession. Someone, at all events, took it up; for in the bland age of the Antonines the priest was still there, pacing with drawn sword, turning his eyes in every direction, lest his successor should spring upon him unawares.
In the opening chapter, which states the central problem, still slowly being worked out in the great series of _The Golden Bough_, Dr. Frazer has drawn the well-known picture of that haunted man. "The dreamy blue,"
he writes:
"The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music--the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the sh.o.r.e, and, in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs."
For the priest himself it can hardly have been a happy life. Thanks to Dr. Frazer, we now partly know how much of man"s religious hope and fear that sinister figure represented. But he himself had no conception of all this, nor can we suppose that even if he had possessed Dr. Frazer"s own wealth of knowledge, it would have cheered him much. When violent death impends on every moment and lurks in every shade, it is small consolation to reflect that you stand as a holy emblem, protector of a symbolic tree, the mystic mate both of the tree itself and of the G.o.ddess of fertility in man and beast and plant. There is no comfort in the knowledge that the slave who waits to kill you, as you killed your predecessor in the office, only obeys the widespread injunction of primitive religion whereby the divine powers incarnate in the priest are maintained active and wholesome with all the fervour and sprightliness of youth. Such knowledge would not relax the perpetual strain of terror, nor could the priest have displayed an intelligent and scientific interest in all the queer mythologies forcibly dragged in and combined to explain his presence there--Orestes fleeing like a runaway from the blood-stained Euxine sh.o.r.e; or Hippolytus, faithful worshipper of the unwedded G.o.ddess, rent by wild horses, and by Diana"s prayer to the medicine-G.o.d subsequently pieced together into life; or Virbius, counterpart of Hippolytus; or perhaps even the two-faced Ja.n.u.s himself, looking before and after. The finest conjectures of research, though ill.u.s.trated in the person of the priest himself, could have supplied him with no antidote to those terrors of ambushed a.s.sa.s.sination.
In his investigations among the "sword-dancers" of Northern England, Mr.
Cecil Sharp has discovered that at Earsdon, after the usual captain"s song, a strange interlude occurs, in which two of the dancers feign a quarrel, and one is killed and carried out for burial amid the lamentations of the "Bessy." A travelled doctor, however, arrives, and calls to the dead man, "Jack! take a drop of my bottle, that"ll go down your thrittle-throttle." Whereupon up jumps Jack and shakes his sword, and the dance proceeds amid the rejoicings of Bessy and the rest. So priest slays priest, the British Diana laments her hero slain, the British Aesculapius, in verse inferior to Euripides, tends him back to life, and who in that Northumbrian dance could fail to recognise a rite sprung from the same primitive worship as the myths of Nemi? But if one had been able to stand beside that murderous and apprehensive priest, and to foretell to him that in future centuries, long after his form of religion had died away, far off in Britain, beside the wall of the Empire"s frontier, his tragedy would thus be burlesqued by Bessy, Jack, and the doctor, one may doubt if he would have expressed any kind of scientific interest, or have even smiled, as, sword in hand, he prowled around his sacred tree, peering on every side.
Why, then, did he do it? How came it that there was always a candidate for that b.l.o.o.d.y deed and disquieting existence? It is true that the compet.i.tion for the post appears to have decreased with years.
Originally, the priest"s murder seems to have been an annual affair, regular as the "grotter" which we are called upon to remember every August in London streets, or as the Guy Faux, whose fires will in future ages be connected with autumnal myths or with the disappearance of Adonis or Thammuz yearly wounded. The virtues of fertility"s G.o.d had to be renewed each spring; year by year the priest was slain; and only by a subsequent concession to human weakness was he allowed to retain his life till he could no longer defend it. The change seems to show that, as time went on, the privileges of the office were regarded with less eagerness, and it was more difficult to find one man a year anxious to be killed.
But with what motive, century after century, no matter at what interval of years, did a volunteer always come forward to slay and to be slain?
Certainly, the priest had to be a runaway slave; but was Roman slavery so hideous that a life of unending terror by day and night was to be preferred--a life enslaved as a horse"s chained to the grinding mill in a brickyard, and without the horse"s hours of stabled peace? Hunger will drive to much, but even when the risky encounter with one"s predecessor had been successfully accomplished, what enjoyment could there be in meals eaten in bitter haste, with one hand upon the sword? As to money, what should all the wealth of the shrine profit a man compelled, in Bishop Ken"s language, to live each day as it were his last? Promise of future and eternal bliss? The religion held out no sure and certain hope of such a state. Joy in the divine service? It is not to vigorous runaway slaves that we look for ecstatic rapture in performing heaven"s will. Upon the priest was bestowed the t.i.tle of "King of the Wood." Can it be that for that barren honour a human being dyed his hands with murder and risked momentary a.s.sa.s.sination for the remainder of his lifetime? Well, we have heard of the Man who would be King, and empty t.i.tles still are sought by political services equally repellent.
But, for ourselves, in that forlorn and hag-ridden figure we more naturally see a symbol of the generations that slay the slayer and shall themselves be slain. It is thus that each generation comes knocking at the door--comes, rather, so suddenly and unannounced, clutching at the Tree of Life, and with the glittering sword of youth beating down its worn-out defenders. New blood, new thoughts and hopes each generation brings to resuscitate the genius of fertility and growth. Often it longs imperiously to summon a stalwart ruffian, who will finish off decrepitude and make an end; but hardly has the younger generation itself a.s.sumed the office and taken its stand as the Warder of the Tree, when its life and hopes in turn are threatened, and among the ambuscading woods it hears a footstep coming and sees the gleam of a drawn sword. Let us not think too precisely on such events. But rather let us climb the toilsome track up to the little town, where Cicero once waited to meet the a.s.sa.s.sin Brutus after the murder of the world"s greatest man; and there, in the ancient inn still called "Diana"s Looking-gla.s.s" from the old name of the beautiful and mysterious lake which lies in profoundly mingled green and indigo below it, let us forget impending doom over a twopenny quart of wine and a plate of little cuttlefish stewed in garlic, after which any priest might confront his successor with equanimity.
x.x.x
THE UNDERWORLD OF TIME
Sometimes, for a moment, the curtain of the past is rolled up, the seven seals of its book are loosened, and we are allowed to know more of the history than the round number of soldiers with which a general crossed a river, or the succession that brought one crazy voluptuary to follow another upon the Imperial throne. We do not refuse grat.i.tude for what we ordinarily receive. To the general it made all the difference whether he had a thousand soldiers more or less, and to us it makes some. To the Imperial maniac it was of consequence that his predecessor in the government of civilised mankind was slain before him, and for us the information counts for something, too; just as one meets travellers who satisfy an artistic craving by enumerating the columns of a ruined shrine, and seeing that they agree with the guidebook. But it is not often that historians tell us what we really want to know, or that artists will stoop to our questionings. We would willingly go wrong over a thousand or two of those soldiers, if we might catch the language of just one of them as he waded into the river; and how many a simpering Venus would we grind into face-powder if we could follow for just one day the thoughts of a single priest who once guarded her temple! But, occupied with grandeur and beauty, the artists and historians move upon their own elevated plane, and it is only by furtive glimpses that we catch sight of the common and unclean underworld of life, always lumbering along with much the same chaotic noise of hungry desires and incessant labour, of animalism and spiritual aspiration.
One such glimpse we are given in that book of _The Golden a.s.s_, now issued by the Clarendon Press, in Mr. H.E. Butler"s English version, but hitherto best known through a chapter in Walter Pater"s _Marius_, or by William Adlington"s sixteenth century rendering, included among _The Tudor Translations_. It is a strange and incoherent picture that the book presents. Pater well compares it to a dream: "Story within story--stories with the sudden, unlooked-for changes of dreams." And, as though to suit this dream-like inconsequence, the scene is laid in Thessaly, the natural home of witchcraft--where, in fact, I was myself laid under a witch"s incantation little more than ten years ago, and might have been transformed into heaven knows what, if a remembered pa.s.sage from this same book of Apuleius had not caused an outburst of laughter that broke the spell only just in time. It is a savage country, running into deep glens of forest and precipitous defiles among the mountains, fit haunt for the robber bands with which the few roads were infested. The region where the Lucius of the book wandered, either as man, or after his own curiosity into mysterious things had converted him into an a.s.s (whereas he had wished to become a beautiful bird)--the region recalls some wild picture of Salvator Rosa"s. We are surrounded by gloomy shades, sepulchral caverns, and trees writhing in storm, nor are cut-throat bandits ever far away. Violence and murder threaten at every turn. Through the narrow and filthy streets young n.o.blemen, flown with wine, storm at midnight. When a robber chief is nailed through the hand to a door, his devoted followers hew off his arm and set him free.
They capture girls for ransom, and sell them to panders. When one is troublesome, they propose to sew her up in the paunch of the yet living a.s.s, and expose her to the mid-day sun. One of the gang, disguised as a bear, slays all his keepers, and is himself torn in pieces by men and dogs. All the band are finally slaughtered or flung from precipices.
Gladiatorial beasts are kept as sepulchres for criminals. A slave is smeared with honey and slowly devoured by ants till only his white skeleton remains tied to a tree. A dragon eats one of the party, quite cursorily. What with bears, wolves, wild boars, and savage dogs, each step in life would seem a peril, were not the cruelty of man more perilous still. Continued existence in that region was, indeed, so insecure, that men and women in large numbers ended the torments of anxiety by cutting life short.
And then there were the witches, perpetually adding to the uncertainty by rendering it dubious in what form one might awake, if one awoke at all. During sleep, a witch could draw the heart out through a hole in the neck, and, stopping up the orifice with a sponge, allow her victim to pine in wonder why he felt so incomplete. With ointments compounded of dead men"s flesh she could transform a lover into a beaver, or an innkeeper into a frog swimming in his own vat of wine and with doleful croak inviting his former customers to drink; or herself, with the aid of a little shaking, she could convert into a feathered owl uttering a queasy note as it flitted out of the window. Indeed, the whole of nature was uncertain, especially if disaster impended, and sometimes a chicken would be born without the formality of an egg, or a bottomless abyss spurted with gore under the dining-room table, or the wine began to boil in the bottles, or a green frog leapt out of the sheepdog"s mouth.
So life was a little trying, a little perplexing; but it afforded wide scope for curiosity, and Apuleius, an African, brought up in Athens, and living in Rome, was endlessly curious. In his attraction to horrors, to bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps, something of the man of peace. It is only the unwarlike citizen who could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human blood. He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has ever enjoyed--those two or three benign generations when, under the Antonines, provincials combined with Romans in celebrating "the increasing splendours of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger." The slow and secret poison that Gibbon says was introduced by the long peace into the vitals of the Empire, was, perhaps, among the causes that turned the thoughts of Apuleius to scenes of violence and terror--to the "macabre," as Pater said--just as it touched his style with the preciosity of decadence, and prompted him to occupy a page with rapture over the "swift lightnings" flashed against the sunlight from women"s hair. He was, in fact, writing for citizens much like the English of twenty years ago, when the interest of readers, protected from the harsh realities of danger and anxiety, was flattered equally by bloodthirsty slaughters, the shimmer of veiled radiance, and haunted byways for access to the unknown G.o.ds.
Those byways to unknown G.o.ds were much affected by Apuleius himself. The world was at the slack, waiting, as it were, for the next tide to flow, and seldom has religion been so powerless or religions so many. Of one abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one G.o.d only. Apuleius seems to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced G.o.ds of Egypt triumphing on the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed. Here was Anubis, their messenger, and unconquered Osiris, supreme father of G.o.ds, and another whose emblem no mortal tongue might expound. So it came that at the great procession of Isis through a Greek city the a.s.s was at last able, after unutterable sufferings, to devour the chaplet of roses destined to restore him to human shape; and thereupon he took the vows of chast.i.ty and abstinence (so difficult for him to observe) until at length he was worthy to be initiated into the mysteries of the G.o.ddess, and, in his own words, "drew nigh to the confines of death, trod the threshold of Proserpine, was borne through all the elements, and returned to earth again, saw the sun gleaming with bright splendour at dead of night, approached the G.o.ds above and the G.o.ds below, and worshipped them face to face."
It was this redemption by roses, and the initiation into virtue"s path, that caused Adlington in his introduction to call the book "a figure of man"s life, egging mortal men forward from their asinal form to their human and perfect shape, that so they might take a pattern to regenerate their lives from brutish and beastly custom," And, indeed, the book is, in a wider sense, the figure of man"s life, for almost alone among the writings of antiquity it reveals to us every phase of that dim underworld which persists, as we have supposed, almost unnoticed and unchanged from one generation of man to another, and takes little account either of government, the arts, or the other interests of intellectual cla.s.ses. It is a world of incessant toil and primitive pa.s.sion, yet laughter has place in it, and Apuleius shows us how two slave cooks could laugh as they peered through a c.h.i.n.k at their a.s.s carefully selecting the choicest dainties from the table; and how the whole populace of a country town roared with delight at the trial of a man who thought he had killed three thieves, but had really pierced three wine skins; and how the a.s.s in his distress appealed unto Caesar for the rights of a Roman citizen, but could get no further with his best Greek than "O!" It is a world of violence and obscenity and laughter, but, above all, a world of pity. Virgil, too, was touched with the pity of mortal things, but towards the poor and the labouring man he rather affected a pastoral envy. Apuleius had looked poverty nearer in the eyes, and he knew the piteous terror on its face. To him we must turn if we would know how the poor lived in the happiest and most prosperous age that mankind has enjoyed. In the course of his adventures, the a.s.s was sold to a mill--a great flour factory employing numerous hands--and, with his usual curiosity, he there observed, as he says, the way in which that loathsome workshop was conducted:
"What stunted little men met my eye, their skin all striped with livid scars, their backs a ma.s.s of sores, with tattered patchwork clothing that gave them shade rather than covering!
... Letters were branded on their foreheads, their heads were half shaven, iron rings were welded about their ankles, they were hideously pale, and the smoky darkness of that steaming, gloomy den had ulcerated their eyelids: their sight was impaired, and their bodies smeared and filthy white with the powdered meal, making them look like boxers who sprinkle themselves with dust before they fight."
Even to animals the same pity for their sufferings is extended--a pity unusual among the ancients, and still hardly known around the Mediterranean. Yet Apuleius counted the sorrows of the ill-used a.s.s, and, speaking of the same flour mill, he describes the old mules and pack-horses labouring there, with drooping heads, their necks swollen with gangrenes and putrid sores, their nostrils panting with the harsh cough that continually racked them, their chests ulcerated by the ceaseless rubbing of their hempen harness, their hoofs swollen to an enormous size as the result of their long journeys round the mill, their ribs laid bare even to the bone by their endless floggings, and all their hides rough with the scab of neglect and decay.
The first writer of the modern novel--first of romanticists--Apuleius has been called. Romance! If we must keep those rather futile distinctions, it is as the first of realists that we would remember him.
For, as in a dream, he has shown us the actual life that mankind led in the temple, the workshop, the market-place, and the forest, during the century after the Apostles died. And we find it much the same as the actual life of toiling mankind in all ages--full of unwelcome labour and suffering and continual apprehension, haunted by ghostly fears and self-imagined horrors, but illuminated by sudden laughter, and continually goaded on by an inexplicable desire to submit itself to that hard service of perfection under which, as the priest of the G.o.ddess informed Lucius in the story, man may perceive most fully the greatness of his liberty.
x.x.xI
MENTAL EUGENICS
It is horrible. We are being overpopulated with spirits. Day by day, hundreds of newly-created ghosts issue into the world--not the poor relics and incorporeal shadows of the dead, but real living ghosts, who never had any other existence except as they now appear. They are creations of the mind--figments they are sometimes called--but they have as real an existence as any other created thing. We love them or hate them, we talk about them, we quote them, we discuss their characters. To many people they are much more alive than the solid human beings whom in some respects they resemble. Obviously they are more interesting, else the travellers in a railway carriage would converse instead of reading.
Some minds cannot help producing them. They produce them as easily as the queen bee produces the eggs that hatch into drones. And both the number and productivity of such minds are terribly on the increase. A few years ago Anatole France told us that, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day were published, not to mention the newspapers; and the rate has gone up since then. He called it a monstrous orgy. He said it would end in driving us mad. He called books the opium of the West. They devour us, he said. He foresaw the day when we shall all be librarians. We are rushing, he said, through study into general paralysis.
Does it not remind one of the horror with which the wise and prudent about a century ago began to regard the birth-rate? They beheld the geometrical progression of life catching up the arithmetical progression of food with fearful strides. Mankind became to them a devouring mouth, always agape, like a nestling"s, and incessantly multiplying, like a bacillus. What was the good of improving the condition of Tom and Sal, if Tom and Sal, in consequence of the improvement, went their way and in a few years produced d.i.c.k, Poll, Bill, and Meg, who proceeded to eat up the improvement, and in a generation produced sixteen other devourers hungrier than themselves? It was an awesome picture, that ravenous and reduplicating mouth! It cast a chill over humanity, and blighted the hope of progress for many years. To some it is still a bodeful portent, presaging eternal famine. It still hangs ominously over the nations.
But, on the whole, its terrors have lately declined; one cannot exactly say why. Either the mouth is not so hungry, or it gets more to eat, or, for good or evil, it does not multiply so fast. And now there are these teachers of Eugenics, always insisting on quality.
The question is whether some similar means might not check the multiplication of the ghosts that threaten to devour the mind of man.
The progression of man"s mind can hardly be called even arithmetical, and the increase of ghosts accelerates frightfully in comparison. If Paris produced fifty books a day some years ago, London probably produces a hundred now. And then there is Berlin, and all the German Universities, where professors must write or die. And there are New York and Boston. Rome and Athens still count for something, and so does Madrid. Scandinavia is no longer sterile, and a few of Russia"s mournful progeny escape strangulation at their birth. Not every book, it is true, embodies a living soul. Many are stillborn; many are like dolls, bleeding sawdust. But in most there dwells some kind of life, hungry for the human brain, and day by day its share of sustenance diminishes, if shares are equal. They are not equal, but the inequality only increases the clamour of the poor among the ghosts.
Take the case of novels, which make up the majority of books in the modern world. We will a.s.sume the average of souls in a novel to be five, the same as the average of a human family. Probably it is considerably higher, but take it at five. Let us suppose that fifty novels are produced per day in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and other large cities together, which I believe to be a low estimate. Not counting Sundays and Bank holidays, this will give us rather more than 75,000 newly created souls a year--cannibal souls, ravening for the brains of men and women similar to the brains that gave them birth, and each able to devour as many brains as it can catch. It is no good saying that nearly all are short-lived, dying in six months like summer flies. The dead are but succeeded by increasing hordes. They swarm about us; they bite us at every turn. They sit in our chairs, and hover round our tables. They speak to us on mountain tops, and if we descend into the Tube, they are there. They absorb the solid world, making it of no account beside the spirit world in which we dwell, so that we neither see nor hear nor handle the realities of outward life, but perceive them only, if at all, through filmy veils and apparitions, the haunting offspring of another"s mind. And remember, we are now speaking of the spirits in novels alone. Besides novels, there are the breeding grounds of the drama, the essay, the lyric, and every other kind of spiritual and imaginative book. In every corner the spirits lurk, ready to spring upon us unaware. We are ghost-ridden. The witches tear us. Our life is no longer our own. It has become a nebula of alien dreams. O wretched men that we are! Who shall deliver us from the body of these shades?
To what can we look? Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves. In the end, Nature may adjust their birthrate. But at what cost, after how cruel a struggle for existence! Might not teachers of eugenics do something drastic, and at once? Critics are the teachers of spiritual eugenics. Could not a few timely words from them hold the productive powers of certain brains in check? It is easily said, but the result is very doubtful. Mr. Walkley, in an unintentionally despairing article in the _Times_, once maintained that the critics were powerless to stem the increasing flood that pours in upon us, like that hideous stream of babies that Mr. Wells once saw pouring down some gutter or rain-pipe.
Mr. Walkley said no real and industrious artist ever stops to listen to criticism. He said the artist simply cannot help it; the creature is bound to go on creating, whatever people say. Mr. Walkley went further, and told us the critic himself is an artist; that he also cannot help it, but is bound to create. So we go on from bad to worse, the creative artist not only producing shadows on his own account, but the shades of shadows through the critics. Our state is becoming a bewildered horror; and yet we cannot deny that Mr. Walkley was right, though we may regard his pessimism as exaggerated. There are one or two cases on record in which criticism, or the fear of it, has really checked the production of peculiarly sensitive and fastidious minds. I will not mention Keats, for after the savage and Tartarly article he went on producing in greater quant.i.ty and finer quality than ever before, and would have so continued but for a very natural death. Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed, is a happier instance. And there may here and there also have been a poet or novelist like that "Pictor Ignotus" of Browning"s, who cried: