""Tis life, not death, for which you pant; "Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant; More life, and fuller, that you want."
And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is, in every case, the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery. He prefers the voice of the tempter--"Thou shalt not surely die." Nay, he will say at last,--"Better be as G.o.ds awhile, and die: than be the crawling, insufficient thing I am; and live."
He--did I say? Alas! I must say she likewise. The sacred story is only too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling, not merely at the same time as the man, but before the man. Only let us remember that it represents the woman as tempted; tempted, seemingly, by a rational being, of lower race, and yet of superior cunning; who must, therefore, have fallen before the woman. Who or what the being was, who is called the Serpent in our translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say. We have absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical traditions need trouble no man much. But I fancy that a missionary, preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them plainly that the "Serpent" meant the first Obeah man; and then comparing the experiences of that hapless pair in Eden, with their own after certain orgies not yet extinct in Africa and elsewhere, would be only too well understood: so well, indeed, that he might run some risk of eating himself, not of the tree of life, but of that of death. The sorcerer or sorceress tempting the woman; and then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be, certainly among savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised peoples also, the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.
But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman"s yielding before the man is not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to allege who hated, and too often tortured, the s.e.x whom they could not enjoy. It is not to the woman"s dishonour, if she felt, before her husband, higher aspirations than those after mere animal pleasure. To be as G.o.ds, knowing good and evil, is a vain and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and not an animal. And indeed the woman"s more delicate organisation, her more vivid emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special source of temptation which it is to her honour that she has resisted so much better than the physically stronger, and therefore more culpable, man.
As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for us to waste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then it was another. It may have been something which has long since perished off the earth. It may have been--as some learned men have guessed--the sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race; and that may have been a still existing narcotic species of Asclepias. It certainly was not the vine. The language of the Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred use to which it is consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion utterly; at least to those who know enough of antiquity to pa.s.s by, with a smile, the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not intoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am trying to say--how fearfully has that n.o.ble gift to man been abused for the same end as a hundred other vegetable products, ever since those mythic days when Dionusos brought the vine from the far East, amid troops of human Maenads and half-human Satyrs; and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on Cithaeron, for daring to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those historic days, too, when, less than two hundred years before the Christian era, the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.
But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was. Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving. Has he not done so already?
Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede extracts in autumn a few days of brutal happiness, before the setting in of the long six months" night? G.o.d grant that modern science may not bring to light fresh subst.i.tutes for alcohol, opium, and the rest; and give the white races, in that state of effeminate and G.o.dless quasi-civilisation which I sometimes fear is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying themselves delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.
It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island. I have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possible; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase. Overwork of body and mind; circ.u.mstances which depress health; temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often not the means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These, it seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or not.
And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them.
First, overwork. We all live too fast, and work too hard. "All things are full of labour, man cannot utter it." In the heavy struggle for existence which goes on all around us, each man is tasked more and more--if he be really worth buying and using--to the utmost of his powers all day long. The weak have to compete on equal terms with the strong; and crave, in consequence, for artificial strength. How we shall stop that I know not, while every man is "making haste to be rich, and piercing himself through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and hurtful l.u.s.ts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." How we shall stop that, I say, I know not. The old prophet may have been right when he said, "Surely it is not of the Lord that the people shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity;" and in some juster, wiser, more sober system of society--somewhat more like the Kingdom of The Father come on earth--it may be that poor human beings will not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work by stimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, and think of G.o.d, and of G.o.d"s quiet universe, with something of quiet in themselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, as well as of body.
But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when--as it was once well put--"every one has stopped running about like rats:"--that those who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not be surrounded, as now, with every circ.u.mstance which tempts toward drink; by every circ.u.mstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest, disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the country--in which I presume G.o.d, having made it, meant all men, more or less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or through whole districts of the "black countries" of England: and then ask himself--Is it the will of G.o.d that His human children should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth? Let him ask himself--Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces, collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those abominable wastes care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only answer, that I am not surprised.
I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again--that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave.
I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. I know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were drained? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them--who always settled in the lowest grounds--in the shape of fever and ague? Here it may be answered again, that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race in America. I reply boldly, that I do not believe it. There is evidence enough in Jaques Cartier"s "Voyages to the Rivers of Canada;" and evidence more than enough in Strachey"s "Travaile in Virginia"--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove that the Red Indians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North and South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would naturally crave for "the water of life," the "usque-bagh," or whisky, as we have contracted the old name now. But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all horses wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow on foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them alive, than he has done towards destroying them by giving them the chance of a week"s drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would never have got.
Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for stimulants.
But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only of the gallows--and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses--have been the cause of the Red Indians" extinction: then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as much whisky--and usually very bad whisky--not merely twice a year, but as often as they could get it, during the whole "iron age;" and, for aught any one can tell, during the "bronze age," and the "stone age" before that: and yet are still the most healthy, able, valiant, and prolific races in Europe? Had they drunk less whisky they would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and perhaps even more prolific, than they are now. They show no sign, however, as yet, of going the way of the Red Indian.
But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of deficient vitality: then the deadliest foe of that craving, and all its miserable results, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the man who preaches, and--as far as ignorance and vested interests will allow him, procures--for the ma.s.ses, pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure food. Not merely every fresh drinking-fountain: but every fresh public bath and wash-house, every fresh open s.p.a.ce, every fresh growing tree, every fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window--each of these is so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered for Ormuzd, the G.o.d of light and life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the king of darkness and of death; so much taken from the causes of drunkenness and disease, and added to the causes of sobriety and health.
Meanwhile one thing is clear: that if this present barbarism and anarchy of covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed and drilled into something more like a Kingdom of G.o.d on earth: then we should not see the reckless and needless multiplication of liquor shops, which disgraces this country now.
As a single instance: in one country parish of nine hundred inhabitants, in which the population has increased only one-ninth in the last fifty years, there are now practically eight public-houses, where fifty years ago there were but two. One, that is, for every hundred and ten--or rather, omitting children, farmers, shopkeepers, gentlemen, and their households, one for every fifty of the inhabitants. In the face of the allurements, often of the basest kind, which these dens offer, the clergyman and the schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night-schools and young men"s clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence.
The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at least, of England,--though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now--are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead of their grandfathers" smock-frocks.
And if it be so in the country: how must it be in towns? There must come a thorough change in the present licensing system, in spite of all the "pressure" which certain powerful vested interests may bring to bear on governments. And it is the duty of every good citizen, who cares for his countrymen, and for their children after them, to help in bringing about that change as speedily as possible.
Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness was the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew no recreation beyond low animal pleasure. If I am right--and I believe that I am right--I must urge on those who wish drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more refined recreation for the people.
Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply exhaustion; not merely to drive away care: but often simply to drive away dulness. They have nothing to do save to think over what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to-morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought, in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, by no means of the hand-working cla.s.s, but absorbed all day by business, who drink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreate their overburdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are far less common than they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not the decrease of drinking among the richer cla.s.ses certainly due to the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man"s nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his children, or his work-people.
But how little of all this is open to the ma.s.ses, all should know but too well. How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or his wife, has of eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very basest kind, is but too palpable. We are mending, thank G.o.d, in this respect. Free libraries and museums have sprung up of late in other cities beside London. G.o.d"s blessing rest upon them all. And the Crystal Palace, and still later, the Bethnal Green Museum, have been, I believe, of far more use than many average sermons and lectures from many average orators.
But are we not still far behind the old Greeks, and the Romans of the Empire likewise, in the amount of amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction, and even of shelter, which we provide for the people? Recollect the--to me--disgraceful fact; that there is not, as far as I am aware, throughout the whole of London, a single portico or other covered place, in which the people can take refuge during a shower: and this in the climate of England! Where they do take refuge on a wet day the publican knows but too well; as he knows also where thousands of the lower cla.s.ses, simply for want of any other place to be in, save their own sordid dwellings, spend as much as they are permitted of the Sabbath day. Let us put down "Sunday drinking" by all means, if we can. But let us remember that by closing the public-house on Sunday, we prevent no man or woman from carrying home as much poison as they choose on Sat.u.r.day night, to brutalise themselves therewith, perhaps for eight-and-forty hours. And let us see--in the name of Him who said that He had made the Sabbath for man, and not man for the Sabbath--let us see, I say, if we cannot do something to prevent the townsman"s Sabbath being, not a day of rest, but a day of mere idleness; the day of most temptation, because of most dulness, of the whole seven.
And here, perhaps, some sweet soul may look up reprovingly and say--He talks of rest. Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget, that all these outward palliatives will never touch the seat of the disease, the unrest of the soul within? Does he forget, and would he have the working man forget, who it was who said--who only has the right to say--"Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? Ah no, sweet soul. I know your words are true. I know that what we all want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for it is strong enough to use G.o.d"s gifts without abusing them; the character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or food merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from the wild l.u.s.ts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, and, seeking for light and life by means forbidden, found thereby disease and death. Yes; I know that; and know, too, that that rest is found, only where you have already found it.
And yet: in such a world as this; governed by a Being who has made sunshine, and flowers, and green gra.s.s, and the song of birds, and happy human smiles; and who would educate by them--if we would let Him--His human children from the cradle to the grave; in such a world as this, will you grudge any particle of that education, even any harmless subst.i.tute for it, to those spirits in prison, whose surroundings too often tempt them, from the cradle to the grave, to fancy that the world is composed of bricks and iron, and governed by inspectors and policemen?
Preach to those spirits in prison, as you know far better than we parsons how to preach: but let them have besides some glimpses of the splendid fact, that outside their prison-house is a world which G.o.d, not man, has made; wherein grows everywhere that tree of knowledge which is likewise the tree of life; and that they have a right to some small share of its beauty, and its wonder, and its rest, for their own health of soul and body, and for the health of their children after them.
NAUSICAA IN LONDON: OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMAN.
Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way through London streets. My brain was still full of fair and grand forms; the forms of men and women whose every limb and att.i.tude betokened perfect health, and grace, and power, and a self-possession and self-restraint so habitual and complete that it had become unconscious, and undistinguishable from the native freedom of the savage. For I had been up and down the corridors of those Greek sculptures, which remain as a perpetual sermon to rich and poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and it may be decaying pseudo-civilisation; saying with looks more expressive than all words--Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea sh.o.r.e; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander"s host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. And were these women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they not the parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, or aesthetic, and I may say moral likewise--religious education, of course, in our sense of the word, they had none--but do we know anything about education of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not some branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever; leaving us northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow, their example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body--that was their notion of education. To produce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of--But I am treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by G.o.ds and men, represented on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not--for he had no voice--himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, to play at ball amid the chorus of Nausicaa"s maidens.
That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play of Sophocles", I scarce regret it. It is well, perhaps, that we have no second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so grand, and yet so tender, of Homer"s idyllic episode.
Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king. But not of a king in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern sense. Her father, Alcinous, is simply "primus inter pares" among a community of merchants, who are called "kings" likewise; and Mayor for life--so to speak--of a new trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the sh.o.r.e of the Mediterranean. But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her "carved chamber," is "like the immortals in form and face;" and two handmaidens who sleep on each side of the polished door "have beauty from the Graces."
To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less than Pallas Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth--and wash the clothes. {72}
"Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear Child so forgetful? This long time doth rest, Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair.
Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest, And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best.
These are the things whence good repute is born, And praises that make glad a parent"s breast.
Come, let us both go washing with the morn; So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.
"Know that thy maidenhood is not for long, Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo, Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung.
Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew, For wain and mules thy n.o.ble father sue, Which to the place of washing shall convey Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue.
This for thyself were better than essay Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way."
Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents--
"One by the hearth sat, with the maids around, And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent Her morning toil. Him to the council bound, Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found."
And calling him, as she might now, "Pappa phile," Dear Papa, asks for the mule waggon: but it is her father"s and her five brothers" clothes she fain would wash,--
"Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear."
But he understood all--and she goes forth in the mule waggon, with the clothes, after her mother has put in "a chest of all kinds of delicate food, and meat, and wine in a goatskin;" and last but not least, the indispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the bath, to which both Jews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health and beauty. And then we read in the simple verse of a poet too refined, like the rest of his race, to see anything mean or ridiculous in that which was not ugly and unnatural, how she and her maids got into the "polished waggon," "with good wheels," and she "took the whip and the studded reins," and "beat them till they started;" and how the mules "rattled" away, and "pulled against each other," till
"When they came to the fair flowing river Which feeds good lavatories all the year, Fitted to cleanse all sullied robes soever, They from the wain the mules unharnessed there, And chased them free, to crop their juicy fare By the swift river, on the margin green; Then to the waters dashed the clothes they bare And in the stream-filled trenches stamped them clean.
"Which, having washed and cleansed, they spread before The sunbeams, on the beach, where most did lie Thick pebbles, by the sea-wave washed ash.o.r.e.
So, having left them in the heat to dry, They to the bath went down, and by-and-by, Rubbed with rich oil, their midday meal essay, Couched in green turf, the river rolling nigh.
Then, throwing off their veils, at ball they play, While the white-armed Nausicaa leads the choral lay."
The mere beauty of this scene all will feel, who have the sense of beauty in them. Yet it is not on that aspect which I wish to dwell, but on its healthfulness. Exercise is taken, in measured time, to the sound of song, as a duty almost, as well as an amus.e.m.e.nt. For this game of ball, which is here mentioned for the first time in human literature, nearly three thousand years ago, was held by the Greeks and by the Romans after them, to be an almost necessary part of a liberal education; princ.i.p.ally, doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper half of the body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by raising and expanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the torso, whether perpendicular or oblique. The elasticity and grace which it was believed to give were so much prized, that a room for ball-play, and a teacher of the art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians went so far as to bestow on one famous ballplayer, Aristonicus of Carystia, a statue and the rights of citizenship. The rough and hardy young Spartans, when pa.s.sing from boyhood into manhood, received the t.i.tle of ball-players, seemingly from the game which it was then their special duty to learn. In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game would just bring into their right places all that is liable to be contracted and weakened in women, so many of whose occupations must needs be sedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at once filled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violent motion, or unseemly att.i.tude. We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them. Those old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them.
But fair Nausicaa must have been--some will say--surely a mere child of nature, and an uncultivated person?
So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of the very highest sort, full of "sweetness and light."--Intelligent and fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and sudden adventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answer his lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and pious withal;--for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famous words:
"Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus; And alms, though small, are sweet"
Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her wish that the G.o.ds might send her such a spouse.--This is Nausicaa as Homer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has accepted her for the ideal of n.o.ble maidenhood. I ask my readers to study for themselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsley"s translation, or rather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek, {76} and judge whether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined her--or, it may be, drew her from life--must have been a perfect gentleman; both complete in those "manners" which, says the old proverb, "make the man:" but which are the woman herself; because with her--who acts more by emotion than by calculation--manners are the outward and visible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flow instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner nature.
True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write. No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair in the race of life. But I am not aware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, or happiness, by acquiring them in after centuries. A wise man would sooner see his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or even an Hypatia.