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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Essays on Life, Art and Science, by Samuel
+Butler, Edited by R. A. Streatfeild
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Essays on Life, Art and Science
+
+
+Author: Samuel Butler
+
+Editor: R. A. Streatfeild
+
+Release Date: December 27, 2007  [eBook #3461]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON LIFE, ART AND SCIENCE***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1908 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS ON LIFE
+ART AND SCIENCE
+
+
+BY
+SAMUEL BUTLER
+
+AUTHOR OF "EREWHON," "EREWHON RE-VISITED,"
+"THE WAY OF ALL FLESH," ETC.
+
+EDITED BY
+R. A. STREATFEILD
+
+LONDON
+A. C. FIFIELD
+1908
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO
+At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh.
+
+Contents:
+
+Introduction
+Quis Desiderio?
+Ramblings in Cheapside
+The Aunt, The Nieces, and the Dog
+How to make the best of life
+The Sanctuary of Montrigone
+A Medieval Girl School
+Art in the Valley of Saas
+Thought and Language
+The Deadlock in Darwinism
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+It is hardly necessary to apologise for the miscellaneous character of
+the following collection of essays.  Samuel Butler was a man of such
+unusual versatility, and his interests were so many and so various that
+his literary remains were bound to cover a wide field.  Nevertheless it
+will be found that several of the subjects to which he devoted much time
+and labour are not represented in these pages.  I have not thought it
+necessary to reprint any of the numerous pamphlets and articles which he
+wrote upon the Iliad and Odyssey, since these were all merged in "The
+Authoress of the Odyssey," which gives his matured views upon everything
+relating to the Homeric poems.  For a similar reason I have not included
+an essay on the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which he
+printed in 1865 for private circulation, since he subsequently made
+extensive use of it in "The Fair Haven."
+
+Two of the essays in this collection were originally delivered as
+lectures; the remainder were published in _The Universal Review_ during
+1888, 1889, and 1890.
+
+I should perhaps explain why two other essays of his, which also appeared
+in _The Universal Review_, have been omitted.
+
+The first of these, entitled "L'Affaire Holbein-Rippel," relates to a
+drawing of Holbein's "Danse des Paysans," in the Basle Museum, which is
+usually described as a copy, but which Butler believed to be the work of
+Holbein himself.  This essay requires to be illustrated in so elaborate a
+manner that it was impossible to include it in a book of this size.
+
+The second essay, which is a sketch of the career of the sculptor
+Tabachetti, was published as the first section of an article entitled "A
+Sculptor and a Shrine," of which the second section is here given under
+the title, "The Sanctuary of Montrigone."  The section devoted to the
+sculptor represents all that Butler then knew about Tabachetti, but since
+it was written various documents have come to light, principally owing to
+the investigations of Cavaliere Francesco Negri, of Casale Monferrato,
+which negative some of Butler's most cherished conclusions.  Had Butler
+lived he would either have rewritten his essay in accordance with
+Cavaliere Negri's discoveries, of which he fully recognised the value, or
+incorporated them into the revised edition of "Ex Voto," which he
+intended to publish.  As it stands, the essay requires so much revision
+that I have decided to omit it altogether, and to postpone giving English
+readers a full account of Tabachetti's career until a second edition of
+"Ex Voto" is required.  Meanwhile I have given a brief summary of the
+main facts of Tabachetti's life in a note (page 154) to the essay on "Art
+in the Valley of Saas."  Any one who wishes for further details of the
+sculptor and his work will find them in Cavaliere Negri's pamphlet, "Il
+Santuario di Crea" (Alessandria, 1902).
+
+The three essays grouped together under the title of "The Deadlock in
+Darwinism" may be regarded as a postscript to Butler's four books on
+evolution, viz., "Life and Habit," "Evolution, Old and New," "Unconscious
+Memory" and "Luck or Cunning."  An occasion for the publication of these
+essays seemed to be afforded by the appearance in 1889 of Mr. Alfred
+Russel Wallace's "Darwinism"; and although nearly fourteen years have
+elapsed since they were published in the _Universal Review_, I have no
+fear that they will be found to be out of date.  How far, indeed, the
+problem embodied in the deadlock of which Butler speaks is from solution
+was conclusively shown by the correspondence which appeared in the
+_Times_ in May 1903, occasioned by some remarks made at University
+College by Lord Kelvin in moving a vote of thanks to Professor Henslow
+after his lecture on "Present Day Rationalism."  Lord Kelvin's claim for
+a recognition of the fact that in organic nature scientific thought is
+compelled to accept the idea of some kind of directive power, and his
+statement that biologists are coming once more to a firm acceptance of a
+vital principle, drew from several distinguished men of science retorts
+heated enough to prove beyond a doubt that the gulf between the two main
+divisions of evolutionists is as wide to-day as it was when Butler wrote.
+It will be well, perhaps, for the benefit of readers who have not
+followed the history of the theory of evolution during its later
+developments, to state in a few words what these two main divisions are.
+All evolutionists agree that the differences between species are caused
+by the accumulation and transmission of variations, but they do not agree
+as to the causes to which the variations are due.  The view held by the
+older evolutionists, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, who have been
+followed by many modern thinkers, including Herbert Spencer and Butler,
+is that the variations occur mainly as the result of effort and design;
+the opposite view, which is that advocated by Mr. Wallace in "Darwinism,"
+is that the variations occur merely as the result of chance.  The former
+is sometimes called the theological view, because it recognises the
+presence in organic nature of design, whether it be called creative
+power, directive force, directivity, or vital principle; the latter view,
+in which the existence of design is absolutely negatived, is now usually
+described as Weismannism, from the name of the writer who has been its
+principal advocate in recent years.
+
+In conclusion, I must thank my friend Mr. Henry Festing Jones most warmly
+for the invaluable assistance which he has given me in preparing these
+essays for publication, in correcting the proofs, and in compiling the
+introduction and notes.
+
+R. A. STREATFEILD.
+
+
+
+
+QUIS DESIDERIO . . . ? {1}
+
+
+Like Mr. Wilkie Collins, I, too, have been asked to lay some of my
+literary experiences before the readers of the _Universal Review_.  It
+occurred to me that the _Review_ must be indeed universal before it could
+open its pages to one so obscure as myself; but, nothing daunted by the
+distinguished company among which I was for the first time asked to move,
+I resolved to do as I was told, and went to the British Museum to see
+what books I had written.  Having refreshed my memory by a glance at the
+catalogue, I was about to try and diminish the large and ever-increasing
+circle of my non-readers when I became aware of a calamity that brought
+me to a standstill, and indeed bids fair, so far as I can see at present,
+to put an end to my literary existence altogether.
+
+I should explain that I cannot write unless I have a sloping desk, and
+the reading-room of the British Museum, where alone I can compose freely,
+is unprovided with sloping desks.  Like every other organism, if I cannot
+get exactly what I want I make shift with the next thing to it; true,
+there are no desks in the reading-room, but, as I once heard a visitor
+from the country say, "it contains a large number of very interesting
+works."  I know it was not right, and hope the Museum authorities will
+not be severe upon me if any of them reads this confession; but I wanted
+a desk, and set myself to consider which of the many very interesting
+works which a grateful nation places at the disposal of its would-be
+authors was best suited for my purpose.
+
+For mere reading I suppose one book is pretty much as good as another;
+but the choice of a desk-book is a more serious matter.  It must be
+neither too thick nor too thin; it must be large enough to make a
+substantial support; it must be strongly bound so as not to yield or
+give; it must not be too troublesome to carry backwards and forwards; and
+it must live on shelf C, D, or E, so that there need be no stooping or
+reaching too high.  These are the conditions which a really good book
+must fulfil; simple, however, as they are, it is surprising how few
+volumes comply with them satisfactorily; moreover, being perhaps too
+sensitively conscientious, I allowed another consideration to influence
+me, and was sincerely anxious not to take a book which would be in
+constant use for reference by readers, more especially as, if I did this,
+I might find myself disturbed by the officials.
+
+For weeks I made experiments upon sundry poetical and philosophical
+works, whose names I have forgotten, but could not succeed in finding my
+ideal desk, until at length, more by luck than cunning, I happened to
+light upon Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians," which I had no sooner
+tried than I discovered it to be the very perfection and _ne plus ultra_
+of everything that a book should be.  It lived in Case No. 2008, and I
+accordingly took at once to sitting in Row B, where for the last dozen
+years or so I have sat ever since.
+
+The first thing I have done whenever I went to the Museum has been to
+take down Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians" and carry it to my seat.
+It is not the custom of modern writers to refer to the works to which
+they are most deeply indebted, and I have never, that I remember,
+mentioned it by name before; but it is to this book alone that I have
+looked for support during many years of literary labour, and it is round
+this to me invaluable volume that all my own have page by page grown up.
+There is none in the Museum to which I have been under anything like such
+constant obligation, none which I can so ill spare, and none which I
+would choose so readily if I were allowed to select one single volume and
+keep it for my own.
+
+On finding myself asked for a contribution to the _Universal Review_, I
+went, as I have explained, to the Museum, and presently repaired to
+bookcase No. 2008 to get my favourite volume.  Alas! it was in the room
+no longer.  It was not in use, for its place was filled up already;
+besides, no one ever used it but myself.  Whether the ghost of the late
+Mr. Frost has been so eminently unchristian as to interfere, or whether
+the authorities have removed the book in ignorance of the steady demand
+which there has been for it on the part of at least one reader, are
+points I cannot determine.  All I know is that the book is gone, and I
+feel as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt when he became
+aware that Lucy was in her grave, and exclaimed so emphatically that this
+would make a considerable difference to him, or words to that effect.
+
+Now I think of it, Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians" was very like
+Lucy.  The one resided at Dovedale in Derbyshire, the other in Great
+Russell Street, Bloomsbury.  I admit that I do not see the resemblance
+here at this moment, but if I try to develop my perception I shall
+doubtless ere long find a marvellously striking one.  In other respects,
+however, than mere local habitat the likeness is obvious.  Lucy was not
+particularly attractive either inside or out--no more was Frost's "Lives
+of Eminent Christians"; there were few to praise her, and of those few
+still fewer could bring themselves to like her; indeed, Wordsworth
+himself seems to have been the only person who thought much about her one
+way or the other.  In like manner, I believe I was the only reader who
+thought much one way or the other about Frost's "Lives of Eminent
+Christians," but this in itself was one of the attractions of the book;
+and as for the grief we respectively felt and feel, I believe my own to
+be as deep as Wordsworth's, if not more so.
+
+I said above, "as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt"; for any
+one imbued with the spirit of modern science will read Wordsworth's poem
+with different eyes from those of a mere literary critic.  He will note
+that Wordsworth is most careful not to explain the nature of the
+difference which the death of Lucy will occasion to him.  He tells us
+that there will be a difference; but there the matter ends.  The
+superficial reader takes it that he was very sorry she was dead; it is,
+of course, possible that he may have actually been so, but he has not
+said this.  On the contrary, he has hinted plainly that she was ugly, and
+generally disliked; she was only like a violet when she was half-hidden
+from the view, and only fair as a star when there were so few stars out
+that it was practically impossible to make an invidious comparison.  If
+there were as many as even two stars the likeness was felt to be at an
+end.  If Wordsworth had imprudently promised to marry this young person
+during a time when he had been unusually long in keeping to good
+resolutions, and had afterwards seen some one whom he liked better, then
+Lucy's death would undoubtedly have made a considerable difference to
+him, and this is all that he has ever said that it would do.  What right
+have we to put glosses upon the masterly reticence of a poet, and credit
+him with feelings possibly the very reverse of those he actually
+entertained?
+
+Sometimes, indeed, I have been inclined to think that a mystery is being
+hinted at more dark than any critic has suspected.  I do not happen to
+possess a copy of the poem, but the writer, if I am not mistaken, says
+that "few could know when Lucy ceased to be."  "Ceased to be" is a
+suspiciously euphemistic expression, and the words "few could know" are
+not applicable to the ordinary peaceful death of a domestic servant such
+as Lucy appears to have been.  No matter how obscure the deceased, any
+number of people commonly can know the day and hour of his or her demise,
+whereas in this case we are expressly told it would be impossible for
+them to do so.  Wordsworth was nothing if not accurate, and would not
+have said that few could know, but that few actually did know, unless he
+was aware of circumstances that precluded all but those implicated in the
+crime of her death from knowing the precise moment of its occurrence.  If
+Lucy was the kind of person not obscurely pourtrayed in the poem; if
+Wordsworth had murdered her, either by cutting her throat or smothering
+her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if
+he had thus found himself released from an engagement which had become
+irksome to him, or possibly from the threat of an action for breach of
+promise, then there is not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns
+his crime that is not alive with meaning.  On any other supposition to
+the general reader it is unintelligible.
+
+We cannot be too guarded in the interpretations we put upon the words of
+great poets.  Take the young lady who never loved the dear gazelle--and I
+don't believe she did; we are apt to think that Moore intended us to see
+in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable, but most unfortunate
+young woman, whereas all he has told us about her points to an exactly
+opposite conclusion.  In reality, he wished us to see a young lady who
+had been an habitual complainer from her earliest childhood; whose plants
+had always died as soon as she bought them, while those belonging to her
+neighbours had flourished.  The inference is obvious, nor can we
+reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to draw it; if her plants were
+the very first to fade away, she was evidently the very first to neglect
+or otherwise maltreat them.  She did not give them enough water, or left
+the door of her fern-ease open when she was cooking her dinner at the gas
+stove, or kept them too near the paraffin oil, or other like folly; and
+as for her temper, see what the gazelles did; as long as they did not
+know her "well," they could just manage to exist, but when they got to
+understand her real character, one after another felt that death was the
+only course open to it, and accordingly died rather than live with such a
+mistress.  True, the young lady herself said the gazelles loved her; but
+disagreeable people are apt to think themselves amiable, and in view of
+the course invariably taken by the gazelles themselves any one accustomed
+to weigh evidence will hold that she was probably mistaken.
+
+I must, however, return to Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians."  I will
+leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and Wordsworth
+seem to have delighted.  I am very sorry the book is gone, and know not
+where to turn for its successor.  Till I have found a substitute I can
+write no more, and I do not know how to find even a tolerable one.  I
+should try a volume of Migne's "Complete Course of Patrology," but I do
+not like books in more than one volume, for the volumes vary in
+thickness, and one never can remember which one took; the four volumes,
+however, of Bede in Giles's "Anglican Fathers" are not open to this
+objection, and I have reserved them for favourable consideration.
+Mather's "Magnalia" might do, but the binding does not please me;
+Cureton's "Corpus Ignatianum" might also do if it were not too thin.  I
+do not like taking Norton's "Genuineness of the Gospels," as it is just
+possible some one may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine
+or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton's book.
+Baxter's "Church History of England," Lingard's "Anglo-Saxon Church," and
+Cardwell's "Documentary Annals," though none of them as good as Frost,
+are works of considerable merit; but on the whole I think Arvine's
+"Cyclopedia of Moral and Religious Anecdote" is perhaps the one book in
+the room which comes within measurable distance of Frost.  I should
+probably try this book first, but it has a fatal objection in its too
+seductive title.  "I am not curious," as Miss Lottie Venne says in one of
+her parts, "but I like to know," and I might be tempted to pervert the
+book from its natural uses and open it, so as to find out what kind of a
+thing a moral and religious anecdote is.  I know, of course, that there
+are a great many anecdotes in the Bible, but no one thinks of calling
+them either moral or religious, though some of them certainly seem as if
+they might fairly find a place in Mr. Arvine's work.  There are some
+things, however, which it is better not to know, and take it all round I
+do not think I should be wise in putting myself in the way of temptation,
+and adopting Arvine as the successor to my beloved and lamented Frost.
+
+Some successor I must find, or I must give up writing altogether, and
+this I should be sorry to do.  I have only as yet written about a third,
+or from that--counting works written but not published--to a half, of the
+books which I have set myself to write.  It would not so much matter if
+old age was not staring me in the face.  Dr. Parr said it was "a beastly
+shame for an old man not to have laid down a good cellar of port in his
+youth"; I, like the greater number, I suppose, of those who write books
+at all, write in order that I may have something to read in my old age
+when I can write no longer.  I know what I shall like better than any one
+can tell me, and write accordingly; if my career is nipped in the bud, as
+seems only too likely, I really do not know where else I can turn for
+present agreeable occupation, nor yet how to make suitable provision for
+my later years.  Other writers can, of course, make excellent provision
+for their own old ages, but they cannot do so for mine, any more than I
+should succeed if I were to try to cater for theirs.  It is one of those
+cases in which no man can make agreement for his brother.
+
+I have no heart for continuing this article, and if I had, I have nothing
+of interest to say.  No one's literary career can have been smoother or
+more unchequered than mine.  I have published all my books at my own
+expense, and paid for them in due course.  What can be conceivably more
+unromantic?  For some years I had a little literary grievance against the
+authorities of the British Museum because they would insist on saying in
+their catalogue that I had published three sermons on Infidelity in the
+year 1820.  I thought I had not, and got them out to see.  They were
+rather funny, but they were not mine.  Now, however, this grievance has
+been removed.  I had another little quarrel with them because they would
+describe me as "of St. John's College, Cambridge," an establishment for
+which I have the most profound veneration, but with which I have not had
+the honour to be connected for some quarter of a century.  At last they
+said they would change this description if I would only tell them what I
+was, for, though they had done their best to find out, they had
+themselves failed.  I replied with modest pride that I was a Bachelor of
+Arts.  I keep all my other letters inside my name, not outside.  They
+mused and said it was unfortunate that I was not a Master of Arts.  Could
+I not get myself made a Master?  I said I understood that a Mastership
+was an article the University could not do under about five pounds, and
+that I was not disposed to go sixpence higher than three ten.  They again
+said it was a pity, for it would be very inconvenient to them if I did
+not keep to something between a bishop and a poet.  I might be anything I
+liked in reason, provided I showed proper respect for the alphabet; but
+they had got me between "Samuel Butler, bishop," and "Samuel Butler,
+poet."  It would be very troublesome to shift me, and bachelor came
+before bishop.  This was reasonable, so I replied that, under those
+circumstances, if they pleased, I thought I would like to be a
+philosophical writer.  They embraced the solution, and, no matter what I
+write now, I must remain a philosophical writer as long as I live, for
+the alphabet will hardly be altered in my time, and I must be something
+between "Bis" and "Poe."  If I could get a volume of my excellent
+namesake's "Hudibras" out of the list of my works, I should be robbed of
+my last shred of literary grievance, so I say nothing about this, but
+keep it secret, lest some worse thing should happen to me.  Besides, I
+have a great respect for my namesake, and always say that if "Erewhon"
+had been a racehorse it would have been got by "Hudibras" out of
+"Analogy."  Some one said this to me many years ago, and I felt so much
+flattered that I have been repeating the remark as my own ever since.
+
+But how small are these grievances as compared with those endured without
+a murmur by hundreds of writers far more deserving than myself.  When I
+see the scores and hundreds of workers in the reading-room who have done
+so much more than I have, but whose work is absolutely fruitless to
+themselves, and when I think of the prompt recognition obtained by my own
+work, I ask myself what I have done to be thus rewarded.  On the other
+hand, the feeling that I have succeeded far beyond my deserts hitherto,
+makes it all the harder for me to acquiesce without complaint in the
+extinction of a career which I honestly believe to be a promising one;
+and once more I repeat that, unless the Museum authorities give me back
+my Frost, or put a locked clasp on Arvine, my career must be
+extinguished.  Give me back Frost, and, if life and health are spared, I
+will write another dozen of volumes yet before I hang up my fiddle--if so
+serious a confusion of metaphors may be pardoned.  I know from long
+experience how kind and considerate both the late and present
+superintendents of the reading-room were and are, but I doubt how far
+either of them would be disposed to help me on this occasion; continue,
+however, to rob me of my Frost, and, whatever else I may do, I will write
+no more books.
+
+_Note by Dr. Garnett_, _British Museum_.--The frost has broken up.  Mr.
+Butler is restored to literature.  Mr. Mudie may make himself easy.
+England will still boast a humourist; and the late Mr. Darwin (to whose
+posthumous machinations the removal of the book was owing) will continue
+to be confounded.--R. GANNETT.
+
+
+
+
+RAMBLINGS IN CHEAPSIDE {2}
+
+
+Walking the other day in Cheapside I saw some turtles in Mr. Sweeting's
+window, and was tempted to stay and look at them.  As I did so I was
+struck not more by the defences with which they were hedged about, than
+by the fatuousness of trying to hedge that in at all which, if hedged
+thoroughly, must die of its own defencefulness.  The holes for the head
+and feet through which the turtle leaks out, as it were, on to the
+exterior world, and through which it again absorbs the exterior world
+into itself--"catching on" through them to things that are thus both
+turtle and not turtle at one and the same time--these holes stultify the
+armour, and show it to have been designed by a creature with more of
+faithfulness to a fixed idea, and hence one-sidedness, than of that quick
+sense of relative importances and their changes, which is the main factor
+of good living.
+
+The turtle obviously had no sense of proportion; it differed so widely
+from myself that I could not comprehend it; and as this word occurred to
+me, it occurred also that until my body comprehended its body in a
+physical material sense, neither would my mind be able to comprehend its
+mind with any thoroughness.  For unity of mind can only be consummated by
+unity of body; everything, therefore, must be in some respects both knave
+and fool to all that which has not eaten it, or by which it has not been
+eaten.  As long as the turtle was in the window and I in the street
+outside, there was no chance of our comprehending one another.
+
+Nevertheless I knew that I could get it to agree with me if I could so
+effectually button-hole and fasten on to it as to eat it.  Most men have
+an easy method with turtle soup, and I had no misgiving but that if I
+could bring my first premise to bear I should prove the better reasoner.
+My difficulty lay in this initial process, for I had not with me the
+argument that would alone compel Mr. Sweeting think that I ought to be
+allowed to convert the turtles--I mean I had no money in my pocket.  No
+missionary enterprise can be carried on without any money at all, but
+even so small a sum as half-a-crown would, I suppose, have enabled me to
+bring the turtle partly round, and with many half-crowns I could in time
+no doubt convert the lot, for the turtle needs must go where the money
+drives.  If, as is alleged, the world stands on a turtle, the turtle
+stands on money.  No money no turtle.  As for money, that stands on
+opinion, credit, trust, faith--things that, though highly material in
+connection with money, are still of immaterial essence.
+
+The steps are perfectly plain.  The men who caught the turtles brought a
+fairly strong and definite opinion to bear upon them, that passed into
+action, and later on into money.  They thought the turtles would come
+that way, and verified their opinion; on this, will and action were
+generated, with the result that the men turned the turtles on their backs
+and carried them off.  Mr. Sweeting touched these men with money, which
+is the outward and visible sign of verified opinion.  The customer
+touches Mr. Sweeting with money, Mr. Sweeting touches the waiter and the
+cook with money.  They touch the turtle with skill and verified opinion.
+Finally, the customer applies the clinching argument that brushes all
+sophisms aside, and bids the turtle stand protoplasm to protoplasm with
+himself, to know even as it is known.
+
+But it must be all touch, touch, touch; skill, opinion, power, and money,
+passing in and out with one another in any order we like, but still link
+to link and touch to touch.  If there is failure anywhere in respect of
+opinion, skill, power, or money, either as regards quantity or quality,
+the chain can be no stronger than its weakest link, and the turtle and
+the clinching argument will fly asunder.  Of course, if there is an
+initial failure in connection, through defect in any member of the chain,
+or of connection between the links, it will no more be attempted to bring
+the turtle and the clinching argument together, than it will to chain up
+a dog with two pieces of broken chain that are disconnected.  The contact
+throughout must be conceived as absolute; and yet perfect contact is
+inconceivable by us, for on becoming perfect it ceases to be contact, and
+becomes essential, once for all inseverable, identity.  The most absolute
+contact short of this is still contact by courtesy only.  So here, as
+everywhere else, Eurydice glides off as we are about to grasp her.  We
+can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of
+blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.
+
+Presently my own blind finger-ends fished up the conclusion, that as I
+had neither time nor money to spend on perfecting the chain that would
+put me in full spiritual contact with Mr. Sweeting's turtles, I had
+better leave them to complete their education at some one else's expense
+rather than mine, so I walked on towards the Bank.  As I did so it struck
+me how continually we are met by this melting of one existence into
+another.  The limits of the body seem well defined enough as definitions
+go, but definitions seldom go far.  What, for example, can seem more
+distinct from a man than his banker or his solicitor?  Yet these are
+commonly so much parts of him that he can no more cut them off and grow
+new ones, than he can grow new legs or arms; neither must he wound his
+solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing.  As for his
+bank--failure of his bank's action may be as fatal to a man as failure of
+his heart.  I have said nothing about the medical or spiritual adviser,
+but most men grow into the society that surrounds them by the help of
+these four main tap-roots, and not only into the world of humanity, but
+into the universe at large.  We can, indeed, grow butchers, bakers, and
+greengrocers, almost _ad libitum_, but these are low developments, and
+correspond to skin, hair, or finger-nails.  Those of us again who are not
+highly enough organised to have grown a solicitor or banker can generally
+repair the loss of whatever social organisation they may possess as
+freely as lizards are said to grow new tails; but this with the higher
+social, as well as organic, developments is only possible to a very
+limited extent.
+
+The doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls--a doctrine to
+which the foregoing considerations are for the most part easy
+corollaries--crops up no matter in what direction we allow our thoughts
+to wander.  And we meet instances of transmigration of body as well as of
+soul.  I do not mean that both body and soul have transmigrated together,
+far from it; but that, as we can often recognise a transmigrated mind in
+an alien body, so we not less often see a body that is clearly only a
+transmigration, linked on to some one else's new and alien soul.  We meet
+people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long
+dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits.  We see them
+going about in omnibuses, railway carriages, and in all public places.
+The cards have been shuffled, and they have drawn fresh lots in life and
+nationalities, but any one fairly well up in mediaeval and last century
+portraiture knows them at a glance.
+
+Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I
+recognised, only he seemed to have got younger.  He was with a friend,
+and his face was in continual play, but for some little time I puzzled in
+vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him before.  All of a
+sudden I remembered he was King Francis I. of France.  I had hitherto
+thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I
+understood it.  His great contemporary Henry VIII. keeps a restaurant in
+Oxford Street.  Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many
+years, and only retired when the railway was opened.  Titian once made me
+a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones.  At Modena I had my
+hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle.  The model who
+sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery
+establishment at Montreal.  She has a little motherly pimple on the left
+side of her nose that is misleading at first, but on examination she is
+readily recognised; probably Raffaelle's model had the pimple too, but
+Raffaelle left it out--as he would.
+
+Handel, of course, is Madame Patey.  Give Madame Patey Handel's wig and
+clothes, and there would be no telling her from Handel.  It is not only
+that the features and the shape of the head are the same, but there is a
+certain imperiousness of expression and attitude about Handel which he
+hardly attempts to conceal in Madame Patey.  It is a curious coincidence
+that he should continue to be such an incomparable renderer of his own
+music.  Pope Julius II. was the late Mr. Darwin.  Rameses II. is a blind
+woman now, and stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug.  I never could
+understand why I always found myself humming "They oppressed them with
+burthens" when I passed her, till one day I was looking in Mr. Spooner's
+window in the Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses II.  Mary Queen of
+Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe in
+Tottenham Court Road.
+
+Michael Angelo is a commissionaire; I saw him on board the _Glen Rosa_,
+which used to run every day from London to Clacton-on-Sea and back.  It
+gave me quite a turn when I saw him coming down the stairs from the upper
+deck, with his bronzed face, flattened nose, and with the familiar bar
+upon his forehead.  I never liked Michael Angelo, and never shall, but I
+am afraid of him, and was near trying to hide when I saw him coming
+towards me.  He had not got his commissionaire's uniform on, and I did
+not know he was one till I met him a month or so later in the Strand.
+When we got to Blackwall the music struck up and people began to dance.  I
+never saw a man dance so much in my life.  He did not miss a dance all
+the way to Clacton, nor all the way back again, and when not dancing he
+was flirting and cracking jokes.  I could hardly believe my eyes when I
+reflected that this man had painted the famous "Last Judgment," and had
+made all those statues.
+
+Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissago on the Lago
+Maggiore, only he is better-tempered-looking, and has a more intellectual
+expression.  He gave me his ideas upon beauty: "Tutto ch' e vero e
+bello," he exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence.  I am not afraid
+of Dante.  I know people by their friends, and he went about with Virgil,
+so I said with some severity, "No, Dante, il naso della Signora Robinson
+e vero, ma non e bello"; and he admitted I was right.  Beatrice's name is
+Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland.  I used to
+sit at my window and hear people call "Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty
+times in a forenoon.  She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I
+remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how
+often they called Towler, every one came before she did.  I suppose they
+spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met
+any one else with this name.  She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who
+made me play the piano to her, and she said it was lovely.  Of course I
+only played my own compositions; so I believed her, and it all went off
+very nicely.  I thought it might save trouble if I did not tell her who
+she really was, so I said nothing about it.
+
+I met Socrates once.  He was my muleteer on an excursion which I will not
+name, for fear it should identify the man.  The moment I saw my guide I
+knew he was somebody, but for the life of me I could not remember who.
+All of a sudden it flashed across me that he was Socrates.  He talked
+enough for six, but it was all in _dialetto_, so I could not understand
+him, nor, when I had discovered who he was, did I much try to do so.  He
+was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing fruit and vegetables, but
+an amiable man enough.  He had had a long day with his mule and me, and
+he only asked me five francs.  I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor old
+patched boots, and there was a meekness about him that touched me.  "And
+now, Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our several ways, you to
+steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest--which
+of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in
+heaven knows, but we know not."
+
+I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the
+terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna.  He is not
+called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs.  He is in the costume of
+a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears
+to be making an offer of marriage to his cook.  Beethoven both my friend
+Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an
+engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost
+his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the
+same refractory hair that he always had.  It was very interesting to
+watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become
+positively posthumous.  One morning I was told the Beethovens were going
+away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the
+stairs.  The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half
+thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been
+surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the-box.  "Sono
+indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes.  The
+porters knew what I meant, and laughed.  But there is no end to the list
+of people whom I have been able to recognise, and before I had got
+through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had
+involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.
+
+I do not like books.  I believe I have the smallest library of any
+literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it.  I keep my
+books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if
+any one gives me one for my private library.  I once heard two ladies
+disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not
+been wasting money.  "I spent it in books," said the accused, "and it's
+not wasting money to buy books."  "Indeed, my dear, I think it is," was
+the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it.  Webster's Dictionary,
+Whitaker's Almanack, and Bradshaw's Railway Guide should be sufficient
+for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when
+the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been
+mastered.  Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly
+busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from
+mere force of habit.
+
+I know not what made me pick up a copy of AEschylus--of course in an
+English version--or rather I know not what made AEschylus take up with
+me, for he took me rather than I him; but no sooner had he got me than he
+began puzzling me, as he has done any time this forty years, to know
+wherein his transcendent merit can be supposed to lie.  To me he is, like
+the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary
+Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal.  There are true
+immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great
+impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are,
+five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs.  It comforts me to remember that
+Aristophanes liked AEschylus no better than I do.  True, he praises him
+by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he
+may run down these last more effectively.  Aristophanes is a safe man to
+follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as
+to pull a long face with the Greek Professors; but this is neither here
+nor there, for no one really cares about AEschylus; the more interesting
+question is how he contrived to make so many people for so many years
+pretend to care about him.
+
+Perhaps he married somebody's daughter.  If a man would get hold of the
+public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight.  I have never understood that
+AEschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I
+suppose he must have married a theatrical manager's daughter, and got his
+plays brought out that way.  The ear of any age or country is like its
+land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is
+already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no
+squatting on such valuable property.  It is written and talked up to as
+closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming
+population.  There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands,
+and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase,
+marriage, or fighting, in the usual way--and fighting gives the longest,
+safest tenure.  The public itself has hardly more voice in the question
+who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners.  It is
+farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small
+blame to them; nevertheless, it has a residuum of mulishness which the
+land has not, and does sometimes dispossess its tenants.  It is in this
+residuum that those who fight place their hope and trust.
+
+Or perhaps AEschylus squared the leading critics of his time.  When one
+comes to think of it, he must have done so, for how is it conceivable
+that such plays should have had such runs if he had not?  I met a lady
+one year in Switzerland who had some parrots that always travelled with
+her and were the idols of her life.  These parrots would not let any one
+read aloud in their presence, unless they heard their own names
+introduced from time to time.  If these were freely interpolated into the
+text they would remain as still as stones, for they thought the reading
+was about themselves.  If it was not about them it could not be allowed.
+The leaders of literature are like these parrots; they do not look at
+what a man writes, nor if they did would they understand it much better
+than the parrots do; but they like the sound of their own names, and if
+these are freely interpolated in a tone they take as friendly, they may
+even give ear to an outsider.  Otherwise they will scream him off if they
+can.
+
+I should not advise any one with ordinary independence of mind to attempt
+the public ear unless he is confident that he can out-lung and out-last
+his own generation; for if he has any force, people will and ought to be
+on their guard against him, inasmuch as there is no knowing where he may
+not take them.  Besides, they have staked their money on the wrong men so
+often without suspecting it, that when there comes one whom they do
+suspect it would be madness not to bet against him.  True, he may die
+before he has out-screamed his opponents, but that has nothing to do with
+it.  If his scream was well pitched it will sound clearer when he is
+dead.  We do not know what death is.  If we know so little about life
+which we have experienced, how shall we know about death which we have
+not--and in the nature of things never can?  Every one, as I said years
+ago in "Alps and Sanctuaries," is an immortal to himself, for he cannot
+know that he is dead until he is dead, and when dead how can he know
+anything about anything?  All we know is, that even the humblest dead may
+live long after all trace of the body has disappeared; we see them doing
+it in the bodies and memories of those that come after them; and not a
+few live so much longer and more effectually than is desirable, that it
+has been necessary to get rid of them by Act of Parliament.  It is love
+that alone gives life, and the truest life is that which we live not in
+ourselves but vicariously in others, and with which we have no concern.
+Our concern is so to order ourselves that we may be of the number of them
+that enter into life--although we know it not.
+
+AEschylus did so order himself; but his life is not of that inspiriting
+kind that can be won through fighting the good fight only--or being
+believed to have fought it.  His voice is the echo of a drone,
+drone-begotten and drone-sustained.  It is not a tone that a man must
+utter or die--nay, even though he die; and likely enough half the
+allusions and hard passages in AEschylus of which we can make neither
+head nor tail are in reality only puffs of some of the literary leaders
+of his time.
+
+The lady above referred to told me more about her parrots.  She was like
+a Nasmyth's hammer going slow--very gentle, but irresistible.  She always
+read the newspaper to them.  What was the use of having a newspaper if
+one did not read it to one's parrots?
+
+"And have you divined," I asked, "to which side they incline in
+politics?"
+
+"They do not like Mr. Gladstone," was the somewhat freezing answer; "this
+is the only point on which we disagree, for I adore him.  Don't ask more
+about this, it is a great grief to me.  I tell them everything," she
+continued, "and hide no secret from them."
+
+"But can any parrot be trusted to keep a secret?"
+
+"Mine can."
+
+"And on Sundays do you give them the same course of reading as on a week-
+day, or do you make a difference?"
+
+"On Sundays I always read them a genealogical chapter from the Old or New
+Testament, for I can thus introduce their names without profanity.  I
+always keep tea by me in case they should ask for it in the night, and I
+have an Etna to warm it for them; they take milk and sugar.  The old
+white-headed clergyman came to see them last night; it was very painful,
+for Jocko reminded him so strongly of his late . . . "
+
+I thought she was going to say "wife," but it proved to have been only of
+a parrot that he had once known and loved.
+
+One evening she was in difficulties about the quarantine, which was
+enforced that year on the Italian frontier.  The local doctor had gone
+down that morning to see the Italian doctor and arrange some details.
+"Then, perhaps, my dear," she said to her husband, "he is the
+quarantine."  "No, my love," replied her husband.  "The quarantine is not
+a person, it is a place where they put people"; but she would not be
+comforted, and suspected the quarantine as an enemy that might at any
+moment pounce out upon her and her parrots.  So a lady told me once that
+she had been in like trouble about the anthem.  She read in her prayer-
+book that in choirs and places where they sing "here followeth the
+anthem," yet the person with this most mysteriously sounding name never
+did follow.  They had a choir, and no one could say the church was not a
+place where they sang, for they did sing--both chants and hymns.  Why,
+then, this persistent slackness on the part of the anthem, who at this
+juncture should follow her papa, the rector, into the reading-desk?  No
+doubt he would come some day, and then what would he be like?  Fair or
+dark?  Tall or short?  Would he be bald and wear spectacles like papa, or
+would he be young and good-looking?  Anyhow, there was something wrong,
+for it was announced that he would follow, and he never did follow;
+therefore there was no knowing what he might not do next.
+
+I heard of the parrots a year or two later as giving lessons in Italian
+to an English maid.  I do not know what their terms were.  Alas! since
+then both they and their mistress have joined the majority.  When the
+poor lady felt her end was near she desired (and the responsibility for
+this must rest with her, not me) that the birds might be destroyed, as
+fearing that they might come to be neglected, and knowing that they could
+never be loved again as she had loved them.  On being told that all was
+over, she said, "Thank you," and immediately expired.
+
+Reflecting in such random fashion, and strolling with no greater method,
+I worked my way back through Cheapside and found myself once more in
+front of Sweeting's window.  Again the turtles attracted me.  They were
+alive, and so far at any rate they agreed with me.  Nay, they had eyes,
+mouths, legs, if not arms, and feet, so there was much in which we were
+both of a mind, but surely they must be mistaken in arming themselves so
+very heavily.  Any creature on getting what the turtle aimed at would
+overreach itself and be landed not in safety but annihilation.  It should
+have no communion with the outside world at all, for death could creep in
+wherever the creature could creep out; and it must creep out somewhere if
+it was to hook on to outside things.  What death can be more absolute
+than such absolute isolation?  Perfect death, indeed, if it were
+attainable (which it is not), is as near perfect security as we can
+reach, but it is not the kind of security aimed at by any animal that is
+at the pains of defending itself.  For such want to have things both
+ways, desiring the livingness of life without its perils, and the safety
+of death without its deadness, and some of us do actually get this for a
+considerable time, but we do not get it by plating ourselves with armour
+as the turtle does.  We tried this in the Middle Ages, and no longer mock
+ourselves with the weight of armour that our forefathers carried in
+battle.  Indeed the more deadly the weapons of attack become the more we
+go into the fight slug-wise.
+
+Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as
+the turtles their pursuit of it.  They have hardly more than skin enough
+to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the
+road.  Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose
+defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended.
+Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out,
+while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all the world
+over for every single turtle.  Of the two vanities, therefore, that of
+the slug seems most substantial.
+
+In either case the creature thinks itself safe, but is sure to be found
+out sooner or later; nor is it easy to explain this mockery save by
+reflecting that everything must have its meat in due season, and that
+meat can only be found for such a multitude of mouths by giving
+everything as meat in due season to something else.  This is like the
+Kilkenny cats, or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it is the way of the
+world, and as every animal must contribute in kind to the picnic of the
+universe, one does not see what better arrangement could be made than the
+providing each race with a hereditary fallacy, which shall in the end get
+it into a scrape, but which shall generally stand the wear and tear of
+life for some time.  "_Do ut des_" is the writing on all flesh to him
+that eats it; and no creature is dearer to itself than it is to some
+other that would devour it.
+
+Nor is there any statement or proposition more invulnerable than living
+forms are.  Propositions prey upon and are grounded upon one another just
+like living forms.  They support one another as plants and animals do;
+they are based ultimately on credit, or faith, rather than the cash of
+irrefragable conviction.  The whole universe is carried on on the credit
+system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to
+collapse, it must itself collapse immediately.  Just or unjust, it lives
+by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some
+inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in
+matter and in flesh: it is meteoric--suspended in midair; it is the
+baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no
+base can seem more broad than such stupendous baselessness, and yet any
+man can bring it about his ears by being over-curious; when faith fails a
+system based on faith fails also.
+
+Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an
+inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter.
+If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for
+everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of
+the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand
+so great a drain even on so great a reserve?  Probably there is not, but
+happily there can be no such panic, for even though the cultured classes
+may do so, the uncultured are too dull to have brains enough to commit
+such stupendous folly.  It takes a long course of academic training to
+educate a man up to the standard which he must reach before he can
+entertain such questions seriously, and by a merciful dispensation of
+Providence, university training is almost as costly as it is
+unprofitable.  The majority will thus be always unable to afford it, and
+will base their opinions on mother wit and current opinion rather than on
+demonstration.
+
+So I turned my steps homewards; I saw a good many more things on my way
+home, but I was told that I was not to see more this time than I could
+get into twelve pages of the _Universal Review_; I must therefore reserve
+any remark which I think might perhaps entertain the reader for another
+occasion.
+
+
+
+
+THE AUNT, THE NIECES, AND THE DOG {3}
+
+
+When a thing is old, broken, and useless we throw it on the dust-heap,
+but when it is sufficiently old, sufficiently broken, and sufficiently
+useless we give money for it, put it into a museum, and read papers over
+it which people come long distances to hear.  By-and-by, when the
+whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself
+becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is
+re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age--containing,
+perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation.  So when
+people are old, indigent, and in all respects incapable, we hold them in
+greater and greater contempt as their poverty and impotence increase,
+till they reach the pitch when they are actually at the point to die,
+whereon they become sublime.  Then we place every resource our hospitals
+can command at their disposal, and show no stint in our consideration for
+them.
+
+It is the same with all our interests.  We care most about extremes of
+importance and of unimportance; but extremes of importance are tainted
+with fear, and a very imperfect fear casteth out love.  Extremes of
+unimportance cannot hurt us, therefore we are well disposed towards them;
+the means may come to do so, therefore we do not love them.  Hence we
+pick a fly out of a milk-jug and watch with pleasure over its recovery,
+for we are confident that under no conceivable circumstances will it want
+to borrow money from us; but we feel less sure about a mouse, so we show
+it no quarter.  The compilers of our almanacs well know this tendency of
+our natures, so they tell us, not when Noah went into the ark, nor when
+the temple of Jerusalem was dedicated, but that Lindley Murray,
+grammarian, died January 16, 1826.  This is not because they could not
+find so many as three hundred and sixty-five events of considerable
+interest since the creation of the world, but because they well know we
+would rather hear of something less interesting.  We care most about what
+concerns us either very closely, or so little that practically we have
+nothing whatever to do with it.
+
+I once asked a young Italian, who professed to have a considerable
+knowledge of English literature, which of all our poems pleased him best.
+He replied without a moment's hesitation:--
+
+   "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
+      The cow jumped over the moon;
+   The little dog laughed to see such sport,
+      And the dish ran away with the spoon."
+
+He said this was better than anything in Italian.  They had Dante and
+Tasso, and ever so many more great poets, but they had nothing comparable
+to "Hey diddle diddle," nor had he been able to conceive how any one
+could have written it.  Did I know the author's name, and had we given
+him a statue?  On this I told him of the young lady of Harrow who would
+go to church in a barrow, and plied him with whatever rhyming nonsense I
+could call to mind, but it was no use; all of these things had an element
+of reality that robbed them of half their charm, whereas "Hey diddle
+diddle" had nothing in it that could conceivably concern him.
+
+So again it is with the things that gall us most.  What is it that rises
+up against us at odd times and smites us in the face again and again for
+years after it has happened?  That we spent all the best years of our
+life in learning what we have found to be a swindle, and to have been
+known to be a swindle by those who took money for misleading us?  That
+those on whom we most leaned most betrayed us?  That we have only come to
+feel our strength when there is little strength left of any kind to feel?
+These things will hardly much disturb a man of ordinary good temper.  But
+that he should have said this or that little unkind and wanton saying;
+that he should have gone away from this or that hotel and given a
+shilling too little to the waiter; that his clothes were shabby at such
+or such a garden-party--these things gall us as a corn will sometimes do,
+though the loss of a limb way not be seriously felt.
+
+I have been reminded lately of these considerations with more than common
+force by reading the very voluminous correspondence left by my
+grandfather, Dr. Butler, of Shrewsbury, whose memoirs I am engaged in
+writing.  I have found a large number of interesting letters on subjects
+of serious import, but must confess that it is to the hardly less
+numerous lighter letters that I have been most attracted, nor do I feel
+sure that my eminent namesake did not share my predilection.  Among other
+letters in my possession I have one bundle that has been kept apart, and
+has evidently no connection with Dr. Butler's own life.  I cannot use
+these letters, therefore, for my book, but over and above the charm of
+their inspired spelling, I find them of such an extremely trivial nature
+that I incline to hope the reader may derive as much amusement from them
+as I have done myself, and venture to give them the publicity here which
+I must refuse them in my book.  The dates and signatures have, with the
+exception of Mrs. Newton's, been carefully erased, but I have collected
+that they were written by the two servants of a single lady who resided
+at no great distance from London, to two nieces of the said lady who
+lived in London itself.  The aunt never writes, but always gets one of
+the servants to do so for her.  She appears either as "your aunt" or as
+"She"; her name is not given, but she is evidently looked upon with a
+good deal of awe by all who had to do with her.
+
+The letters almost all of them relate to visits either of the aunt to
+London, or of the nieces to the aunt's home, which, from occasional
+allusions to hopping, I gather to have been in Kent, Sussex, or Surrey.  I
+have arranged them to the best of my power, and take the following to be
+the earliest.  It has no signature, but is not in the handwriting of the
+servant who styles herself Elizabeth, or Mrs. Newton.  It runs:--
+
+   "MADAM,--Your Aunt Wishes me to inform you she will be glad if you
+   will let hir know if you think of coming To hir House thiss month or
+   Next as she cannot have you in September on a kount of the Hoping If
+   you ar coming she thinkes she had batter Go to London on the Day you
+   com to hir House the says you shall have everry Thing raddy for you at
+   hir House and Mrs. Newton to meet you and stay with you till She
+   returnes a gann.
+
+   "if you arnot Coming thiss Summer She will be in London before thiss
+   Month is out and will Sleep on the Sofy As She willnot be in London
+   more thann two nits. and She Says she willnot truble you on anny a
+   kount as She Will returne the Same Day before She will plage you anny
+   more. but She thanks you for asking hir to London. but She says She
+   cannot leve the house at prassant She sayhir Survants ar to do for you
+   as she cannot lodge yours nor she willnot have thim in at the house
+   anny more to brake and destroy hir thinks and beslive hir and make up
+   Lies by hir and Skandel as your too did She says she mens to pay fore
+   2 Nits and one day, She says the Pepelwill let hir have it if you ask
+   thim to let hir: you Will be so good as to let hir know sun: wish She
+   is to do, as She says She dos not care anny thing a bout it. which way
+   tiss she is batter than She was and desirs hir Love to bouth bouth.
+
+   "Your aunt wises to know how the silk Clocks ar madup [how the silk
+   cloaks are made up] with a Cape or a wood as she is a goin to have one
+   madeup to rideout in in hir littel shas [chaise].
+
+   "Charles is a butty and so good.
+
+   "Mr & Mrs Newton ar quite wall & desires to be remembered to you."
+
+I can throw no light on the meaning of the verb to "beslive."  Each
+letter in the MS. is so admirably formed that there can be no question
+about the word being as I have given it.  Nor have I been able to
+discover what is referred to by the words "Charles is a butty and so
+good."  We shall presently meet with a Charles who "flies in the Fier,"
+but that Charles appears to have been in London, whereas this one is
+evidently in Kent, or wherever the aunt lived.
+
+The next letter is from Mrs. Newton
+
+   "DER MISS ---, I Receve your Letter your Aunt is vary Ill and
+   Lowspireted I Donte think your Aunt wood Git up all Day if My Sister
+   Wasnot to Persage her We all Think hir lif is two monopolous. you Wish
+   to know Who Was Liveing With your Aunt. that is My Sister and
+   Willian--and Cariline--as Cock and Old Poll Pepper is Come to Stay
+   With her a Littel Wile and I hoped [hopped] for Your Aunt, and Harry
+   has Worked for your Aunt all the Summer.  Your Aunt and Harry Whent to
+   the Wells Races and Spent a very Pleasant Day your Aunt has Lost Old
+   Fanney Sow She Died about a Week a Go Harry he Wanted your Aunt to
+   have her killed and send her to London and Shee Wold Fech her 11
+   pounds the Farmers have Lost a Greet Deal of Cattel such as Hogs and
+   Cows What theay call the Plage I Whent to your Aunt as you Wish Mee to
+   Do But She Told Mee She Did not wont aney Boddy She Told Mee She
+   Should Like to Come up to see you But She Cant Come know for she is
+   Boddyley ill and Harry Donte Work there know But he Go up there Once
+   in Two or Three Day Harry Offered is self to Go up to Live With your
+   Aunt But She Made him know Ancer.  I hay Been up to your Aunt at Work
+   for 5 Weeks Hopping and Ragluting Your Aunt Donte Eat nor Drink But
+   vary Littel indeed.
+
+   "I am Happy to Say We are Both Quite Well and I am Glad no hear you
+   are Both Quite Well
+
+   "MRS NEWTON."
+
+This seems to have made the nieces propose to pay a visit to their aunt,
+perhaps to try and relieve the monopoly of her existence and cheer her up
+a little.  In their letter, doubtless, the dog motive is introduced that
+is so finely developed presently by Mrs. Newton.  I should like to have
+been able to give the theme as enounced by the nieces themselves, but
+their letters are not before me.  Mrs. Newton writes:--
+
+   "MY DEAR GIRLS,--Your Aunt receiv your Letter your Aunt will Be vary
+   glad to see you as it quite a greeable if it tis to you and Shee is
+   Quite Willing to Eair the beds and the Rooms if you Like to Trust to
+   hir and the Servantes; if not I may Go up there as you Wish.  My
+   Sister Sleeps in the Best Room as she allways Did and the Coock in the
+   garret and you Can have the Rooms the same as you allways Did as your
+   Aunt Donte set in the Parlour She Continlery Sets in the Ciching. your
+   Aunt says she Cannot Part from the dog know hows and She Says he will
+   not hurt you for he is Like a Child and I can safeley say My Self he
+   wonte hurt you as She Cannot Sleep in the Room With out him as he
+   allWay Sleep in the Same Room as She Dose. your Aunt is agreeable to
+   Git in What Coles and Wood you Wish for I am know happy to say your
+   Aunt is in as Good health as ever She Was and She is happy to hear you
+   are Both Well your Aunt Wishes for Ancer By Return of Post."
+
+The nieces replied that their aunt must choose between the dog and them,
+and Mrs. Newton sends a second letter which brings her development to a
+climax.  It runs:--
+
+   "DEAR MISS ---, I have Receve your Letter and i Whent up to your Aunt
+   as you Wish me and i Try to Perveal With her about the Dog But she
+   Wold not Put the Dog away nor it alow him to Be Tied up But She Still
+   Wishes you to Come as Shee says the Dog Shall not interrup you for She
+   Donte alow the Dog nor it the Cats to Go in the Parlour never sence
+   She has had it Donup ferfere of Spoiling the Paint your Aunt think it
+   vary Strange you Should Be so vary Much afraid of a Dog and She says
+   you Cant Go out in London But What you are up a gance one and She says
+   She Wonte Trust the Dog in know one hands But her Owne for She is
+   afraid theay Will not fill is Belley as he Lives upon Rost Beeff and
+   Rost and Boil Moutten Wich he Eats More then the Servantes in the
+   House there is not aney One Wold Beable to Give Sattefacktion upon
+   that account Harry offerd to Take the Dog But She Wood not Trust him
+   in our hands so I Cold not Do aney thing With her your Aunt youse to
+   Tell Me When we was at your House in London She Did not know how to
+   make you amens and i Told her know it was the Time to Do it But i
+   Considder She sets the Dog Before you your Aunt keep know Beer know
+   Sprits know Wines in the House of aney Sort Oneley a Little Barl of
+   Wine I made her in the Summer the Workmen and servantes are a Blige to
+   Drink wauter Morning Noon and Night your Aunt the Same She Donte Low
+   her Self aney Tee nor Coffee But is Loocking Wonderful Well
+
+   "I Still Remane your Humble Servant Mrs Newton
+
+   "I am vary sorry to think the Dog Perventes your Comeing
+
+   "I am Glad to hear you are Both Well and we are the same."
+
+The nieces remained firm, and from the following letter it is plain the
+aunt gave way.  The dog motive is repeated _pianissimo_, and is not
+returned to--not at least by Mrs. Newton.
+
+   "DEAR MISS ---, I Receve your Letter on Thursday i Whent to your Aunt
+   and i see her and She is a Greable to everry thing i asked her and
+   seme so vary Much Please to see you Both Next Tuseday and she has sent
+   for the Faggots to Day and she Will Send for the Coles to Morrow and i
+   will Go up there to Morrow Morning and Make the Fiers and Tend to the
+   Beds and sleep in it Till you Come Down your Aunt sends her Love to
+   you Both and she is Quite well your Aunt Wishes you wold Write againe
+   Before you Come as she ma Expeckye and the Dog is not to Gointo the
+   Parlor a Tall
+
+   "your Aunt kind Love to you Both & hopes you Wonte Fail in Coming
+   according to Prommis
+
+   MRS NEWTON."
+
+From a later letter it appears that the nieces did not pay their visit
+after all, and what is worse a letter had miscarried, and the aunt sat up
+expecting them from seven till twelve at night, and Harry had paid for
+"Faggots and Coles quarter of Hund.  Faggots Half tun of Coles 1_l._
+1_s._ 3_d._"  Shortly afterwards, however, "She" again talks of coming up
+to London herself and writes through her servant--
+
+   "My Dear girls i Receve your kind letter & I am happy to hear you ar
+   both Well and I Was in hopes of seeing of you Both Down at My House
+   this spring to stay a Wile I am Quite well my self in Helth But vary
+   Low Spireted I am vary sorry to hear the Misforting of Poor charles &
+   how he cum to flie in the Fier I cannot think.  I should like to know
+   if he is dead or a Live, and I shall come to London in August & stay
+   three or four daies if it is agreable to you.  Mrs. Newton has lost
+   her mother in Law 4 day March & I hope you send me word Wather charles
+   is Dead or a Live as soon as possible, and will you send me word what
+   Little Betty is for I cannot make her out."
+
+The next letter is a new handwriting, and tells the nieces of their
+aunt's death in the the following terms:--
+
+   "DEAR MISS ---, It is my most painful duty to inform you that your
+   dear aunt expired this morning comparatively easy as Hannah informs me
+   and in so doing restored her soul to the custody of him whom she
+   considered to be alone worthy of its care.
+
+   "The doctor had visited her about five minutes previously and had
+   applied a blister.
+
+   "You and your sister will I am sure excuse further details at present
+   and believe me with kindest remembrances to remain
+
+   "Yours truly, &c."
+
+After a few days a lawyer's letter informs the nieces that their aunt had
+left them the bulk of her not very considerable property, but had charged
+them with an annuity of 1 pound a week to be paid to Harry and Mrs.
+Newton so long as the dog lived.
+
+The only other letters by Mrs. Newton are written on paper of a different
+and more modern size; they leave an impression of having been written a
+good many years later.  I take them as they come.  The first is very
+short:--
+
+   "DEAR MISS ---, i write to say i cannot possiblely come on Wednesday
+   as we have killed a pig.  your's truely,
+
+   "ELIZABETH NEWTON."
+
+The second runs:--
+
+   "DEAR MISS ---, i hope you are both quite well in health & your Leg
+   much better i am happy to say i am getting quite well again i hope
+   Amandy has reached you safe by this time i sent a small parcle by
+   Amandy, there was half a dozen Pats of butter & the Cakes was very
+   homely and not so light as i could wish i hope by this time Sarah Ann
+   has promised she will stay untill next monday as i think a few daies
+   longer will not make much diferance and as her young man has been very
+   considerate to wait so long as he has i think he would for a few days
+   Longer dear Miss --- I wash for William and i have not got his clothes
+   yet as it has been delayed by the carrier & i cannot possiblely get it
+   done before Sunday and i do not Like traviling on a Sunday but to
+   oblige you i would come but to come sooner i cannot possiblely but i
+   hope Sarah Ann will be prevailed on once more as She has so many times
+   i feel sure if she tells her young man he will have patient for he is
+   a very kind young man
+
+   "i remain your sincerely
+   "ELIZABETH NEWTON."
+
+The last letter in my collection seems written almost within measurable
+distance of the Christmas-card era.  The sheet is headed by a beautifully
+embossed device of some holly in red and green, wishing the recipient of
+the letter a merry Xmas and a happy new year, while the border is crimped
+and edged with blue.  I know not what it is, but there is something in
+the writer's highly finished style that reminds me of Mendelssohn.  It
+would almost do for the words of one of his celebrated "Lieder ohne
+Worte":
+
+   "DEAR MISS MARIA,--I hasten to acknowledge the receipt of your kind
+   note with the inclosure for which I return my best thanks.  I need
+   scarcely say how glad I was to know that the volumes secured your
+   approval, and that the announcement of the improvement in the
+   condition of your Sister's legs afforded me infinite pleasure.  The
+   gratifying news encouraged me in the hope that now the nature of the
+   disorder is comprehended her legs will--notwithstanding the process
+   may be gradual--ultimately get quite well.  The pretty Robin Redbreast
+   which lay ensconced in your epistle, conveyed to me, in terms more
+   eloquent than words, how much you desired me those Compliments which
+   the little missive he bore in his bill expressed; the emblem is
+   sweetly pretty, and now that we are again allowed to felicitate each
+   other on another recurrence of the season of the Christian's
+   rejoicing, permit me to tender to yourself, and by you to your Sister,
+   mine and my Wife's heartfelt congratulations and warmest wishes with
+   respect to the coming year.  It is a common belief that if we take a
+   retrospective view of each departing year, as it behoves us annually
+   to do, we shall find the blessings which we have received to
+   immeasurably outnumber our causes of sorrow.  Speaking for myself I
+   can fully subscribe to that sentiment, and doubtless neither Miss ---
+   nor yourself are exceptions.  Miss ---'s illness and consequent
+   confinement to the house has been a severe trial, but in that trouble
+   an opportunity was afforded you to prove a Sister's devotion and she
+   has been enabled to realise a larger (if possible) display of sisterly
+   affection.
+
+   "A happy Christmas to you both, and may the new year prove a
+   Cornucopia from which still greater blessings than even those we have
+   hitherto received, shall issue, to benefit us all by contributing to
+   our temporal happiness and, what is of higher importance, conducing to
+   our felicity hereafter.
+
+   "I was sorry to hear that you were so annoyed with mice and rats, and
+   if I should have an opportunity to obtain a nice cat I will do so and
+   send my boy to your house with it.
+
+   "I remain,
+   "Yours truly."
+
+How little what is commonly called education can do after all towards the
+formation of a good style, and what a delightful volume might not be
+entitled "Half Hours with the Worst Authors."  Why, the finest word I
+know of in the English language was coined, not by my poor old
+grandfather, whose education had left little to desire, nor by any of the
+admirable scholars whom he in his turn educated, but by an old matron who
+presided over one of the halls, or houses of his school.
+
+This good lady, whose name by the way was Bromfield, had a fine high
+temper of her own, or thought it politic to affect one.  One night when
+the boys were particularly noisy she burst like a hurricane into the
+hall, collared a youngster, and told him he was "the
+ramp-ingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy in the
+whole school."  Would Mrs. Newton have been able to set the aunt and the
+dog before us so vividly if she had been more highly educated?  Would
+Mrs. Bromfield have been able to forge and hurl her thunderbolt of a word
+if she had been taught how to do so, or indeed been at much pains to
+create it at all?  It came.  It was her [Greek text].  She did not
+probably know that she had done what the greatest scholar would have had
+to rack his brains over for many an hour before he could even approach.
+Tradition says that having brought down her boy she looked round the hall
+in triumph, and then after a moment's lull said, "Young gentlemen,
+prayers are excused," and left them.
+
+I have sometimes thought that, after all, the main use of a classical
+education consists in the check it gives to originality, and the way in
+which it prevents an inconvenient number of people from using their own
+eyes.  That we will not be at the trouble of looking at things for
+ourselves if we can get any one to tell us what we ought to see goes
+without saying, and it is the business of schools and universities to
+assist us in this respect.  The theory of evolution teaches that any
+power not worked at pretty high pressure will deteriorate: originality
+and freedom from affectation are all very well in their way, but we can
+easily have too much of them, and it is better that none should be either
+original or free from cant but those who insist on being so, no matter
+what hindrances obstruct, nor what incentives are offered them to see
+things through the regulation medium.
+
+To insist on seeing things for oneself is to be in [Greek text], or in
+plain English, an idiot; nor do I see any safer check against general
+vigour and clearness of thought, with consequent terseness of expression,
+than that provided by the curricula of our universities and schools of
+public instruction.  If a young man, in spite of every effort to fit him
+with blinkers, will insist on getting rid of them, he must do so at his
+own risk.  He will not be long in finding out his mistake.  Our public
+schools and universities play the beneficent part in our social scheme
+that cattle do in forests: they browse the seedlings down and prevent the
+growth of all but the luckiest and sturdiest.  Of course, if there are
+too many either cattle or schools, they browse so effectually that they
+find no more food, and starve till equilibrium is restored; but it seems
+to be a provision of nature that there should always be these alternate
+periods, during which either the cattle or the trees are getting the best
+of it; and, indeed, without such provision we should have neither the one
+nor the other.  At this moment the cattle, doubtless, are in the
+ascendant, and if university extension proceeds much farther, we shall
+assuredly have no more Mrs. Newtons and Mrs. Bromfields; but whatever is
+is best, and, on the whole, I should propose to let things find pretty
+much their own level.
+
+However this may be, who can question that the treasures hidden in many a
+country house contain sleeping beauties even fairer than those that I
+have endeavoured to waken from long sleep in the foregoing article?  How
+many Mrs. Quicklys are there not living in London at this present moment?
+For that Mrs. Quickly was an invention of Shakespeare's I will not
+believe.  The old woman from whom he drew said every word that he put
+into Mrs. Quickly's mouth, and a great deal more which he did not and
+perhaps could not make use of.  This question, however, would again lead
+me far from my subject, which I should mar were I to dwell upon it
+longer, and therefore leave with the hope that it may give my readers
+absolutely no food whatever for reflection.
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO MAKE THE BEST OF LIFE {4}
+
+
+I have been asked to speak on the question how to make the best of life,
+but may as well confess at once that I know nothing about it.  I cannot
+think that I have made the best of my own life, nor is it likely that I
+shall make much better of what may or may not remain to me.  I do not
+even know how to make the best of the twenty minutes that your committee
+has placed at my disposal, and as for life as a whole, who ever yet made
+the best of such a colossal opportunity by conscious effort and
+deliberation?  In little things no doubt deliberate and conscious effort
+will help us, but we are speaking of large issues, and such kingdoms of
+heaven as the making the best of these come not by observation.
+
+The question, therefore, on which I have undertaken to address you is, as
+you must all know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously.  Life is like
+playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes
+on.  One cannot make the best of such impossibilities, and the question
+is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our two lives--the conscious
+or the unconscious--is held by the asker to be the truer life.  Which
+does the question contemplate--the life we know, or the life which others
+may know, but which we know not?
+
+Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-
+called existence here is as nothing.  Which is the truer life of
+Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the "Odyssey," and of
+Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within
+their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating
+in ours?  In whose consciousness does their truest life consist--their
+own, or ours?  Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a
+hundred years or so after he was dead and buried?  His physical life was
+but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and
+dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to
+enjoy hereafter.  We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we
+are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as
+regards that life which every age and country has recognised as higher
+and truer than the one of which we are now sentient.  As the life of the
+race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than
+that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more
+important than the one we live in ourselves.  This appears nowhere
+perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the
+lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything
+produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other
+lives into which they infused their own.
+
+Death to such people is the ending of a short life, but it does not touch
+the life they are already living in those whom they have taught; and
+happily, as none can know when he shall die, so none can make sure that
+he too shall not live long beyond the grave; for the life after death is
+like money before it--no one can be sure that it may not fall to him or
+her even at the eleventh hour.  Money and immortality come in such odd
+unaccountable ways that no one is cut off from hope.  We may not have
+made either of them for ourselves, but yet another may give them to us in
+virtue of his or her love, which shall illumine us for ever, and
+establish us in some heavenly mansion whereof we neither dreamed nor
+shall ever dream.  Look at the Doge Loredano Loredani, the old man's
+smile upon whose face has been reproduced so faithfully in so many lands
+that it can never henceforth be forgotten--would he have had one
+hundredth part of the life he now lives had he not been linked awhile
+with one of those heaven-sent men who know _che cosa e amor_?  Look at
+Rembrandt's old woman in our National Gallery; had she died before she
+was eighty-three years old she would not have been living now.  Then,
+when she was eighty-three, immortality perched upon her as a bird on a
+withered bough.
+
+I seem to hear some one say that this is a mockery, a piece of special
+pleading, a giving of stones to those that ask for bread.  Life is not
+life unless we can feel it, and a life limited to a knowledge of such
+fraction of our work as may happen to survive us is no true life in other
+people; salve it as we may, death is not life any more than black is
+white.
+
+The objection is not so true as it sounds.  I do not deny that we had
+rather not die, nor do I pretend that much even in the case of the most
+favoured few can survive them beyond the grave.  It is only because this
+is so that our own life is possible; others have made room for us, and we
+should make room for others in our turn without undue repining.  What I
+maintain is that a not inconsiderable number of people do actually attain
+to a life beyond the grave which we can all feel forcibly enough, whether
+they can do so or not--that this life tends with increasing civilisation
+to become more and more potent, and that it is better worth considering,
+in spite of its being unfelt by ourselves, than any which we have felt or
+can ever feel in our own persons.
+
+Take an extreme case.  A group of people are photographed by Edison's new
+process--say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the
+finest men singers the age has known--let them be photographed
+incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin";
+let all be done stereoscopically.  Let them be phonographed at the same
+time so that their minutest shades of intonation are preserved, let the
+slides be coloured by a competent artist, and then let the scene be
+called suddenly into sight and sound, say a hundred years hence.  Are
+those people dead or alive?  Dead to themselves they are, but while they
+live so powerfully and so livingly in us, which is the greater paradox--to
+say that they are alive or that they are dead?  To myself it seems that
+their life in others would be more truly life than their death to
+themselves is death.  Granted that they do not present all the phenomena
+of life--who ever does so even when he is held to be alive?  We are held
+to be alive because we present a sufficient number of living phenomena to
+let the others go without saying; those who see us take the part for the
+whole here as in everything else, and surely, in the case supposed above,
+the phenomena of life predominate so powerfully over those of death, that
+the people themselves must be held to be more alive than dead.  Our
+living personality is, as the word implies, only our mask, and those who
+still own such a mask as I have supposed have a living personality.
+Granted again that the case just put is an extreme one; still many a man
+and many a woman has so stamped him or herself on his work that, though
+we would gladly have the aid of such accessories as we doubtless
+presently shall have to the livingness of our great dead, we can see them
+very sufficiently through the master pieces they have left us.
+
+As for their own unconsciousness I do not deny it.  The life of the
+embryo was unconscious before birth, and so is the life--I am speaking
+only of the life revealed to us by natural religion--after death.  But as
+the embryonic and infant life of which we were unconscious was the most
+potent factor in our after life of consciousness, so the effect which we
+may unconsciously produce in others after death, and it may be even
+before it on those who have never seen us, is in all sober seriousness
+our truer and more abiding life, and the one which those who would make
+the best of their sojourn here will take most into their consideration.
+
+Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness.  Our conscious actions are a
+drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones.  Could we know all
+the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste
+and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part
+consciousness plays in our present existence; yet our unconscious life is
+as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to
+itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our
+other and conscious self, which exists but in virtue of our unconscious
+self.  So we have also a vicarious consciousness in others.  The
+unconscious life of those that have gone before us has in great part
+moulded us into such men and women as we are, and our own unconscious
+lives will in like manner have a vicarious consciousness in others,
+though we be dead enough to it in ourselves.
+
+If it is again urged that it matters not to us how much we may be alive
+in others, if we are to know nothing about it, I reply that the common
+instinct of all who are worth considering gives the lie to such cynicism.
+I see here present some who have achieved, and others who no doubt will
+achieve, success in literature.  Will one of them hesitate to admit that
+it is a lively pleasure to her to feel that on the other side of the
+world some one may be smiling happily over her work, and that she is thus
+living in that person though she knows nothing about it?  Here it seems
+to me that true faith comes in.  Faith does not consist, as the Sunday
+School pupil said, "in the power of believing that which we know to be
+untrue."  It consists in holding fast that which the healthiest and most
+kindly instincts of the best and most sensible men and women are
+intuitively possessed of, without caring to require much evidence further
+than the fact that such people are so convinced; and for my own part I
+find the best men and women I know unanimous in feeling that life in
+others, even though we know nothing about it, is nevertheless a thing to
+be desired and gratefully accepted if we can get it either before death
+or after.  I observe also that a large number of men and women do
+actually attain to such life, and in some cases continue so to live, if
+not for ever, yet to what is practically much the same thing.  Our life
+then in this world is, to natural religion as much as to revealed, a
+period of probation.  The use we make of it is to settle how far we are
+to enter into another, and whether that other is to be a heaven of just
+affection or a hell of righteous condemnation.
+
+Who, then, are the most likely so to run that they may obtain this
+veritable prize of our high calling?  Setting aside such lucky numbers
+drawn as it were in the lottery of immortality, which I have referred to
+casually above, and setting aside also the chances and changes from which
+even immortality is not exempt, who on the whole are most likely to live
+anew in the affectionate thoughts of those who never so much as saw them
+in the flesh, and know not even their names?  There is a _nisus_, a
+straining in the dull dumb economy of things, in virtue of which some,
+whether they will it and know it or no, are more likely to live after
+death than others, and who are these?  Those who aimed at it as by some
+great thing that they would do to make them famous?  Those who have lived
+most in themselves and for themselves, or those who have been most
+ensouled consciously, but perhaps better unconsciously, directly but more
+often indirectly, by the most living souls past and present that have
+flitted near them?  Can we think of a man or woman who grips us firmly,
+at the thought of whom we kindle when we are alone in our honest daw's
+plumes, with none to admire or shrug his shoulders, can we think of one
+such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her
+personality--that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with,
+and therefore life in and communion with other people?  In the wreckage
+that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we
+must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people;
+granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and
+necessarily into our own lives; we use them and throw them away when we
+have done with them.  I do not speak of these, I do not speak of the
+Virgils and Alexander Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I
+dare not mention for fear of offending.  They are as stuffed birds or
+beasts in a Museum, serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint,
+but with no vivid or vivifying hold upon us.  They seem to be alive, but
+are not.  I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us
+to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts out
+our own and overrides it.  I speak of those who draw us ever more towards
+them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel at once that we
+are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would most wish to
+resemble.  What is the secret of the hold that these people have upon us?
+Is it not that while, conventionally speaking, alive, they most merged
+their lives in, and were in fullest communion with those among whom they
+lived?  They found their lives in losing them.  We never love the memory
+of any one unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.
+
+I have seen it urged, again, in querulous accents, that the so-called
+immortality even of the most immortal is not for ever.  I see a passage
+to this effect in a book that is making a stir as I write.  I will quote
+it.  The writer says:--
+
+   "So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of
+   departed artists.  If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life
+   they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant
+   but inevitable death.  They can no longer, as heretofore, speak
+   directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or
+   laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which
+   imagination holds the secret.  Driven from the marketplace they become
+   first the companions of the student, then the victims of the
+   specialist.  He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them
+   must train himself to penetrate the veil which in ever-thickening
+   folds conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone of
+   a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien associations, he
+   must think in a language not his own." {5}
+
+This is crying for the moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for the
+writer is obviously insincere.  I see the _Saturday Review_ says the
+passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find
+many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive.  No prose is free
+from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting
+over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as
+many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose.  This,
+however, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of the writer was not so
+obviously that of cheap pessimism.  I know not which is cheapest,
+pessimism or optimism.  One forces lights, the other darks; both are
+equally untrue to good art, and equally sure of their effect with the
+groundlings.  The one extenuates, the other sets down in malice.  The
+first is the more amiable lie, but both are lies, and are known to be so
+by those who utter them.  Talk about catching the tone of a vanished
+society to understand Rembrandt or Giovanni Bellini!  It's nonsense--the
+folds do not thicken in front of these men; we understand them as well as
+those among whom they went about in the flesh, and perhaps better.  Homer
+and Shakespeare speak to us probably far more effectually than they did
+to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them at their best.
+I cannot think that Shakespeare talked better than we hear him now in
+"Hamlet" or "Henry the Fourth"; like enough he would have been found a
+very disappointing person in a drawing-room.  People stamp themselves on
+their work; if they have not done so they are naught; if they have we
+have them; and for the most part they stamp themselves deeper in their
+work than on their talk.  No doubt Shakespeare and Handel will be one day
+clean forgotten, as though they had never been born.  The world will in
+the end die; mortality therefore itself is not immortal, and when death
+dies the life of these men will die with it--but not sooner.  It is
+enough that they should live within us and move us for many ages as they
+have and will.  Such immortality, therefore, as some men and women are
+born to, achieve, or have thrust upon them, is a practical if not a
+technical immortality, and he who would have more let him have nothing.
+
+I see I have drifted into speaking rather of how to make the best of
+death than of life, but who can speak of life without his thoughts
+turning instantly to that which is beyond it?  He or she who has made the
+best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it; who
+cares one straw for any such chances and changes as will commonly befall
+him here if he is upheld by the full and certain hope of everlasting life
+in the affections of those that shall come after?  If the life after
+death is happy in the hearts of others, it matters little how unhappy was
+the life before it.
+
+And now I leave my subject, not without misgiving that I shall have
+disappointed you.  But for the great attention which is being paid to the
+work from which I have quoted above, I should not have thought it well to
+insist on points with which you are, I doubt not, as fully impressed as I
+am: but that book weakens the sanctions of natural religion, and
+minimises the comfort which it affords us, while it does more to
+undermine than to support the foundations of what is commonly called
+belief.  Therefore I was glad to embrace this opportunity of protesting.
+Otherwise I should not have been so serious on a matter that transcends
+all seriousness.  Lord Beaconsfield cut it shorter with more effect.  When
+asked to give a rule of life for the son of a friend he said, "Do not let
+him try and find out who wrote the letters of Junius."  Pressed for
+further counsel he added, "Nor yet who was the man in the iron mask"--and
+he would say no more.  Don't bore people.  And yet I am by no means sure
+that a good many people do not think themselves ill-used unless he who
+addresses them has thoroughly well bored them--especially if they have
+paid any money for hearing him.  My great namesake said, "Surely the
+pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat," and great as the
+pleasure both of cheating and boring undoubtedly is, I believe he was
+right.  So I remember a poem which came out some thirty years ago in
+_Punch_, about a young lady who went forth in quest to "Some burden make
+or burden bear, but which she did not greatly care, oh Miserie."  So,
+again, all the holy men and women who in the Middle Ages professed to
+have discovered how to make the best of life took care that being bored,
+if not cheated, should have a large place in their programme.  Still
+there are limits, and I close not without fear that I may have exceeded
+them.
+
+
+
+
+THE SANCTUARY OF MONTRIGONE {6}
+
+
+The only place in the Valsesia, except Varallo, where I at present
+suspect the presence of Tabachetti {7} is at Montrigone, a little-known
+sanctuary dedicated to St. Anne, about three-quarters of a mile south of
+Borgo-Sesia station.  The situation is, of course, lovely, but the
+sanctuary does not offer any features of architectural interest.  The
+sacristan told me it was founded in 1631; and in 1644 Giovanni d'Enrico,
+while engaged in superintending and completing the work undertaken here
+by himself and Giacomo Ferro, fell ill and died.  I do not know whether
+or no there was an earlier sanctuary on the same site, but was told it
+was built on the demolition of a stronghold belonging to the Counts of
+Biandrate.
+
+The incidents which it illustrates are treated with even more than the
+homeliness usual in works of this description when not dealing with such
+solemn events as the death and passion of Christ.  Except when these
+subjects were being represented, something of the latitude, and even
+humour, allowed in the old mystery plays was permitted, doubtless from a
+desire to render the work more attractive to the peasants, who were the
+most numerous and most important pilgrims.  It is not until faith begins
+to be weak that it fears an occasionally lighter treatment of semi-sacred
+subjects, and it is impossible to convey an accurate idea of the spirit
+prevailing at this hamlet of sanctuary without attuning oneself somewhat
+to the more pagan character of the place.  Of irreverence, in the sense
+of a desire to laugh at things that are of high and serious import, there
+is not a trace, but at the same time there is a certain unbending of the
+bow at Montrigone which is not perceivable at Varallo.
+
+The first chapel to the left on entering the church is that of the Birth
+of the Virgin.  St. Anne is sitting up in bed.  She is not at all ill--in
+fact, considering that the Virgin has only been born about five minutes,
+she is wonderful; still the doctors think it may be perhaps better that
+she should keep her room for half an hour longer, so the bed has been
+festooned with red and white paper roses, and the counterpane is covered
+with bouquets in baskets and in vases of glass and china.  These cannot
+have been there during the actual birth of the Virgin, so I suppose they
+had been in readiness, and were brought in from an adjoining room as soon
+as the baby had been born.  A lady on her left is bringing in some more
+flowers, which St. Anne is receiving with a smile and most gracious
+gesture of the hands.  The first thing she asked for, when the birth was
+over, was for her three silver hearts.  These were immediately brought to
+her, and she has got them all on, tied round her neck with a piece of
+blue silk ribbon.
+
+Dear mamma has come.  We felt sure she would, and that any little
+misunderstandings between her and Joachim would ere long be forgotten and
+forgiven.  They are both so good and sensible if they would only
+understand one another.  At any rate, here she is, in high state at the
+right hand of the bed.  She is dressed in black, for she has lost her
+husband some few years previously, but I do not believe a smarter, sprier
+old lady for her years could be found in Palestine, nor yet that either
+Giovanni d'Enrico or Giacomo Ferro could have conceived or executed such
+a character.  The sacristan wanted to have it that she was not a woman at
+all, but was a portrait of St. Joachim, the Virgin's father.  "Sembra una
+donna," he pleaded more than once, "ma non e donna."  Surely, however, in
+works of art even more than in other things, there is no "is" but
+seeming, and if a figure seems female it must be taken as such.  Besides,
+I asked one of the leading doctors at Varallo whether the figure was man
+or woman.  He said it was evident I was not married, for that if I had
+been I should have seen at once that she was not only a woman but a
+mother-in-law of the first magnitude, or, as he called it, "una suocera
+tremenda," and this without knowing that I wanted her to be a mother-in-
+law myself.  Unfortunately she had no real drapery, so I could not settle
+the question as my friend Mr. H. F. Jones and I had been able to do at
+Varallo with the figure of Eve that had been turned into a Roman soldier
+assisting at the capture of Christ.  I am not, however, disposed to waste
+more time upon anything so obvious, and will content myself with saying
+that we have here the Virgin's grandmother.  I had never had the
+pleasure, so far as I remembered, of meeting this lady before, and was
+glad to have an opportunity of making her acquaintance.
+
+Tradition says that it was she who chose the Virgin's name, and if so,
+what a debt of gratitude do we not owe her for her judicious selection!
+It makes one shudder to think what might have happened if she had named
+the child Keren-Happuch, as poor Job's daughter was called.  How could we
+have said, "Ave Keren-Happuch!"  What would the musicians have done?  I
+forget whether Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was a man or a woman, but there were
+plenty of names quite as unmanageable at the Virgin's grandmother's
+option, and we cannot sufficiently thank her for having chosen one that
+is so euphonious in every language which we need take into account.  For
+this reason alone we should not grudge her her portrait, but we should
+try to draw the line here.  I do not think we ought to give the Virgin's
+great-grandmother a statue.  Where is it to end?  It is like Mr.
+Crookes's ultimissimate atoms; we used to draw the line at ultimate
+atoms, and now it seems we are to go a step farther back and have
+ultimissimate atoms.  How long, I wonder, will it be before we feel that
+it will be a material help to us to have ultimissimissimate atoms?
+Quavers stopped at demi-semi-demi, but there is no reason to suppose that
+either atoms or ancestresses of the Virgin will be so complacent.
+
+I have said that on St. Anne's left hand there is a lady who is bringing
+in some flowers.  St. Anne was always passionately fond of flowers.  There
+is a pretty story told about her in one of the Fathers, I forget which,
+to the effect that when a child she was asked which she liked best--cakes
+or flowers?  She could not yet speak plainly and lisped out, "Oh fowses,
+pretty fowses"; she added, however, with a sigh and as a kind of wistful
+corollary, "but cakes are very nice."  She is not to have any cakes, just
+now, but as soon as she has done thanking the lady for her beautiful
+nosegay, she is to have a couple of nice new-laid eggs, that are being
+brought her by another lady.  Valsesian women immediately after their
+confinement always have eggs beaten up with wine and sugar, and one can
+tell a Valsesian Birth of the Virgin from a Venetian or a Florentine by
+the presence of the eggs.  I learned this from an eminent Valsesian
+professor of medicine, who told me that, though not according to received
+rules, the eggs never seemed to do any harm.  Here they are evidently to
+be beaten up, for there is neither spoon nor egg-cup, and we cannot
+suppose that they were hard-boiled.  On the other hand, in the Middle
+Ages Italians never used egg-cups and spoons for boiled eggs.  The
+mediaeval boiled egg was always eaten by dipping bread into the yolk.
+
+Behind the lady who is bringing in the eggs is the under-under-nurse who
+is at the fire warming a towel.  In the foreground we have the regulation
+midwife holding the regulation baby (who, by the way, was an
+astonishingly fine child for only five minutes old).  Then comes the
+under-nurse--a good buxom creature, who, as usual, is feeling the water
+in the bath to see that it is of the right temperature.  Next to her is
+the head-nurse, who is arranging the cradle.  Behind the head-nurse is
+the under-under-nurse's drudge, who is just going out upon some errands.
+Lastly--for by this time we have got all round the chapel--we arrive at
+the Virgin's grandmother's-body-guard, a stately, responsible-looking
+lady, standing in waiting upon her mistress.  I put it to the reader--is
+it conceivable that St. Joachim should have been allowed in such a room
+at such a time, or that he should have had the courage to avail himself
+of the permission, even though it had been extended to him?  At any rate,
+is it conceivable that he should have been allowed to sit on St. Anne's
+right hand, laying down the law with a "Marry, come up here," and a
+"Marry, go-down there," and a couple of such unabashed collars as the old
+lady has put on for the occasion?
+
+Moreover (for I may as well demolish this mischievous confusion between
+St. Joachim and his mother-in-law once and for all), the merest tyro in
+hagiology knows that St. Joachim was not at home when the Virgin was
+born.  He had been hustled out of the temple for having no children, and
+had fled desolate and dismayed into the wilderness.  It shows how silly
+people are, for all the time he was going, if they had only waited a
+little, to be the father of the most remarkable person of purely human
+origin who had ever been born, and such a parent as this should surely
+not be hurried.  The story is told in the frescoes of the chapel of
+Loreto, only a quarter of an hour's walk from Varallo, and no one can
+have known it better than D'Enrico.  The frescoes are explained by
+written passages that tell us how, when Joachim was in the desert, an
+angel came to him in the guise of a fair, civil young gentleman, and told
+him the Virgin was to be born.  Then, later on, the same young gentleman
+appeared to him again, and bade him "in God's name be comforted, and turn
+again to his content," for the Virgin had been actually born.  On which
+St. Joachim, who seems to have been of opinion that marriage after all
+_was_ rather a failure, said that, as things were going on so nicely
+without him, he would stay in the desert just a little longer, and
+offered up a lamb as a pretext to gain time.  Perhaps he guessed about
+his mother-in-law, or he may have asked the angel.  Of course, even in
+spite of such evidence as this I may be mistaken about the Virgin's
+grandmother's sex, and the sacristan may be right; but I can only say
+that if the lady sitting by St. Anne's bedside at Montrigone is the
+Virgin's father--well, in that case I must reconsider a good deal that I
+have been accustomed to believe was beyond question.
+
+Taken singly, I suppose that none of the figures in the chapel, except
+the Virgin's grandmother, should be rated very highly.  The under-nurse
+is the next best figure, and might very well be Tabachetti's, for neither
+Giovanni d'Enrico nor Giacomo Ferro was successful with his female
+characters.  There is not a single really comfortable woman in any chapel
+by either of them on the Sacro Monte at Varallo.  Tabachetti, on the
+other hand, delighted in women; if they were young he made them comely
+and engaging, if they were old he gave them dignity and individual
+character, and the under-nurse is much more in accordance with
+Tabachetti's habitual mental attitude than with D'Enrico's or Giacomo
+Ferro's.  Still there are only four figures out of the eleven that are
+mere otiose supers, and taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant
+impression as being throughout naive and homely, and sometimes, which is
+of less importance, technically excellent.
+
+Allowance must, of course, be made for tawdry accessories and repeated
+coats of shiny oleaginous paint--very disagreeable where it has peeled
+off and almost more so where it has not.  What work could stand against
+such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures have had to put up
+with?  Take the Venus of Milo; let her be done in terra-cotta, and have
+run, not much, but still something, in the baking; paint her pink, two
+oils, all over, and then varnish her--it will help to preserve the paint;
+glue a lot of horsehair on to her pate, half of which shall have come
+off, leaving the glue still showing; scrape her, not too thoroughly, get
+the village drawing-master to paint her again, and the drawing-master in
+the next provincial town to put a forest background behind her with the
+brightest emerald-green leaves that he can do for the money; let this
+painting and scraping and repainting be repeated several times over;
+festoon her with pink and white flowers made of tissue paper; surround
+her with the cheapest German imitations of the cheapest decorations that
+Birmingham can produce; let the night air and winter fogs get at her for
+three hundred years, and how easy, I wonder, will it be to see the
+goddess who will be still in great part there?  True, in the case of the
+Birth of the Virgin chapel at Montrigone, there is no real hair and no
+fresco background, but time has had abundant opportunities without these.
+I will conclude my notice of this chapel by saying that on the left,
+above the door through which the under-under-nurse's drudge is about to
+pass, there is a good painted terra-cotta bust, said--but I believe on no
+authority--to be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico.  Others say that the
+Virgin's grandmother is Giovanni d'Enrico, but this is even more absurd
+than supposing her to be St. Joachim.
+
+The next chapel to the Birth of the Virgin is that of the _Sposalizio_.
+There is no figure here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there are
+some very good ones.  The best have no taint of _barocco_; the man who
+did them, whoever he may have been, had evidently a good deal of life and
+go, was taking reasonable pains, and did not know too much.  Where this
+is the case no work can fail to please.  Some of the figures have real
+hair and some terra cotta.  There is no fresco background worth
+mentioning.  A man sitting on the steps of the altar with a book on his
+lap, and holding up his hand to another, who is leaning over him and
+talking to him, is among the best figures; some of the disappointed
+suitors who are breaking their wands are also very good.
+
+The angel in the Annunciation chapel, which comes next in order, is a
+fine, burly, ship's-figurehead, commercial-hotel sort of being enough,
+but the Virgin is very ordinary.  There is no real hair and no fresco
+background, only three dingy old blistered pictures of no interest
+whatever.
+
+In the visit of Mary to Elizabeth there are three pleasing subordinate
+lady attendants, two to the left and one to the right of the principal
+figures; but these figures themselves are not satisfactory.  There is no
+fresco background.  Some of the figures have real hair and some terra
+cotta.
+
+In the Circumcision and Purification chapel--for both these events seem
+contemplated in the one that follows--there are doves, but there is
+neither dog nor knife.  Still Simeon, who has the infant Saviour in his
+arms, is looking at him in a way which can only mean that, knife or no
+knife, the matter is not going to end here.  At Varallo they have now got
+a dreadful knife for the Circumcision chapel.  They had none last winter.
+What they have now got would do very well to kill a bullock with, but
+could not be used professionally with safety for any animal smaller than
+a rhinoceros.  I imagine that some one was sent to Novara to buy a knife,
+and that, thinking it was for the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, he
+got the biggest he could see.  Then when he brought it back people said
+"chow" several times, and put it upon the table and went away.
+
+Returning to Montrigone, the Simeon is an excellent figure, and the
+Virgin is fairly good, but the prophetess Anna, who stands just behind
+her, is by far the most interesting in the group, and is alone enough to
+make me feel sure that Tabachetti gave more or less help here, as he had
+done years before at Orta.  She, too, like the Virgin's grandmother, is a
+widow lady, and wears collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever
+since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously.  There is a
+largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but
+an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a
+second or third-rate man.  The hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon
+the broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old
+experience of a great poet can reach.  The lips of the prophetess are for
+the moment closed, but she has been prophesying all the morning, and the
+people round the wall in the background are in ecstasies at the lucidity
+with which she has explained all sorts of difficulties that they had
+never been able to understand till now.  They are putting their
+forefingers on their thumbs and their thumbs on their forefingers, and
+saying how clearly they see it all and what a wonderful woman Anna is.  A
+prophet indeed is not generally without honour save in his own country,
+but then a country is generally not without honour save with its own
+prophet, and Anna has been glorifying her country rather than reviling
+it.  Besides, the rule may not have applied to prophetesses.
+
+The Death of the Virgin is the last of the six chapels inside the church
+itself.  The Apostles, who of course are present, have all of them real
+hair, but, if I may say so, they want a wash and a brush-up so very badly
+that I cannot feel any confidence in writing about them.  I should say
+that, take them all round, they are a good average sample of apostle as
+apostles generally go.  Two or three of them are nervously anxious to
+find appropriate quotations in books that lie open before them, which
+they are searching with eager haste; but I do not see one figure about
+which I should like to say positively that it is either good or bad.
+There is a good bust of a man, matching the one in the Birth of the
+Virgin chapel, which is said to be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico, but
+it is not known whom it represents.
+
+Outside the church, in three contiguous cells that form part of the
+foundations, are:--
+
+1.  A dead Christ, the head of which is very impressive while the rest of
+the figure is poor.  I examined the treatment of the hair, which is terra-
+cotta, and compared it with all other like hair in the chapels above
+described; I could find nothing like it, and think it most likely that
+Giacomo Ferro did the figure, and got Tabachetti to do the head, or that
+they brought the head from some unused figure by Tabachetti at Varallo,
+for I know no other artist of the time and neighbourhood who could have
+done it.
+
+2.  A Magdalene in the desert.  The desert is a little coal-cellar of an
+arch, containing a skull and a profusion of pink and white paper
+bouquets, the two largest of which the Magdalene is hugging while she is
+saying her prayers.  She is a very self-sufficient lady, who we may be
+sure will not stay in the desert a day longer than she can help, and
+while there will flirt even with the skull if she can find nothing better
+to flirt with.  I cannot think that her repentance is as yet genuine, and
+as for her praying there is no object in her doing so, for she does not
+want anything.
+
+3.  In the next desert there is a very beautiful figure of St. John the
+Baptist kneeling and looking upwards.  This figure puzzles me more than
+any other at Montrigone; it appears to be of the fifteenth rather than
+the sixteenth century; it hardly reminds me of Gaudenzio, and still less
+of any other Valsesian artist.  It is a work of unusual beauty, but I can
+form no idea as to its authorship.
+
+I wrote the foregoing pages in the church at Montrigone itself, having
+brought my camp-stool with me.  It was Sunday; the church was open all
+day, but there was no mass said, and hardly any one came.  The sacristan
+was a kind, gentle, little old man, who let me do whatever I wanted.  He
+sat on the doorstep of the main door, mending vestments, and to this end
+was cutting up a fine piece of figured silk from one to two hundred years
+old, which, if I could have got it, for half its value, I should much
+like to have bought.  I sat in the cool of the church while he sat in the
+doorway, which was still in shadow, snipping and snipping, and then
+sewing, I am sure with admirable neatness.  He made a charming picture,
+with the arched portico over his head, the green grass and low church
+wall behind him, and then a lovely landscape of wood and pasture and
+valleys and hillside.  Every now and then he would come and chirrup about
+Joachim, for he was pained and shocked at my having said that his Joachim
+was some one else and not Joachim at all.  I said I was very sorry, but I
+was afraid the figure was a woman.  He asked me what he was to do.  He
+had known it, man and boy, this sixty years, and had always shown it as
+St. Joachim; he had never heard any one but myself question his
+ascription, and could not suddenly change his mind about it at the
+bidding of a stranger.  At the same time he felt it was a very serious
+thing to continue showing it as the Virgin's father if it was really her
+grandmother.  I told him I thought this was a case for his spiritual
+director, and that if he felt uncomfortable about it he should consult
+his parish priest and do as he was told.
+
+On leaving Montrigone, with a pleasant sense of having made acquaintance
+with a new and, in many respects, interesting work, I could not get the
+sacristan and our difference of opinion out of my head.  What, I asked
+myself, are the differences that unhappily divide Christendom, and what
+are those that divide Christendom from modern schools of thought, but a
+seeing of Joachims as the Virgin's grandmothers on a larger scale?  True,
+we cannot call figures Joachim when we know perfectly well that they are
+nothing of the kind; but I registered a vow that henceforward when I
+called Joachims the Virgin's grandmothers I would bear more in mind than
+I have perhaps always hitherto done, how hard it is for those who have
+been taught to see them as Joachims to think of them as something
+different.  I trust that I have not been unfaithful to this vow in the
+preceding article.  If the reader differs from me, let me ask him to
+remember how hard it is for one who has got a figure well into his head
+as the Virgin's grandmother to see it as Joachim.
+
+
+
+
+A MEDIEVAL GIRL SCHOOL {8}
+
+
+This last summer I revisited Oropa, near Biella, to see what connection I
+could find between the Oropa chapels and those at Varallo.  I will take
+this opportunity of describing the chapels at Oropa, and more especially
+the remarkable fossil, or petrified girl school, commonly known as the
+_Dimora_, or Sojourn of the Virgin Mary in the Temple.
+
+If I do not take these works so seriously as the reader may expect, let
+me beg him, before he blames me, to go to Oropa and see the originals for
+himself.  Have the good people of Oropa themselves taken them very
+seriously?  Are we in an atmosphere where we need be at much pains to
+speak with bated breath?  We, as is well known, love to take even our
+pleasures sadly; the Italians take even their sadness _allegramente_, and
+combine devotion with amusement in a manner that we shall do well to
+study if not imitate.  For this best agrees with what we gather to have
+been the custom of Christ himself, who, indeed, never speaks of austerity
+but to condemn it.  If Christianity is to be a living faith, it must
+penetrate a man's whole life, so that he can no more rid himself of it
+than he can of his flesh and bones or of his breathing.  The Christianity
+that can be taken up and laid down as if it were a watch or a book is
+Christianity in name only.  The true Christian can no more part from
+Christ in mirth than in sorrow.  And, after all, what is the essence of
+Christianity?  What is the kernel of the nut?  Surely common sense and
+cheerfulness, with unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and
+Pharisaisms of a man's own times.  The essence of Christianity lies
+neither in dogma, nor yet in abnormally holy life, but in faith in an
+unseen world, in doing one's duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the
+true life rather in others than in oneself, and in the certain hope that
+he who loses his life on these behalfs finds more than he has lost.  What
+can Agnosticism do against such Christianity as this?  I should be
+shocked if anything I had ever written or shall ever write should seem to
+make light of these things.  I should be shocked also if I did not know
+how to be amused with things that amiable people obviously intended to be
+amusing.
+
+The reader may need to be reminded that Oropa is among the somewhat
+infrequent sanctuaries at which the Madonna and infant Christ are not
+white, but black.  I shall return to this peculiarity of Oropa later on,
+but will leave it for the present.  For the general characteristics of
+the place I must refer the reader to my book, "Alps and Sanctuaries." {9}
+I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing
+life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of
+the main features of the place.  At a first glance, perhaps, all these
+chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some,
+if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at
+Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance.
+The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and
+shows the Conception of the Virgin Mary.  It represents St. Anne as
+kneeling before a terrific dragon or, as the Italians call it, "insect,"
+about the size of a Crystal Palace pleiosaur.  This "insect" is supposed
+to have just had its head badly crushed by St. Anne, who seems to be
+begging its pardon.  The text "Ipsa conteret caput tuum" is written
+outside the chapel.  The figures have no artistic interest.  As regards
+dragons being called insects, the reader may perhaps remember that the
+island of S. Giulio, in the Lago d'Orta, was infested with _insetti_,
+which S. Giulio destroyed, and which appear, in a fresco underneath the
+church on the island, to have been monstrous and ferocious dragons; but I
+cannot remember whether their bodies are divided into three sections, and
+whether or no they have exactly six legs--without which, I am told, they
+cannot be true insects.
+
+The fifth chapel represents the birth of the Virgin.  Having obtained
+permission to go inside it, I found the date 1715 cut large and deep on
+the back of one figure before baking, and I imagine that this date covers
+the whole.  There is a Queen Anne feeling throughout the composition, and
+if we were told that the sculptor and Francis Bird, sculptor of the
+statue in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, had studied under the same
+master, we could very well believe it.  The apartment in which the Virgin
+was born is spacious, and in striking contrast to the one in which she
+herself gave birth to the Redeemer.  St. Anne occupies the centre of the
+composition, in an enormous bed; on her right there is a lady of the
+George Cruikshank style of beauty, and on the left an older person.  Both
+are gesticulating and impressing upon St. Anne the enormous obligation
+she has just conferred upon mankind; they seem also to be imploring her
+not to overtax her strength, but, strange to say, they are giving her
+neither flowers nor anything to eat and drink.  I know no other birth of
+the Virgin in which St. Anne wants so little keeping up.
+
+I have explained in my book "Ex Voto," {10} but should perhaps repeat
+here, that the distinguishing characteristic of the Birth of the Virgin,
+as rendered by Valsesian artists, is that St. Anne always has eggs
+immediately after the infant is born, and usually a good deal more,
+whereas the Madonna never has anything to eat or drink.  The eggs are in
+accordance with a custom that still prevails among the peasant classes in
+the Valsesia, where women on giving birth to a child generally are given
+a _sabaglione_--an egg beaten up with a little wine, or rum, and sugar.
+East of Milan the Virgin's mother does not have eggs, and I suppose, from
+the absence of the eggs at Oropa, that the custom above referred to does
+not prevail in the Biellese district.  The Virgin also is invariably
+washed.  St. John the Baptist, when he is born at all, which is not very
+often, is also washed; but I have not observed that St. Elizabeth has
+anything like the attention paid her that is given to St. Anne.  What,
+however, is wanting here at Oropa in meat and drink is made up in Cupids;
+they swarm like flies on the walls, clouds, cornices, and capitals of
+columns.
+
+Against the right-hand wall are two lady-helps, each warming a towel at a
+glowing fire, to be ready against the baby should come out of its bath;
+while in the right-hand foreground we have the _levatrice_, who having
+discharged her task, and being now so disposed, has removed the bottle
+from the chimney-piece, and put it near some bread, fruit and a chicken,
+over which she is about to discuss the confinement with two other
+gossips.  The _levatrice_ is a very characteristic figure, but the best
+in the chapel is the one of the head nurse, near the middle of the
+composition; she has now the infant in full charge, and is showing it to
+St. Joachim, with an expression as though she were telling him that her
+husband was a merry man.  I am afraid Shakespeare was dead before the
+sculptor was born, otherwise I should have felt certain that he had drawn
+Juliet's nurse from this figure.  As for the little Virgin herself, I
+believe her to be a fine boy of about ten months old.  Viewing the work
+as a whole, if I only felt more sure what artistic merit really is, I
+should say that, though the chapel cannot be rated very highly from some
+standpoints, there are others from which it may be praised warmly enough.
+It is innocent of anatomy-worship, free from affectation or swagger, and
+not devoid of a good deal of homely _naivete_.  It can no more be
+compared with Tabachetti or Donatello than Hogarth can with Rembrandt or
+Giovanni Bellini; but as it does not transcend the limitations of its
+age, so neither is it wanting in whatever merits that age possessed; and
+there is no age without merits of some kind.  There is no inscription
+saying who made the figures, but tradition gives them to Pietro Aureggio
+Termine, of Biella, commonly called Aureggio.  This is confirmed by their
+strong resemblance to those in the _Dimora_ Chapel, in which there is an
+inscription that names Aureggio as the sculptor.
+
+The sixth chapel deals with the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.
+The Virgin is very small, but it must be remembered that she is only
+seven years old, and she is not nearly so small as she is at Crea, where,
+though a life-sized figure is intended, the head is hardly bigger than an
+apple.  She is rushing up the steps with open arms towards the High
+Priest, who is standing at the top.  For her it is nothing alarming; it
+is the High Priest who appears frightened; but it will all come right in
+time.  The Virgin seems to be saying, "Why, don't you know me?  I'm the
+Virgin Mary."  But the High Priest does not feel so sure about that, and
+will make further inquiries.  The scene, which comprises some twenty
+figures, is animated enough, and though it hardly kindles enthusiasm,
+still does not fail to please.  It looks as though of somewhat older date
+than the Birth of the Virgin chapel, and I should say shows more signs of
+direct Valsesian influence.  In Marocco's book about Oropa it is ascribed
+to Aureggio, but I find it difficult to accept this.
+
+The seventh, and in many respects most interesting chapel at Oropa, shows
+what is in reality a medieval Italian girl school, as nearly like the
+thing itself as the artist could make it; we are expected, however, to
+see in this the high-class kind of Girton College for young gentlewomen
+that was attached to the Temple at Jerusalem, under the direction of the
+Chief Priest's wife, or some one of his near female relatives.  Here all
+well-to-do Jewish young women completed their education, and here
+accordingly we find the Virgin, whose parents desired she should shine in
+every accomplishment, and enjoy all the advantages their ample means
+commanded.
+
+I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her
+Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple College.
+These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other than eventful;
+but incidents, or bits of life, are like living forms--it is only here
+and here, as by rare chance, that one of them gets arrested and
+fossilised; the greater number disappear like the greater number of
+antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it
+were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another.  Talk,
+indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a
+hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's.  What moment
+could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen
+by the artist for the chapel we are considering?  Why should this one get
+arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have
+perished?  Yet preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's
+wand had struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others
+who do duty instead of the Hebrew originals.  It has locked them up as
+sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon.  Surely the hours are
+like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the other left,
+and none can give the reason more than he can say why Gallio should have
+won immortality by caring for none of "these things."
+
+It seems to me, moreover, that fairies have changed their practice now in
+the matter of sleeping beauties, much as shopkeepers have done in Regent
+Street.  Formerly the shopkeeper used to shut up his goods behind strong
+shutters, so that no one might see them after closing hours.  Now he
+leaves everything open to the eye and turns the gas on.  So the fairies,
+who used to lock up their sleeping beauties in impenetrable thickets, now
+leave them in the most public places they can find, as knowing that they
+will there most certainly escape notice.  Look at De Hooghe; look at "The
+Pilgrim's Progress," or even Shakespeare himself--how long they slept
+unawakened, though they were in broad daylight and on the public
+thoroughfares all the time.  Look at Tabachetti, and the masterpieces he
+left at Varallo.  His figures there are exposed to the gaze of every
+passer-by; yet who heeds them?  Who, save a very few, even know of their
+existence?  Look again at Gaudenzio Ferrari, or the "Danse des Paysans,"
+by Holbein, to which I ventured to call attention in the _Universal
+Review_.  No, no; if a thing be in Central Africa, it is the glory of
+this age to find it out; so the fairies think it safer to conceal their
+_proteges_ under a show of openness; for the schoolmaster is much abroad,
+and there is no hedge so thick or so thorny as the dulness of culture.
+
+It may be, again, that ever so many years hence, when Mr. Darwin's earth-
+worms shall have buried Oropa hundreds of feet deep, some one sinking a
+well or making a railway-cutting will unearth these chapels, and will
+believe them to have been houses, and to contain the _exuviae_ of the
+living forms that tenanted them.  In the meantime, however, let us return
+to a consideration of the chapel as it may now be seen by any one who
+cares to pass that way.
+
+The work consists of about forty figures in all, not counting Cupids, and
+is divided into four main divisions.  First, there is the large public
+sitting-room or drawing-room of the College, where the elder young ladies
+are engaged in various elegant employments.  Three, at a table to the
+left, are making a mitre for the Bishop, as may be seen from the model on
+the table.  Some are merely spinning or about to spin.  One young lady,
+sitting rather apart from the others, is doing an elaborate piece of
+needlework at a tambour-frame near the window; others are making lace or
+slippers, probably for the new curate; another is struggling with a
+letter, or perhaps a theme, which seems to be giving her a good deal of
+trouble, but which, when done, will, I am sure, be beautiful.  One dear
+little girl is simply reading "Paul and Virginia" underneath the window,
+and is so concealed that I hardly think she can be seen from the outside
+at all, though from inside she is delightful; it was with great regret
+that I could not get her into any photograph.  One most amiable young
+woman has got a child's head on her lap, the child having played itself
+to sleep.  All are industriously and agreeably employed in some way or
+other; all are plump; all are nice looking; there is not one Becky Sharp
+in the whole school; on the contrary, as in "Pious Orgies," all is
+pious--or sub-pious--and all, if not great, is at least eminently
+respectable.  One feels that St. Joachim and St. Anne could not have
+chosen a school more judiciously, and that if one had daughter oneself
+this is exactly where one would wish to place her.  If there is a fault
+of any kind in the arrangements, it is that they do not keep cats enough.
+The place is overrun with mice, though what these can find to eat I know
+not.  It occurs to me also that the young ladies might be kept a little
+more free of spiders' webs; but in all these chapels, bats, mice and
+spiders are troublesome.
+
+Off the main drawing-room on the side facing the window there is a dais,
+which is approached by a large raised semicircular step, higher than the
+rest of the floor, but lower than the dais itself.  The dais is, of
+course, reserved for the venerable Lady Principal and the
+under-mistresses, one of whom, by the way, is a little more _mondaine_
+than might have been expected, and is admiring herself in a
+looking-glass--unless, indeed, she is only looking to see if there is a
+spot of ink on her face.  The Lady Principal is seated near a table, on
+which lie some books in expensive bindings, which I imagine to have been
+presented to her by the parents of pupils who were leaving school.  One
+has given her a photographic album; another a large scrap-book, for
+illustrations of all kinds; a third volume has red edges, and is
+presumably of a devotional character.  If I dared venture another
+criticism, I should say it would be better not to keep the ink-pot on the
+top of these books.  The Lady Principal is being read to by the monitress
+for the week, whose duty it was to recite selected passages from the most
+approved Hebrew writers; she appears to be a good deal outraged, possibly
+at the faulty intonation of the reader, which she has long tried vainly
+to correct; or perhaps she has been hearing of the atrocious way in which
+her forefathers had treated the prophets, and is explaining to the young
+ladies how impossible it would be, in their own more enlightened age, for
+a prophet to fail of recognition.
+
+On the half-dais, as I suppose the large semicircular step between the
+main room and the dais should be called, we find, first, the monitress
+for the week, who stands up while she recites; and secondly, the Virgin
+herself, who is the only pupil allowed a seat so near to the august
+presence of the Lady Principal.  She is ostensibly doing a piece of
+embroidery which is stretched on a cushion on her lap, but I should say
+that she was chiefly interested in the nearest of four pretty little
+Cupids, who are all trying to attract her attention, though they pay no
+court to any other young lady.  I have sometimes wondered whether the
+obviously scandalised gesture of the Lady Principal might not be directed
+at these Cupids, rather than at anything the monitress may have been
+reading, for she would surely find them disquieting.  Or she may be
+saying, "Why, bless me!  I do declare the Virgin has got another hamper,
+and St. Anne's cakes are always so terribly rich!"  Certainly the hamper
+is there, close to the Virgin, and the Lady Principal's action may be
+well directed at it, but it may have been sent to some other young lady,
+and be put on the sub-dais for public exhibition.  It looks as if it
+might have come from Fortnum and Mason's, and I half expected to find a
+label, addressing it to "The Virgin Mary, Temple College, Jerusalem," but
+if ever there was one the mice have long since eaten it.  The Virgin
+herself does not seem to care much about it, but if she has a fault it is
+that she is generally a little apathetic.
+
+Whose the hamper was, however, is a point we shall never now certainly
+determine, for the best fossil is worse than the worst living form.  Why,
+alas! was not Mr. Edison alive when this chapel was made?  We might then
+have had a daily phonographic recital of the conversation, and an
+announcement might be put outside the chapels, telling us at what hours
+the figures would speak.
+
+On either of side the main room there are two annexes opening out from
+it; these are reserved chiefly for the younger children, some of whom, I
+think, are little boys.  In the left-hand annex, behind the ladies who
+are making a mitre, there is a child who has got a cake, and another has
+some fruit--possibly given them by the Virgin--and a third child is
+begging for some of it.  The light failed so completely here that I was
+not able to photograph any of these figures.  It was a dull September
+afternoon, and the clouds had settled thick round the chapel, which is
+never very light, and is nearly 4000 feet above the sea.  I waited till
+such twilight as made it hopeless that more detail could be got--and a
+queer ghostly place enough it was to wait in--but after giving the plate
+an exposure of fifty minutes, I saw I could get no more, and desisted.
+
+These long photographic exposures have the advantage that one is
+compelled to study a work in detail through mere lack of other
+employment, and that one can take one's notes in peace without being
+tempted to hurry over them; but even so I continually find I have omitted
+to note, and have clean forgotten, much that I want later on.
+
+In the other annex there are also one or two younger children, but it
+seems to have been set apart for conversation and relaxation more than
+any other part of the establishment.
+
+I have already said that the work is signed by an inscription inside the
+chapel, to the effect that the sculptures are by Pietro Aureggio Termine
+di Biella.  It will be seen that the young ladies are exceedingly like
+one another, and that the artist aimed at nothing more than a faithful
+rendering of the life of his own times.  Let us be thankful that he aimed
+at nothing less.  Perhaps his wife kept a girls' school; or he may have
+had a large family of fat, good-natured daughters, whose little ways he
+had studied attentively; at all events the work is full of spontaneous
+incident, and cannot fail to become more and more interesting as the age
+it renders falls farther back into the past.  It is to be regretted that
+many artists, better known men, have not been satisfied with the humbler
+ambitions of this most amiable and interesting sculptor.  If he has left
+us no laboured life-studies, he has at least done something for us which
+we can find nowhere else, which we should be very sorry not to have, and
+the fidelity of which to Italian life at the beginning of the last
+century will not be disputed.
+
+The eighth chapel is that of the _Sposalizio_, is certainly not by
+Aureggio, and I should say was mainly by the same sculptor who did the
+Presentation in the Temple.  On going inside I found the figures had come
+from more than one source; some of them are constructed so absolutely on
+Valsesian principles, as regards technique, that it may be assumed they
+came from Varallo.  Each of these last figures is in three pieces, that
+are baked separately and cemented together afterwards, hence they are
+more easily transported; no more clay is used than is absolutely
+necessary; and the off-side of the figure is neglected; they will be
+found chiefly, if not entirely, at the top of the steps.  The other
+figures are more solidly built, and do not remind me in their business
+features of anything in the Valsesia.  There was a sculptor, Francesco
+Sala, of Locarno (doubtless the village a short distance below Varallo,
+and not the Locarno on the Lago Maggiore), who made designs for some of
+the Oropa chapels, and some of whose letters are still preserved, but
+whether the Valsesian figures in this present work are by him or not I
+cannot say.
+
+The statues are twenty-five in number; I could find no date or signature;
+the work reminds me of Montrigone; several of the figures are not at all
+bad, and several have horsehair for hair, as at Varallo.  The effect of
+the whole composition is better than we have a right to expect from any
+sculpture dating from the beginning of the last century.
+
+The ninth chapel, the Annunciation, presents no feature of interest; nor
+yet does the tenth, the Visit of Mary to Elizabeth.  The eleventh, the
+Nativity, though rather better, is still not remarkable.
+
+The twelfth, the Purification, is absurdly bad, but I do not know whether
+the expression of strong personal dislike to the Virgin which the High
+Priest wears is intended as prophetic, or whether it is the result of
+incompetence, or whether it is merely a smile gone wrong in the baking.
+It is amusing to find Marocco, who has not been strict about
+archaeological accuracy hitherto, complain here that there is an
+anachronism, inasmuch as some young ecclesiastics are dressed as they
+would be at present, and one of them actually carries a wax candle.  This
+is not as it should be; in works like those at Oropa, where implicit
+reliance is justly placed on the earnest endeavours that have been so
+successfully made to thoroughly and carefully and patiently ensure the
+accuracy of the minutest details, it is a pity that even a single error
+should have escaped detection; this, however, has most unfortunately
+happened here, and Marocco feels it his duty to put us on our guard.  He
+explains that the mistake arose from the sculptor's having taken both his
+general arrangement and his details from some picture of the fourteenth
+or fifteenth century, when the value of the strictest historical accuracy
+was not yet so fully understood.
+
+It seems to me that in the matter of accuracy, priests and men of science
+whether lay or regular on the one hand, and plain people whether lay or
+regular on the other, are trying to play a different game, and fail to
+understand one another because they do not see that their objects are not
+the same.  The cleric and the man of science (who is only the cleric in
+his latest development) are trying to develop a throat with two distinct
+passages--one that shall refuse to pass even the smallest gnat, and
+another that shall gracefully gulp even the largest camel; whereas we men
+of the street desire but one throat, and are content that this shall
+swallow nothing bigger than a pony.  Every one knows that there is no
+such effectual means of developing the power to swallow camels as
+incessant watchfulness for opportunities of straining at gnats, and this
+should explain many passages that puzzle us in the work both of our
+clerics and our scientists.  I, not being a man of science, still
+continue to do what I said I did in "Alps and Sanctuaries," and make it a
+rule to earnestly and patiently and carefully swallow a few of the
+smallest gnats I can find several times a day, as the best astringent for
+the throat I know of.
+
+The thirteenth chapel is the Marriage Feast at Cana of Galilee.  This is
+the best chapel as a work of art; indeed, it is the only one which can
+claim to be taken quite seriously.  Not that all the figures are very
+good; those to the left of the composition are commonplace enough; nor
+are the Christ and the giver of the feast at all remarkable; but the ten
+or dozen figures of guests and attendants at the right-hand end of the
+work are as good as anything of their kind can be, and remind me so
+strongly of Tabachetti that I cannot doubt they were done by some one who
+was indirectly influenced by that great sculptor's work.  It is not
+likely that Tabachetti was alive long after 1640, by which time he would
+have been about eighty years old; and the foundations of this chapel were
+not laid till about 1690; the statues are probably a few years later;
+they can hardly, therefore, be by one who had even studied under
+Tabachetti; but until I found out the dates, and went inside the chapel
+to see the way in which the figures had been constructed, I was inclined
+to think they might be by Tabachetti himself, of whom, indeed, they are
+not unworthy.  On examining the figures I found them more heavily
+constructed than Tabachetti's are, with smaller holes for taking out
+superfluous clay, and more finished on the off-sides.  Marocco says the
+sculptor is not known.  I looked in vain for any date or signature.
+Possibly the right-hand figures (for the left-hand ones can hardly be by
+the same hand) may be by some sculptor from Crea, which is at no very
+great distance from Oropa, who was penetrated by Tabachetti's influence;
+but whether as regards action and concert with one another, or as regards
+excellence in detail, I do not see how anything can be more realistic,
+and yet more harmoniously composed.  The placing of the musicians in a
+minstrels' gallery helps the effect; these musicians are six in number,
+and the other figures are twenty-three.  Under the table, between Christ
+and the giver of the feast, there is a cat.
+
+The fourteenth chapel, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, is without
+interest.
+
+The fifteenth, the Coronation of the Virgin, contains forty-six angels,
+twenty-six cherubs, fifty-six saints, the Holy Trinity, the Madonna
+herself, and twenty-four innocents, making 156 statues in all.  Of these
+I am afraid there is not one of more than ordinary merit; the most
+interesting is a half-length nude life-study of Disma--the good thief.
+After what had been promised him it was impossible to exclude him, but it
+was felt that a half-length nude figure would be as much as he could
+reasonably expect.
+
+Behind the sanctuary there is a semi-ruinous and wholly valueless work,
+which shows the finding of the black image, which is now in the church,
+but is only shown on great festivals.
+
+This leads us to a consideration that I have delayed till now.  The black
+image is the central feature of Oropa; it is the _raison d'etre_ of the
+whole place, and all else is a mere incrustation, so to speak, around it.
+According to this image, then, which was carved by St. Luke himself, and
+than which nothing can be better authenticated, both the Madonna and the
+infant Christ were as black as anything can be conceived.  It is not
+likely that they were as black as they have been painted; no one yet ever
+was so black as that; yet, even allowing for some exaggeration on St.
+Luke's part, they must have been exceedingly black if the portrait is to
+be accepted; and uncompromisingly black they accordingly are on most of
+the wayside chapels for many a mile around Oropa.  Yet in the chapels we
+have been hitherto considering--works in which, as we know, the most
+punctilious regard has been shown to accuracy--both the Virgin and Christ
+are uncompromisingly white.  As in the shops under the Colonnade where
+devotional knick-knacks are sold, you can buy a black china image or a
+white one, whichever you like; so with the pictures--the black and white
+are placed side by side--_pagando il danaro si puo scegliere_.  It rests
+not with history or with the Church to say whether the Madonna and Child
+were black or white, but you may settle it for yourself, whichever way
+you please, or rather you are required, with the acquiescence of the
+Church, to hold that they were both black and white at one and the same
+time.
+
+It cannot be maintained that the Church leaves the matter undecided, and
+by tolerating both types proclaims the question an open one, for she
+acquiesces in the portrait by St. Luke as genuine.  How, then, justify
+the whiteness of the Holy Family in the chapels?  If the portrait is not
+known as genuine, why set such a stumbling-block in our paths as to show
+us a black Madonna and a white one, both as historically accurate, within
+a few yards of one another?
+
+I ask this not in mockery, but as knowing that the Church must have an
+explanation to give, if she would only give it, and as myself unable to
+find any, even the most farfetched, that can bring what we see at Oropa,
+Loreto and elsewhere into harmony with modern conscience, either
+intellectual or ethical.
+
+I see, indeed, from an interesting article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for
+September 1889, entitled "The Black Madonna of Loreto," that black
+Madonnas were so frequent in ancient Christian art that "some of the
+early writers of the Church felt obliged to account for it by explaining
+that the Virgin was of a very dark complexion, as might be proved by the
+verse of Canticles which says, 'I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of
+Jerusalem.'  Others maintained that she became black during her sojourn
+in Egypt. . . .  Priests, of to-day, say that extreme age and exposure to
+the smoke of countless altar-candles have caused that change in
+complexion which the more naive fathers of the Church attributed to the
+power of an Egyptian sun"; but the writer ruthlessly disposes of this
+supposition by pointing out that in nearly all the instances of black
+Madonnas it is the flesh alone that is entirely black, the crimson of the
+lips, the white of the eyes, and the draperies having preserved their
+original colour.  The authoress of the article (Mrs. Hilliard) goes on to
+tell us that Pausanias mentions two statues of the black Venus, and says
+that the oldest statue of Ceres among the Phigalenses was black.  She
+adds that Minerva Aglaurus, the daughter of Cecrops, at Athens, was
+black; that Corinth had a black Venus, as also the Thespians; that the
+oracles of Dodona and Delphi were founded by black doves, the emissaries
+of Venus, and that the Isis Multimammia in the Capitol at Rome is black.
+
+Sometimes I have asked myself whether the Church does not intend to
+suggest that the whole story falls outside the domain of history, and is
+to be held as the one great epos, or myth, common to all mankind;
+adaptable by each nation according to its own several needs;
+translatable, so to speak, into the facts of each individual nation, as
+the written word is translatable into its language, but appertaining to
+the realm of the imagination rather than to that of the understanding,
+and precious for spiritual rather than literal truths.  More briefly, I
+have wondered whether she may not intend that such details as whether the
+Virgin was white or black are of very little importance in comparison
+with the basing of ethics on a story that shall appeal to black races as
+well as to white ones.
+
+If so, it is time we were made to understand this more clearly.  If the
+Church, whether of Rome or England, would lean to some such view as
+this--tainted though it be with mysticism--if we could see either great
+branch of the Church make a frank, authoritative attempt to bring its
+teaching into greater harmony with the educated understanding and
+conscience of the time, instead of trying to fetter that understanding
+with bonds that gall it daily more and more profoundly; then I, for one,
+in view of the difficulty and graciousness of the task, and in view of
+the great importance of historical continuity, would gladly sink much of
+my own private opinion as to the value of the Christian ideal, and would
+gratefully help either Church or both, according to the best of my very
+feeble ability.  On these terms, indeed, I could swallow not a few camels
+myself cheerfully enough.
+
+Can we, however, see any signs as though either Rome or England will stir
+hand or foot to meet us?  Can any step be pointed to as though either
+Church wished to make things easier for men holding the opinions held by
+the late Mr. Darwin, or by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Professor Huxley?  How
+can those who accept evolution with any thoroughness accept such
+doctrines as the Incarnation or the Redemption with any but a
+quasi-allegorical and poetical interpretation?  Can we conceivably accept
+these doctrines in the literal sense in which the Church advances them?
+And can the leaders of the Church be blind to the resistlessness of the
+current that has set against those literal interpretations which she
+seems to hug more and more closely the more religious life is awakened at
+all?  The clergyman is wanted as supplementing the doctor and the lawyer
+in all civilised communities; these three keep watch on one another, and
+prevent one another from becoming too powerful.  I, who distrust the
+_doctrinaire_ in science even more than the _doctrinaire_ in religion,
+should view with dismay the abolition of the Church of England, as
+knowing that a blatant bastard science would instantly step into her
+shoes; but if some such deplorable consummation is to be avoided in
+England, it can only be through more evident leaning on the part of our
+clergy to such an interpretation of the Sacred History as the presence of
+a black and white Madonna almost side by side at Oropa appears to
+suggest.
+
+I fear that in these last paragraphs I may have trenched on dangerous
+ground, but it is not possible to go to such places as Oropa without
+asking oneself what they mean and involve.  As for the average Italian
+pilgrims, they do not appear to give the matter so much as a thought.
+They love Oropa, and flock to it in thousands during the summer; the
+President of the Administration assured me that they lodged, after a
+fashion, as many as ten thousand pilgrims on the 15th of last August.  It
+is astonishing how living the statues are to these people, and how the
+wicked are upbraided and the good applauded.  At Varallo, since I took
+the photographs I published in my book "Ex Voto," an angry pilgrim has
+smashed the nose of the dwarf in Tabachetti's Journey to Calvary, for no
+other reason than inability to restrain his indignation against one who
+was helping to inflict pain on Christ.  It is the real hair and the
+painting up to nature that does this.  Here at Oropa I found a paper on
+the floor of the _Sposalizio_ Chapel, which ran as follows:--
+
+"By the grace of God and the will of the administrative chapter of this
+sanctuary, there have come here to work --- ---, mason --- ---,
+carpenter, and --- --- plumber, all of Chiavazza, on the twenty-first day
+of January 1886, full of cold (_pieni di freddo_).
+
+"They write these two lines to record their visit.  They pray the Blessed
+Virgin that she will maintain them safe and sound from everything
+equivocal that may befall them (_sempre sani e salvi da ogni equivoco li
+possa accadere_).  Oh, farewell!  We reverently salute all the present
+statues, and especially the Blessed Virgin, and the reader."
+
+Through the _Universal Review_, I suppose, all its readers are to
+consider themselves saluted; at any rate, these good fellows, in the
+effusiveness of their hearts, actually wrote the above in pencil.  I was
+sorely tempted to steal it, but, after copying it, left it in the Chief
+Priest's hands instead.
+
+
+
+
+ART IN THE VALLEY OF SAAS {11}
+
+
+Having been told by Mr. Fortescue, of the British Museum, that there were
+some chapels at Saas-Fee which bore analogy to those at Varallo,
+described in my book "Ex Voto," {12} I went to Saas during this last
+summer, and venture now to lay my conclusions before the reader.
+
+The chapels are fifteen in number, and lead up to a larger and singularly
+graceful one, rather more than half-way between Saas and Saas-Fee.  This
+is commonly but wrongly called the chapel of St. Joseph, for it is
+dedicated to the Virgin, and its situation is of such extreme beauty--the
+great Fee glaciers showing through the open portico--that it is in itself
+worth a pilgrimage.  It is surrounded by noble larches and overhung by
+rock; in front of the portico there is a small open space covered with
+grass, and a huge larch, the stem of which is girt by a rude stone seat.
+The portico itself contains seats for worshippers, and a pulpit from
+which the preacher's voice can reach the many who must stand outside.  The
+walls of the inner chapel are hung with votive pictures, some of them
+very quaint and pleasing, and not overweighted by those qualities that
+are usually dubbed by the name of artistic merit.  Innumerable wooden and
+waxen representations of arms, legs, eyes, ears and babies tell of the
+cures that have been effected during two centuries of devotion, and can
+hardly fail to awaken a kindly sympathy with the long dead and forgotten
+folks who placed them where they are.
+
+The main interest, however, despite the extreme loveliness of the St.
+Mary's Chapel, centres rather in the small and outwardly unimportant
+oratories (if they should be so called) that lead up to it.  These begin
+immediately with the ascent from the level ground on which the village of
+Saas-im-Grund is placed, and contain scenes in the history of the
+Redemption, represented by rude but spirited wooden figures, each about
+two feet high, painted, gilt, and rendered as life-like in all respects
+as circumstances would permit.  The figures have suffered a good deal
+from neglect, and are still not a little misplaced.  With the assistance,
+however, of the Rev. E. J. Selwyn, English Chaplain at Saas-im-Grund, I
+have been able to replace many of them in their original positions, as
+indicated by the parts of the figures that are left rough-hewn and
+unpainted.  They vary a good deal in interest, and can be easily sneered
+at by those who make a trade of sneering.  Those, on the other hand, who
+remain unsophisticated by overmuch art-culture will find them full of
+character in spite of not a little rudeness of execution, and will be
+surprised at coming across such works in a place so remote from any art-
+centre as Saas must have been at the time these chapels were made.  It
+will be my business therefore to throw what light I can upon the
+questions how they came to be made at all, and who was the artist who
+designed them.
+
+The only documentary evidence consists in a chronicle of the valley of
+Saas written in the early years of this century by the Rev. Peter Jos.
+Ruppen, and published at Sion in 1851.  This work makes frequent
+reference to a manuscript by the Rev. Peter Joseph Clemens Lommatter,
+_cure_ of Saas-Fee from 1738 to 1751, which has unfortunately been lost,
+so that we have no means of knowing how closely it was adhered to.  The
+Rev. Jos. Ant. Ruppen, the present excellent _cure_ of Saas-im-Grund,
+assures me that there is no reference to the Saas-Fee oratories in the
+"Actes de l'Eglise" at Saas, which I understand go a long way back; but I
+have not seen these myself.  Practically, then, we have no more
+documentary evidence than is to be found in the published chronicle above
+referred to.
+
+We there find it stated that the large chapel, commonly, but as above
+explained, wrongly called St. Joseph's, was built in 1687, and enlarged
+by subscription in 1747.  These dates appear on the building itself, and
+are no doubt accurate.  The writer adds that there was no actual edifice
+on this site before the one now existing was built, but there was a
+miraculous picture of the Virgin placed in a mural niche, before which
+the pious herdsmen and devout inhabitants of the valley worshipped under
+the vault of heaven. {13}  A miraculous (or miracle-working) picture was
+always more or less rare and important; the present site, therefore,
+seems to have been long one of peculiar sanctity.  Possibly the name Fee
+may point to still earlier Pagan mysteries on the same site.
+
+As regards the fifteen small chapels, the writer says they illustrate the
+fifteen mysteries of the Psalter, and were built in 1709, each
+householder of the Saas-Fee contributing one chapel.  He adds that
+Heinrich Andenmatten, afterwards a brother of the Society of Jesus, was
+an especial benefactor or promoter of the undertaking.  One of the
+chapels, the Ascension (No. 12 of the series), has the date 1709 painted
+on it; but there is no date on any other chapel, and there seems no
+reason why this should be taken as governing the whole series.
+
+Over and above this, there exists in Saas a tradition, as I was told
+immediately on my arrival, by an English visitor, that the chapels were
+built in consequence of a flood, but I have vainly endeavoured to trace
+this story to an indigenous source.
+
+The internal evidence of the wooden figures themselves--nothing analogous
+to which, it should be remembered, can be found in the chapel of
+1687--points to a much earlier date.  I have met with no school of
+sculpture belonging to the early part of the eighteenth century to which
+they can be plausibly assigned; and the supposition that they are the
+work of some unknown local genius who was not led up to and left no
+successors may be dismissed, for the work is too scholarly to have come
+from any one but a trained sculptor.  I refer of course to those figures
+which the artist must be supposed to have executed with his own hand, as,
+for example, the central figure of the Crucifixion group and those of the
+Magdalene and St. John.  The greater number of the figures were probably,
+as was suggested to me by Mr. Ranshaw, of Lowth, executed by a local
+woodcarver from models in clay and wax furnished by the artist himself.
+Those who examine the play of line in the hair, mantle, and sleeve of the
+Magdalene in the Crucifixion group, and contrast it with the greater part
+of the remaining draperies, will find little hesitation in concluding
+that this was the case, and will ere long readily distinguish the two
+hands from which the figures have mainly come.  I say "mainly," because
+there is at least one other sculptor who may well have belonged to the
+year 1709, but who fortunately has left us little.  Examples of his work
+may perhaps be seen in the nearest villain with a big hat in the
+Flagellation chapel, and in two cherubs in the Assumption of the Virgin.
+
+We may say, then, with some certainty, that the designer was a cultivated
+and practised artist.  We may also not less certainly conclude that he
+was of Flemish origin, for the horses in the Journey to Calvary and
+Crucifixion chapels, where alone there are any horses at all, are of
+Flemish breed, with no trace of the Arab blood adopted by Gaudenzio at
+Varallo.  The character, moreover, of the villains is Northern--of the
+Quentin Matsys, Martin Schongauer type, rather than Italian; the same sub-
+Rubensesque feeling which is apparent in more than one chapel at Varallo
+is not less evident here--especially in the Journey to Calvary and
+Crucifixion chapels.  There can hardly, therefore, be a doubt that the
+artist was a Fleming who had worked for several years in Italy.
+
+It is also evident that he had Tabachetti's work at Varallo well in his
+mind.  For not only does he adopt certain details of costume (I refer
+particularly to the treatment of soldiers' tunics) which are peculiar to
+Tabachetti at Varallo, but whenever he treats a subject which Tabachetti
+had treated at Varallo, as in the Flagellation, Crowning with Thorns, and
+Journey to Calvary chapels, the work at Saas is evidently nothing but a
+somewhat modified abridgement of that at Varallo.  When, however, as in
+the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and other chapels, the
+work at Varallo is by another than Tabachetti, no allusion is made to it.
+The Saas artist has Tabachetti's Varallo work at his finger-ends, but
+betrays no acquaintance whatever with Gaudenzio Ferrari, Gio. Ant.
+Paracca, or Giovanni D'Enrico.
+
+Even, moreover, when Tabachetti's work at Varallo is being most obviously
+drawn from, as in the Journey to Calvary chapel, the Saas version differs
+materially from that at Varallo, and is in some respects an improvement
+on it.  The idea of showing other horsemen and followers coming up from
+behind, whose heads can be seen over the crown of the interposing hill,
+is singularly effective as suggesting a number of others that are unseen,
+nor can I conceive that any one but the original designer would follow
+Tabachetti's Varallo design with as much closeness as it has been
+followed here, and yet make such a brilliantly successful modification.
+The stumbling, again, of one horse (a detail almost hidden, according to
+Tabachetti's wont) is a touch which Tabachetti himself might add, but
+which no Saas woodcarver who was merely adapting from a reminiscence of
+Tabachetti's Varallo chapel would be likely to introduce.  These
+considerations have convinced me that the designer of the chapels at Saas
+is none other than Tabachetti himself, who, as has been now conclusively
+shown, was a native of Dinant, in Belgium.
+
+The Saas chronicler, indeed, avers that the chapels were not built till
+1709--a statement apparently corroborated by a date now visible on one
+chapel; but we must remember that the chronicler did not write until a
+century or so later than 1709, and though, indeed, his statement may have
+been taken from the lost earlier manuscript of 1738, we know nothing
+about this either one way or the other.  The writer may have gone by the
+still existing 1709 on the Ascension chapel, whereas this date may in
+fact have referred to a restoration, and not to an original construction.
+There is nothing, as I have said, in the choice of the chapel on which
+the date appears, to suggest that it was intended to govern the others.  I
+have explained that the work is isolated and exotic.  It is by one in
+whom Flemish and Italian influences are alike equally predominant; by one
+who was saturated with Tabachetti's Varallo work, and who can improve
+upon it, but over whom the other Varallo sculptors have no power.  The
+style of the work is of the sixteenth and not of the eighteenth
+century--with a few obvious exceptions that suit the year 1709
+exceedingly well.  Against such considerations as these, a statement made
+at the beginning of this century referring to a century earlier, and a
+promiscuous date upon one chapel, can carry but little weight.  I shall
+assume, therefore, henceforward, that we have here groups designed in a
+plastic material by Tabachetti, and reproduced in wood by the best local
+wood-sculptor available, with the exception of a few figures cut by the
+artist himself.
+
+We ask, then, at what period in his life did Tabachetti design these
+chapels, and what led to his coming to such an out-of-the-way place as
+Saas at all?  We should remember that, according both to Fassola and
+Torrotti (writing in 1671 and 1686 respectively), Tabachetti {14} became
+insane about the year 1586 or early in 1587, after having just begun the
+Salutation chapel.  I have explained in "Ex Voto" that I do not believe
+this story.  I have no doubt that Tabachetti was declared to be mad, but
+I believe this to have been due to an intrigue, set on foot in order to
+get a foreign artist out of the way, and to secure the Massacre of the
+Innocents chapel, at that precise time undertaken, for Gio. Ant. Paracca,
+who was an Italian.
+
+Or he may have been sacrificed in order to facilitate the return of the
+workers in stucco whom he had superseded on the Sacro Monte.  He may have
+been goaded into some imprudence which was seized upon as a pretext for
+shutting him up; at any rate, the fact that when in 1587 he inherited his
+father's property at Dinant, his trustee (he being expressly stated to be
+"_expatrie_") was "_datif_," "_dativus_," appointed not by himself but by
+the court, lends colour to the statement that he was not his own master
+at the time; for in later kindred deeds, now at Namur, he appoints his
+own trustee.  I suppose, then, that Tabachetti was shut up in a madhouse
+at Varallo for a considerable time, during which I can find no trace of
+him, but that eventually he escaped or was released.
+
+Whether he was a fugitive, or whether he was let out from prison, he
+would in either case, in all reasonable probability, turn his face
+homeward.  If he was escaping, he would make immediately for the Savoy
+frontier, within which Saas then lay.  He would cross the Baranca above
+Fobello, coming down on to Ponte Grande in the Val Anzasca.  He would go
+up the Val Anzasca to Macugnaga, and over the Monte Moro, which would
+bring him immediately to Saas.  Saas, therefore, is the nearest and most
+natural place for him to make for, if he were flying from Varallo, and
+here I suppose him to have halted.
+
+It so happened that on the 9th of September, 1589, there was one of the
+three great outbreaks of the Mattmark See that have from time to time
+devastated the valley of Saas. {15}  It is probable that the chapels were
+decided upon in consequence of some grace shown by the miraculous picture
+of the Virgin, which had mitigated a disaster occurring so soon after the
+anniversary of her own Nativity.  Tabachetti, arriving at this juncture,
+may have offered to undertake them if the Saas people would give him an
+asylum.  Here, at any rate, I suppose him to have stayed till some time
+in 1590, probably the second half of it, his design of eventually
+returning home, if he ever entertained it, being then interrupted by a
+summons to Crea near Casale, where I believe him to have worked with a
+few brief interruptions thenceforward for little if at all short of half
+a century, or until about the year 1640.  I admit, however, that the
+evidence for assigning him so long a life rests solely on the supposed
+identity of the figure known as "Il Vecchietto," in the Varallo Descent
+from the Cross chapel, with the portrait of Tabachetti himself in the
+Ecce Homo chapel, also at Varallo.
+
+I find additional reason for thinking the chapels owe their origin to the
+inundation of September 9, 1589, in the fact that the 8th of September is
+made a day of pilgrimage to the Saas-Fee chapels throughout the whole
+valley of Saas.  It is true the 8th of September is the festival of the
+Nativity of the Virgin Mary, so that under any circumstances this would
+be a great day, but the fact that not only the people of Saas, but the
+whole valley down to Visp, flock to this chapel on the 8th of September,
+points to the belief that some special act of grace on the part of the
+Virgin was vouchsafed on this day in connection with this chapel.  A
+belief that it was owing to the intervention of St. Mary of Fee that the
+inundation was not attended with loss of life would be very likely to
+lead to the foundation of a series of chapels leading up to the place
+where her miraculous picture was placed, and to the more special
+celebration of her Nativity in connection with this spot throughout the
+valley of Saas.  I have discussed the subject with the Rev. Jos. Ant.
+Ruppen, and he told me he thought the fact that the great _fete_ of the
+year in connection with the Saas-Fee chapels was on the 8th of September
+pointed rather strongly to the supposition that there was a connection
+between these and the recorded flood of September 9, 1589.
+
+Turning to the individual chapels they are as follows:--
+
+1.  The Annunciation.  The treatment here presents no more analogy to
+that of the same subject at Varallo than is inevitable in the nature of
+the subject.  The Annunciation figures at Varallo have proved to be mere
+draped dummies with wooden heads; Tabachetti, even though he did the
+heads, which he very likely did, would take no interest in the Varallo
+work with the same subject.  The Annunciation, from its very simplicity
+as well as from the transcendental nature of the subject, is singularly
+hard to treat, and the work here, whatever it may once have been, is now
+no longer remarkable.
+
+2.  The Salutation of Mary by Elizabeth.  This group, again, bears no
+analogy to the Salutation chapel at Varallo, in which Tabachetti's share
+was so small that it cannot be considered as in any way his.  It is not
+to be expected, therefore, that the Saas chapel should follow the Varallo
+one.  The figures, four in number, are pleasing and well arranged.  St.
+Joseph, St. Elizabeth, and St. Zacharias are all talking at once.  The
+Virgin is alone silent.
+
+3.  The Nativity is much damaged and hard to see.  The treatment bears no
+analogy to that adopted by Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo.  There is one
+pleasing young shepherd standing against the wall, but some figures have
+no doubt (as in others of the chapels) disappeared, and those that remain
+have been so shifted from their original positions that very little idea
+can be formed of what the group was like when Tabachetti left it.
+
+4.  The Purification.  I can hardly say why this chapel should remind me,
+as it does, of the Circumcision chapel at Varallo, for there are more
+figures here than space at Varallo will allow.  It cannot be pretended
+that any single figure is of extraordinary merit, but amongst them they
+tell their story with excellent effect.  Two, those of St. Joseph and St.
+Anna (?), that doubtless were once more important factors in the drama,
+are now so much in corners near the window that they can hardly be seen.
+
+5.  The Dispute in the Temple.  This subject is not treated at Varallo.
+Here at Saas there are only six doctors now; whether or no there were
+originally more cannot be determined.
+
+6.  The Agony in the Garden.  Tabachetti had no chapel with this subject
+at Varallo, and there is no resemblance between the Saas chapel and that
+by D'Enrico.  The figures are no doubt approximately in their original
+positions, but I have no confidence that I have rearranged them
+correctly.  They were in such confusion when I first saw them that the
+Rev. E. J. Selwyn and myself determined to rearrange them.  They have
+doubtless been shifted more than once since Tabachetti left them.  The
+sleeping figures are all good.  St. James is perhaps a little prosaic.
+One Roman soldier who is coming into the garden with a lantern, and
+motioning silence with his hand, does duty for the others that are to
+follow him.  I should think more than one of these figures is actually
+carved in wood by Tabachetti, allowance being made for the fact that he
+was working in a material with which he was not familiar, and which no
+sculptor of the highest rank has ever found congenial.
+
+7.  The Flagellation.  Tabachetti has a chapel with this subject at
+Varallo, and the Saas group is obviously a descent with modification from
+his work there.  The figure of Christ is so like the one at Varallo that
+I think it must have been carved by Tabachetti himself.  The man with the
+hooked nose, who at Varallo is stooping to bind his rods, is here
+upright: it was probably the intention to emphasise him in the succeeding
+scenes as well as this, in the same way as he has been emphasised at
+Varallo, but his nose got pared down in the cutting of later scenes, and
+could not easily be added to.  The man binding Christ to the column at
+Varallo is repeated (_longo intervallo_) here, and the whole work is one
+inspired by that at Varallo, though no single figure except that of the
+Christ is adhered to with any very great closeness.  I think the nearer
+malefactor, with a goitre, and wearing a large black hat, is either an
+addition of the year 1709, or was done by the journeyman of the local
+sculptor who carved the greater number of the figures.  The man stooping
+down to bind his rods can hardly be by the same hand as either of the two
+black-hatted malefactors, but it is impossible to speak with certainty.
+The general effect of the chapel is excellent, if we consider the
+material in which it is executed, and the rudeness of the audience to
+whom it addresses itself.
+
+8.  The Crowning with Thorns.  Here again the inspiration is derived from
+Tabachetti's Crowning with Thorns at Varallo.  The Christs in the two
+chapels are strikingly alike, and the general effect is that of a
+residuary impression left in the mind of one who had known the Varallo
+Flagellation exceedingly well.
+
+9.  Sta. Veronica.  This and the next succeeding chapels are the most
+important of the series.  Tabachetti's Journey to Calvary at Varallo is
+again the source from which the present work was taken, but, as I have
+already said, it has been modified in reproduction.  Mount Calvary is
+still shown, as at Varallo, towards the left-hand corner of the work, but
+at Saas it is more towards the middle than at Varallo, so that horsemen
+and soldiers may be seen coming up behind it--a stroke that deserves the
+name of genius none the less for the manifest imperfection with which it
+has been carried into execution.  There are only three horses fully
+shown, and one partly shown.  They are all of the heavy Flemish type
+adopted by Tabachetti at Varallo.  The man kicking the fallen Christ and
+the goitred man (with the same teeth missing), who are so conspicuous in
+the Varallo Journey to Calvary, reappear here, only the kicking man has
+much less nose than at Varallo, probably because (as explained) the nose
+got whittled away and could not be whittled back again.  I observe that
+the kind of lapelled tunic which Tabachetti, and only Tabachetti, adopts
+at Varallo, is adopted for the centurion in this chapel, and indeed
+throughout the Saas chapels this particular form of tunic is the most
+usual for a Roman soldier.  The work is still a very striking one,
+notwithstanding its translation into wood and the decay into which it has
+been allowed to fall; nor can it fail to impress the visitor who is
+familiar with this class of art as coming from a man of extraordinary
+dramatic power and command over the almost impossible art of composing
+many figures together effectively in all-round sculpture.  Whether all
+the figures are even now as Tabachetti left them I cannot determine, but
+Mr. Selwyn has restored Simon the Cyrenian to the position in which he
+obviously ought to stand, and between us we have got the chapel into
+something more like order.
+
+10.  The Crucifixion.  This subject was treated at Varallo not by
+Tabachetti but by Gaudenzio Ferrari.  It confirms therefore my opinion as
+to the designer of the Saas chapels to find in them no trace of the
+Varallo Crucifixion, while the kind of tunic which at Varallo is only
+found in chapels wherein Tabachetti worked again appears here.  The work
+is in a deplorable state of decay.  Mr. Selwyn has greatly improved the
+arrangement of the figures, but even now they are not, I imagine, quite
+as Tabachetti left them.  The figure of Christ is greatly better in
+technical execution than that of either of the two thieves; the folds of
+the drapery alone will show this even to an unpractised eye.  I do not
+think there can be a doubt but that Tabachetti cut this figure himself,
+as also those of the Magdalene and St. John, who stand at the foot of the
+cross.  The thieves are coarsely executed, with no very obvious
+distinction between the penitent and the impenitent one, except that
+there is a fiend painted on the ceiling over the impenitent thief.  The
+one horse introduced into the composition is again of the heavy Flemish
+type adopted by Tabachetti at Varallo.  There is great difference in the
+care with which the folds on the several draperies have been cut, some
+being stiff and poor enough, while others are done very sufficiently.  In
+spite of smallness of scale, ignoble material, disarrangement and decay,
+the work is still striking.
+
+11.  The Resurrection.  There being no chapel at Varallo with any of the
+remaining subjects treated at Saas, the sculptor has struck out a line
+for himself.  The Christ in the Resurrection Chapel is a carefully
+modelled figure, and if better painted might not be ineffective.  Three
+soldiers, one sleeping, alone remain.  There were probably other figures
+that have been lost.  The sleeping soldier is very pleasing.
+
+12.  The Ascension is not remarkably interesting; the Christ appears to
+be, but perhaps is not, a much more modern figure than the rest.
+
+18.  The Descent of the Holy Ghost.  Some of the figures along the end
+wall are very good, and were, I should imagine, cut by Tabachetti
+himself.  Those against the two side walls are not so well cut.
+
+14.  The Assumption of the Virgin Mary.  The two large cherubs here are
+obviously by a later hand, and the small ones are not good.  The figure
+of the Virgin herself is unexceptionable.  There were doubtless once
+other figures of the Apostles which have disappeared; of these a single
+St. Peter (?), so hidden away in a corner near the window that it can
+only be seen with difficulty, is the sole survivor.
+
+15.  The Coronation of the Virgin is of later date, and has probably
+superseded an earlier work.  It can hardly be by the designer of the
+other chapels of the series.  Perhaps Tabachetti had to leave for Crea
+before all the chapels at Saas were finished.
+
+Lastly, we have the larger chapel dedicated to St. Mary, which crowns the
+series.  Here there is nothing of more than common artistic interest,
+unless we except the stone altar mentioned in Ruppen's chronicle.  This
+is of course classical in style, and is, I should think, very good.
+
+Once more I must caution the reader against expecting to find
+highly-finished gems of art in the chapels I have been describing.  A
+wooden figure not more than two feet high clogged with many coats of
+paint can hardly claim to be taken very seriously, and even those few
+that were cut by Tabachetti himself were not meant to have attention
+concentrated on themselves alone.  As mere wood-carving the Saas-Fee
+chapels will not stand comparison, for example, with the triptych of
+unknown authorship in the Church of St. Anne at Gliss, close to Brieg.
+But, in the first place, the work at Gliss is worthy of Holbein himself:
+I know no wood-carving that can so rivet the attention; moreover it is
+coloured with water-colour and not oil, so that it is tinted, not
+painted; and, in the second place, the Gliss triptych belongs to a date
+(1519) when artists held neither time nor impressionism as objects, and
+hence, though greatly better than the Saas-Fee chapels as regards a
+certain Japanese curiousness of finish and _naivete_ of literal
+transcription, it cannot even enter the lists with the Saas work as
+regards _elan_ and dramatic effectiveness.  The difference between the
+two classes of work is much that between, say, John Van Eyck or Memling
+and Rubens or Rembrandt, or, again, between Giovanni Bellini and
+Tintoretto; the aims of the one class of work are incompatible with those
+of the other.  Moreover, in the Gliss triptych the intention of the
+designer is carried out (whether by himself or no) with admirable skill;
+whereas at Saas the wisdom of the workman is rather of Ober-Ammergau than
+of the Egyptians, and the voice of the poet is not a little drowned in
+that of his mouthpiece.  If, however, the reader will bear in mind these
+somewhat obvious considerations, and will also remember the pathetic
+circumstances under which the chapels were designed--for Tabachetti when
+he reached Saas was no doubt shattered in body and mind by his four
+years' imprisonment--he will probably be not less attracted to them than
+I observed were many of the visitors both at Saas-Grund and Saas-Fee with
+whom I had the pleasure of examining them.
+
+I will now run briefly through the other principal works in the
+neighbourhood to which I think the reader would be glad to have his
+attention directed.
+
+At Saas-Fee itself the main altar-piece is without interest, as also one
+with a figure of St. Sebastian.  The Virgin and Child above the remaining
+altar are, so far as I remember them, very good, and greatly superior to
+the smaller figures of the same altar-piece.
+
+At Almagel, an hour's walk or so above Saas-Grund--a village, the name of
+which, like those of the Alphubel, the Monte Moro, and more than one
+other neighbouring site, is supposed to be of Saracenic origin--the main
+altar-piece represents a female saint with folded arms being beheaded by
+a vigorous man to the left.  These two figures are very good.  There are
+two somewhat inferior elders to the right, and the composition is crowned
+by the Assumption of the Virgin.  I like the work, but have no idea who
+did it.  Two bishops flanking the composition are not so good.  There are
+two other altars in the church: the right-hand one has some pleasing
+figures, not so the left-hand.
+
+In St. Joseph's Chapel, on the mule-road between Saas-Grund and Saas-Fee,
+the St. Joseph and the two children are rather nice.  In the churches and
+chapels which I looked into between Saas and Stalden, I saw many florid
+extravagant altar-pieces, but nothing that impressed me favourably.
+
+In the parish church at Saas-Grund there are two altar-pieces which
+deserve attention.  In the one over the main altar the arrangement of the
+Last Supper in a deep recess half-way up the composition is very pleasing
+and effective; in that above the right-hand altar of the two that stand
+in the body of the church there are a number of round lunettes, about
+eight inches in diameter, each containing a small but spirited group of
+wooden figures.  I have lost my notes on these altar-pieces and can only
+remember that the main one has been restored, and now belongs to two
+different dates, the earlier date being, I should imagine, about 1670.  A
+similar treatment of the Last Supper may be found near Brieg in the
+church of Naters, and no doubt the two altar-pieces are by the same man.
+There are, by the way, two very ambitious altars on either side the main
+arch leading to the chance in the church at Naters, of which the one on
+the south side contains obvious reminiscences of Gaudenzio Ferrari's Sta.
+Maria frescoes at Varallo; but none of the four altar-pieces in the two
+transepts tempted me to give them much attention.  As regards the smaller
+altar-piece at Saas-Grund, analogous work may be found at Cravagliana,
+half-way between Varallo and Fobello, but this last has suffered through
+the inveterate habit which Italians have of showing their hatred towards
+the enemies of Christ by mutilating the figures that represent them.
+Whether the Saas work is by a Valsesian artist who came over to
+Switzerland, or whether the Cravagliana work is by a Swiss who had come
+to Italy, I cannot say without further consideration and closer
+examination than I have been able to give.  The altar-pieces of Mairengo,
+Chiggiogna, and, I am told, Lavertezzo, all in the Canton Ticino, are by
+a Swiss or German artist who has migrated southward; but the reverse
+migration was equally common.
+
+Being in the neighbourhood, and wishing to assure myself whether the
+sculptor of the Saas-Fee chapels had or had not come lower down the
+valley, I examined every church and village which I could hear of as
+containing anything that might throw light on this point.  I was thus led
+to Vispertimenen, a village some three hours above either Visp or
+Stalden.  It stands very high, and is an almost untouched example of a
+medieval village.  The altar-piece of the main church is even more
+floridly ambitious in its abundance of carving and gilding than the many
+other ambitious altar-pieces with which the Canton Valais abounds.  The
+Apostles are receiving the Holy Ghost on the first storey of the
+composition, and they certainly are receiving it with an overjoyed
+alacrity and hilarious ecstasy of _allegria spirituale_ which it would
+not be easy to surpass.  Above the village, reaching almost to the limits
+beyond which there is no cultivation, there stands a series of chapels
+like those I have been describing at Saas-Fee, only much larger and more
+ambitious.  They are twelve in number, including the church that crowns
+the series.  The figures they contain are of wood (so I was assured, but
+I did not go inside the chapels): they are life-size, and in some chapels
+there are as many as a dozen figures.  I should think they belonged to
+the later half of the last century, and here, one would say, sculpture
+touches the ground; at least, it is not easy to see how cheap
+exaggeration can sink an art more deeply.  The only things that at all
+pleased me were a smiling donkey and an ecstatic cow in the Nativity
+chapel.  Those who are not allured by the prospect of seeing perhaps the
+very worst that can be done in its own line, need not be at the pains of
+climbing up to Vispertimenen.  Those, on the other hand, who may find
+this sufficient inducement will not be disappointed, and they will enjoy
+magnificent views of the Weisshorn and the mountains near the Dom.
+
+I have already referred to the triptych at Gliss.  This is figured in
+Wolf's work on Chamonix and the Canton Valais, but a larger and clearer
+reproduction of such an extraordinary work is greatly to be desired.  The
+small wooden statues above the triptych, as also those above its modern
+companion in the south transept, are not less admirable than the triptych
+itself.  I know of no other like work in wood, and have no clue whatever
+as to who the author can have been beyond the fact that the work is
+purely German and eminently Holbeinesque in character.
+
+I was told of some chapels at Rarogne, five or six miles lower down the
+valley than Visp.  I examined them, and found they had been stripped of
+their figures.  The few that remained satisfied me that we have had no
+loss.  Above Brieg there are two other like series of chapels.  I
+examined the higher and more promising of the two, but found not one
+single figure left.  I was told by my driver that the other series, close
+to the Pont Napoleon on the Simplon road, had been also stripped of its
+figures, and, there being a heavy storm at the time, have taken his word
+for it that this was so.
+
+
+
+
+THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE {16}
+
+
+Three well-known writers, Professor Max Muller, Professor Mivart, and Mr.
+Alfred Russel Wallace have lately maintained that though the theory of
+descent with modification accounts for the development of all vegetable
+life, and of all animals lower than man, yet that man cannot--not at
+least in respect of the whole of his nature--be held to have descended
+from any animal lower than himself, inasmuch as none lower than man
+possesses even the germs of language.  Reason, it is contended--more
+especially by Professor Max Muller in his "Science of Thought," to which
+I propose confining our attention this evening--is so inseparably
+connected with language, that the two are in point of fact identical;
+hence it is argued that, as the lower animals have no germs of language,
+they can have no germs of reason, and the inference is drawn that man
+cannot be conceived as having derived his own reasoning powers and
+command of language through descent from beings in which no germ of
+either can be found.  The relations therefore between thought and
+language, interesting in themselves, acquire additional importance from
+the fact of their having become the battle-ground between those who say
+that the theory of descent breaks down with man, and those who maintain
+that we are descended from some ape-like ancestor long since extinct.
+
+The contention of those who refuse to admit man unreservedly into the
+scheme of evolution is comparatively recent.  The great propounders of
+evolution, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck--not to mention a score of
+others who wrote at the close of the last and early part of this present
+century--had no qualms about admitting man into their system.  They have
+been followed in this respect by the late Mr. Charles Darwin, and by the
+greatly more influential part of our modern biologists, who hold that
+whatever loss of dignity we may incur through being proved to be of
+humble origin, is compensated by the credit we may claim for having
+advanced ourselves to such a high pitch of civilisation; this bids us
+expect still further progress, and glorifies our descendants more than it
+abases our ancestors.  But to whichever view we may incline on
+sentimental grounds the fact remains that, while Charles Darwin declared
+language to form no impassable barrier between man and the lower animals,
+Professor Max Muller calls it the Rubicon which no brute dare cross, and
+deduces hence the conclusion that man cannot have descended from an
+unknown but certainly speechless ape.
+
+It may perhaps be expected that I should begin a lecture on the relations
+between thought and language with some definition of both these things;
+but thought, as Sir William Grove said of motion, is a phenomenon "so
+obvious to simple apprehension, that to define it would make it more
+obscure." {17}  Definitions are useful where things are new to us, but
+they are superfluous about those that are already familiar, and
+mischievous, so far as they are possible at all, in respect of all those
+things that enter so profoundly and intimately into our being that in
+them we must either live or bear no life.  To vivisect the more vital
+processes of thought is to suspend, if not to destroy them; for thought
+can think about everything more healthily and easily than about itself.
+It is like its instrument the brain, which knows nothing of any injuries
+inflicted upon itself.  As regards what is new to us, a definition will
+sometimes dilute a difficulty, and help us to swallow that which might
+choke us undiluted; but to define when we have once well swallowed is to
+unsettle, rather than settle, our digestion.  Definitions, again, are
+like steps cut in a steep slope of ice, or shells thrown on to a greasy
+pavement; they give us foothold, and enable us to advance, but when we
+are at our journey's end we want them no longer.  Again, they are useful
+as mental fluxes, and as helping us to fuse new ideas with our older
+ones.  They present us with some tags and ends of ideas that we have
+already mastered, on to which we can hitch our new ones; but to multiply
+them in respect of such a matter as thought, is like scratching the bite
+of a gnat; the more we scratch the more we want to scratch; the more we
+define the more we shall have to go on defining the words we have used in
+our definitions, and shall end by setting up a serious mental raw in the
+place of a small uneasiness that was after all quite endurable.  We know
+too well what thought is, to be able to know that we know it, and I am
+persuaded there is no one in this room but understands what is meant by
+thought and thinking well enough for all the purposes of this discussion.
+Whoever does not know this without words will not learn it for all the
+words and definitions that are laid before him.  The more, indeed, he
+hears, the more confused he will become.  I shall, therefore, merely
+premise that I use the word "thought" in the same sense as that in which
+it is generally used by people who say that they think this or that.  At
+any rate, it will be enough if I take Professor Max Muller's own
+definition, and say that its essence consists in a bringing together of
+mental images and ideas with deductions therefrom, and with a
+corresponding power of detaching them from one another.  Hobbes, the
+Professor tells us, maintained this long ago, when he said that all our
+thinking consists of addition and subtraction--that is to say, in
+bringing ideas together, and in detaching them from one another.
+
+Turning from thought to language, we observe that the word is derived
+from the French _langue_, or _tongue_.  Strictly, therefore, it means
+_tonguage_.  This, however, takes account of but a very small part of the
+ideas that underlie the word.  It does, indeed, seize a familiar and
+important detail of everyday speech, though it may be doubted whether the
+tongue has more to do with speaking than lips, teeth and throat have, but
+it makes no attempt at grasping and expressing the essential
+characteristic of speech.  Anything done with the tongue, even though it
+involve no speaking at all, is _tonguage_; eating oranges is as much
+tonguage as speech is.  The word, therefore, though it tells us in part
+how speech is effected, reveals nothing of that ulterior meaning which is
+nevertheless inseparable from any right use of the words either "speech"
+or "language."  It presents us with what is indeed a very frequent
+adjunct of conversation, but the use of written characters, or the finger-
+speech of deaf mutes, is enough to show that the word "language" omits
+all reference to the most essential characteristics of the idea, which in
+practice it nevertheless very sufficiently presents to us.  I hope
+presently to make it clear to you how and why it should do so.  The word
+is incomplete in the first place, because it omits all reference to the
+ideas which words, speech or language are intended to convey, and there
+can be no true word without its actually or potentially conveying an
+idea.  Secondly, it makes no allusion to the person or persons to whom
+the ideas are to be conveyed.  Language is not language unless it not
+only expresses fairly definite and coherent ideas, but unless it also
+conveys these ideas to some other living intelligent being, either man or
+brute, that can understand them.  We may speak to a dog or horse, but not
+to a stone.  If we make pretence of doing so we are in reality only
+talking to ourselves.  The person or animal spoken to is half the
+battle--a half, moreover, which is essential to there being any battle at
+all.  It takes two people to say a thing--a sayee as well as a sayer.  The
+one is as essential to any true saying as the other.  A. may have spoken,
+but if B. has not heard, there has been nothing said, and he must speak
+again.  True, the belief on A.'s part that he had a _bona fide_ sayee in
+B., saves his speech qua him, but it has been barren and left no fertile
+issue.  It has failed to fulfil the conditions of true speech, which
+involve not only that A. should speak, but also that B. should hear.
+True, again, we often speak of loose, incoherent, indefinite language;
+but by doing so we imply, and rightly, that we are calling that language
+which is not true language at all.  People, again, sometimes talk to
+themselves without intending that any other person should hear them, but
+this is not well done, and does harm to those who practise it.  It is
+abnormal, whereas our concern is with normal and essential
+characteristics; we may, therefore, neglect both delirious babblings, and
+the cases in which a person is regarding him or herself, as it were, from
+outside, and treating himself as though he were some one else.
+
+Inquiring, then, what are the essentials, the presence of which
+constitutes language, while their absence negatives it altogether, we
+find that Professor Max Muller restricts them to the use of grammatical
+articulate words that we can write or speak, and denies that anything can
+be called language unless it can be written or spoken in articulate words
+and sentences.  He also denies that we can think at all unless we do so
+in words; that is to say, in sentences with verbs and nouns.  Indeed he
+goes so far as to say upon his title-page that there can be no
+reason--which I imagine comes to much the same thing as thought--without
+language, and no language without reason.
+
+Against the assertion that there can be no true language without reason I
+have nothing to say.  But when the Professor says that there can be no
+reason, or thought, without language, his opponents contend, as it seems
+to me, with greater force, that thought, though infinitely aided,
+extended and rendered definite through the invention of words,
+nevertheless existed so fully as to deserve no other name thousands, if
+not millions of years before words had entered into it at all.  Words,
+they say, are a comparatively recent invention, for the fuller expression
+of something that was already in existence.
+
+Children, they urge, are often evidently thinking and reasoning, though
+they can neither think nor speak in words.  If you ask me to define
+reason, I answer as before that this can no more be done than thought,
+truth or motion can be defined.  Who has answered the question, "What is
+truth?"  Man cannot see God and live.  We cannot go so far back upon
+ourselves as to undermine our own foundations; if we try to do we topple
+over, and lose that very reason about which we vainly try to reason.  If
+we let the foundations be, we know well enough that they are there, and
+we can build upon them in all security.  We cannot, then, define reason
+nor crib, cabin and confine it within a thus-far-shalt-thou-go-and-no-
+further.  Who can define heat or cold, or night or day?  Yet, so long as
+we hold fast by current consent, our chances of error for want of better
+definition are so small that no sensible person will consider them.  In
+like manner, if we hold by current consent or common sense, which is the
+same thing, about reason, we shall not find the want of an academic
+definition hinder us from a reasonable conclusion.  What nurse or mother
+will doubt that her infant child can reason within the limits of its own
+experience, long before it can formulate its reason in articulately
+worded thought?  If the development of any given animal is, as our
+opponents themselves admit, an epitome of the history of its whole
+anterior development, surely the fact that speech is an accomplishment
+acquired after birth so artificially that children who have gone wild in
+the woods lose it if they have ever learned it, points to the conclusion
+that man's ancestors only learned to express themselves in articulate
+language at a comparatively recent period.  Granted that they learn to
+think and reason continually the more and more fully for having done so,
+will common sense permit us to suppose that they could neither think nor
+reason at all till they could convey their ideas in words?
+
+I will return later to the reason of the lower animals, but will now deal
+with the question what it is that constitutes language in the most
+comprehensive sense that can be properly attached to it.  I have said
+already that language to be language at all must not only convey fairly
+definite coherent ideas, but must also convey them to another living
+being.  Whenever two living beings have conveyed and received ideas,
+there has been language, whether looks or gestures or words spoken or
+written have been the vehicle by means of which the ideas have travelled.
+Some ideas crawl, some run, some fly; and in this case words are the
+wings they fly with, but they are only the wings of thought or of ideas,
+they are not the thought or ideas themselves, nor yet, as Professor Max
+Muller would have it, inseparably connected with them.  Last summer I was
+at an inn in Sicily, where there was a deaf and dumb waiter; he had been
+born so, and could neither write nor read.  What had he to do with words
+or words with him?  Are we to say, then, that this most active, amiable
+and intelligent fellow could neither think nor reason?  One day I had had
+my dinner and had left the hotel.  A friend came in, and the waiter saw
+him look for me in the place I generally occupied.  He instantly came up
+to my friend, and moved his two forefingers in a way that suggested two
+people going about together, this meant "your friend"; he then moved his
+forefingers horizontally across his eyes, this meant, "who wears divided
+spectacles"; he made two fierce marks over the sockets of his eyes, this
+meant, "with the heavy eyebrows"; he pulled his chin, and then touched
+his white shirt, to say that my beard was white.  Having thus identified
+me as a friend of the person he was speaking to, and as having a white
+beard, heavy eyebrows, and wearing divided spectacles, he made a munching
+movement with his jaws to say that I had had my dinner; and finally, by
+making two fingers imitate walking on the table, he explained that I had
+gone away.  My friend, however, wanted to know how long I had been gone,
+so he pulled out his watch and looked inquiringly.  The man at once
+slapped himself on the back, and held up the five fingers of one hand, to
+say it was five minutes ago.  All this was done as rapidly as though it
+had been said in words; and my friend, who knew the man well, understood
+without a moment's hesitation.  Are we to say that this man had no
+thought, nor reason, nor language, merely because he had not a single
+word of any kind in his head, which I am assured he had not; for, as I
+have said, he could not speak with his fingers?  Is it possible to deny
+that a dialogue--an intelligent conversation--had passed between the two
+men?  And if conversation, then surely it is technical and pedantic to
+deny that all the essential elements of language were present.  The signs
+and tokens used by this poor fellow were as rude an instrument of
+expression, in comparison with ordinary language, as going on one's hands
+and knees is in comparison with walking, or as walking compared with
+going by train; but it is as great an abuse of words to limit the word
+"language" to mere words written or spoken, as it would be to limit the
+idea of a locomotive to a railway engine.  This may indeed pass in
+ordinary conversation, where so much must be suppressed if talk is to be
+got through at all, but it is intolerable when we are inquiring about the
+relations between thought and words.  To do so is to let words become as
+it were the masters of thought, on the ground that the fact of their
+being only its servants and appendages is so obvious that it is generally
+allowed to go without saying.
+
+If all that Professor Max Muller means to say is, that no animal but man
+commands an articulate language, with verbs and nouns, or is ever likely
+to command one (and I question whether in reality he means much more than
+this), no one will differ from him.  No dog or elephant has one word for
+bread, another for meat, and another for water.  Yet, when we watch a cat
+or dog dreaming, as they often evidently do, can we doubt that the dream
+is accompanied by a mental image of the thing that is dreamed of, much
+like what we experience in dreams ourselves, and much doubtless like the
+mental images which must have passed through the mind of my deaf and dumb
+waiter?  If they have mental images in sleep, can we doubt that waking,
+also, they picture things before their mind's eyes, and see them much as
+we do--too vaguely indeed to admit of our thinking that we actually see
+the objects themselves, but definitely enough for us to be able to
+recognise the idea or object of which we are thinking, and to connect it
+with any other idea, object, or sign that we may think appropriate?
+
+Here we have touched on the second essential element of language.  We
+laid it down, that its essence lay in the communication of an idea from
+one intelligent being to another; but no ideas can be communicated at all
+except by the aid of conventions to which both parties have agreed to
+attach an identical meaning.  The agreement may be very informal, and may
+pass so unconsciously from one generation to another that its existence
+can only be recognised by the aid of much introspection, but it will be
+always there.  A sayer, a sayee, and a convention, no matter what, agreed
+upon between them as inseparably attached to the idea which it is
+intended to convey--these comprise all the essentials of language.  Where
+these are present there is language; where any of them are wanting there
+is no language.  It is not necessary for the sayee to be able to speak
+and become a sayer.  If he comprehends the sayer--that is to say, if he
+attaches the same meaning to a certain symbol as the sayer does--if he is
+a party to the bargain whereby it is agreed upon by both that any given
+symbol shall be attached invariably to a certain idea, so that in virtue
+of the principle of associated ideas the symbol shall never be present
+without immediately carrying the idea along with it, then all the
+essentials of language are complied with, and there has been true speech
+though never a word was spoken.
+
+The lower animals, therefore, many of them, possess a part of our own
+language, though they cannot speak it, and hence do not possess it so
+fully as we do.  They cannot say "bread," "meat," or "water," but there
+are many that readily learn what ideas they ought to attach to these
+symbols when they are presented to them.  It is idle to say that a cat
+does not know what the cat's-meat man means when he says "meat."  The cat
+knows just as well, neither better nor worse than the cat's-meat man
+does, and a great deal better than I myself understand much that is said
+by some very clever people at Oxford or Cambridge.  There is more true
+employment of language, more _bona fide_ currency of speech, between a
+sayer and a sayee who understand each other, though neither of them can
+speak a word, than between a sayer who can speak with the tongues of men
+and of angels without being clear about his own meaning, and a sayee who
+can himself utter the same words, but who is only in imperfect agreement
+with the sayer as to the ideas which the words or symbols that he utters
+are intended to convey.  The nature of the symbols counts for nothing;
+the gist of the matter is in the perfect harmony between sayer and sayee
+as to the significance that is to be associated with them.
+
+Professor Max Muller admits that we share with the lower animals what he
+calls an emotional language, and continues that we may call their
+interjections and imitations language if we like, as we speak of the
+language of the eyes or the eloquence of mute nature, but he warns us
+against mistaking metaphor for fact.  It is indeed mere metaphor to talk
+of the eloquence of mute nature, or the language of winds and waves.
+There is no intercommunion of mind with mind by means of a covenanted
+symbol; but it is only an apparent, not a real, metaphor to say that two
+pairs of eyes have spoken when they have signalled to one another
+something which they both understand.  A schoolboy at home for the
+holidays wants another plate of pudding, and does not like to apply
+officially for more.  He catches the servant's eye and looks at the
+pudding; the servant understands, takes his plate without a word, and
+gets him some.  Is it metaphor to say that the boy asked the servant to
+do this, or is it not rather pedantry to insist on the letter of a bond
+and deny its spirit, by denying that language passed, on the ground that
+the symbols covenanted upon and assented to by both were uttered and
+received by eyes and not by mouth and ears?  When the lady drank to the
+gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there no
+conversation because there was neither noun nor verb?  Eyes are verbs,
+and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those who understand
+one another.  Whether the ideas underlying them are expressed and
+conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail that matters nothing.
+
+But everything we say is metaphorical if we choose to be captious.
+Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor.  Written
+words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or
+substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language.
+They are indeed potential language, and the symbols employed presuppose
+nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech; but for the most part it is
+in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any
+letter is conveyed.  There are words unwritten and untranslatable into
+any nouns that are nevertheless felt as above, about and underneath the
+gross material symbols that lie scrawled upon the paper; and the deeper
+the feeling with which anything is written the more pregnant will it be
+of meaning which can be conveyed securely enough, but which loses rather
+than gains if it is squeezed into a sentence, and limited by the parts of
+speech.  The language is not in the words but in the heart-to-heartness
+of the thing, which is helped by words, but is nearer and farther than
+they.  A correspondent wrote to me once, many years ago, "If I could
+think to you without words you would understand me better."  But surely
+in this he was thinking to me, and without words, and I did understand
+him better . . .  So it is not by the words that I am too presumptuously
+venturing to speak to-night that your opinions will be formed or
+modified.  They will be formed or modified, if either, by something that
+you will feel, but which I have not spoken, to the full as much as by
+anything that I have actually uttered.  You may say that this borders on
+mysticism.  Perhaps it does, but their really is some mysticism in
+nature.
+
+To return, however, to _terra firma_.  I believe I am right in saying
+that the essence of language lies in the intentional conveyance of ideas
+from one living being to another through the instrumentality of arbitrary
+tokens or symbols agreed upon, and understood by both as being associated
+with the particular ideas in question.  The nature of the symbol chosen
+is a matter of indifference; it may be anything that appeals to human
+senses, and is not too hot or too heavy; the essence of the matter lies
+in a mutual covenant that whatever it is it shall stand invariably for
+the same thing, or nearly so.
+
+We shall see this more easily if we observe the differences between
+written and spoken language.  The written word "stone," and the spoken
+word, are each of them symbols arrived at in the first instance
+arbitrarily.  They are neither of them more like the other than they are
+to the idea of a stone which rises before our minds, when we either see
+or hear the word, or than this idea again is like the actual stone
+itself, but nevertheless the spoken symbol and the written one each alike
+convey with certainty the combination of ideas to which we have agreed to
+attach them.
+
+The written symbol is formed with the hand, appeals to the eye, leaves a
+material trace as long as paper and ink last, can travel as far as paper
+and ink can travel, and can be imprinted on eye after eye practically _ad
+infinitum_ both as regards time and space.
+
+The spoken symbol is formed by means of various organs in or about the
+mouth, appeals to the ear, not the eye, perishes instantly without
+material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those
+who heard it.  The range of its action is no wider than that within which
+a voice can be heard; and every time a fresh impression is wanted the
+type must be set up anew.
+
+The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the
+range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the
+writer's mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers,
+as against that of his flesh and blood body.  On the other hand, it takes
+longer to learn the rules so as to be able to apply them with ease and
+security, and even then they cannot be applied so quickly and easily as
+those attaching to spoken symbols.  Moreover, the spoken symbol admits of
+a hundred quick and subtle adjuncts by way of action, tone and
+expression, so that no one will use written symbols unless either for the
+special advantages of permanence and travelling power, or because he is
+incapacitated from using spoken ones.  This, however, is hardly to the
+point; the point is that these two conventional combinations of symbols,
+that are as unlike one another as the Hallelujah Chorus is to St. Paul's
+Cathedral, are the one as much language as the other; and we therefore
+inquire what this very patent fact reveals to us about the more essential
+characteristics of language itself.  What is the common bond that unites
+these two classes of symbols that seem at first sight to have nothing in
+common, and makes the one raise the idea of language in our minds as
+readily as the other?  The bond lies in the fact that both are a set of
+conventional tokens or symbols, agreed upon between the parties to whom
+they appeal as being attached invariably to the same ideas, and because
+they are being made as a means of communion between one mind and
+another,--for a memorandum made for a person's own later use is nothing
+but a communication from an earlier mind to a later and modified one; it
+is therefore in reality a communication from one mind to another as much
+as though it had been addressed to another person.
+
+We see, therefore, that the nature of the outward and visible sign to
+which the inward and spiritual idea of language is attached does not
+matter.  It may be the firing of a gun; it may be an old semaphore
+telegraph; it may be the movements of a needle; a look, a gesture, the
+breaking of a twig by an Indian to tell some one that he has passed that
+way: a twig broken designedly with this end in view is a letter addressed
+to whomsoever it may concern, as much as though it had been written out
+in full on bark or paper.  It does not matter one straw what it is,
+provided it is agreed upon in concert, and stuck to.  Just as the lowest
+forms of life nevertheless present us with all the essential
+characteristics of livingness, and are as much alive in their own humble
+way as the most highly developed organisms, so the rudest intentional and
+effectual communication between two minds through the instrumentality of
+a concerted symbol is as much language as the most finished oratory of
+Mr. Gladstone.  I demur therefore to the assertion that the lower animals
+have no language, inasmuch as they cannot themselves articulate a
+grammatical sentence.  I do not indeed pretend that when the cat calls
+upon the tiles it uses what it consciously and introspectively recognises
+as language; it says what it has to say without introspection, and in the
+ordinary course of business, as one of the common forms of courtship.  It
+no more knows that it has been using language than M. Jourdain knew he
+had been speaking prose, but M. Jourdain's knowing or not knowing was
+neither here nor there.
+
+Anything which can be made to hitch on invariably to a definite idea that
+can carry some distance--say an inch at the least, and which can be
+repeated at pleasure, can be pressed into the service of language.  Mrs.
+Bentley, wife of the famous Dr. Bentley of Trinity College, Cambridge,
+used to send her snuff-box to the college buttery when she wanted beer,
+instead of a written order.  If the snuff-box came the beer was sent, but
+if there was no snuff-box there was no beer.  Wherein did the snuff-box
+differ more from a written order, than a written order differs from a
+spoken one?  The snuff-box was for the time being language.  It sounds
+strange to say that one might take a pinch of snuff out of a sentence,
+but if the servant had helped him or herself to a pinch while carrying it
+to the buttery this is what would have been done; for if a snuff-box can
+say "Send me a quart of beer," so efficiently that the beer is sent, it
+is impossible to say that it is not a _bona fide_ sentence.  As for the
+recipient of the message, the butler did not probably translate the snuff-
+box into articulate nouns and verbs; as soon as he saw it he just went
+down into the cellar and drew the beer, and if he thought at all, it was
+probably about something else.  Yet he must have been thinking without
+words, or he would have drawn too much beer or too little, or have spilt
+it in the bringing it up, and we may be sure that he did none of these
+things.
+
+You will, of course, observe that if Mrs. Bentley had sent the snuff-box
+to the buttery of St. John's College instead of Trinity, it would not
+have been language, for there would have been no covenant between sayer
+and sayee as to what the symbol should represent, there would have been
+no previously established association of ideas in the mind of the butler
+of St. John's between beer and snuff-box; the connection was artificial,
+arbitrary, and by no means one of those in respect of which an impromptu
+bargain might be proposed by the very symbol itself, and assented to
+without previous formality by the person to whom it was presented.  More
+briefly, the butler of St. John's would not have been able to understand
+and read it aright.  It would have been a dead letter to him--a snuff-box
+and not a letter; whereas to the butler of Trinity it was a letter and
+not a snuff-box.
+
+You will also note that it was only at the moment when he was looking at
+it and accepting it as a message that it flashed forth from snuff-box-
+hood into the light and life of living utterance.  As soon as it had
+kindled the butler into sending a single quart of beer, its force was
+spent until Mrs. Bentley threw her soul into it again and charged it anew
+by wanting more beer, and sending it down accordingly.
+
+Again, take the ring which the Earl of Essex sent to Queen Elizabeth, but
+which the queen did not receive.  This was intended as a sentence, but
+failed to become effectual language because the sensible material symbol
+never reached those sentient organs which it was intended to affect.  A
+book, again, however full of excellent words it may be, is not language
+when it is merely standing on a bookshelf.  It speaks to no one, unless
+when being actually read, or quoted from by an act of memory.  It is
+potential language as a lucifer-match is potential fire, but it is no
+more language till it is in contact with a recipient mind, than a match
+is fire till it is struck, and is being consumed.
+
+A piece of music, again, without any words at all, or a song with words
+that have nothing in the world to do with the ideas which it is
+nevertheless made to convey, is often very effectual language.  Much
+lying, and all irony depends on tampering with covenanted symbols, and
+making those that are usually associated with one set of ideas convey by
+a sleight of mind others of a different nature.  That is why irony is
+intolerably fatiguing unless very sparingly used.  Take the song which
+Blondel sang under the window of King Richard's prison.  There was not
+one syllable in it to say that Blondel was there, and was going to help
+the king to get out of prison.  It was about some silly love affair, but
+it was a letter all the same, and the king made language of what would
+otherwise have been no language, by guessing the meaning, that is to say
+by perceiving that he was expected to enter then and there into a new
+covenant as to the meaning of the symbols that were presented to him,
+understanding what this covenant was to be, and acquiescing in it.
+
+On the other hand, no ingenuity can torture language into being a fit
+word to use in connection with either sounds or any other symbols that
+have not been intended to convey a meaning, or again in connection with
+either sounds or symbols in respect of which there has been no covenant
+between sayer and sayee.  When we hear people speaking a foreign
+language--we will say Welsh--we feel that though they are no doubt using
+what is very good language as between themselves, there is no language
+whatever as far as we are concerned.  We call it lingo, not language.  The
+Chinese letters on a tea-chest might as well not be there, for all that
+they say to us, though the Chinese find them very much to the purpose.
+They are a covenant to which we have been no parties--to which our
+intelligence has affixed no signature.
+
+We have already seen that it is in virtue of such an understood covenant
+that symbols so unlike one another as the written word "stone" and the
+spoken word alike at once raise the idea of a stone in our minds.  See
+how the same holds good as regards the different languages that pass
+current in different nations.  The letters p, i, e, r, r, e convey the
+idea of a stone to a Frenchman as readily as s, t, o, n, e do to
+ourselves.  And why? because that is the covenant that has been struck
+between those who speak and those who are spoken to.  Our "stone" conveys
+no idea to a Frenchman, nor his "pierre" to us, unless we have done what
+is commonly called acquiring one another's language.  To acquire a
+foreign language is only to learn and adhere to the covenants in respect
+of symbols which the nation in question has adopted and adheres to.
+
+Till we have done this we neither of us know the rules, so to speak, of
+the game that the other is playing, and cannot, therefore, play together;
+but the convention being once known and assented to, it does not matter
+whether we raise the idea of a stone by the word "lapis," or by "lithos,"
+"pietra," "pierre," "stein," "stane" or "stone"; we may choose what
+symbols written or spoken we choose, and one set, unless they are of
+unwieldy length will do as well as another, if we can get other people to
+choose the same and stick to them; it is the accepting and sticking to
+them that matters, not the symbols.  The whole power of spoken language
+is vested in the invariableness with which certain symbols are associated
+with certain ideas.  If we are strict in always connecting the same
+symbols with the same ideas, we speak well, keep our meaning clear to
+ourselves, and convey it readily and accurately to any one who is also
+fairly strict.  If, on the other hand, we use the same combination of
+symbols for one thing one day and for another the next, we abuse our
+symbols instead of using them, and those who indulge in slovenly habits
+in this respect ere long lose the power alike of thinking and of
+expressing themselves correctly.  The symbols, however, in the first
+instance, may be anything in the wide world that we have a fancy for.
+They have no more to do with the ideas they serve to convey than money
+has with the things that it serves to buy.
+
+The principle of association, as every one knows, involves that whenever
+two things have been associated sufficiently together, the suggestion of
+one of them to the mind shall immediately raise a suggestion of the
+other.  It is in virtue of this principle that language, as we so call
+it, exists at all, for the essence of language consists, as I have said
+perhaps already too often, in the fixity with which certain ideas are
+invariably connected with certain symbols.  But this being so, it is hard
+to see how we can deny that the lower animals possess the germs of a
+highly rude and unspecialised, but still true language, unless we also
+deny that they have any ideas at all; and this I gather is what Professor
+Max Muller in a quiet way rather wishes to do.  Thus he says, "It is easy
+enough to show that animals communicate, but this is a fact which has
+never been doubted.  Dogs who growl and bark leave no doubt in the minds
+of other dogs or cats, or even of man, of what they mean, but growling
+and barking are not language, nor do they even contain the elements of
+language." {18}
+
+I observe the Professor says that animals communicate without saying what
+it is that they communicate.  I believe this to have been because if he
+said that the lower animals communicate their ideas, this would be to
+admit that they have ideas; if so, and if, as they present every
+appearance of doing, they can remember, reflect upon, modify these ideas
+according to modified surroundings, and interchange them with one
+another, how is it possible to deny them the germs of thought, language,
+and reason--not to say a good deal more than the germs?  It seems to me
+that not knowing what else to say that animals communicated if it was not
+ideas, and not knowing what mess he might not get into if he admitted
+that they had ideas at all, he thought it safer to omit his accusative
+case altogether.
+
+That growling and barking cannot be called a very highly specialised
+language goes without saying; they are, however, so much diversified in
+character, according to circumstances, that they place a considerable
+number of symbols at an animal's command, and he invariably attaches the
+same symbol to the same idea.  A cat never purrs when she is angry, nor
+spits when she is pleased.  When she rubs her head against any one
+affectionately it is her symbol for saying that she is very fond of him,
+and she expects, and usually finds that it will be understood.  If she
+sees her mistress raise her hand as though to pretend to strike her, she
+knows that it is the symbol her mistress invariably attaches to the idea
+of sending her away, and as such she accepts it.  Granted that the
+symbols in use among the lower animals are fewer and less highly
+differentiated than in the case of any known human language, and
+therefore that animal language is incomparably less subtle and less
+capable of expressing delicate shades of meaning than our own, these
+differences are nevertheless only those that exist between highly
+developed and inchoate language; they do not involve those that
+distinguish language from no language.  They are the differences between
+the undifferentiated protoplasm of the amoeba and our own complex
+organisation; they are not the differences between life and no life.  In
+animal language as much as in human there is a mind intentionally making
+use of a symbol accepted by another mind as invariably attached to a
+certain idea, in order to produce that idea in the mind which it is
+desired to affect--more briefly, there is a sayer, a sayee, and a
+covenanted symbol designedly applied.  Our own speech is vertebrated and
+articulated by means of nouns, verbs, and the rules of grammar.  A dog's
+speech is invertebrate, but I do not see how it is possible to deny that
+it possesses all the essential elements of language.
+
+I have said nothing about Professor R. L. Garner's researches into the
+language of apes, because they have not yet been so far verified and
+accepted as to make it safe to rely upon them; but when he lays it down
+that all voluntary sounds are the products of thought, and that, if they
+convey a meaning to another, they perform the functions of human speech,
+he says what I believe will commend itself to any unsophisticated mind.  I
+could have wished, however, that he had not limited himself to sounds,
+and should have preferred his saying what I doubt not he would readily
+accept--I mean, that all symbols or tokens of whatever kind, if
+voluntarily adopted as such, are the products of thought, and perform the
+functions of human speech; but I cannot too often remind you that nothing
+can be considered as fulfilling the conditions of language, except a
+voluntary application of a recognised token in order to convey a more or
+less definite meaning, with the intention doubtless of thus purchasing as
+it were some other desired meaning and consequent sensation.  It is
+astonishing how closely in this respect money and words resemble one
+another.  Money indeed may be considered as the most universal and
+expressive of all languages.  For gold and silver coins are no more money
+when not in the actual process of being voluntarily used in purchase,
+than words not so in use are language.  Pounds, shillings and pence are
+recognised covenanted tokens, the outward and visible signs of an inward
+and spiritual purchasing power, but till in actual use they are only
+potential money, as the symbols of language, whatever they may be, are
+only potential language till they are passing between two minds.  It is
+the power and will to apply the symbols that alone gives life to money,
+and as long as these are in abeyance the money is in abeyance also; the
+coins may be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as a log till
+they begin to burn in it, and so are our words till they begin to burn
+within us.
+
+The real question, however, as to the substantial underlying identity
+between the language of the lower animals and our own, turns upon that
+other question whether or no, in spite of an immeasurable difference of
+degree, the thought and reason of man and of the lower animals is
+essentially the same.  No one will expect a dog to master and express the
+varied ideas that are incessantly arising in connection with human
+affairs.  He is a pauper as against a millionaire.  To ask him to do so
+would be like giving a street-boy sixpence and telling him to go and buy
+himself a founder's share in the New River Company.  He would not even
+know what was meant, and even if he did it would take several millions of
+sixpences to buy one.  It is astonishing what a clever workman will do
+with very modest tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will make a
+very small sum of money go, or again in like manner how many ideas an
+intelligent brute can receive and convey with its very limited
+vocabulary; but no one will pretend that a dog's intelligence can ever
+reach the level of a man's.  What we do maintain is that, within its own
+limited range, it is of the same essential character as our own, and that
+though a dog's ideas in respect of human affairs are both vague and
+narrow, yet in respect of canine affairs they are precise enough and
+extensive enough to deserve no other name than thought or reason.  We
+hold moreover that they communicate their ideas in essentially the same
+manner as we do--that is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of
+symbols attached to certain states of mind and material objects, in the
+first instance arbitrarily, but so persistently, that the presentation of
+the symbol immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to
+convey.  Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most
+concerns them.  As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago,
+they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit can fly."
+And they not only know what's what themselves, but can impart to one
+another any new what's-whatness that they may have acquired, for they are
+notoriously able to instruct and correct one another.
+
+Against this Professor Max Muller contends that we can know nothing of
+what goes on in the mind of any lower animal, inasmuch as we are not
+lower animals ourselves.  "We can imagine anything we like about what
+passes in the mind of an animal," he writes, "we can know absolutely
+nothing." {19}  It is something to have it in evidence that he conceives
+animals as having a mind at all, but it is not easy to see how they can
+be supposed to have a mind, without being able to acquire ideas, and
+having acquired, to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.  Surely
+the mistake of requiring too much evidence is hardly less great than that
+of being contented with too little.  We, too, are animals, and can no
+more refuse to infer reason from certain visible actions in their case
+than we can in our own.  If Professor Max Muller's plea were allowed, we
+should have to deny our right to infer confidently what passes in the
+mind of any one not ourselves, inasmuch as we are not that person.  We
+never, indeed, can obtain irrefragable certainty about this or any other
+matter, but we can be sure enough in many cases to warrant our staking
+all that is most precious to us on the soundness of our opinion.
+Moreover, if the Professor denies our right to infer that animals reason,
+on the ground that we are not animals enough ourselves to be able to form
+an opinion, with what right does he infer so confidently himself that
+they do not reason?  And how, if they present every one of those
+appearances which we are accustomed to connect with the communication of
+an idea from one mind to another, can we deny that they have a language
+of their own, though it is one which in most cases we can neither speak
+nor understand?  How can we say that a sentinel rook, when it sees a man
+with a gun and warns the other rooks by a concerted note which they all
+show that they understand by immediately taking flight, should not be
+credited both with reason and the germs of language?
+
+After all, a professor, whether of philology, psychology, biology, or any
+other ology, is hardly the kind of person to whom we should appeal on
+such an elementary question as that of animal intelligence and language.
+We might as well ask a botanist to tell us whether grass grows, or a
+meteorologist to tell us if it has left off raining.  If it is necessary
+to appeal to any one, I should prefer the opinion of an intelligent
+gamekeeper to that of any professor, however learned.  The keepers,
+again, at the Zoological Gardens, have exceptional opportunities for
+studying the minds of animals--modified, indeed, by captivity, but still
+minds of animals.  Grooms, again, and dog-fanciers, are to the full as
+able to form an intelligent opinion on the reason and language of animals
+as any University Professor, and so are cats'-meat men.  I have
+repeatedly asked gamekeepers and keepers at the Zoological Gardens
+whether animals could reason and converse with one another, and have
+always found myself regarded somewhat contemptuously for having even
+asked the question.  I once said to a friend, in the hearing of a keeper
+at the Zoological Gardens, that the penguin was very stupid.  The man was
+furious, and jumped upon me at once.  "He's not stupid at all," said he;
+"he's very intelligent."
+
+Who has not seen a cat, when it wishes to go out, raise its fore paws on
+to the handle of the door, or as near as it can get, and look round,
+evidently asking some one to turn it for her?  Is it reasonable to deny
+that a reasoning process is going on in the cat's mind, whereby she
+connects her wish with the steps necessary for its fulfilment, and also
+with certain invariable symbols which she knows her master or mistress
+will interpret?  Once, in company with a friend, I watched a cat playing
+with a house-fly in the window of a ground-floor room.  We were in the
+street, while the cat was inside.  When we came up to the window she gave
+us one searching look, and, having satisfied herself that we had nothing
+for her, went on with her game.  She knew all about the glass in the
+window, and was sure we could do nothing to molest her, so she treated us
+with absolute contempt, never even looking at us again.
+
+The game was this.  She was to catch the fly and roll it round and round
+under her paw along the window-sill, but so gently as not to injure it
+nor prevent it from being able to fly again when she had done rolling it.
+It was very early spring, and flies were scarce, in fact there was not
+another in the whole window.  She knew that if she crippled this one, it
+would not be able to amuse her further, and that she would not readily
+get another instead, and she liked the feel of it under her paw.  It was
+soft and living, and the quivering of its wings tickled the ball of her
+foot in a manner that she found particularly grateful; so she rolled it
+gently along the whole length of the window-sill.  It then became the
+fly's turn.  He was to get up and fly about in the window, so as to
+recover himself a little; then she was to catch him again, and roll him
+softly all along the window-sill, as she had done before.
+
+It was plain that the cat knew the rules of her game perfectly well, and
+enjoyed it keenly.  It was equally plain that the fly could not make head
+or tail of what it was all about.  If it had been able to do so it would
+have gone to play in the upper part of the window, where the cat could
+not reach it.  Perhaps it was always hoping to get through the glass, and
+escape that way; anyhow, it kept pretty much to the same pane, no matter
+how often it was rolled.  At last, however, the fly, for some reason or
+another, did not reappear on the pane, and the cat began looking
+everywhere to find it.  Her annoyance when she failed to do so was
+extreme.  It was not only that she had lost her fly, but that she could
+not conceive how she should have ever come to do so.  Presently she noted
+a small knot in the woodwork of the sill, and it flashed upon her that
+she had accidentally killed the fly, and that this was its dead body.  She
+tried to move it gently with her paw, but it was no use, and for the time
+she satisfied herself that the knot and the fly had nothing to do with
+one another.  Every now and then, however, she returned to it as though
+it were the only thing she could think of, and she would try it again.
+She seemed to say she was certain there had been no knot there before--she
+must have seen it if there had been; and yet, the fly could hardly have
+got jammed so firmly into the wood.  She was puzzled and irritated beyond
+measure, and kept looking in the same place again and again, just as we
+do when we have mislaid something.  She was rapidly losing temper and
+dignity when suddenly we saw the fly reappear from under the cat's
+stomach and make for the window-pane, at the very moment when the cat
+herself was exclaiming for the fiftieth time that she wondered where that
+stupid fly ever could have got to.  No man who has been hunting twenty
+minutes for his spectacles could be more delighted when he suddenly finds
+them on his own forehead.  "So that's where you were," we seemed to hear
+her say, as she proceeded to catch it, and again began rolling it very
+softly without hurting it, under her paw.  My friend and I both noticed
+that the cat, in spite of her perplexity, never so much as hinted that we
+were the culprits.  The question whether anything outside the window
+could do her good or harm had long since been settled by her in the
+negative, and she was not going to reopen it; she simply cut us dead, and
+though her annoyance was so great that she was manifestly ready to lay
+the blame on anybody or anything with or without reason, and though she
+must have perfectly well known that we were watching the whole affair
+with amusement, she never either asked us if we had happened to see such
+a thing as a fly go down our way lately, or accused us of having taken it
+from her--both of which ideas she would, I am confident, have been very
+well able to convey to us if she had been so minded.
+
+Now what are thought and reason if the processes that were going through
+this cat's mind were not both one and the other?  It would be childish to
+suppose that the cat thought in words of its own, or in anything like
+words.  Its thinking was probably conducted through the instrumentality
+of a series of mental images.  We so habitually think in words ourselves
+that we find it difficult to realise thought without words at all; our
+difficulty, however, in imagining the particular manner in which the cat
+thinks has nothing to do with the matter.  We must answer the question
+whether she thinks or no, not according to our own ease or difficulty in
+understanding the particular manner of her thinking, but according as her
+action does or does not appear to be of the same character as other
+action that we commonly call thoughtful.  To say that the cat is not
+intelligent, merely on the ground that we cannot ourselves fathom her
+intelligence--this, as I have elsewhere said, is to make intelligence
+mean the power of being understood, rather than the power of
+understanding.  This nevertheless is what, for all our boasted
+intelligence, we generally do.  The more we can understand an animal's
+ways, the more intelligent we call it, and the less we can understand
+these, the more stupid do we declare it to be.  As for plants--whose
+punctuality and attention to all the details and routine of their
+somewhat restricted lines of business is as obvious as it is beyond all
+praise--we understand the working of their minds so little that by common
+consent we declare them to have no intelligence at all.
+
+Before concluding I should wish to deal a little more fully with
+Professor Max Muller's contention that there can be no reason without
+language, and no language without reason.  Surely when two practised
+pugilists are fighting, parrying each other's blows, and watching keenly
+for an unguarded point, they are thinking and reasoning very subtly the
+whole time, without doing so in words.  The machination of their
+thoughts, as well as its expression, is actual--I mean, effectuated and
+expressed by action and deed, not words.  They are unaware of any logical
+sequence of thought that they could follow in words as passing through
+their minds at all.  They may perhaps think consciously in words now and
+again, but such thought will be intermittent, and the main part of the
+fighting will be done without any internal concomitance of articulated
+phrases.  Yet we cannot doubt that their action, however much we may
+disapprove of it, is guided by intelligence and reason; nor should we
+doubt that a reasoning process of the same character goes on in the minds
+of two dogs or fighting-cocks when they are striving to master their
+opponents.
+
+Do we think in words, again, when we wind up our watches, put on our
+clothes, or eat our breakfasts?  If we do, it is generally about
+something else.  We do these things almost as much without the help of
+words as we wink or yawn, or perform any of those other actions that we
+call reflex, as it would almost seem because they are done without
+reflection.  They are not, however, the less reasonable because wordless.
+
+Even when we think we are thinking in words, we do so only in half
+measure.  A running accompaniment of words no doubt frequently attends
+our thoughts; but, unless we are writing or speaking, this accompaniment
+is of the vaguest and most fitful kind, as we often find out when we try
+to write down or say what we are thinking about, though we have a fairly
+definite notion of it, or fancy that we have one, all the time.  The
+thought is not steadily and coherently governed by and moulded in words,
+nor does it steadily govern them.  Words and thought interact upon and
+help one another, as any other mechanical appliances interact on and help
+the invention that first hit upon them; but reason or thought, for the
+most part, flies along over the heads of words, working its own
+mysterious way in paths that are beyond our ken, though whether some of
+our departmental personalities are as unconscious of what is passing, as
+that central government is which we alone dub with the name of "we" or
+"us," is a point on which I will not now touch.
+
+I cannot think, then, that Professor Max Muller's contention that thought
+and language are identical--and he has repeatedly affirmed this--will
+ever be generally accepted.  Thought is no more identical with language
+than feeling is identical with the nervous system.  True, we can no more
+feel without a nervous system than we can discern certain minute
+organisms without a microscope.  Destroy the nervous system, and we
+destroy feeling.  Destroy the microscope, and we can no longer see the
+animalcules; but our sight of the animalcules is not the microscope,
+though it is effectuated by means of the microscope, and our feeling is
+not the nervous system, though the nervous system is the instrument that
+enables us to feel.
+
+The nervous system is a device which living beings have gradually
+perfected--I believe I may say quite truly--through the will and power
+which they have derived from a fountain-head, the existence of which we
+can infer, but which we can never apprehend.  By the help of this device,
+and in proportion as they have perfected it, living beings feel ever with
+greater definiteness, and hence formulate their feelings in thought with
+more and more precision.  The higher evolution of thought has reacted on
+the nervous system, and the consequent higher evolution of the nervous
+system has again reacted upon thought.  These things are as power and
+desire, or supply and demand, each one of which is continually
+outstripping, and being in turn outstripped by the other; but, in spite
+of their close connection and interaction, power is not desire, nor
+demand supply.  Language is a device evolved sometimes by leaps and
+bounds, and sometimes exceedingly slowly, whereby we help ourselves alike
+to greater ease, precision, and complexity of thought, and also to more
+convenient interchange of thought among ourselves.  Thought found rude
+expression, which gradually among other forms assumed that of words.
+These reacted upon thought, and thought again on them, but thought is no
+more identical with words than words are with the separate letters of
+which they are composed.
+
+To sum up, then, and to conclude.  I would ask you to see the connection
+between words and ideas, as in the first instance arbitrary.  No doubt in
+some cases an imitation of the cry of some bird or wild beast would
+suggest the name that should be attached to it; occasionally the sound of
+an operation such as grinding may have influenced the choice of the
+letters g, r, as the root of many words that denote a grinding, grating,
+grasping, crushing, action; but I understand that the number of words due
+to direct imitation is comparatively few in number, and that they have
+been mainly coined as the result of connections so far-fetched and
+fanciful as to amount practically to no connection at all.  Once chosen,
+however, they were adhered to for a considerable time among the dwellers
+in any given place, so as to become acknowledged as the vulgar tongue,
+and raise readily in the mind of the inhabitants of that place the ideas
+with which they had been artificially associated.
+
+As regards our being able to think and reason without words, the Duke of
+Argyll has put the matter as soundly as I have yet seen it stated.  "It
+seems to me," he wrote, "quite certain that we can and do constantly
+think of things without thinking of any sound or word as designating
+them.  Language seems to me to be necessary for the progress of thought,
+but not at all for the mere act of thinking.  It is a product of thought,
+an expression of it, a vehicle for the communication of it, and an
+embodiment which is essential to its growth and continuity; but it seems
+to me altogether erroneous to regard it as an inseparable part of
+cogitation."
+
+The following passages, again, are quoted from Sir William Hamilton in
+Professor Max Muller's own book, with so much approval as to lead one to
+suppose that the differences between himself and his opponents are in
+reality less than he believes them to be:--
+
+"Language," says Sir W. Hamilton, "is the attribution of signs to our
+cognitions of things.  But as a cognition must have already been there
+before it could receive a sign, consequently that knowledge which is
+denoted by the formation and application of a word must have preceded the
+symbol that denotes it.  A sign, however, is necessary to give stability
+to our intellectual progress--to establish each step in our advance as a
+new starting-point for our advance to another beyond.  A country may be
+overrun by an armed host, but it is only conquered by the establishment
+of fortresses.  Words are the fortresses of thought.  They enable us to
+realise our dominion over what we have already overrun in thought; to
+make every intellectual conquest the base of operations for others still
+beyond."
+
+"This," says Professor Max Muller, "is a most happy illustration," and he
+proceeds to quote the following, also from Sir William Hamilton, which he
+declares to be even happier still.
+
+"You have all heard," says Sir William Hamilton, "of the process of
+tunnelling through a sandbank.  In this operation it is impossible to
+succeed unless every foot, nay, almost every inch of our progress be
+secured by an arch of masonry before we attempt the excavation of
+another.  Now language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the
+tunnel.  The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not
+dependent on the words in the one case or on the mason-work in the other;
+but without these subsidiaries neither could be carried on beyond its
+rudimentary commencement.  Though, therefore, we allow that every
+movement forward in language must be determined by an antecedent movement
+forward in thought, still, unless thought be accompanied at each point of
+its evolutions by a corresponding evolution of language, its further
+development is arrested."
+
+Man has evolved an articulate language, whereas the lower animals seem to
+be without one.  Man, therefore, has far outstripped them in reasoning
+faculty as well as in power of expression.  This, however, does not bar
+the communications which the lower animals make to one another from
+possessing all the essential characteristics of language, and as a matter
+of fact, wherever we can follow them we find such communications
+effectuated by the aid of arbitrary symbols covenanted upon by the living
+beings that wish to communicate, and persistently associated with certain
+corresponding feelings, states of mind, or material objects.  Human
+language is nothing more than this in principle, however much further the
+principle has been carried in our own case than in that of the lower
+animals.
+
+This being admitted, we should infer that the thought or reason on which
+the language of men and animals is alike founded differs as between men
+and brutes in degree but not in kind.  More than this cannot be claimed
+on behalf of the lower animals, even by their most enthusiastic admirer.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM {20}--PART I
+
+
+It will be readily admitted that of all living writers Mr. Alfred Russel
+Wallace is the one the peculiar turn of whose mind best fits him to write
+on the subject of natural selection, or the accumulation of fortunate but
+accidental variations through descent and the struggle for existence.  His
+mind in all its more essential characteristics closely resembles that of
+the late Mr. Charles Darwin himself, and it is no doubt due to this fact
+that he and Mr. Darwin elaborated their famous theory at the same time,
+and independently of one another.  I shall have occasion in the course of
+the following article to show how misled and misleading both these
+distinguished men have been, in spite of their unquestionable familiarity
+with the whole range of animal and vegetable phenomena.  I believe it
+will be more respectful to both of them to do this in the most out-spoken
+way.  I believe their work to have been as mischievous as it has been
+valuable, and as valuable as it has been mischievous; and higher, whether
+praise or blame, I know not how to give.  Nevertheless I would in the
+outset, and with the utmost sincerity, admit concerning Messrs. Wallace
+and Darwin that neither can be held as the more profound and
+conscientious thinker; neither can be put forward as the more ready to
+acknowledge obligation to the great writers on evolution who had preceded
+him, or to place his own developments in closer and more conspicuous
+historical connection with earlier thought upon the subject; neither is
+the more ready to welcome criticism and to state his opponent's case in
+the most pointed and telling way in which it can be put; neither is the
+more quick to encourage new truth; neither is the more genial, generous
+adversary, or has the profounder horror of anything even approaching
+literary or scientific want of candour; both display the same inimitable
+power of putting their opinions forward in the way that shall best ensure
+their acceptance; both are equally unrivalled in the tact that tells them
+when silence will be golden, and when on the other hand a whole volume of
+facts may be advantageously brought forward.  Less than the foregoing
+tribute both to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace I will not, and more I cannot
+pay.
+
+Let us now turn to the most authoritative exponent of latter-day
+evolution--I mean to Mr. Wallace, whose work, entitled "Darwinism,"
+though it should have been entitled "Wallaceism," is still so far
+Darwinistic that it develops the teaching of Mr. Darwin in the direction
+given to it by Mr. Darwin himself--so far, indeed, as this can be
+ascertained at all--and not in that of Lamarck.  Mr. Wallace tells us, on
+the first page of his preface, that he has no intention of dealing even
+in outline with the vast subject of evolution in general, and has only
+tried to give such an account of the theory of natural selection as may
+facilitate a clear conception of Darwin's work.  How far he has succeeded
+is a point on which opinion will probably be divided.  Those who find Mr.
+Darwin's works clear will also find no difficulty in understanding Mr.
+Wallace; those, on the other hand, who find Mr. Darwin puzzling are
+little likely to be less puzzled by Mr. Wallace.  He continues:--
+
+"The objections now made to Darwin's theory apply solely to the
+particular means by which the change of species has been brought about,
+not to the fact of that change."
+
+But "Darwin's theory"--as Mr. Wallace has elsewhere proved that he
+understands--has no reference "to the fact of that change"--that is to
+say, to the fact that species have been modified in course of descent
+from other species.  This is no more Mr. Darwin's theory than it is the
+reader's or my own.  Darwin's theory is concerned only with "the
+particular means by which the change of species has been brought about";
+his contention being that this is mainly due to the natural survival of
+those individuals that have happened by some accident to be born most
+favourably adapted to their surroundings, or, in other words, through
+accumulation in the common course of nature of the more lucky variations
+that chance occasionally purveys.  Mr. Wallace's words, then, in reality
+amount to this, that the objections now made to Darwin's theory apply
+solely to Darwin's theory, which is all very well as far as it goes, but
+might have been more easily apprehended if he had simply said, "There are
+several objections now made to Mr. Darwin's theory."
+
+It must be remembered that the passage quoted above occurs on the first
+page of a preface dated March 1889, when the writer had completed his
+task, and was most fully conversant with his subject.  Nevertheless, it
+seems indisputable either that he is still confusing evolution with Mr.
+Darwin's theory, or that he does not know when his sentences have point
+and when they have none.
+
+I should perhaps explain to some readers that Mr. Darwin did not modify
+the main theory put forward, first by Buffon, to whom it indisputably
+belongs, and adopted from him by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and many other
+writers in the latter half of the last century and the earlier years of
+the present.  The early evolutionists maintained that all existing forms
+of animal and vegetable life, including man, were derived in course of
+descent with modification from forms resembling the lowest now known.
+
+Mr. Darwin went as far as this, and farther no one can go.  The point at
+issue between him and his predecessors involves neither the main fact of
+evolution, nor yet the geometrical ratio of increase, and the struggle
+for existence consequent thereon.  Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have each
+thrown invaluable light upon these last two points, but Buffon, as early
+as 1756, had made them the keystone of his system.  "The movement of
+nature," he then wrote, "turns on two immovable pivots: one, the
+illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species: the other, the
+innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity."
+Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense.  They thus admit
+the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they
+do not make use of this particular expression.  The dispute turns not
+upon natural selection, which is common to all writers on evolution, but
+upon the nature and causes of the variations that are supposed to be
+selected from and thus accumulated.  Are these mainly attributable to the
+inherited effects of use and disuse, supplemented by occasional sports
+and happy accidents?  Or are they mainly due to sports and happy
+accidents, supplemented by occasional inherited effects of use and
+disuse?
+
+The Lamarckian system has all along been maintained by Mr. Herbert
+Spencer, who, in his "Principles of Biology," published in 1865, showed
+how impossible it was that accidental variations should accumulate at
+all.  I am not sure how far Mr. Spencer would consent to being called a
+Lamarckian pure and simple, nor yet how far it is strictly accurate to
+call him one; nevertheless, I can see no important difference in the main
+positions taken by him and by Lamarck.
+
+The question at issue between the Lamarckians, supported by Mr. Spencer
+and a growing band of those who have risen in rebellion against the
+Charles-Darwinian system on the one hand, and Messrs. Darwin and Wallace
+with the greater number of our more prominent biologists on the other,
+involves the very existence of evolution as a workable theory.  For it is
+plain that what Nature can be supposed able to do by way of choice must
+depend on the supply of the variations from which she is supposed to
+choose.  She cannot take what is not offered to her; and so again she
+cannot be supposed able to accumulate unless what is gained in one
+direction in one generation, or series of generations, is little likely
+to be lost in those that presently succeed.  Now variations ascribed
+mainly to use and disuse can be supposed capable of being accumulated,
+for use and disuse are fairly constant for long periods among the
+individuals of the same species, and often over large areas; moreover,
+conditions of existence involving changes of habit, and thus of
+organisation, come for the most part gradually; so that time is given
+during which the organism can endeavour to adapt itself in the requisite
+respects, instead of being shocked out of existence by too sudden change.
+Variations, on the other hand, that are ascribed to mere chance cannot be
+supposed as likely to be accumulated, for chance is notoriously
+inconstant, and would not purvey the variations in sufficiently unbroken
+succession, or in a sufficient number of individuals, modified similarly
+in all the necessary correlations at the same time and place to admit of
+their being accumulated.  It is vital therefore to the theory of
+evolution, as was early pointed out by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin
+and by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that variations should be supposed to have a
+definite and persistent principle underlying them, which shall tend to
+engender similar and simultaneous modification, however small, in the
+vast majority of individuals composing any species.  The existence of
+such a principle and its permanence is the only thing that can be
+supposed capable of acting as rudder and compass to the accumulation of
+variations, and of making it hold steadily on one course for each
+species, till eventually many havens, far remote from one another, are
+safely reached.
+
+It is obvious that the having fatally impaired the theory of his
+predecessors could not warrant Mr. Darwin in claiming, as he most
+fatuously did, the theory of evolution.  That he is still generally
+believed to have been the originator of this theory is due to the fact
+that he claimed it, and that a powerful literary backing at once came
+forward to support him.  It seems at first sight improbable that those
+who too zealously urged his claims were unaware that so much had been
+written on the subject, but when we find even Mr. Wallace himself as
+profoundly ignorant on this subject as he still either is, or affects to
+be, there is no limit assignable to the ignorance or affected ignorance
+of the kind of biologists who would write reviews in leading journals
+thirty years ago.  Mr. Wallace writes:--
+
+"A few great naturalists, struck by the very slight difference between
+many of these species, and the numerous links that exist between the most
+different forms of animals and plants, and also observing that a great
+many species do vary considerably in their forms, colours and habits,
+conceived the idea that they might be all produced one from the other.
+The most eminent of these writers was a great French naturalist, Lamarck,
+who published an elaborate work, the _Philosophie Zoologique_, in which
+he endeavoured to prove that all animals whatever are descended from
+other species of animals.  He attributed the change of species chiefly to
+the effect of changes in the conditions of life--such as climate, food,
+&c.; and especially to the desires and efforts of the animals themselves
+to improve their condition, leading to a modification of form or size in
+certain parts, owing to the well-known physiological law that all organs
+are strengthened by constant use, while they are weakened or even
+completely lost by disuse . . .
+
+"The only other important work dealing with the question was the
+celebrated 'Vestiges of Creation,' published anonymously, but now
+acknowledged to have been written by the late Robert Chambers."
+
+None are so blind as those who will not see, and it would be waste of
+time to argue with the invincible ignorance of one who thinks Lamarck and
+Buffon conceived that all species were produced from one another, more
+especially as I have already dealt at some length with the early
+evolutionists in my work, "Evolution, Old and New," first published ten
+years ago, and not, so far as I am aware, detected in serious error or
+omission.  If, however, Mr. Wallace still thinks it safe to presume so
+far on the ignorance of his readers as to say that the only two important
+works on evolution before Mr. Darwin's were Lamarck's _Philosophie
+Zoologique_ and the "Vestiges of Creation," how fathomable is the
+ignorance of the average reviewer likely to have been thirty years ago,
+when the "Origin of Species" was first published?  Mr. Darwin claimed
+evolution as his own theory.  Of course, he would not claim it if he had
+no right to it.  Then by all means give him the credit of it.  This was
+the most natural view to take, and it was generally taken.  It was not,
+moreover, surprising that people failed to appreciate all the niceties of
+Mr. Darwin's "distinctive feature" which, whether distinctive or no, was
+assuredly not distinct, and was never frankly contrasted with the older
+view, as it would have been by one who wished it to be understood and
+judge upon its merits.  It was in consequence of this omission that
+people failed to note how fast and loose Mr. Darwin played with his
+distinctive feature, and how readily he dropped it on occasion.
+
+It may be said that the question of what was thought by the predecessors
+of Mr. Darwin is, after all, personal, and of no interest to the general
+public, comparable to that of the main issue--whether we are to accept
+evolution or not.  Granted that Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck bore
+the burden and heat of the day before Mr. Charles Darwin was born, they
+did not bring people round to their opinion, whereas Mr. Darwin and Mr.
+Wallace did, and the public cannot be expected to look beyond this broad
+and indisputable fact.
+
+The answer to this is, that the theory which Messrs. Darwin and Wallace
+have persuaded the public to accept is demonstrably false, and that the
+opponents of evolution are certain in the end to triumph over it.  Paley,
+in his "Natural Theology," long since brought forward far too much
+evidence of design in animal organisation to allow of our setting down
+its marvels to the accumulations of fortunate accident, undirected by
+will, effort and intelligence.  Those who examine the main facts of
+animal and vegetable organisation without bias will, no doubt, ere long
+conclude that all animals and vegetables are derived ultimately from
+unicellular organisms, but they will not less readily perceive that the
+evolution of species without the concomitance and direction of mind and
+effort is as inconceivable as is the independent creation of every
+individual species.  The two facts, evolution and design, are equally
+patent to plain people.  There is no escaping from either.  According to
+Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, we may have evolution, but are on no account
+to have it as mainly due to intelligent effort, guided by ever higher and
+higher range of sensations, perceptions, and ideas.  We are to set it
+down to the shuffling of cards, or the throwing of dice without the play,
+and this will never stand.
+
+According to the older men, cards did indeed count for much, but play
+counted for more.  They denied the teleology of the time--that is to say,
+the teleology that saw all adaptation to surroundings as part of a plan
+devised long ages since by a quasi-anthropomorphic being who schemed
+everything out much as a man would do, but on an infinitely vaster scale.
+This conception they found repugnant alike to intelligence and
+conscience, but, though they do not seem to have perceived it, they left
+the door open for a design more true and more demonstrable than that
+which they excluded.  By making their variations mainly due to effort and
+intelligence, they made organic development run on all-fours with human
+progress, and with inventions which we have watched growing up from small
+beginnings.  They made the development of man from the amoeba part and
+parcel of the story that may be read, though on an infinitely smaller
+scale, in the development of our most powerful marine engines from the
+common kettle, or of our finest microscopes from the dew-drop.
+
+The development of the steam-engine and the microscope is due to
+intelligence and design, which did indeed utilise chance suggestions, but
+which improved on these, and directed each step of their accumulation,
+though never foreseeing more than a step or two ahead, and often not so
+much as this.  The fact, as I have elsewhere urged, that the man who made
+the first kettle did not foresee the engines of the _Great Eastern_, or
+that he who first noted the magnifying power of the dew-drop had no
+conception of our present microscopes--the very limited amount, in fact,
+of design and intelligence that was called into play at any one
+point--this does not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope
+owe their development to design.  If each step of the road was designed,
+the whole journey was designed, though the particular end was not
+designed when the journey was begun.  And so is it, according to the
+older view of evolution, with the development of those living organs, or
+machines, that are born with us, as part of the perambulating carpenter's
+chest we call our bodies.  The older view gives us our design, and gives
+us our evolution too.  If it refuses to see a quasi-anthropomorphic God
+modelling each species from without as a potter models clay, it gives us
+God as vivifying and indwelling in all His creatures--He in them, and
+they in Him.  If it refuses to see God outside the universe, it equally
+refuses to see any part of the universe as outside God.  If it makes the
+universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe.  The
+question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the
+neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a
+personal one.  It not only involves the existence of evolution, but it
+affects the view we take of life and things in an endless variety of most
+interesting and important ways.  It is imperative, therefore, on those
+who take any interest in these matters, to place side by side in the
+clearest contrast the views of those who refer the evolution of species
+mainly to accumulation of variations that have no other inception than
+chance, and of that older school which makes design perceive and develop
+still further the goods that chance provides.
+
+But over and above this, which would be in itself sufficient, the
+historical mode of studying any question is the only one which will
+enable us to comprehend it effectually.  The personal element cannot be
+eliminated from the consideration of works written by living persons for
+living persons.  We want to know who is who--whom we can depend upon to
+have no other end than the making things clear to himself and his
+readers, and whom we should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on which
+he is more intent than on the furthering of our better understanding.  We
+want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to
+make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are
+vested.  There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points
+than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the
+same field with himself, and, again, than his style.  A man's style, as
+Buffon long since said, is the man himself.  By style, I do not, of
+course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again
+said that it is like happiness, and _vient de la douceur de l'ame_.  When
+we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences
+that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a
+fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch.  We often
+cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we
+most of us know enough of human nature to be able to tell a good witness
+from a bad one.
+
+However this may be, and whatever we may think of judging systems by the
+directness or indirectness of those who advance them, biologists, having
+committed themselves too rashly, would have been more than human if they
+had not shown some pique towards those who dared to say, first, that the
+theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace was unworkable; and secondly, that
+even though it were workable it would not justify either of them in
+claiming evolution.  When biologists show pique at all they generally
+show a good deal of pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned Mr.
+Spencer's objection above referred to with a persistency more unanimous
+and obstinate than I ever remember to have seen displayed even by
+professional truth-seekers.  I find no rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin
+himself, between 1865 when it was first put forward, and 1882 when Mr.
+Darwin died.  It has been similarly "ostrichised" by all the leading
+apologists of Darwinism, so far at least as I have been able to observe,
+and I have followed the matter closely for many years.  Mr. Spencer has
+repeated and amplified it in his recent work, "The Factors of Organic
+Evolution," but it still remains without so much as an attempt at serious
+answer, for the perfunctory and illusory remarks of Mr. Wallace at the
+end of his "Darwinism" cannot be counted as such.  The best proof of its
+irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin, though maintaining silence in
+respect to it, retreated from his original position in the direction that
+would most obviate Mr. Spencer's objection.
+
+Yet this objection has been repeatedly urged by the more prominent anti-
+Charles-Darwinian authorities, and there is no sign that the British
+public is becoming less rigorous in requiring people either to reply to
+objections repeatedly urged by men of even moderate weight, or to let
+judgment go by default.  As regards Mr. Darwin's claim to the theory of
+evolution generally, Darwinians are beginning now to perceive that this
+cannot be admitted, and either say with some hardihood that Mr. Darwin
+never claimed it, or after a few saving clauses to the effect that this
+theory refers only to the particular means by which evolution has been
+brought about, imply forthwith thereafter none the less that evolution is
+Mr. Darwin's theory.  Mr. Wallace has done this repeatedly in his recent
+"Darwinism."  Indeed, I should be by no means sure that on the first page
+of his preface, in the passage about "Darwin's theory," which I have
+already somewhat severely criticised, he was not intending evolution by
+"Darwin's theory," if in his preceding paragraph he had not so clearly
+shown that he knew evolution to be a theory of greatly older date than
+Mr. Darwin's.
+
+The history of science--well exemplified by that of the development
+theory--is the history of eminent men who have fought against light and
+have been worsted.  The tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their
+accumulation of fortuitous variations is on a par with the like tenacity
+shown by the illustrious Cuvier, who did his best to crush evolution
+altogether.  It always has been thus, and always will be; nor is it
+desirable in the interests of Truth herself that it should be otherwise.
+Truth is like money--lightly come, lightly go; and if she cannot hold her
+own against even gross misrepresentation, she is herself not worth
+holding.  Misrepresentation in the long run makes Truth as much as it
+mars her; hence our law courts do not think it desirable that pleaders
+should speak their _bona fide_ opinions, much less that they should
+profess to do so.  Rather let each side hoodwink judge and jury as best
+it can, and let truth flash out from collision of defence and accusation.
+When either side will not collide, it is an axiom of controversy that it
+desires to prevent the truth from being elicited.
+
+Let us now note the courses forced upon biologists by the difficulties of
+Mr. Darwin's distinctive feature.  Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, as is well
+known, brought the feature forward simultaneously and independently of
+one another, but Mr. Wallace always believed in it more firmly than Mr.
+Darwin did.  Mr. Darwin as a young man did not believe in it.  He wrote
+before 1889, "Nature, by making habit omnipotent and its effects
+hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his
+country," {21} a sentence than which nothing can coincide more fully with
+the older view that use and disuse were the main purveyors of variations,
+or conflict more fatally with his own subsequent distinctive feature.
+Moreover, as I showed in my last work on evolution, {22} in the
+peroration to his "Origin of Species," he discarded his accidental
+variations altogether, and fell back on the older theory, so that the
+body of the "Origin of Species" supports one theory, and the peroration
+another that differs from it _toto coelo_.  Finally, in his later
+editions, he retreated indefinitely from his original position, edging
+always more and more continually towards the theory of his grandfather
+and Lamarck.  These facts convince me that he was at no time a thorough-
+going Darwinian, but was throughout an unconscious Lamarckian, though
+ever anxious to conceal the fact alike from himself and from his readers.
+
+Not so with Mr. Wallace, who was both more outspoken in the first
+instance, and who has persevered along the path of Wallaceism just as Mr.
+Darwin with greater sagacity was ever on the retreat from Darwinism.  Mr.
+Wallace's profounder faith led him in the outset to place his theory in
+fuller daylight than Mr. Darwin was inclined to do.  Mr. Darwin just
+waved Lamarck aside, and said as little about him as he could, while in
+his earlier editions Erasmus Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named.
+Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and
+declared it exorcised.  He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was "quite
+unnecessary."  The giraffe did not "acquire its long neck by desiring to
+reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its
+neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its
+antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of
+pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on
+the first scarcity of food were thus enabled to outlive them." {23}
+
+"Which occurred" is evidently "which happened to occur" by some chance or
+accident unconnected with use and disuse.  The word "accident" is never
+used, but Mr. Wallace must be credited with this instance of a desire to
+give his readers a chance of perceiving that according to his distinctive
+feature evolution is an affair of luck, rather than of cunning.  Whether
+his readers actually did understand this as clearly as Mr. Wallace
+doubtless desired that they should, and whether greater development at
+this point would not have helped them to fuller apprehension, we need not
+now inquire.  What was gained in distinctness might have been lost in
+distinctiveness, and after all he did technically put us upon our guard.
+
+Nevertheless he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism.  In relation
+to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and other flat-fish
+travel round the head so as to become in the end unsymmetrically placed,
+he says:--
+
+"The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both eyes
+may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any use. . . .
+Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is completed in a few
+days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands of generations during
+the development of these fish, those usually surviving _whose eyes
+retained more and more of the position into which the young fish tried to
+twist them_ [italics mine], the change becomes intelligible." {24}  When
+it was said by Professor Ray Lankester--who knows as well as most people
+what Lamarck taught--that this was "flat Lamarckism," Mr. Wallace
+rejoined that it was the survival of the modified individuals that did it
+all, not the efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the
+transmission to descendants of the effects of those efforts.  But this,
+as I said in my book, "Evolution, Old and New," {25} is like saying that
+horses are swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they
+were, that occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary
+towards ever greater and greater swiftness, but because their more slow-
+going uncles and aunts go away.  Plain people will prefer to say that the
+main cause of any accumulation of favourable modifications consists
+rather in that which brings about the initial variations, and in the fact
+that these can be inherited at all, than in the fact that the unmodified
+individuals were not successful.  People do not become rich because the
+poor in large numbers go away, but because they have been lucky, or
+provident, or more commonly both.  If they would keep their wealth when
+they have made it they must exclude luck thenceforth to the utmost of
+their power, and their children must follow their example, or they will
+soon lose their money.  The fact that the weaker go to the wall does not
+bring about the greater strength of the stronger; it is the consequence
+of this last and not the cause--unless, indeed, it be contended that a
+knowledge that the weak go to the wall stimulates the strong to exertions
+which they would not otherwise so make, and that these exertions produce
+inheritable modifications.  Even in this case, however, it would be the
+exertions, or use and disuse, that would be the main agents in the
+modification.  But it is not often that Mr. Wallace thus backslides.  His
+present position is that acquired (as distinguished from congenital)
+modifications are not inherited at all.  He does not indeed put his faith
+prominently forward and pin himself to it as plainly as could be wished,
+but under the heading, "The Non-Heredity of Acquired Characters," he
+writes as follows on p. 440 of his recent work in reference to Professor
+Weismann's Theory of Heredity:--
+
+"Certain observations on the embryology of the lower animals are held to
+afford direct proof of this theory of heredity, but they are too
+technical to be made clear to ordinary readers.  A logical result of the
+theory is the impossibility of the transmission of acquired characters,
+since the molecular structure of the germ-plasm is already determined
+within the embryo; and Weismann holds that there are no facts which
+really prove that acquired characters can be inherited, although their
+inheritance has, by most writers, been considered so probable as hardly
+to stand in need of direct proof.
+
+"We have already seen in the earlier part of this chapter that many
+instances of change, imputed to the inheritance of acquired variations,
+are really cases of selection."
+
+And the rest of the remarks tend to convey the impression that Mr.
+Wallace adopts Professor Weismann's view, but, curiously enough, though I
+have gone through Mr. Wallace's book with a special view to this
+particular point, I have not been able to find him definitely committing
+himself either to the assertion that acquired modifications never are
+inherited, or that they sometimes are so.  It is abundantly laid down
+that Mr. Darwin laid too much stress on use and disuse, and a residuary
+impression is left that Mr. Wallace is endorsing Professor Weismann's
+view, but I have found it impossible to collect anything that enables me
+to define his position confidently in this respect.
+
+This is natural enough, for Mr. Wallace has entitled his book
+"Darwinism," and a work denying that use and disuse produced any effect
+could not conceivably be called Darwinism.  Mr. Herbert Spencer has
+recently collected many passages from "The Origin of Species" and from
+"Animals and Plants under Domestication," {26} which show how largely,
+after all, use and disuse entered into Mr. Darwin's system, and we know
+that in his later years he attached still more importance to them.  It
+was out of the question, therefore, that Mr. Wallace should categorically
+deny that their effects were inheritable.  On the other hand, the
+temptation to adopt Professor Weismann's view must have been overwhelming
+to one who had been already inclined to minimise the effects of use and
+disuse.  On the whole, one does not see what Mr. Wallace could do, other
+than what he has done--unless, of course, he changed his title, or had
+been no longer Mr. Wallace.
+
+Besides, thanks to the works of Mr. Spencer, Professor Mivart, Professor
+Semper, and very many others, there has for some time been a growing
+perception that the Darwinism of Charles Darwin was doomed.  Use and
+disuse must either do even more than is officially recognised in Mr.
+Darwin's later concessions, or they must do a great deal less.  If they
+can do as much as Mr. Darwin himself said they did, why should they not
+do more?  Why stop where Mr. Darwin did?  And again, where in the name of
+all that is reasonable did he really stop?  He drew no line, and on what
+principle can we say that so much is possible as effect of use and
+disuse, but so much more impossible?  If, as Mr. Darwin contended, disuse
+can so far reduce an organ as to render it rudimentary, and in many cases
+get rid of it altogether, why cannot use create as much as disuse can
+destroy, provided it has anything, no matter how low in structure, to
+begin with?  Let us know where we stand.  If it is admitted that use and
+disuse can do a good deal, what does a good deal mean?  And what is the
+proportion between the shares attributable to use and disuse and to
+natural selection respectively?  If we cannot be told with absolute
+precision, let us at any rate have something more definite than the
+statement that natural selection is "the most important means of
+modification."
+
+Mr. Darwin gave us no help in this respect; and worse than this, he
+contradicted himself so flatly as to show that he had very little
+definite idea upon the subject at all.  Thus in respect to the
+winglessness of the Madeira beetles he wrote:--
+
+"In some cases we might easily put down to disuse modifications of
+structure, which are wholly or mainly due to natural selection.  Mr.
+Wollaston has discovered the remarkable fact that 200 beetles, out of the
+550 species (but more are now known) inhabiting Madeira, are so far
+deficient in wings that they cannot fly; and that of the 29 endemic
+genera no less than 23 have all their species in this condition!  Several
+facts,--namely, that beetles in many parts of the world are frequently
+blown out to sea and perish; that the beetles in Madeira, as observed by
+Mr. Wollaston, lie much concealed until the wind lulls and the sun
+shines; that the proportion of wingless beetles is larger on the exposed
+Desertas than in Madeira itself; and especially the extraordinary fact,
+so strongly insisted on by Mr. Wollaston, that certain large groups of
+beetles, elsewhere excessively numerous, which absolutely require the use
+of their wings are here almost entirely absent;--these several
+considerations make me believe that the wingless condition of so many
+Madeira beetles is mainly due to the action of natural selection,
+_combined probably with disuse_ [italics mine].  For during many
+successive generations each individual beetle which flew least, either
+from its wings having been ever so little less perfectly developed or
+from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of surviving, from not
+being blown out to sea; and, on the other hand, those beetles which most
+readily took to flight would oftenest have been blown to sea, and thus
+destroyed." {27}
+
+We should like to know, first, somewhere about how much disuse was able
+to do after all, and moreover why, if it can do anything at all, it
+should not be able to do all.  Mr. Darwin says: "Any change in structure
+and function which can be effected by small stages is within the power of
+natural selection."  "And why not," we ask, "within the power of use and
+disuse?"  Moreover, on a later page we find Mr. Darwin saying:--
+
+"_It appears probable that disuse has been the main agent in rendering
+organs rudimentary_ [italics mine].  It would at first lead by slow steps
+to the more and more complete reduction of a part, until at last it has
+become rudimentary--as in the case of the eyes of animals inhabiting dark
+caverns, and of the wings of birds inhabiting oceanic islands, which have
+seldom been forced by beasts of prey to take flight, and have ultimately
+lost the power of flying.  Again, an organ, useful under certain
+conditions, might become injurious under others, _as with the wings of
+beetles living on small and exposed islands_; and in this case natural
+selection will have aided in reducing the organ, until it was rendered
+harmless and rudimentary [italics mine]." {28}
+
+So that just as an undefined amount of use and disuse was introduced on
+the earlier page to supplement the effects of natural selection in
+respect of the wings of beetles on small and exposed islands, we have
+here an undefined amount of natural selection introduced to supplement
+the effects of use and disuse in respect of the identical phenomena.  In
+the one passage we find that natural selection has been the main agent in
+reducing the wings, though use and disuse have had an appreciable share
+in the result; in the other, it is use and disuse that have been the main
+agents, though an appreciable share in the result must be ascribed to
+natural selection.
+
+Besides, who has seen the uncles and aunts going away with the uniformity
+that is necessary for Mr. Darwin's contention?  We know that birds and
+insects do often get blown out to sea and perish, but in order to
+establish Mr. Darwin's position we want the evidence of those who watched
+the reduction of the wings during the many generations in the course of
+which it was being effected, and who can testify that all, or the
+overwhelming majority, of the beetles born with fairly well-developed
+wings got blown out to sea, while those alone survived whose wings were
+congenitally degenerate.  Who saw them go, or can point to analogous
+cases so conclusive as to compel assent from any equitable thinker?
+
+Darwinians of the stamp of Mr. Thiselton Dyer, Professor Ray Lankester,
+or Mr. Romanes, insist on their pound of flesh in the matter of
+irrefragable demonstration.  They complain of us for not bringing forward
+some one who has been able to detect the movement of the hour-hand of a
+watch during a second of time, and when we fail to do so, declare
+triumphantly that we have no evidence that there is any connection
+between the beating of a second and the movement of the hour-hand.  When
+we say that rain comes from the condensation of moisture in the
+atmosphere, they demand of us a rain-drop from moisture not yet
+condensed.  If they stickle for proof and cavil on the ninth part of a
+hair, as they do when we bring forward what we deem excellent instances
+of the transmission of an acquired characteristic, why may not we, too,
+demand at any rate some evidence that the unmodified beetles actually did
+always, or nearly always, get blown out to sea, during the reduction
+above referred to, and that it is to this fact, and not to the masterly
+inactivity of their fathers and mothers, that the Madeira beetles owe
+their winglessness?  If we began stickling for proof in this way, our
+opponents would not be long in letting us know that absolute proof is
+unattainable on any subject, that reasonable presumption is our highest
+certainty, and that crying out for too much evidence is as bad as
+accepting too little.  Truth is like a photographic sensitised plate,
+which is equally ruined by over and by under exposure, and the just
+exposure for which can never be absolutely determined.
+
+Surely if disuse can be credited with the vast powers involved in Mr.
+Darwin's statement that it has probably "been the main agent in rendering
+organs rudimentary," no limits are assignable to the accumulated effects
+of habit, provided the effects of habit, or use and disuse, are supposed,
+as Mr. Darwin supposed them, to be inheritable at all.  Darwinians have
+at length woke up to the dilemma in which they are placed by the manner
+in which Mr. Darwin tried to sit on the two stools of use and disuse, and
+natural selection of accidental variations, at the same time.  The knell
+of Charles-Darwinism is rung in Mr. Wallace's present book, and in the
+general perception on the part of biologists that we must either assign
+to use and disuse such a predominant share in modification as to make it
+the feature most proper to be insisted on, or deny that the
+modifications, whether of mind or body, acquired during a single
+lifetime, are ever transmitted at all.  If they can be inherited at all,
+they can be accumulated.  If they can be accumulated at all, they can be
+so, for anything that appears to the contrary, to the extent of the
+specific and generic differences with which we are surrounded.  The only
+thing to do is to pluck them out root and branch: they are as a cancer
+which, if the smallest fibre be left unexcised, will grow again, and kill
+any system on to which it is allowed to fasten.  Mr. Wallace, therefore,
+may well be excused if he casts longing eyes towards Weismannism.
+
+And what was Mr. Darwin's system?  Who can make head or tail of the
+inextricable muddle in which he left it?  The "Origin of Species" in its
+latest shape is the reduction of hedging to an absurdity.  How did Mr.
+Darwin himself leave it in the last chapter of the last edition of the
+"Origin of Species"?  He wrote:--
+
+"I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have
+thoroughly convinced me that species have been modified during a long
+course of descent.  This has been effected chiefly through the natural
+selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided
+in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of
+parts, and in an unimportant manner--that is, in relation to adaptive
+structures whether past or present--by the direct action of external
+conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise
+spontaneously.  It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and
+value of these latter forms of variation, as leading to permanent
+modifications of structure independently of natural selection."
+
+The "numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations" above referred
+to are intended to be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous.  It is the
+essence of Mr. Darwin's theory that this should be so.  Mr. Darwin's
+solemn statement, therefore, of his theory, after he had done his best or
+his worst with it, is, when stripped of surplusage, as follows:--
+
+"The modification of species has been mainly effected by accumulation of
+spontaneous variations; it has been aided in an important manner by
+accumulation of variations due to use and disuse, and in an unimportant
+manner by spontaneous variations; I do not even now think that
+spontaneous variations have been very important, but I used once to think
+them less important than I do now."
+
+It is a discouraging symptom of the age that such a system should have
+been so long belauded, and it is a sign of returning intelligence that
+even he who has been more especially the _alter ego_ of Mr. Darwin should
+have felt constrained to close the chapter of Charles-Darwinism as a
+living theory, and relegate it to the important but not very creditable
+place in history which it must henceforth occupy.  It is astonishing,
+however, that Mr. Wallace should have quoted the extract from the "Origin
+of Species" just given, as he has done on p. 412 of his "Darwinism,"
+without betraying any sign that he has caught its driftlessness--for
+drift, other than a desire to hedge, it assuredly has not got.  The
+battle now turns on the question whether modifications of either
+structure or instinct due to use or disuse are ever inherited, or whether
+they are not.  Can the effects of habit be transmitted to progeny at all?
+We know that more usually they are not transmitted to any perceptible
+extent, but we believe also that occasionally, and indeed not
+infrequently, they are inherited and even intensified.  What are our
+grounds for this opinion?  It will be my object to put these forward in
+the following number of the _Universal Review_.
+
+
+
+THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM--PART II {29}
+
+
+At the close of my article in last month's number of the _Universal
+Review_, I said I would in this month's issue show why the opponents of
+Charles-Darwinism believe the effects of habits acquired during the
+lifetime of a parent to produce an effect on their subsequent offspring,
+in spite of the fact that we can rarely find the effect in any one
+generation, or even in several, sufficiently marked to arrest our
+attention.
+
+I will now show that offspring can be, and not very infrequently is,
+affected by occurrences that have produced a deep impression on the
+parent organism--the effect produced on the offspring being such as
+leaves no doubt that it is to be connected with the impression produced
+on the parent.  Having thus established the general proposition, I will
+proceed to the more particular one--that habits, involving use and disuse
+of special organs, with the modifications of structure thereby
+engendered, produce also an effect upon offspring, which, though seldom
+perceptible as regards structure in a single, or even in several
+generations, is nevertheless capable of being accumulated in successive
+generations till it amounts to specific and generic difference.  I have
+found the first point as much as I can treat within the limits of this
+present article, and will avail myself of the hospitality of the
+_Universal Review_ next month to deal with the second.
+
+The proposition which I have to defend is one which no one till recently
+would have questioned, and even now, those who look most askance at it do
+not venture to dispute it unreservedly; they every now and then admit it
+as conceivable, and even in some cases probable; nevertheless they seek
+to minimise it, and to make out that there is little or no connection
+between the great mass of the cells of which the body is composed, and
+those cells that are alone capable of reproducing the entire organism.
+The tendency is to assign to these last a life of their own, apart from,
+and unconnected with that of the other cells of the body, and to cheapen
+all evidence that tends to prove any response on their part to the past
+history of the individual, and hence ultimately of the race.
+
+Professor Weismann is the foremost exponent of those who take this line.
+He has naturally been welcomed by English Charles-Darwinians; for if his
+view can be sustained, then it can be contended that use and disuse
+produce no transmissible effect, and the ground is cut from under
+Lamarck's feet; if, on the other hand, his view is unfounded, the
+Lamarckian reaction, already strong, will gain still further strength.
+The issue, therefore, is important, and is being fiercely contested by
+those who have invested their all of reputation for discernment in
+Charles-Darwinian securities.
+
+Professor Weismann's theory is, that at every new birth a part of the
+substance which proceeds from parents and which goes to form the new
+embryo is not used up in forming the new animal, but remains apart to
+generate the germ-cells--or perhaps I should say "germ-plasm"--which the
+new animal itself will in due course issue.
+
+Contrasting the generally received view with his own, Professor Weismann
+says that according to the first of these "the organism produces germ-
+cells afresh again and again, and that it produces them entirely from its
+own substance."  While by the second "the germ-cells are no longer looked
+upon as the product of the parent's body, at least as far as their
+essential part--the specific germ-plasm--is concerned; they are rather
+considered as something which is to be placed in contrast with the _tout
+ensemble_ of the cells which make up the parent's body, and the
+germ-cells of succeeding generations stand in a similar relation to one
+another as a series of generations of unicellular organisms arising by a
+continued process of cell-division." {30}
+
+On another page he writes:--
+
+"I believe that heredity depends upon the fact that a small portion of
+the effective substance of the germ, the germ-plasm, remains unchanged
+during the development of the ovum into an organism, and that this part
+of the germ-plasm serves as a foundation from which the germ-cells of the
+new organism are produced.  There is, therefore, continuity of the germ-
+plasm from one generation to another.  One might represent the germ-plasm
+by the metaphor of a long creeping root-stock from which plants arise at
+intervals, these latter representing the individuals of successive
+generations." {31}
+
+Mr. Wallace, who does not appear to have read Professor Weismann's essays
+themselves, but whose remarks are, no doubt, ultimately derived from the
+sequel to the passage just quoted from page 266 of Professor Weismann's
+book, contends that the impossibility of the transmission of acquired
+characters follows as a logical result from Professor Weismann's theory,
+inasmuch as the molecular structure of the germ-plasm that will go to
+form any succeeding generation is already predetermined within the still
+unformed embryo of its predecessor; "and Weismann," continues Mr.
+Wallace, "holds that there are no facts which really prove that acquired
+characters can be inherited, although their inheritance has, by most
+writers, been considered so probable as hardly to stand in need of direct
+proof." {32}
+
+Professor Weismann, in passages too numerous to quote, shows that he
+recognises this necessity, and acknowledges that the non-transmission of
+acquired characters "forms the foundation of the views" set forth in his
+book, p. 291.
+
+Professor Ray Lankester does not commit himself absolutely to this view,
+but lends it support by saying (_Nature_, December 12, 1889): "It is
+hardly necessary to say that it has never yet been shown experimentally
+that _anything_ acquired by one generation is transmitted to the next
+(putting aside diseases)."
+
+Mr. Romanes, writing in _Nature_, March 18, 1890, and opposing certain
+details of Professor Weismann's theory, so far supports it as to say that
+"there is the gravest possible doubt lying against the supposition that
+any really inherited decrease is due to the inherited effects of disuse."
+The "gravest possible doubt" should mean that Mr. Romanes regards it as a
+moral certainty that disuse has no transmitted effect in reducing an
+organ, and it should follow that he holds use to have no transmitted
+effect in its development.  The sequel, however, makes me uncertain how
+far Mr. Romanes intends this, and I would refer the reader to the article
+which Mr. Romanes has just published on Weismann in the _Contemporary
+Review_ for this current month.
+
+The burden of Mr. Thiselton Dyer's controversy with the Duke of Argyll
+(see _Nature_, January 16, 1890, _et seq._) was that there was no
+evidence in support of the transmission of any acquired modification.  The
+orthodoxy of science, therefore, must be held as giving at any rate a
+provisional support to Professor Weismann, but all of them, including
+even Professor Weismann himself, shrink from committing themselves to the
+opinion that the germ-cells of any organisms remain in all cases
+unaffected by the events that occur to the other cells of the same
+organism, and until they do this they have knocked the bottom out of
+their case.
+
+From among the passages in which Professor Weismann himself shows a
+desire to hedge I may take the following from page 170 of his book:--
+
+"I am also far from asserting that the germ-plasm which, as I hold, is
+transmitted as the basis of heredity from one generation to another, is
+absolutely unchangeable or totally uninfluenced by forces residing in the
+organism within which it is transformed into germ-cells.  I am also
+compelled to admit it as conceivable that organisms may exert a modifying
+influence upon their germ-cells, and even that such a process is to a
+certain extent inevitable.  The nutrition and growth of the individual
+must exercise some influence upon its germ-cells . . . "
+
+Professor Weismann does indeed go on to say that this influence must be
+extremely slight, but we do not care how slight the changes produced may
+be provided they exist and can be transmitted.  On an earlier page (p.
+101) he said in regard to variations generally that we should not expect
+to find them conspicuous; their frequency would be enough, if they could
+be accumulated.  The same applies here, if stirring events that occur to
+the somatic cells can produce any effect at all on offspring.  A very
+small effect, provided it can be repeated and accumulated in successive
+generations, is all that even the most exacting Lamarckian will ask for.
+
+Having now made the reader acquainted with the position taken by the
+leading Charles-Darwinian authorities, I will return to Professor
+Weismann himself, who declares that the transmission of acquired
+characters "at first sight certainly seems necessary," and that "it
+appears rash to attempt to dispense with its aid."  He continues:--
+
+"Many phenomena only appear to be intelligible if we assume the
+hereditary transmission of such acquired characters as the changes which
+we ascribe to the use or disuse of particular organs, or to the direct
+influence of climate.  Furthermore, how can we explain instinct as
+hereditary habit, unless it has gradually arisen by the accumulation,
+through heredity, of habits which were practised in succeeding
+generations?" {33}
+
+I may say in passing that Professor Weismann appears to suppose that the
+view of instinct just given is part of the Charles-Darwinian system, for
+on page 889 of his book he says "that many observers had followed Darwin
+in explaining them [instincts] as inherited habits."  This was not Mr.
+Darwin's own view of the matter.  He wrote:--
+
+"If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited--and I think it
+can be shown that this does sometimes happen--then the resemblance
+between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as
+not to be distinguished. . . But it would be the most serious error to
+suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit
+in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding
+generations.  It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts
+with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many
+ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired."--["Origin of Species,"
+ed., 1859, p. 209.]
+
+Again we read: "Domestic instincts are sometimes spoken of as actions
+which have become inherited solely from long-continued and compulsory
+habit, but this, I think, is not true."--_Ibid._, p. 214.
+
+Again: "I am surprised that no one has advanced this demonstrative case
+of neuter insects, against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as
+advanced by Lamarck."--["Origin of Species," ed. 1872, p. 283.]
+
+I am not aware that Lamarck advanced the doctrine that instinct is
+inherited habit, but he may have done so in some work that I have not
+seen.
+
+It is true, as I have more than once pointed out, that in the later
+editions of the "Origin of Species" it is no longer "the _most_ serious"
+error to refer instincts generally to inherited habit, but it still
+remains "a serious error," and this slight relaxation of severity does
+not warrant Professor Weismann in ascribing to Mr. Darwin an opinion
+which he emphatically condemned.  His tone, however, is so offhand, that
+those who have little acquaintance with the literature of evolution would
+hardly guess that he is not much better informed on this subject than
+themselves.
+
+Returning to the inheritance of acquired characters, Professor Weismann
+says that this has never been proved either by means of direct
+observation or by experiment.  "It must be admitted," he writes, "that
+there are in existence numerous descriptions of cases which tend to prove
+that such mutilations as the loss of fingers, the scars of wounds, &c.,
+are inherited by the offspring, but in these descriptions the previous
+history is invariably obscure, and hence the evidence loses all
+scientific value."
+
+The experiments of M.  Brown-Sequard throw so much light upon the
+question at issue that I will quote at some length from the summary given
+by Mr. Darwin in his "Variation of Animals and Plants under
+Domestication." {34}  Mr. Darwin writes:--
+
+"With respect to the inheritance of structures mutilated by injuries or
+altered by disease, it was until lately difficult to come to any definite
+conclusion."  [Then follow several cases in which mutilations practised
+for many generations are not found to be transmitted.]  "Notwithstanding,"
+continues Mr. Darwin, "the above several negative cases, we now possess
+conclusive evidence that the effects of operations are sometimes
+inherited.  Dr. Brown-Sequard gives the following summary of his
+observations on guinea-pigs, and this summary is so important that I will
+quote the whole:--
+
+"'1st.  Appearance of epilepsy in animals born of parents having been
+rendered epileptic by an injury to the spinal cord.
+
+"'2nd.  Appearance of epilepsy also in animals born of parents having
+been rendered epileptic by the section of the sciatic nerve.
+
+"'3rd.  A change in the shape of the ear in animals born of parents in
+which such a change was the effect of a division of the cervical
+sympathetic nerve.
+
+"'4th.  Partial closure of the eyelids in animals born of parents in
+which that state of the eyelids had been caused either by the section of
+the cervical sympathetic nerve or the removal of the superior cervical
+ganglion.
+
+"'5th.  Exophthalmia in animals born of parents in which an injury to the
+restiform body had produced that protrusion of the eyeball.  This
+interesting fact I have witnessed a good many times, and I have seen the
+transmission of the morbid state of the eye continue through four
+generations.  In these animals modified by heredity, the two eyes
+generally protruded, although in the parents usually only one showed
+exophthalmia, the lesion having been made in most cases only on one of
+the corpora restiformia.
+
+"'6th.  Haematoma and dry gangrene of the ears in animals born of parents
+in which these ear-alterations had been caused by an injury to the
+restiform body near the nib of the calamus.
+
+"'7th.  Absence of two toes out of the three of the hind leg, and
+sometimes of the three, in animals whose parents had eaten up their hind-
+leg toes which had become anaesthetic from a section of the sciatic nerve
+alone, or of that nerve and also of the crural.  Sometimes, instead of
+complete absence of the toes, only a part of one or two or three was
+missing in the young, although in the parent not only the toes but the
+whole foot was absent (partly eaten off, partly destroyed by
+inflammation, ulceration, or gangrene).
+
+"'8th.  Appearance of various morbid states of the skin and hair of the
+neck and face in animals born of parents having had similar alterations
+in the same parts, as effects of an injury to the sciatic nerve.'
+
+"It should be especially observed that Brown-Sequard has bred during
+thirty years many thousand guinea-pigs from animals which had not been
+operated upon, and not one of these manifested the epileptic tendency.
+Nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without toes, which was not the
+offspring of parents which had gnawed off their own toes owing to the
+sciatic nerve having been divided.  Of this latter fact thirteen
+instances were carefully recorded, and a greater number were seen; yet
+Brown-Sequard speaks of such cases as one of the rarer forms of
+inheritance.  It is a still more interesting fact, 'that the sciatic
+nerve in the congenitally toeless animal has inherited the power of
+passing through all the different morbid states which have occurred in
+one of its parents from the time of the division till after its reunion
+with the peripheric end.  It is not, therefore, simply the power of
+performing an action which is inherited, but the power of performing a
+whole series of actions, in a certain order.'
+
+"In most of the cases of inheritance recorded by Brown-Sequard only one
+of the two parents had been operated upon and was affected.  He concludes
+by expressing his belief that 'what is transmitted is the morbid state of
+the nervous system,' due to the operation performed on the parents."
+
+Mr. Darwin proceeds to give other instances of inherited effects of
+mutilations:--
+
+"With the horse there seems hardly a doubt that exostoses on the legs,
+caused by too much travelling on hard roads, are inherited.  Blumenbach
+records the case of a man who had his little finger on the right hand
+almost cut off, and which in consequence grew crooked, and his sons had
+the same finger on the same hand similarly crooked.  A soldier, fifteen
+years before his marriage, lost his left eye from purulent ophthalmia,
+and his two sons were microphthalmic on the same side."
+
+The late Professor Rolleston, whose competence as an observer no one is
+likely to dispute, gave Mr. Darwin two cases as having fallen under his
+own notice, one of a man whose knee had been severely wounded, and whose
+child was born with the same spot marked or scarred, and the other of one
+who was severely cut upon the cheek, and whose child was born scarred in
+the same place.  Mr. Darwin's conclusion was that "the effects of
+injuries, especially when followed by disease, or perhaps exclusively
+when thus followed, are occasionally inherited."
+
+Let us now see what Professor Weismann has to say against this.  He
+writes:--
+
+"The only cases worthy of discussion are the well-known experiments upon
+guinea-pigs conducted by the French physiologist, Brown-Sequard.  But the
+explanation of his results is, in my opinion, open to discussion.  In
+these cases we have to do with the apparent transmission of artificially
+produced malformations . . . All these effects were said to be
+transmitted to descendants as far as the fifth or sixth generation.
+
+"But we must inquire whether these cases are really due to heredity, and
+not to simple infection.  In the case of epilepsy, at any rate, it is
+easy to imagine that the passage of some specific organism through the
+reproductive cells may take place, as in the case of syphilis.  We are,
+however, entirely ignorant of the nature of the former disease.  This
+suggested explanation may not perhaps apply to the other cases; but we
+must remember that animals which have been subjected to such severe
+operations upon the nervous system have sustained a great shock, and if
+they are capable of breeding, it is only probable that they will produce
+weak descendants, and such as are easily affected by disease.  Such a
+result does not, however, explain why the offspring should suffer from
+the same disease as that which was artificially induced in the parents.
+But this does not appear to have been by any means invariably the case.
+Brown-Sequard himself says: 'The changes in the eye of the offspring were
+of a very variable nature, and were only occasionally exactly similar to
+those observed in the parents.'
+
+"There is no doubt, however, that these experiments demand careful
+consideration, but before they can claim scientific recognition, they
+must be subjected to rigid criticism as to the precautions taken, the
+nature and number of the control experiments, &c.
+
+"Up to the present time such necessary conditions have not been
+sufficiently observed.  The recent experiments themselves are only
+described in short preliminary notices, which, as regards their accuracy,
+the possibility of mistake, the precautions taken, and the exact
+succession of individuals affected, afford no data on which a scientific
+opinion can be founded" (pp. 81, 82).
+
+The line Professor Weismann takes, therefore, is to discredit the facts;
+yet on a later page we find that the experiments have since been repeated
+by Obersteiner, "who has described them in a very exact and unprejudiced
+manner," and that "the fact"--(I imagine that Professor Weismann intends
+"the facts")--"cannot be doubted."
+
+On a still later page, however, we read:--
+
+"If, for instance, it could be shown that artificial mutilation
+spontaneously reappears in the offspring with sufficient frequency to
+exclude all possibilities of chance, then such proof [_i.e._, that
+acquired characters can be transmitted] would be forthcoming.  The
+transmission of mutilations has been frequently asserted, and has been
+even recently again brought forward, but all the supposed instances have
+broken down when carefully examined" (p. 390).
+
+Here, then, we are told that proof of the occasional transmission of
+mutilations would be sufficient to establish the fact, but on p. 267 we
+find that no single fact is known which really proves that acquired
+characters can be transmitted, "_for the ascertained facts which seem to
+point to the transmission of artificially produced diseases cannot be
+considered as proof_" [Italics mine.]  Perhaps; but it was mutilation in
+many cases that Professor Weismann practically admitted to have been
+transmitted when he declared that Obersteiner had verified
+Brown-Sequard's experiments.
+
+That Professor Weismann recognises the vital importance to his own theory
+of the question whether or no mutilations can be transmitted under any
+circumstances, is evident from a passage on p. 425 of his work, on which
+he says: "It can hardly be doubted that mutilations are acquired
+characters; they do not arise from any tendency contained in the germ,
+but are merely the reaction of the body under certain external
+influences.  They are, as I have recently expressed it, purely
+somatogenic characters--viz., characters which emanate from the body
+(_soma_) only, as opposed to the germ-cells; they are, therefore,
+characters that do not arise from the germ itself.
+
+"If mutilations must necessarily be transmitted" [which no one that I
+know of has maintained], "or even if they might occasionally be
+transmitted" [which cannot, I imagine, be reasonably questioned], "a
+powerful support would be given to the Lamarckian principle, and the
+transmission of functional hypertrophy or atrophy would thus become
+highly probable."
+
+I have not found any further attempt in Professor Weismann's book to deal
+with the evidence adduced by Mr. Darwin to show that mutilations, if
+followed by diseases, are sometimes inherited; and I must leave it to the
+reader to determine how far Professor Weismann has shown reason for
+rejecting Mr. Darwin's conclusion.  I do not, however, dwell upon these
+facts now as evidence of a transmitted change of bodily form, or of
+instinct due to use and disuse or habit; what they prove is that the germ-
+cells within the parent's body do not stand apart from the other cells of
+the body so completely as Professor Weismann would have us believe, but
+that, as Professor Hering, of Prague, has aptly said, they echo with more
+or less frequency and force to the profounder impressions made upon other
+cells.
+
+I may say that Professor Weismann does not more cavalierly wave aside the
+mass of evidence collected by Mr. Darwin and a host of other writers, to
+the effect that mutilations are sometimes inherited, than does Mr.
+Wallace, who says that, "as regards mutilations, it is generally admitted
+that they are not inherited, and there is ample evidence on this point."
+It is indeed generally admitted that mutilations, when not followed by
+disease, are very rarely, if ever, inherited; and Mr. Wallace's appeal to
+the "ample evidence" which he alleges to exist on this head, is much as
+though he should say that there is ample evidence to show that the days
+are longer in summer than in winter.  "Nevertheless," he continues, "a
+few cases of apparent inheritance of mutilations have been recorded, and
+these, if trustworthy, are difficulties in the way of the theory." . . .
+"The often-quoted case of a disease induced by mutilation being inherited
+(Brown-Sequard's epileptic guinea-pigs) has been discussed by Professor
+Weismann and shown to be not conclusive.  The mutilation itself--a
+section of certain nerves--was never inherited, but the resulting
+epilepsy, or a general state of weakness, deformity, or sores, was
+sometimes inherited.  It is, however, possible that the mere injury
+introduced and encouraged the growth of certain microbes, which,
+spreading through the organism, sometimes reached the germ-cells, and
+thus transmitted a diseased condition to the offspring." {35}
+
+I suppose a microbe which made guinea-pigs eat their toes off was
+communicated to the germ-cells of an unfortunate guinea-pig which had
+been already microbed by it, and made the offspring bite its toes off
+too.  The microbe has a good deal to answer for.
+
+On the case of the deterioration of horses in the Falkland Islands after
+a few generations, Professor Weismann says:--
+
+"In such a case we have only to assume that the climate which is
+unfavourable, and the nutriment which is insufficient for horses, affect
+not only the animal as a whole but also its germ-cells.  This would
+result in the diminution in size of the germ-cells, the effects upon the
+offspring being still further intensified by the insufficient nourishment
+supplied during growth.  But such results would not depend upon the
+transmission by the germ-cells of certain peculiarities due to the
+unfavourable climate, which only appear in the full-grown horse."
+
+But Professor Weismann does not like such cases, and admits that he
+cannot explain the facts in connection with the climatic varieties of
+certain butterflies, except "by supposing the passive acquisition of
+characters produced by the direct influence of climate."
+
+Nevertheless in his next paragraph but one he calls such cases
+"doubtful," and proposes that for the moment they should be left aside.
+He accordingly leaves them, but I have not yet found what other moment he
+considered auspicious for returning to them.  He tells us that "new
+experiments will be necessary, and that he has himself already begun to
+undertake them."  Perhaps he will give us the results of these
+experiments in some future book--for that they will prove satisfactory to
+him can hardly, I think, be doubted.  He writes:--
+
+"Leaving on one side, for the moment, these doubtful and insufficiently
+investigated cases, we may still maintain that the assumption that
+changes induced by external conditions in the organism as a whole are
+communicated to the germ-cells after the manner indicated in Darwin's
+hypothesis of pangenesis, is wholly unnecessary for the explanation of
+these phenomena.  Still we cannot exclude the possibility of such a
+transmission occasionally occurring, for even if the greater part of the
+effects must be attributable to natural selection, there might be a
+smaller part in certain cases which depends on this exceptional factor."
+
+I repeatedly tried to understand Mr. Darwin's theory of pangenesis, and
+so often failed that I long since gave the matter up in despair.  I did
+so with the less unwillingness because I saw that no one else appeared to
+understand the theory, and that even Mr. Darwin's warmest adherents
+regarded it with disfavour.  If Mr. Darwin means that every cell of the
+body throws off minute particles that find their way to the germ-cells,
+and hence into the new embryo, this is indeed difficult of comprehension
+and belief.  If he means that the rhythms or vibrations that go on
+ceaselessly in every cell of the body communicate themselves with greater
+or less accuracy or perturbation, as the case may be, to the cells that
+go to form offspring, and that since the characteristics of matter are
+determined by vibrations, in communicating vibrations they in effect
+communicate matter, according to the view put forward in the last chapter
+of my book "Luck or Cunning," {36} then we can better understand it.  I
+have nothing, however, to do with Mr. Darwin's theory of pangenesis
+beyond avoiding the pretence that I understand either the theory itself
+or what Professor Weismann says about it; all I am concerned with is
+Professor Weismann's admission, made immediately afterwards, that the
+somatic cells may, and perhaps sometimes do, impart characteristics to
+the germ-cells.
+
+"A complete and satisfactory refutation of such an opinion," he
+continues, "cannot be brought forward at present"; so I suppose we must
+wait a little longer, but in the meantime we may again remark that, if we
+admit even occasional communication of changes in the somatic cells to
+the germ-cells, we have let in the thin end of the wedge, as Mr. Darwin
+did when he said that use and disuse did a good deal towards
+modification.  Buffon, in his first volume on the lower animals, {37}
+dwells on the impossibility of stopping the breach once made by admission
+of variation at all.  "If the point," he writes, "were once gained, that
+among animals and vegetables there had been, I do not say several
+species, but even a single one, which had been produced in the course of
+direct descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once
+shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse--then there is
+no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be
+wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all
+other organised forms from one primordial type."  So with use and disuse
+and transmission of acquired characteristics generally--once show that a
+single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations,
+and we can impose no limit on the results achievable by accumulation in
+this respect, nor shall we be wrong in conceiving it as possible that all
+specialisation, whether of structure or instinct, may be due ultimately
+to habit.
+
+How far this can be shown to be probable is, of course, another matter,
+but I am not immediately concerned with this; all I am concerned with now
+is to show that the germ-cells not unfrequently become permanently
+affected by events that have made a profound impression upon the somatic
+cells, in so far that they transmit an obvious reminiscence of the
+impression to the embryos which they go subsequently towards forming.
+This is all that is necessary for my case, and I do not find that
+Professor Weismann, after all, disputes it.
+
+But here, again, comes the difficulty of saying what Professor Weismann
+does, and what he does not, dispute.  One moment he gives all that is
+wanted for the Lamarckian contention, the next he denies common-sense the
+bare necessaries of life.  For a more exhaustive and detailed criticism
+of Professor Weismann's position, I would refer the reader to an
+admirably clear article by Mr. Sidney H. Vines, which appeared in
+_Nature_, October 24, 1889.  I can only say that while reading Professor
+Weismann's book, I feel as I do when I read those of Mr. Darwin, and of a
+good many other writers on biology whom I need not name.  I become like a
+fly in a window-pane.  I see the sunshine and freedom beyond, and buzz up
+and down their pages, ever hopeful to get through them to the fresh air
+without, but ever kept back by a mysterious something, which I feel but
+cannot either grasp or see.  It was not thus when I read Buffon, Erasmus
+Darwin, and Lamarck; it is not thus when I read such articles as Mr.
+Vines's just referred to.  Love of self-display, and the want of
+singleness of mind that it inevitably engenders--these, I suppose, are
+the sins that glaze the casements of most men's minds; and from these, no
+matter how hard he tries to free himself, nor how much he despises them,
+who is altogether exempt?
+
+Finally, then, when we consider the immense mass of evidence referred to
+briefly, but sufficiently, by Mr. Charles Darwin, and referred to without
+other, for the most part, than off-hand dismissal by Professor Weismann
+in the last of the essays that have been recently translated, I do not
+see how any one who brings an unbiased mind to the question can hesitate
+as to the side on which the weight of testimony inclines.  Professor
+Weismann declares that "the transmission of mutilations may be dismissed
+into the domain of fable." {38}  If so, then, whom can we trust?  What is
+the use of science at all if the conclusions of a man as competent as I
+readily admit Mr. Darwin to have been, on the evidence laid before him
+from countless sources, is to be set aside lightly and without giving the
+clearest and most cogent explanation of the why and wherefore?  When we
+see a person "ostrichising" the evidence which he has to meet, as clearly
+as I believe Professor Weismann to be doing, we shall in nine cases out
+of ten be right in supposing that he knows the evidence to be too strong
+for him.
+
+
+
+THE DEADLOCK IN DARWINISM--PART III
+
+
+Now let me return to the recent division of biological opinion into two
+main streams--Lamarckism and Weismannism Both Lamarckians and
+Weismannists, not to mention mankind in general, admit that the better
+adapted to its surroundings a living form may be, the more likely it is
+to outbreed its compeers.  The world at large, again, needs not to be
+told that the normal course is not unfrequently deflected through the
+fortunes of war; nevertheless, according to Lamarckians and
+Erasmus-Darwinians, habitual effort, guided by ever-growing
+intelligence--that is to say, by continued increase of power in the
+matter of knowing our likes and dislikes--has been so much the main
+factor throughout the course of organic development, that the rest,
+though not lost sight of, may be allowed to go without saying.  According,
+on the other hand, to extreme Charles-Darwinians and Weismannists, habit,
+effort and intelligence acquired during the experience of any one life
+goes for nothing.  Not even a little fraction of it endures to the
+benefit of offspring.  It dies with him in whom it is acquired, and the
+heirs of a man's body take no interest therein.  To state this doctrine
+is to arouse instinctive loathing; it is my fortunate task to maintain
+that such a nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as it is
+repulsive.
+
+The split in biological opinion occasioned by the deadlock to which
+Charles-Darwinism has been reduced, though comparatively recent, widens
+rapidly.  Ten years ago Lamarck's name was mentioned only as a byword for
+extravagance; now, we cannot take up a number of _Nature_ without seeing
+how hot the contention is between his followers and those of Weismann.
+This must be referred, as I implied earlier, to growing perception that
+Mr. Darwin should either have gone farther towards Lamarckism or not so
+far.  In admitting use and disuse as freely as he did, he gave
+Lamarckians leverage for the overthrow of a system based ostensibly on
+the accumulation of fortunate accidents.  In assigning the lion's share
+of development to the accumulation of fortunate accidents, he tempted
+fortuitists to try to cut the ground from under Lamarck's feet by denying
+that the effects of use and disuse can be inherited at all.  When the
+public had once got to understand what Lamarck had intended, and wherein
+Mr. Charles Darwin had differed from him, it became impossible for
+Charles-Darwinians to remain where they were, nor is it easy to see what
+course was open to them except to cast about for a theory by which they
+could get rid of use and disuse altogether.  Weismannism, therefore, is
+the inevitable outcome of the straits to which Charles-Darwinians were
+reduced through the way in which their leader had halted between two
+opinions.
+
+This is why Charles-Darwinians, from Professor Huxley downwards, have
+kept the difference between Lamarck's opinions and those of Mr. Darwin so
+much in the background.  Unwillingness to make this understood is nowhere
+manifested more clearly than in Dr. Francis Darwin's life of his father.
+In this work Lamarck is sneered at once or twice, and told to go away,
+but there is no attempt to state the two cases side by side; from which,
+as from not a little else, I conclude that Dr. Francis Darwin has
+descended from his father with singularly little modification.
+
+Proceeding to the evidence for the transmissions of acquired habits, I
+will quote two recently adduced examples from among the many that have
+been credibly attested.  The first was contributed to _Nature_ (March 14,
+1889) by Professor Marcus M. Hartog, who wrote:--
+
+"A. B. is moderately myopic and very astigmatic in the left eye;
+extremely myopic in the right.  As the left eye gave such bad images for
+near objects, he was compelled in childhood to mask it, and acquired the
+habit of leaning his head on his left arm for writing, so as to blind
+that eye, or of resting the left temple and eye on the hand, with the
+elbow on the table.  At the age of fifteen the eyes were equalised by the
+use of suitable spectacles, and he soon lost the habit completely and
+permanently.  He is now the father of two children, a boy and a girl,
+whose vision (tested repeatedly and fully) is emmetropic in both eyes, so
+that they have not inherited the congenital optical defect of their
+father.  All the same, they have both of them inherited his early
+acquired habit, and need constant watchfulness to prevent their hiding
+the left eye when writing, by resting the head on the left forearm or
+hand.  Imitation is here quite out of the question.
+
+"Considering that every habit involves changes in the proportional
+development of the muscular and osseous systems, and hence probably of
+the nervous system also, the importance of inherited habits, natural or
+acquired, cannot be overlooked in the general theory of inheritance.  I
+am fully aware that I shall be accused of flat Lamarckism, but a nickname
+is not an argument."
+
+To this Professor Ray Lankester rejoined (_Nature_, March 21, 1889):--
+
+"It is not unusual for children to rest the head on the left forearm or
+hand when writing, and I doubt whether much value can be attached to the
+case described by Professor Hartog.  The kind of observation which his
+letter suggests is, however, likely to lead to results either for or
+against the transmission of acquired characters.  An old friend of mine
+lost his right arm when a schoolboy, and has ever since written with his
+left.  He has a large family and grandchildren, but I have not heard of
+any of them showing a disposition to left-handedness."
+
+From _Nature_ (March 21, 1889) I take the second instance communicated by
+Mr. J. Jenner-Weir, who wrote as follows:--
+
+"Mr. Marcus M. Hartog's letter of March 6th, inserted in last week's
+number (p. 462), is a very valuable contribution to the growing evidence
+that acquired characters may be inherited.  I have long held the view
+that such is often the case, and I have myself observed several instances
+of the, at least I may say, apparent fact.
+
+"Many years ago there was a very fine male of the _Capra megaceros_ in
+the gardens of the Zoological Society.  To restrain this animal from
+jumping over the fence of the enclosure in which he was confined, a long,
+and heavy chain was attached to the collar round his neck.  He was
+constantly in the habit of taking this chain up by his horns and moving
+it from one side to another over his back; in doing this he threw his
+head very much back, his horns being placed in a line with the back.  The
+habit had become quite chronic with him, and was very tiresome to look
+at.  I was very much astonished to observe that his offspring inherited
+the habit, and although it was not necessary to attach a chain to their
+necks, I have often seen a young male throwing his horns over his back
+and shifting from side to side an imaginary chain.  The action was
+exactly the same as that of his ancestor.  The case of the kid of this
+goat appears to me to be parallel to that of child and parent given by
+Mr. Hartog.  I think at the time I made this observation I informed Mr.
+Darwin of the fact by letter, and he did not accuse me of 'flat
+Lamarckism.'"
+
+To this letter there was no rejoinder.  It may be said, of course, that
+the action of the offspring in each of these cases was due to accidental
+coincidence only.  Anything can be said, but the question turns not on
+what an advocate can say, but on what a reasonably intelligent and
+disinterested jury will believe; granted they might be mistaken in
+accepting the foregoing stories, but the world of science, like that of
+commerce, is based on the faith or confidence, which both creates and
+sustains them.  Indeed the universe itself is but the creature of faith,
+for assuredly we know of no other foundation.  There is nothing so
+generally and reasonably accepted--not even our own continued
+identity--but questions may be raised about it that will shortly prove
+unanswerable.  We cannot so test every sixpence given us in change as to
+be sure that we never take a bad one, and had better sometimes be cheated
+than reduce caution to an absurdity.  Moreover, we have seen from the
+evidence given in my preceding article that the germ-cells issuing from a
+parent's body can, and do, respond to profound impressions made on the
+somatic-cells.  This being so, what impressions are more profound, what
+needs engage more assiduous attention than those connected with
+self-protection, the procuring of food, and the continuation of the
+species?  If the mere anxiety connected with an ill-healing wound
+inflicted on but one generation is sometimes found to have so impressed
+the germ-cells that they hand down its scars to offspring, how much more
+shall not anxieties that have directed action of all kinds from birth
+till death, not in one generation only but in a longer series of
+generations than the mind can realise to itself, modify, and indeed
+control, the organisation of every species?
+
+I see Professor S. H. Vines, in the article on Weismann's theory referred
+to in my preceding article, says Mr. Darwin "held that it was not the
+sudden variations due to altered external conditions which become
+permanent, but those slowly produced by what he termed 'the accumulative
+action of changed conditions of life.'"  Nothing can be more soundly
+Lamarckian, and nothing should more conclusively show that, whatever else
+Mr. Darwin was, he was not a Charles-Darwinian; but what evidence other
+than inferential can from the nature of the case be adduced in support of
+this, as I believe, perfectly correct judgment?  None know better than
+they who clamour for direct evidence that their master was right in
+taking the position assigned to him by Professor Vines, that they cannot
+reasonably look for it.  With us, as with themselves, modification
+proceeds very gradually, and it violates our principles as much as their
+own to expect visible permanent progress, in any single generation, or
+indeed in any number of generations of wild species which we have yet had
+time to observe.  Occasionally we can find such cases, as in that of
+_Branchipus stagnalis_, quoted by Mr. Wallace, or in that of the New
+Zealand Kea whose skin, I was assured by the late Sir Julius von Haast,
+has already been modified as a consequence of its change of food.  Here
+we can show that in even a few generations structure is modified under
+changed conditions of existence, but as we believe these cases to occur
+comparatively rarely, so it is still more rarely that they occur when and
+where we can watch them.  Nature is eminently conservative, and fixity of
+type, even under considerable change of conditions, is surely more
+important for the well-being of any species than an over-ready power of
+adaptation to, it may be, passing changes.  There could be no steady
+progress if each generation were not mainly bound by the traditions of
+those that have gone before it.  It is evolution and not incessant
+revolution that both parties are upholding; and this being so, rapid
+visible modification must be the exception, not the rule.  I have quoted
+direct evidence adduced by competent observers, which is, I believe,
+sufficient to establish the fact that offspring can be and is sometimes
+modified by the acquired habits of a progenitor.  I will now proceed to
+the still more, as it appears to me, cogent proof afforded by general
+considerations.
+
+What, let me ask, are the principal phenomena of heredity?  There must be
+physical continuity between parent, or parents, and offspring, so that
+the offspring is, as Erasmus Darwin well said, a kind of elongation of
+the life of the parent.
+
+Erasmus Darwin put the matter so well that I may as well give his words
+in full; he wrote:--
+
+"Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new
+animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent, since a
+part of the embryon animal is, or was, a part of the parent, and
+therefore, in strict language, cannot be said to be entirely new at the
+time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of
+the parent system.
+
+"At the earliest period of its existence the embryon would seem to
+consist of a living filament with certain capabilities of irritation,
+sensation, volition, and association, and also with some acquired habits
+or propensities peculiar to the parent; the former of these are in common
+with other animals; the latter seem to distinguish or produce the kind of
+animal, whether man or quadruped, with the similarity of feature or form
+to the parent." {39}
+
+Those who accept evolution insist on unbroken physical continuity between
+the earliest known life and ourselves, so that we both are and are not
+personally identical with the unicellular organism from which we have
+descended in the course of many millions of years, exactly in the same
+way as an octogenarian both is and is not personally identical with the
+microscopic impregnate ovum from which he grew up.  Everything both is
+and is not.  There is no such thing as strict identity between any two
+things in any two consecutive seconds.  In strictness they are identical
+and yet not identical, so that in strictness they violate a fundamental
+rule of strictness--namely, that a thing shall never be itself and not
+itself at one and the same time; we must choose between logic and dealing
+in a practical spirit with time and space; it is not surprising,
+therefore, that logic, in spite of the show of respect outwardly paid to
+her, is told to stand aside when people come to practice.  In practice
+identity is generally held to exist where continuity is only broken
+slowly and piecemeal, nevertheless, that occasional periods of even rapid
+change are not held to bar identity, appears from the fact that no one
+denies this to hold between the microscopically small impregnate ovum and
+the born child that springs from it, nor yet, therefore, between the
+impregnate ovum and the octogenarian into which the child grows; for both
+ovum and octogenarian are held personally identical with the newborn
+baby, and things that are identical with the same are identical with one
+another.
+
+The first, then, and most important element of heredity is that there
+should be unbroken continuity, and hence sameness of personality, between
+parents and offspring, in neither more nor less than the same sense as
+that in which any other two personalities are said to be the same.  The
+repetition, therefore, of its developmental stages by any offspring must
+be regarded as something which the embryo repeating them has already done
+once, in the person of one or other parent; and if once, then, as many
+times as there have been generations between any given embryo now
+repeating it, and the point in life from which we started--say, for
+example, the amoeba.  In the case of asexually and sexually produced
+organisms alike, the offspring must be held to continue the personality
+of the parent or parents, and hence on the occasion of every fresh
+development, to be repeating something which in the person of its parent
+or parents it has done once, and if once, then any number of times,
+already.
+
+It is obvious, therefore, that the germ-plasm (or whatever the fancy word
+for it may be) of any one generation is as physically identical with the
+germ-plasm of its predecessor as any two things can be.  The difference
+between Professor Weismann and, we will say, Heringians consists in the
+fact that the first maintains the new germ-plasm when on the point of
+repeating its developmental processes to take practically no cognisance
+of anything that has happened to it since the last occasion on which it
+developed itself; while the latter maintain that offspring takes much the
+same kind of account of what has happened to it in the persons of its
+parents since the last occasion on which it developed itself, as people
+in ordinary life take of things that happen to them.  In daily life
+people let fairly normal circumstances come and go without much heed as
+matters of course.  If they have been lucky they make a note of it and
+try to repeat their success.  If they have been unfortunate but have
+recovered rapidly they soon forget it; if they have suffered long and
+deeply they grizzle over it and are scared and scarred by it for a long
+time.  The question is one of cognisance or non-cognisance on the part of
+the new germs, of the more profound impressions made on them while they
+were one with their parents, between the occasion of their last preceding
+development, and the new course on which they are about to enter.  Those
+who accept the theory put forward independently by Professor Hering of
+Prague (whose work on this subject is translated in my book, "Unconscious
+Memory") {40} and by myself in "Life and Habit," {41} believe in
+cognizance, as do Lamarckians generally.  Weismannites, and with them the
+orthodoxy of English science, find non-cognisance more acceptable.
+
+If the Heringian view is accepted, that heredity is only a mode of
+memory, and an extension of memory from one generation to another, then
+the repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes only the
+repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have elsewhere said,
+our view of life is simplified by finding that it is no longer an
+equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of ninety-nine only,
+inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to be substantially
+identical.  In this case the inheritance of acquired characteristics
+cannot be disputed, for it is postulated in the theory that each embryo
+takes note of, remembers and is guided by the profounder impressions made
+upon it while in the persons of its parents, between its present and last
+preceding development.  To maintain this is to maintain use and disuse to
+be the main factors throughout organic development; to deny it is to deny
+that use and disuse can have any conceivable effect.  For the detailed
+reasons which led me to my own conclusions I must refer the reader to my
+books, "Life and Habit" {42} and "Unconscious Memory," {42} the
+conclusions of which have been often adopted, but never, that I have
+seen, disputed.  A brief _resume_ of the leading points in the argument
+is all that space will here allow me to give.
+
+We have seen that it is a first requirement of heredity that there shall
+be physical continuity between parents and offspring.  This holds good
+with memory.  There must be continued identity between the person
+remembering and the person to whom the thing that is remembered happened.
+We cannot remember things that happened to some one else, and in our
+absence.  We can only remember having heard of them.  We have seen,
+however, that there is as much _bona-fide_ sameness of personality
+between parents and offspring up to the time at which the offspring quits
+the parent's body, as there is between the different states of the parent
+himself at any two consecutive moments; the offspring therefore, being
+one and the same person with its progenitors until it quits them, can be
+held to remember what happened to them within, of course, the limitations
+to which all memory is subject, as much as the progenitors can remember
+what happened earlier to themselves.  Whether it does so remember can
+only be settled by observing whether it acts as living beings commonly do
+when they are acting under guidance of memory.  I will endeavour to show
+that, though heredity and habit based on memory go about in different
+dresses, yet if we catch them separately--for they are never seen
+together--and strip them there is not a mole nor strawberry-mark, nor
+trick nor leer of the one, but we find it in the other also.
+
+What are the moles and strawberry-marks of habitual action, or actions
+remembered and thus repeated?  First, the more often we repeat them the
+more easily and unconsciously we do them.  Look at reading, writing,
+walking, talking, playing the piano, &c.; the longer we have practised
+any one of these acquired habits, the more easily, automatically and
+unconsciously, we perform it.  Look, on the other hand, broadly, at the
+three points to which I called attention in "Life and Habit":--
+
+I.  That we are most conscious of and have most control over such habits
+as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which are
+acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and
+not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely
+human.
+
+II.  That we are less conscious of and have less control over eating and
+drinking [provided the food be normal], swallowing, breathing, seeing,
+and hearing--which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for
+which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before
+we saw light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent.
+
+III.  That we are most unconscious of and have least control over our
+digestion and circulation--powers possessed even by our invertebrate
+ancestry, and, geologically speaking, of extreme antiquity.
+
+I have put the foregoing very broadly, but enough is given to show the
+reader the gist of the argument.  Let it be noted that disturbance and
+departure, to any serious extent, from normal practice tends to induce
+resumption of consciousness even in the case of such old habits as
+breathing, seeing, and hearing, digestion and the circulation of the
+blood.  So it is with habitual actions in general.  Let a player be never
+so proficient on any instrument, he will be put out if the normal
+conditions under which he plays are too widely departed from, and will
+then do consciously, if indeed he can do it at all, what he had hitherto
+been doing unconsciously.  It is an axiom as regards actions acquired
+after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of
+long practice; the stages in the case of any acquired facility, the
+inception of which we have been able to watch, have invariably been from
+a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a little somethingness of highly
+self-conscious, arduous performance, and thence to the
+unselfconsciousness of easy mastery.  I saw one year a poor blind lad of
+about eighteen sitting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, playing the
+concertina with his whole body, and snorting like a child.  The next year
+the boy no longer snorted, and he played with his fingers only; the year
+after that he seemed hardly to know whether he was playing or not, it
+came so easily to him.  I know no exception to this rule.  Where is the
+intricate and at one time difficult art in which perfect automatic ease
+has been reached except as the result of long practice?  If, then,
+wherever we can trace the development of automatism we find it to have
+taken this course, is it not most reasonable to infer that it has taken
+the same even when it has risen in regions that are beyond our ken?  Ought
+we not, whenever we see a difficult action performed, automatically to
+suspect antecedent practice?  Granted that without the considerations in
+regard to identity presented above it would not have been easy to see
+where a baby of a day old could have had the practice which enables it to
+do as much as it does unconsciously, but even without these
+considerations it would have been more easy to suppose that the necessary
+opportunities had not been wanting, than that the easy performance could
+have been gained without practice and memory.
+
+When I wrote "Life and Habit" (originally published in 1877) I said in
+slightly different words:--
+
+"Shall we say that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves the whole
+principle of the pump and hence a profound practical knowledge of the
+laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its
+blood--millions of years before any one had discovered oxygen--sees and
+hears, operations that involve an unconscious knowledge of the facts
+concerning optics and acoustics compared with which the conscious
+discoveries of Newton are insignificant--shall we say that a baby can do
+all these things at once, doing them so well and so regularly without
+being even able to give them attention, and yet without mistake, and
+shall we also say at the same time that it has not learnt to do them, and
+never did them before?
+
+"Such an assertion would contradict the whole experience of mankind."
+
+I have met with nothing during the thirteen years since the foregoing was
+published that has given me any qualms about its soundness.  From the
+point of view of the law courts and everyday life it is, of course,
+nonsense; but in the kingdom of thought, as in that of heaven, there are
+many mansions, and what would be extravagance in the cottage or
+farmhouse, as it were, of daily practice, is but common decency in the
+palace of high philosophy, wherein dwells evolution.  If we leave
+evolution alone, we may stick to common practice and the law courts;
+touch evolution and we are in another world; not higher, not lower, but
+different as harmony from counterpoint.  As, however, in the most
+absolute counterpoint there is still harmony, and in the most absolute
+harmony still counterpoint, so high philosophy should be still in touch
+with common sense, and common sense with high philosophy.
+
+The common-sense view of the matter to people who are not over-curious
+and to whom time is money, will be that a baby is not a baby until it is
+born, and that when born it should be born in wedlock.  Nevertheless, as
+a sop to high philosophy, every baby is allowed to be the offspring of
+its father and mother.
+
+The high-philosophy view of the matter is that every human being is still
+but a fresh edition of the primordial cell with the latest additions and
+corrections; there has been no leap nor break in continuity anywhere; the
+man of to-day is the primordial cell of millions of years ago as truly as
+he is the himself of yesterday; he can only be denied to be the one on
+grounds that will prove him not to be the other.  Every one is both
+himself and all his direct ancestors and descendants as well; therefore,
+if we would be logical, he is one also with all his cousins, no matter
+how distant, for he and they are alike identical with the primordial
+cell, and we have already noted it as an axiom that things which are
+identical with the same are identical with one another.  This is
+practically making him one with all living things, whether animal or
+vegetable, that ever have existed or ever will--something of all which
+may have been in the mind of Sophocles when he wrote:--
+
+   "Nor seest thou yet the gathering hosts of ill
+   That shall en-one thee both with thine own self
+   And with thine offspring."
+
+And all this has come of admitting that a man may be the same person for
+two days running!  As for sopping common sense it will be enough to say
+that these remarks are to be taken in a strictly scientific sense, and
+have no appreciable importance as regards life and conduct.  True they
+deal with the foundations on which all life and conduct are based, but
+like other foundations they are hidden out of sight, and the sounder they
+are, the less we trouble ourselves about them.
+
+What other main common features between heredity and memory may we note
+besides the fact that neither can exist without that kind of physical
+continuity which we call personal identity?  First, the development of
+the embryo proceeds in an established order; so must all habitual actions
+based on memory.  Disturb the normal order and the performance is
+arrested.  The better we know "God save the Queen," the less easily can
+we play or sing it backwards.  The return of memory again depends on the
+return of ideas associated with the particular thing that is
+remembered--we remember nothing but for the presence of these, and when
+enough of these are presented to us we remember everything.  So, if the
+development of an embryo is due to memory, we should suppose the memory
+of the impregnate ovum to revert not to yesterday, when it was in the
+persons of its parents, but to the last occasion on which it was an
+impregnate ovum.  The return of the old environment and the presence of
+old associations would at once involve recollection of the course that
+should be next taken, and the same should happen throughout the whole
+course of development.  The actual course of development presents
+precisely the phenomena agreeable with this.  For fuller treatment of
+this point I must refer the reader to the chapter on the abeyance of
+memory in my book "Life and Habit," already referred to.
+
+Secondly, we remember best our last few performances of any given kind,
+so our present performance will probably resemble some one or other of
+these; we remember our earlier performances by way of residuum only, but
+every now and then we revert to an earlier habit.  This feature of memory
+is manifested in heredity by the way in which offspring commonly
+resembles most its nearer ancestors, but sometimes reverts to earlier
+ones.  Brothers and sisters, each as it were giving their own version of
+the same story, but in different words, should generally resemble each
+other more closely than more distant relations.  And this is what
+actually we find.
+
+Thirdly, the introduction of slightly new elements into a method already
+established varies it beneficially; the new is soon fused with the old,
+and the monotony ceases to be oppressive.  But if the new be too foreign,
+we cannot fuse the old and the new--nature seeming to hate equally too
+wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all.  This fact
+reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on
+the one hand, and on the other, in the generally observed sterility of
+hybrids.  If heredity be an affair of memory, how can an embryo, say of a
+mule, be expected to build up a mule on the strength of but two
+mule-memories?  Hybridism causes a fault in the chain of memory, and it
+is to this cause that the usual sterility of hybrids must be referred.
+
+Fourthly, it requires many repeated impressions to fix a method firmly,
+but when it has been engrained into us we cease to have much recollection
+of the manner in which it came to be so, or indeed of any individual
+repetition, but sometimes a single impression, if prolonged as well as
+profound, produces a lasting impression and is liable to return with
+sudden force, and then to go on returning to us at intervals.  As a
+general rule, however, abnormal impressions cannot long hold their own
+against the overwhelming preponderance of normal authority.  This appears
+in heredity as the normal non-inheritance of mutilations on the one hand,
+and on the other as their occasional inheritance in the case of injuries
+followed by disease.
+
+Fifthly, if heredity and memory are essentially the same, we should
+expect that no animal would develop new structures of importance after
+the age at which its species begins ordinarily to continue its race; for
+we cannot suppose offspring to remember anything that happens to the
+parent subsequently to the parent's ceasing to contain the offspring
+within itself.  From the average age, therefore, of reproduction,
+offspring should cease to have any farther steady, continuous memory to
+fall back upon; what memory there is should be full of faults, and as
+such unreliable.  An organism ought to develop as long as it is backed by
+memory--that is to say, until the average age at which reproduction
+begins; it should then continue to go for a time on the impetus already
+received, and should eventually decay through failure of any memory to
+support it, and tell it what to do.  This corresponds absolutely with
+what we observe in organisms generally, and explains, on the one hand,
+why the age of puberty marks the beginning of completed development--a
+riddle hitherto not only unexplained but, so far as I have seen, unasked;
+it explains, on the other hand, the phenomena of old age--hitherto
+without even attempt at explanation.
+
+Sixthly, those organisms that are the longest in reaching maturity should
+on the average be the longest-lived, for they will have received the most
+momentous impulse from the weight of memory behind them.  This harmonises
+with the latest opinion as to the facts.  In his article on Weismann in
+the _Contemporary Review_ for May 1890, Mr. Romanes writes: "Professor
+Weismann has shown that there is throughout the metazoa a general
+correlation between the natural lifetime of individuals composing any
+given species, and the age at which they reach maturity or first become
+capable of procreation."  This, I believe, has been the conclusion
+generally arrived at by biologists for some years past.
+
+Lateness, then, in the average age of reproduction appears to be the
+principle underlying longevity.  There does not appear at first sight to
+be much connection between such distinct and apparently disconnected
+phenomena as 1, the orderly normal progress of development; 2, atavism
+and the resumption of feral characteristics; 3, the more ordinary
+resemblance _inter se_ of nearer relatives; 4, the benefit of an
+occasional cross, and the usual sterility of hybrids; 5, the
+unconsciousness with which alike bodily development and ordinary
+physiological functions proceed, so long as they are normal; 6, the
+ordinary non-inheritance, but occasional inheritance of mutilations; 7,
+the fact that puberty indicates the approach of maturity; 8, the
+phenomena of middle life and old age; 9, the principle underlying
+longevity.  These phenomena have no conceivable bearing on one another
+until heredity and memory are regarded as part of the same story.
+Identify these two things, and I know no phenomenon of heredity that does
+not immediately become infinitely more intelligible.  Is it conceivable
+that a theory which harmonises so many facts hitherto regarded as without
+either connection or explanation should not deserve at any rate
+consideration from those who profess to take an interest in biology?
+
+It is not as though the theory were unknown, or had been condemned by our
+leading men of science.  Professor Ray Lankester introduced it to English
+readers in an appreciative notice of Professor Hering's address, which
+appeared in _Nature_, July 18, 1876.  He wrote to the _Athenaeum_, March
+24, 1884, and claimed credit for having done so, but I do not believe he
+has ever said more in public about it than what I have here referred to.
+Mr. Romanes did indeed try to crush it in _Nature_, January 27, 1881, but
+in 1883, in his "Mental Evolution in Animals," he adopted its main
+conclusion without acknowledgment.  The _Athenaeum_, to my unbounded
+surprise, called him to task for this (March 1, 1884), and since that
+time he has given the Heringian theory a sufficiently wide berth.  Mr.
+Wallace showed himself favourably enough disposed towards the view that
+heredity and memory are part of the same story when he reviewed my book
+"Life and Habit" in _Nature_, March 27, 1879, but he has never since
+betrayed any sign of being aware that such a theory existed.  Mr. Herbert
+Spencer wrote to the _Athenaeum_ (April 5, 1884), and claimed the theory
+for himself, but, in spite of his doing this, he has never, that I have
+seen, referred to the matter again.  I have dealt sufficiently with his
+claim in my book, "Luck or Cunning." {43}  Lastly, Professor Hering
+himself has never that I know of touched his own theory since the single
+short address read in 1870, and translated by me in 1881.  Every one,
+even its originator, except myself, seems afraid to open his mouth about
+it.  Of course the inference suggests itself that other people have more
+sense than I have.  I readily admit it; but why have so many of our
+leaders shown such a strong hankering after the theory, if there is
+nothing in it?
+
+The deadlock that I have pointed out as existing in Darwinism will, I
+doubt not, lead ere long to a consideration of Professor Hering's theory.
+English biologists are little likely to find Weismann satisfactory for
+long, and if he breaks down there is nothing left for them but Lamarck,
+supplemented by the important and elucidatory corollary on his theory
+proposed by Professor Hering.  When the time arrives for this to obtain a
+hearing it will be confirmed, doubtless, by arguments clearer and more
+forcible than any I have been able to adduce; I shall then be delighted
+to resign the championship which till then I shall continue, as for some
+years past, to have much pleasure in sustaining.  Heretofore my
+satisfaction has mainly lain in the fact that more of our prominent men
+of science have seemed anxious to claim the theory than to refute it; in
+the confidence thus engendered I leave it to any fuller consideration
+which the outline I have above given may incline the reader to bestow
+upon it.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  Published in the _Universal Review_, July 1888.
+
+{2}  Published in the _Universal Review_, December 1890.
+
+{3}  Published in the _Universal Review_, May 1889.  As I have several
+times been asked if the letters here reprinted were not fabricated by
+Butler himself, I take this opportunity of stating that they are
+authentic in every particular, and that the originals are now in my
+possession.--R. A. S.
+
+{4}  An address delivered at the Somerville Club, February 27, 1895.
+
+{5}  "The Foundations of Belief," by the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour.
+Longmans, 1895, p. 48.
+
+{6}  Published in the _Universal Review_, November 1888.
+
+{7}  Since this essay was written it has been ascertained by Cavaliere
+Francesco Negri, of Casale Monferrato, that Tabachetti died in 1615.  If,
+therefore, the Sanctuary of Montrigone was not founded until 1631, it is
+plain that Tabachetti cannot have worked there.  All the latest
+discoveries about Tabachetti's career will be found in Cavaliere Negri's
+pamphlet "Il Santuario di Crea" (Alessandria, 1902).  See also note on p.
+154.--R. A. S.
+
+{8}  Published in the _Universal Review_, December 1889.
+
+{9}  Longmans & Co., 1890.
+
+{10}  Longmans & Co., 1890.
+
+{11}  Published in the _Universal Review_, November 1890.
+
+{12}  Longmans & Co., 1890.
+
+{13}  M. Ruppen's words run: "1687 wurde die Kapelle zur hohen Stiege
+gebaut, 1747 durch Zusatz vergrossert und 1755 mit Orgeln ausgestattet.
+Anton Ruppen, ein geschickter Steinhauer mid Maurermeister leitete den
+Kapellebau, und machte darin das kleinere Altarlein.  Bei der hohen
+Stiege war fruher kein Gebetshauslein; nur ein wunderthatiges Bildlein
+der Mutter Gottes stand da in einer Mauer vor dem fromme Hirten und viel
+andachtiges Volk unter freiem Himmel beteten.
+
+"1709 wurden die kleinen Kapellelein die 15 Geheimnisse des Psalters
+vorstelland auf dem Wege zur hohen Stiege gebaut.  Jeder Haushalter des
+Viertels Fee ubernahm den Bau eines dieser Geheimnisskapellen, und ein
+besonderer Gutthater dieser frommen Unternehmung war Heinrich
+Andenmatten, nachher Bruder der Geselischaft Jesu."
+
+{14}  The story of Tabachetti's incarceration is very doubtful.  Cavaliere
+F. Negri, to whose book on Tabachetti and his work at Crea I have already
+referred the reader, does not mention it.  Tabachetti left his native
+Dinant in 1585, and from that date until his death in 1615 he appears to
+have worked chiefly at Varallo and Crea.  There is a document in
+existence stating that in 1588 he executed a statue for the hermitage of
+S. Rocco, at Crea, which, if it is to be relied on, disposes both of the
+incarceration and of the visit to Saas.  It is possible, however, that
+the date is 1598, in which case Butler's theory of the visit to Saas may
+hold good.  In 1590 Tabachetti was certainly at Varallo, and again in
+1594, 1599, and 1602.  He died in 1615, possibly during a visit to
+Varallo, though his home at that time was Costigliole, near Asti.--R. A.
+S.
+
+{15}  This is thus chronicled by M. Ruppen: "1589 den 9 September war
+eine Wassergrosse, die viel Schaden verursachte.  Die Thalstrasse, die
+von den Steinmatten an bis zur Kirche am Ufer der Visp lag, wurde ganz
+zerstort.  Man ward gezwungen eine neue Strasse in einiger Entfernung vom
+Wasser durch einen alten Fussweg auszuhauen welche vier und einerhalben
+Viertel der Klafter, oder 6 Schuh und 9 Zoll breit soilte."  (p. 43).
+
+{16}  A lecture delivered at the Working Men's College in Great Ormond
+Street, March 15, 1890; rewritten and delivered again at the Somerville
+Club, February 13, 1894.
+
+{17}  "Correlation of Forces": Longmans, 1874, p. 15.
+
+{18}  "Three Lectures on the Science of Language," Longmans, 1889, p. 4.
+
+{19}  "Science of Thought," Longmans, 1887, p. 9.
+
+{20}  Published in the _Universal Review_, April, May, and June 1890.
+
+{21}  "Voyages of the _Adventure_ and _Beagle_," iii. p. 237.
+
+{22}  "Luck, or Cunning, as the main means of Organic Modification?"
+(Longmans), pp. 179, 180.
+
+{23}  _Journals of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society_ (Zoology, vol.
+iii.), 1859, p. 61.
+
+{24}  "Darwinism" (Macmillan, 1889), p. 129.
+
+{25}  Longmans, 1890, p. 376.
+
+{26}  See _Nature_, March 6, 1890.
+
+{27}  "Origin of Species," sixth edition, 1888, vol. i. p. 168.
+
+{28}  "Origin of Species," sixth edition, 1888, vol. ii. p. 261.
+
+{29}  Mr. J. T. Cunningham, of the Marine Biological Laboratory,
+Plymouth, has called my attention to the fact that I have ascribed to
+Professor Ray Lankester a criticism on Mr. Wallace's remarks upon the
+eyes of certain fiat-fish, which Professor Ray Lankester was, in reality,
+only adopting--with full acknowledgment--from Mr. Cunningham.  Mr.
+Cunningham has left it to me whether to correct my omission publicly or
+not, but he would so plainly prefer my doing so that I consider myself
+bound to insert this note.  Curiously enough I find that in my book
+"Evolution Old and New," I gave what Lamarck actually said upon the eyes
+of flat-fish, and having been led to return to the subject, I may as well
+quote his words.  He wrote:--
+
+"Need--always occasioned by the circumstances in which an animal is
+placed, and followed by sustained efforts at gratification--can not only
+modify an organ--that is to say, augment or reduce it--but can change its
+position when the case requires its removal.
+
+"Ocean fishes have occasion to see what is on either side of them, and
+have their eyes accordingly placed on either side of their head.  Some
+fishes, however, have their abode near coasts on submarine banks and
+inclinations, and are thus forced to flatten themselves as much as
+possible in order to get as near as they can to the shore.  In this
+situation they receive more light from above than from below, and find it
+necessary to pay attention to whatever happens to be above them; this
+need has involved the displacement of their eyes, which now take the
+remarkable position which we observe in the case of soles, turbots,
+plaice, &c.  The transfer of position is not even yet complete in the
+case of these fishes, and the eyes are not, therefore, symmetrically
+placed; but they are so with the skate, whose head and whole body are
+equally disposed on either side a longitudinal section.  Hence the eyes
+of this fish are placed symmetrically upon the uppermost
+_side_."--_Philosophie Zoologique_, tom. i., pp. 250, 251.  Edition C.
+Martins.  Paris, 1873.
+
+{30}  "Essays on Heredity," &c., Oxford, 1889, p. 171.
+
+{31}  "Essays on Heredity," &c., Oxford, 1889, p. 266.
+
+{32}  "Darwinism," 1889, p. 440.
+
+{33}  Page 83.
+
+{34}  Vol. i. p. 466, &c.  Ed. 1885.
+
+{35}  "Darwinism," p. 440.
+
+{36}  Longmans, 1890.
+
+{37}  Tom. iv. p. 383.  Ed. 1753.
+
+{38}  Essays, &c., p. 447.
+
+{39}  "Zoonomia," 1794, vol. i. p. 480.
+
+{40}  Longmans, 1890.
+
+{41}  Longmans, 1890.
+
+{42}  Longmans, 1890.
+
+{43}  Longmans, 1890.
+
+
+
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