§§§ ¿ §§ %ſą §§ Ģ §§ ºº *ģ ∞ ≤ № § s { '%. .ſº·A ##+.. * w ķ „.^， ..Ä （8） ***× ºut.} {{s- Ë. THE BURDEN OF LIFE THE BURDEN OF LIFE A Volume of Essays By JAMES HAIN FRISWELL Author of “The Gentle Life,” etc. Edited by his daughter, Laura Hain Friswell º London FISHER UNWIN 1897 [All rights reserved.] * \ PREFACE “THE Essays that form this volume appeared many years ago in a well-known journal. They have been chosen as touch- ing on some of the popular topics of the present day. The Editor fears the title may be objected to as pessimistic or melancholy; yet, to quote the author, most intelligent people find life a burden. No doubt this is so, because we have each of us an ideal, more or less noble, and it is for ever eluding us; thus the pains and disappointments of life become keener as our capacity for feeling is enlarged. How much heavier we make the burden for ourselves and others by our want of knowledge or wickedness is very difficult to determine, but we all suffer; and we are lucky indeed if it is only “Conventionality” or “The Follies of Fashion ” that trouble us; but every one knows “Wisdom and Learning” have made life more difficult for many, and that even our pleasures, “Making Love” and the “Custom of Kissing,” have added in no small degree to its burdens. Undoubtedly one of the heaviest is ill-health, and the author of these Essays suffered grievously from that affliction, and was at times cast down by it. His friend, Charles Kingsley, in writing to him, once said, “Pray keep up heart. Help and friends are sure to turn up in this strangely well-made world.” But it is not so. In this 2792 vi PREFACE curiously well-ordered world help only comes to those w who can help themselves, and friends are more often than not “Job’s comforters.” Thus some of the most deserving of us live, as far as this life is concerned, for ever in shadow. “Give up your optimism and make it clear to yourself that we have to fight with everything, and against everyone. . . . Learn also that there is nothing more common than to do evil for the pleasure of doing it,” wrote Doudan, in Paris, about the year 1869. Things had gone very wrong 2. indeed; speculation, peculation, and the utter degradation.’ of the army and society, made the old scholar write as he did ; and at that time he no doubt thought—as we all do on occasions—that the world was not “the best of all worlds.” But there are brave and happy people who bear their burdens with so much courage and cheerfulness that the majority think they have none. My father was one, and though he did not quite agree with Kingsley as to this being “a strangely well-made world,” neither was he of Doudan's opinion. In fact, he found fault with both words: optimus, the best ; £essimus, the worst. There is a middle course which the readers of my father's works must have discovered, for, in spite of illness and adverse fortune, his writings ever breathe a spirit of hope, comfort, common- sense, cheerfulness, and love of humanity which is the only safeguard against the burdens of life. LAURA. HAIN FRISWELL. WIMBLEDON, 5th January 1897. ,” \ \ . *~ I. II. III. Iv. conventionALITY . .* V. VI. VII. * VIII, IX. X. ^ XI. *A, 7, XII. XIII. XIV, XV. XVI. XVII, THE BURDEN OF LIFE JoB's comforters . e CONTENTS º & THE FOLLIES OF FASHION Z). THE ADVANCEMENT OF WOMEN MAKING LOVE THE CUSTOM OF KISSING THE WANE OF LOVE . THE CEREMONY AND THE RITE OF MARRIAGE THE womeN’s WAR . te tº r º • sº º THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND WOMEN BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS WISDOM AND LEARNING . e GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE MOTHERHOOD BOYS . RINSFOLK AND RELATIONS º LAZINESS º º PAGR I4 28 55 67 8I 96 III I25 I4I I55 17o 182 196 2 II 223 viii CONTENTS CHAPTER XVIII, XIX. XX, XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV, DOMESTIC ECONOMY . e CONCEIT AND WANITY e THE DANGEROUS CLASSES, AND THE OF AUTHORITY . « » APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN º THE DEATH-DEALING LAW © DEATH FOR DEATH e © © © WI LL Jº <> º tº XXV, e & e THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND e © & © o o 4× & p © O {} e º & º © O PAGE 237 251 264 278 291 305 318 THE BURDEN OF LIFE. Moº IT seems strange to speak of life as a burden. Nevertheless, most intelligent persons find it to be one; and no inconsiderable portion of their energy is devoted to the task of sus- taining, although they are fully as much con- cerned in prolonging, the infliction. Only a Small minority of conscious creatures are able to live, so to say, unconsciously. The great mass of the “creation groaneth and travaileth together; ” the machinery of life labours heavily ; and the sum of work accomplished by living men is much less than it might be under more favourable conditions, because the expenditure of force necessary to main- tain the working organism is considerable and exhausting. Philosophy preaches and experience teaches the wisdom of avoiding the error of excessive carefulness. Nature is a fond guardian, and those who prove docile children, obeying her silent behests, are well A. 2 THE BURDEN OF LIFE cared for and protected. That portion—and it has lately come to be a large part—of the burden of life heaped up in the ever-present anxiety to eke out the span of existence is not only needless but embarrassing. If life is to be loaded in this fashion with its own provender and physic, it will soon cease to be of use in the cause of progress; and society, if not the individual, will begin to ask whether it is worth having. ,' It is, too, becoming a question of common sense, and one of no inconsiderable import- ance, whether some of our instructors are not pushing the pursuit of health and longevity to the verge of the ridiculous. If we are to be converted into a nation of valetudinarians, laid up in lavender, amid surroundings elabo- rately prepared to exclude disease and shut out death, and compelled to live under a “rule" as irksome as that imposed on certain orders of ascetics, it will be time to ask if emigration to a less laboriously and exclu- sively healthful clime may not prove a relief from the toil of bearing a burden ruthlessly exaggerated. By all means rid civilised life of the parasites and creepers which have grown upon and surround it, Amend the THE BURDEN OF LIFE 3 errors and defects of great cities, reform and reconstruct the conditions of an existence carried on in such breathless haste that there has been neither time nor strength to spend upon its own necessities; but let this good work be accomplished without crazing the world with total abstinence or any other totalism which strives to substitute senti- ment for sense, and proceeds on the assump- tion that men and women must be treated as children, to be kept from everything that may be abused instead of being trained in , its use. Obviously, for example, temperance | is incompatible with teetotalism. No one can be temperate in the use of an article from which he is wholly debarred. It is a moni triumph to inculcate temperance, because the faculty of self-restraint is thereby developed and strengthened—and this faculty is the only trusty safeguard against excess of every and any kind. Meanwhile, it is degrading to the intellect and character to enforce total abstin- ence. It is like putting gloves on a lunatic to prevent his injuring himself. It is not the way to elevate “the people”; and it is time to speak out plainly on the subject of a craze which is working wondrous harm by 4 THE BURDEN OF LIFE enfeebling the national character it pretends to improve. Reformers of the school against which our remarks are directly pointed, go about loading the backs of men and women with burdens greater than they can bear. Nor is this the worst phase of the evil. It is chiefly among the weak-minded that they succeed; and for them they neither bring new strength nor suggest a new purpose in life. The mission of true beneficence is distin- guished by these two characteristics — it imparts fresh vigour, and it points to an object for the first time recognised by the awakened intelligence. Those who preach temperance to any useful purpose are en- gaged in a mission distinguished by these qualities. The man who succeeds in using intelligently what he has hitherto abused has acquired a force of character which will serve him and advance his interests in many directions besides that of moderation in the recourse to stimulants; meanwhile, self-govern- ment gives him a new aim in life, and the pursuit brings him happiness. Apply this principle generally to the practical duties and privileges of life. Take the maxim, “All things are given us lawfully to enjoy;” see THE BURDEN OF LIFE 5 Y \ that use never degenerates into abuse, and, without burdening the mind with an additional incubus, progress will be found to be not only possible but prosperous, the present undisturbed, the outlook enlarged and cloudless. Life is a burden; the weight will not be diminished by loading it with needless baggage. Some find the burden in life itself—it is so hard to live; others feel chiefly the weight of accessories. It is a heavy business to live the only life practicable. Many difficulties make it “hard to live.” Personal infirmity and disease are among the most formidable. The cripples in mind or body, who hobble through life sorely burdened by their afflic- tions, are numerous; and, to do them justice, they contrive to get on, not only very toler- ably, but with a measure of success which the careless may envy. In truth, a little burden of this description frequently gives ballast to the character, and not only does the “cracked pitcher go often to the well,” but it displays a great capacity for holding water, which some of the brazen vessels less likely to leak allow to drip and dribble away with prodigal celerity. It would be a curious and comfort- 6 THE BURDEN OF LIFE - ing inquiry to ascertain what proportion per cent. of the happy, if not hale, community of letters, art, intellectual industry, and work of all kinds have had their mortality cast by the doctors ? “Prognosis” is necessarily based on ‘‘diagnosis; ” and it often happens that disease does not run its normal course un- hindered by nature, even when art has failed. Leaving the curative power of the organism itself out of account, and ignoring, forgettingſ or under-estimating the marvellous faculty of adaptation to circumstances and self-help by the vicarious action of organs existing in the human body, physicians form ill-boding and mournful views which, happily, are not uni- formly realised. To be “given over by the faculty" is not therefore a death-sentence without reprieve, and not a few elastic beings with resilient souls have been known to “live happy” a long while afterwards. The great point is to decline to be cast down. Mark Tapley exulted in the triumph over adverse circumstances. Something of the same kind of feeling will carry a weak body through extremely untoward maladies. The rational explanation of this fact is easy, and ought to be more generally considered. The force THE BURDEN OF LIFE 7 which works the organism—if not identical with the manifestation of brain-power we call mind—is so intimately connected with it that the two react one on the other. There is, or ought to be, always a reserve stock of this force available for use under exceptional con- ditions—as, for example, disease. Those who Squander this reserve in dissipation cannot of course have their cake and eat it too; so, when illness occurs, they succumb sometimes before a quite insignificant adversary. The wise liver, who has not wasted this precious reserve in riotous living, can, by a strong and continuous effort of the will, call this latent stock of energy to his aid when art fails to succour him, and not uncommonly the vis medicatria, naturaº cures when, the patient having suffered grievous things of divers physicians, the future seems given over to despair. He who despairs dies; while the wisely-wilful man lives on until the disease is exhausted instead of its victim. Living down disease, shouldering the burden man- fully, and resolving to carry it through the valley of the shadow of death and up the steep hill beyond, is an enterprise noble in itself and wondrously recuperative. Other 8 THE BURDEN OF LIFE i! difficulties, such as those which arise from poverty, stupidity, idleness, and that com- bination of errors and imprudences which it is the fashion to call “ill luck,” are generally amenable to the same kind of energy. The secret of success is judgment—never hesitate to act, or the opportunity may be lost ; but, while moving promptly, look ahead, plan the course of conduct to be pursued, set the object clearly before the mind, and press forward with resolute perseverance. It is only by settled purpose and steady action that the worst obstacles can be overcome. That sense of weariness which oppresses those who bear an uncongenial burden through life is the most painful and disastrous. It is of little use advising a man to step jauntily over a ploughed field. Nevertheless, the light foot is nowhere else so necessary. If the path is encumbered with clods that clog the feet of the traveller, he will spare himself a great deal of superfluous exertion if he speeds lightly over the ground instead of planting a heavy tread in the mire and loading his limbs with needless difficulties. A light heart and a hopeful spirit make the worst burdens of life less burdensome. It is not of much use THE BURDEN OF LIFE 9 counting the milestones. Some leaden and lugubrious philosophers seem to derive a melancholy sort of amusement, and perhaps a spice of cold comfort, from the exercise, but it is a doleful expedient. The miles always appear to grow longer and the way more rugged as we advance. In truth it is a mis- take to bestow so much thought on the road and its ugly incidents. If there are cheering or inspiriting objects around, a man does well to look at them, but, unless these are attractive, it is better to press forward and disregard the troubles and difficulties. The boy who went whistling through the church- yard to keep up his spirits was better employed than he would have been in read- ing the epitaphs. There is a sorry sort of philosophy, essentially morbid, which would seem to derive peculiar consolation from the disagreeableness of “a waste howling wilder- ness.” If people find the world a wilderness, if it be a howling waste, common prudence ought to counsel haste and self-absorption in passing through it. It is difficult not to feel a certain amount of distrust of those who perpetually deplore the worthlessness and wickedness of | 10 THE BURDEN OF LIFE | the world. In truth, it is not a bad place at all. Men and women may make it uncom- fortable, but they seldom do more than incon- venience themselves. There are, doubtless, plenty of objectionable scenes and things around us, just as there are many disagreeable persons in every crowd; but no one is obliged to search out these evils. If he does, it is generally because he takes pleasure in them. A great deal of the pretended philanthropy and meddling goodness in the world is a cover for the gratification of prurient tastes not otherwise to be satisfied. It may seem a very shocking thing to say, but it is no less true that the passion for uprooting vice is generally a love of dabbling in the mire expressing itself respectably. The thrill of righteous horror with which many persons devour the most disgusting details of crime and wickedness acquires its zest from a secret, perhaps unsuspected, proclivity to vicious courses. Men and women are too moral to “themselves do these things,” but they “have pleasure in them that do them ; ” and the enjoyment is none the less real because it takes the shape of a lofty pharisaical “inspec- tion,” or “mission,” or some plausible effort THE BURDEN OF LIFE II to ameliorate the condition of the wrong-doer or extinguish a particular social evil. It is well to look facts in the face; and this un- palatable piece of truth-speaking is not only justified but expedient. The burden of life which consists in the intolerable wickedness of the world, like that which takes the form of a perpetual “cross” or “trial,” ought to be borne in the spirit which once inspired a British sailor to take up a live shell and throw it overboard. No man in his senses would go about looking for inflictions of this class, but, if they come, it is best to grapple with them, and the height of folly and weakness is to go through life sighing and weeping as though the personal sorrow must need make the world as gloomy as it seems. May the burden of life be cast away ? Certainly, if it can be unbuckled and detached, not else. No man or woman who is not at heart a craven coward will seek to end this life because its burden is heavy. When all seems against one, then is the time to pluck up the spirits and fight. To give in when matters are at the worst is to yield the palm of victory to “fate” at the precise moment when a vengeful mind might be excused for 12 THE BURDEN OF LIFE resisting the foe to the uttermost. Many a man has been saved from fatal folly by being roused to a pitch of valorous determination at the turning-point in a downward career. The threatening glare of the enemy burning to overthrow him has been met by a resolve to rescue the trophy of conquest. “Give in, just when the power against me is plainly doing its worst 3 Verily, no! Outlive this, overcome the foe now, and I shall be safe.” That is the true spirit of manliness. The faint heart that does not rally thus at the critical moment deserves to die. “It is hard to rally.” Of course it is. Nothing that was easy ever pro- duced any great result. It is the hand-to-hand struggle that carries the field. Get rid of every burden of life which can be shaken off consis- tently with the obligations of honour and duty, but never think of “shuffling off the mortal coil” itself, least of all when that is the very course to which fate seems to urge its victim, and which it could most gratify its malignant enmity by insisting upon. We speak as if fate were sometimes arrayed in order of battle against an individual. It seems so; but the foe is generally a creature of fancy, the spectre of a policy of mistake or wrong-doing. The THE BURDEN OF LIFE 13 burden of life is oftener than not heavier than it ought to be, and the excess is caused by the heaping up of needless anxieties or vicious troubles. Many excellent persons, like Martha of old, cumber themselves with much serving, while the wicked heap to them- selves wrath, the Nemesis of evil practices. The burden of life is in itself heavy enough, but those who find it heavier than they can bear have commonly themselves to thank for the untoward experience. JOB'S COMFORTERS. LIFE, at the very best, is a mixed benefit, and, if looked at in the way in which most of the religious ones of the world obstinately persist in looking at it, is logically no benefit at all, but to the majority a prior and off-hand con- demnation of a being—who certainly did not make himself — to age-enduring and ever- lasting punishment in the next world for having been miserable, blind, vicious, and unhappy in this. That is plainly what too many preachers Say, and what their logic—a pitiless logic — leads to. Conse- quently we cannot wonder if the world revolts at this, and wishes to “revise the contract,” or to understand better the plea upon which such readings of it are taken. And this is the basis of the scientific atheism of the day. James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, refused, for instance, to assume that God was omnipotent, because His works were, even to 14 JoB's CoMFORTERS 15 man's vision, manifestly imperfect. He was logically wrong there, because he employed human reason as a supreme judge of that of which only a small part was before it, placing the Infinite on the mean level of the finite. But he was not therefore wicked. It may be held that he did more honour to God than those who attribute to Him favour, anger, passions, connivance with their designs, and other human feelings which take upon them a shadow of the human self. Mill and others of his school stood aloof, and, bowing before the immensity of the design, held their tongues concerning the Designer because they knew nothing positively of Him. Another kind of scientific doubter was to be found in Mr Winwood Reade, who published a book called the Martyrdom of Man, wherein he shows, or endeavours to show, that man's impulses are implanted, that he cannot do otherwise than exercise them naturally, that he is continually checked by nature, and that he nobly undergoes and endures a martyrdom for which he deserves a crown and a future of bliss, or a long rest in peace, and certainly not everlasting wrath and fire. Now, it is simply ridiculous to say that N. 16 THE BURDEN OF LIFE this kind of feeling is wicked merely because it does not run in the same groove with ours. It is also foolish to suppose that it was left to Mr James Mill, or to Mr Winwood Reade, to find it out. The attitude of Socrates towards the ordinary religion of the noisy and self-seeking Greek of his day was much the same as that of Mill towards the Chad- bands and Stigginses who expounded the Holy Scriptures as if they alone possessed a key to them. And yet we of the present age, in a higher position and greater light, can see that Socrates was right and the great Chad- bands wrong. As for the “martyrdom of man,” that alliterative title hides nothing new. All literature teems with it—the whole Greek mythology abounds in it. Prometheus himself is man chained to a rock by a tyrant divinity, and his ever-growing vitals, constantly renewed to give constant pain, are gnawed by Jupiter's eagle, and comforted by Poseidon (the ocean) and upheld by the grandeur of that human soul which finds a hope in the overthrow of Jupiter as prince of this world, and the succession of a new ruler with a new heaven and a new earth. Nay, this grand attribute is the standpoint of Job himself. JoB's COMFORTERS 17 That patriarch is the martyr of humanity. He is represented as holy, pure, and prayerful, and as suddenly, without cause given, but merely as a foreknown and forejudged trial between two unequal powers, subjected to the most terrible trouble that ever man under- went. Job himself was perfect; he delivered the poor that cried unto him, was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame, caused the widow's heart to sing with joy, and the blessing of him who was about to perish came upon him. Yet all of a sudden, while he is bearing the white flower of an innocent and beautiful life gravely and gracefully, saying abundant prayer even for his children, lest perchance they should have forgotten it, he is cast down, his ten children slain, his flocks consumed by fire, and himself afflicted with a loathsome and most painful disease, and forced to sit alone and in ashes, scraping his irritating Sores with shreds of broken pottery. Such turns of fortune were not unknown; they are the pro- perty of the schoolboy to illustrate his themes. There is Marius, slain in a dungeon; Belisarius, the great general, begging his bread; Plato grinding at a wheel; AEsop sold as a slave; and Hannibal begging the poison that slew B 18 THE BURDEN OF LIFE t º i; him, an exile and a pauper. The peculiarity of Job is that he just resembles man in the abstract now and always, but especially the Christian man of to-day, who submits to be talked to by the comforters, who, like Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, will insist upon many things, but chiefly that they are the people, and wisdom shall die with them, and that man makes all his own misfortunes, and thoroughly deserves them; that on the whole he is very lucky in not being worse off; that he is a miser- able sinner, and everything that is opprobrious and objectionable, and that in some blind way they are doing God service in speaking against and objurgating with the vilest and most uncharitable insinuations their brother man. It is very pleasant to the lovers of truth and wisdom to find that Job justifies himself against such comforters as Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar. His human heart had hungered for comfort more than the hearts of most, since he too had comforted others, upheld the falling, and strengthened the feeble knees. Heavily burdened and grievously outworn as he was, the friends and preachers around him, who take care to remind him of their own wisdom, and who obtrude their petty selves as frequently as JoB's COMFORTERs I9 a low-class local preacher, instead of offering any comfort, simply overwhelm him with abuse. And they have set the pattern chiefly for religious comforters all over the world. The Saviour alone calls to the heavily burdened to give them rest, to the weary to promise them sleep ; He alone tells us that Lazarus receives good things, because in this world he has received evil, and that he is comforted, because theretofore he has been tormented. Never was the perverse ingenuity of the Spiritual Evil which besets man more busily and noxiously employed than in turning the hearts of our comforters to gall and wormwood. If there be any time in which man certainly desires to be saved from his friends, it is when he has had a misfortune, or is forced into a quarrel. His friends either look on coldly, or take the wrong side, or misunderstand the matter, or they desire to hold aloof. Perhaps the loveliest character ever given to a man in few words is that of the hero of Tennyson's song, who is said to have been “truest friend and noblest foe”—but these are not the days of Pylades and Orestes, of Hamlet and Horatio, or of the high feeling which dictated the words, “Gentleman of the French Guard, fire first.” 20 THE BURDEN OF LIFE We run away from, not towards, our friends in misfortune, and, as for letting an enemy fire first, we grin with an ape-like delight if we can invent a torpedo which will blow our sleeping foes into eternity. What the heart of man requires is some- thing as far as the poles asunder from the cold friendship and the politic innuendos of Job's friends; and so far from doing God honour it is well for the inspiration of that noble and ancient poem, the sublimest as well as the most ancient in the world, to find that when God answers Job out of the whirlwind the mind of the Creator scorns the miserable creatures who have been saying cruel platitudes in His name, and have been heaping contumely on their sick friend. Job, who desires to speak with God, to justify himself qua man, is com- forted and reinstated, and the “miserable comforters,” who have preached “goody- goody” nonsense to the crushed heart and the smarting body of Job, are reproved and silenced. Of Job's wife posterity has thought but little ; she is regarded as an exceedingly bitter drop in Job's cup, but there is another view to be taken. Her suggestion that, as all evils that were possible, or at least con- JOB's COMFORTERS 21 ceivable, had fallen on the man of Uz, he should “curse God and die,” is very foolish but exceedingly womanly, and might have been the outcome of hysterical affection and ignorance. To her, after this world, there was only the peace of annihilation. Job by his trust in God, which never fails, seems to have Snatched a hope in immortality, and shudders at the grave and the long sleep in which worms shall devour his body. But he is content to assign to God the mischief done without assigning evil. “We came naked into this world,” he says, “and assuredly we shall take nothing away. Have we received good at God's hands, and shall we not receive evil? Blessed be the name of the Lord ' " He closes with the Eastern formula, which is now as familiar to the Arab as it was in the days of the patriarch, and which is heard cried forth ‘in the desert when the ocean of sand stretches out on every side and the great stars globe themselves in the vast, deep-blue dome of the sky, and God seems nearer to man than He possibly can in our crowded cities. “Bless the name of the Lord,” cries Job from the throne of his sorrows and his aching Sores; and the record adds that in all this, in imputing the 22 THE BURDEN OF LIFE sore evils that he felt to the One only power, either by permission or by direct action, Job sinned not with his lips nor charged God foolishly. The fact is that the people who did sin with their lips were just those very high-and- dry comforters who emptied the wind-bags of their solemn nonsense upon Job, and would make out that he was in the wrong, and that they were in the secret of Providence and knew all about it. Unfortunately, hundreds of people read Job, preach upon it and pro- fess to admire it, from whom its true meaning is as hidden as was the djinn hidden from the fisherman when he was sealed up in the leaden casket. If a poor friend of theirs breaks his leg, they go to him and say, “Ah, my friend, this is a visitation, this is a judgment—think of your sins,” etc. Should a person fall in the street, the Reverend Pomposo cries, “I saw how it would be—I told him so.” If the passionate heart of Some young girl breaks through restraint, the comfort offered to the sorrowing parents is a reiteration of some egotist's wisdom. He or she saw how things were going on—what can parents ex- pect who indulge their children ? A sudden JOB's COMFORTERS 23 disease Smites a certain family, and every one tells why. They did not eat vegetables enough, or meat, or they drank beer, or they did not. Just when the hearts of the poor people are opened, and they lift up their voices to cry for love and help, by comes some awkward friend and drops in a ghastly plug of drivel that chokes their utterance and turns their hearts to stone. Of all the troubles—and they are many—that the poor have to put up with, none are worse than the little cut-and-dried sermons of self- elected comforters, who, from the height of a small pile of sovereigns, affect to tell them what to do with their farthings and sixpences, and who never fail to comfort them with a splendid demonstration, as plain as a simple addition sum in chalk on a blackboard, that they are in the wrong, that they brought all this evil on themselves, and that, on the whole, they ought to be delighted that they are not worse off than they are. “Miserable comforters are ye all !” cries Job; and so convinced are we of the truth of the implied condemnation that we find it easy to believe that a multitude of Job's com- forters do more harm to Christianity than 24 THE G BURDEN OF LIFE a dozen preachers of the ignorant atheisms of the day. They turn away the heart at a critical period. They minimise the merit and the troubles of man; they magnify and in- tensify his sins. In all this they wickedly except themselves, and do exactly the opposite of what God does. When He says, “Comfort ye, My people, and turn unto Me; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as Snow,” these over-righteous persons try to curry favour with Heaven by abusing their own kind, for which, according to their own creed, Heaven performed the astounding miracle. In spite of the question, “If ye love not man whom ye have seen, how can ye love God whom ye have not seen 2° they objurgate man as if he were an actual devil. A possible devil he may be, but he is just as often a possible, ay, and an actual angel. There is no use in discounting him or in looking at him as the bad progeny of a clever monkey. He is our brother, and is a noble animal. He is the highest out- come of God's visible power, to whom a sun is a mere mass of incandescent cloud, and a planet a mere inanimated clod. He is the friend of God; he is the creative power JoB's COMFORTERS 25 of the tiller, and the gardener of the earth; he makes the lightning bear his messages, and the very sea to be his servant. And he does this amidst the rudest destiny and the most constant hardships. Man that is born of woman has but a short time to live; his days are few and evil. About twenty years are a long average for his work, and half of those are spent in sleep. Whatever he has he wins. His dress may be purple, but he spins it ; his cups may be of gold, but he digs it from the mine; he sits on an ivory throne, which he has polished, and his crown sparkles with , jewels—but he has learnt to polish and to cut those stones in a way that makes them flash back the light of heaven, and the diamonds glitter with the glory of the stars. He warms his houses—raised with wondrous art, built after an architecture ranged in stately orders, and from which the common mind takes its ideas of heaven—with pre- Adamite coal, which holds the gathered heat of myriads of suns; but he does it at the expense of life, and raises it from the perilous mine. He brings the treasures of the East to the West, and comforts the East with the 26 THE BURDEN OF LIFE exchanged industries of the hardier and more knowing West. He does this at the expense of never-ceasing work, and pays for every comfort with a life. There is not an occu- pation which is not followed by its disease; the pleasant but wearying plying of a pen is as fatal as the business of the sword. Around man, as he works, there are the troubles of climate and the evils of the air. The miser- able Eskimo—a good and patient creature— is blinded by the smoke of his blubber fire in his six months' winter and the glare of the Snow in his long, changeless Summer. In the tropics man can hardly breathe and live, and death descends on him almost instantaneously. In many latitudes miasma and pestilence kill as surely as night hides the day. Two-thirds of man's globe are covered with water, and four-fifths of the remaining space are unfitted for his habita- tion; yet he goes forth as monk, or missionary, or emigrant, and turns the rivers into the arid places and makes the desert a garden. To the evils without him, one must add those in his own bosom. Tyrants enchain him, fools mislead him, wars, troubles, and madness distract him ; miserable superstitions JOB's COMFORTERS 27 blind him ; and, even if he be great, and a king, his enemies are too strong for him, and he perishes. The benefactors of their race, the men who loved most, have been the worst used. In his constant struggle with nature man is perpetually plagued by fools and Job's comforters— “Each with his flickering lamp, Schoolman, philosopher, scamp, Shows you the way you should tramp.” Few remind him of his greatness, and of the celestial power within his reach ; they cover him with the shameful garment of his weak- ness and folly, and never aid him with the promise of his glorious heritage. Is this the way to teach him faith and to bring him to his God 2 THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 0 THE ADVANCEMENT OF WOMEN. “WHEN I See,” writes a Yankee humorist, “one pritty or even good-looking young lady jine the wimmen's rites movement, I'll jine on to the tail of it tu.” He might see more than one now in England—indeed one or two advocates are exceptionally pretty, if excep- tionally silly, and, with “bud mouths” and faces like those of the Angli or English, whom the good Pope Gregory the Great wanted to call angels—non Angli, Sed angeli—debate social questions on platforms and in drawing- rooms, in mixed company, which men talk of only between themselves and in moral dissecting - rooms with closed doors. Nor would this matter much if good were done by it ; but, so far as we can see, the evil grows. Openness of debate is not always an evil, and in Queen Anne's time things were 28 THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 29 talked of and books were read as well as written by women which they would not discuss or look at now—and that is saying a great deal—yet their daughters were chaste and their sons brave, and England, on the whole, produced some fine soldiers, poets, and statesmen—at least as good as those of the rest of the world. The American writer quoted, who wrote many years ago, would find now that the mingling of the sexes in education, the ad- mission of women to colleges and to the right of voting, are questions which have retrograded in his democratic and new country and have advanced in our aristocratic old country. Here we may presume that women's colleges are established, and that there is a hospital— a London hospital—which opens its doors to women-students, and a first-class college— University College, London—which will grant them degrees. The battle, however, has not been won all along the line; and a recent exhibition in a court of law of what an “advanced" woman will say and do, and what a lady-doctor will swear to, together with more than one recent biography, will hardly predispose John Bull, if we know 30 THE BURDEN OF LIFE anything of him, to desire any more such revelations or productions. If the plant comes up like that, is it worth while sowing any more such seed ? And a nation, like a man, does sow its seeds, and very unmistakably, as we see in history, reaps its harvest too. “Sowing the seed of a ling’ring pain, Sowing the seed of a maddened brain, Sowing the seed of a tarnished name, Sowing the seed of eternal shame— What shall the harvest be? Oh, what shall the harvest be '''' What indeed? That is a very serious question for the great mass of good, quiet people, who have to suffer for the sins of the “advanced” people, and who gain neither popularity nor pleasure from the noise they make. There is great comfort, however, to those conservatives who do not wish to see women reformed back into barbarism, in noting that the nature of woman herself forbids anything like a dead lift of the sex into philosophic mannishness. It is plain that woman wants to be man, and that she cannot, and can never succeed; it is equally plain that she might ameliorate her condition amazingly, and enter THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 31 upon a real advancement, and that in the mass she will not do so. This is visible to everybody. A very advanced, clever, and pretty young lady, who had been to college, and who now teaches and lectures other young ladies, visited a philosopher the other day in the country, and was triumphantly cited by the ladies of the family as a proof that woman's battle was won. “On the contrary,” said the philosopher—“it is not begun. Did you notice her dress : " “Yes, it was very pretty, very good, rich, and in the fashion.” “Precisely,” answered the gentleman, “with a band like a bend sinister from the left shoulder to the right foot, cross-wise, and on that band, in rows of three, thickly sown, no fewer than one hundred and ninety-six buttons without a single button-hole ! Here are we, ‘the latest seed of time,' reproducing the tinselled non- sense of Helen of Troy in the pre-historic ages —for Doctor Schliemann in his discovery of Argive tombs in Mycenae swept up dozens of thin round plates, or gold buttons. Now what man, what savage of the male kind who fastens his blanket with a wooden skewer, would, after inventing a button, dispense with the necessary button-hole, or encumber his 32 THE BURDEN OF LIFE * garment with a few dozen of weighty roundels, just because they looked pretty ?” Very much the same argument is taken up by Mr Mattieu Williams, a well-known savant, in his excellent book of travel, Through Norway with Ladies. He pays every compli- ment to the pluck, energy, and strength of English ladies; where they fail, he says, “it is not the natural weakness of woman, but the intolerable incumbrance of her ridiculous costume that cripples her physical energies.” He anticipates Mr Du Maurier's caricature in Punch, wherein two young men, about to play lawn tennis with some ladies, are handi- capped by skirts and shawls fastened round their legs, and hats and feathers stuck on their heads, to make the game fair. “Imagine,” says the learned chemist, “an army thus encumbered attacked by men in manly costume, or even by women in tunics and short skirts | What has been the fate of the petticoated men of the East and other regions of the earth ? They have been run down and overwhelmed by bare-legged barbarians and trousered Anglo-Saxons.” Nor, as we have more than once said in these pages, will it be of any use for woman THE FOLLIES OF FASBITON 33 to discuss her own advancement until she disembarrasses herself. Will she do it 2 Mr Williams seems to think not ; she is still the “abject slave of a crushing, grinding, pul- verising, morally annihilating despotism—that of the obscure, nameless, unknown humbugs who, inspired by the demons of ugliness, draw, paint, print, and publish those hideous cari- catures, those foul libels on the human form divine, those pictorial atrocities which periodi- cally emerge from an unknown somewhere, and represent the Modes de Paris; the worship of this hideous fetish is the principal source of female degradation.” And it is not only so now but it was always so. When Mr Mattieu Williams was young, he says he was an ardent supporter of the widening of the suffrage; but he found that, unless the class demanding it was worthy and in earnest, it was not only useless to extend it, but the demand failed. Now, he asks, is woman really desirous of emancipating herself? Does she really give her attention to her own improvement, or does she now as ever follow this Will-o'-the-wisp, which, we all admit, is neither artistic, nor healthful, nor attractive, nor useful ? These last are our own words— C 34 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and indeed years before this we have asked much the same questions. Women adopt the ridiculous steel-expanded skirts of one day and the bandaged legs of the next ; sometimes a bonnet utterly hides the face, or a Leghorn hat is adopted so large that ladies cannot pass Storey's Gate without taking the article off, or hats are worn posi- tively not upon, but some inches behind the head, and the bonnet is changed into some- thing really to be described as “a bunch of beads and a shoestring.” The hair at one time is plastered over the face, at another is pulled up from the head like a pillow round a frame- work of cane, and brushed back and tied in a button, or it is developed into long ringlets at the side of the face, or into a furze-bush over the forehead, or expanded by frizettes and pads into what the Americans call a waterfall, and we and the French a clubbed horse's tail (chignon). At one time in Queen Anne's day the doors had to be made wider and higher than needs be, because woman took it into her head to wear hoops and tall head-dresses, and no doubt to some extent architecture was modified by it. Sedan chairs were resorted to instead of carriages, and the ...” THE FOLLIES OF FASEIION 35 tops were made to lift up, so that the ladies might enter and sit down without crushing their monstrous head-dresses. After being too wide and too high—for high heels, which lamed the feet and crippled the toes, were in fashion — it was but a natural reaction to become narrow and low. In the close of George III.'s reign women were dressed as now, very tightly indeed, and perhaps less gracefully, for they looked like pillow-cases, and their skirts were so narrow that they had to mind their steps, being quite unable to walk in a natural way—a perfectly flat straw or gipsy hat tied under the chin, or a poke- bonnet, made Small women appear dumpy. Of course this is a mere outline of what was done in the sixty years' reign of George III. There were at least a hundred varieties of fashion. Who can portray her vagaries : She changes to-day, and a few days hence takes up her cast-off clothes. “Fashions that are now called new Have been worn by more than you; Though the new ones have a name, Elder times have worn the same.” If any readers doubt this, let them look ^ N N 36 THE BURDEN OF LIFE through two or three old fashion-books, or, better still, Fairholt's British Costume, Les Costumes de France, or some of Hollar's illustrations of the women of his time. Like all things in this world in the latter days, change gets more rapid. Those wonderfully acute persons who forged the old books, as some will have it, which we certainly have had with us at least sixteen hundred years, spoke of a time when there should be a great hurry and bustle—when, in the latter days, people should run to and fro on the face of the earth, and knowledge should be increased. A knowledge of the fashions of Paris seems to be one portion that is greatly increased. Our changes of fashion quicken each year; in Elizabeth's time, though dress was sometimes ridiculously gorgeous and expensive, it was made to last almost as long as does the dress of a modern Norwegian or Laplander. In the higher and palmier days of Rome's true great- ness, the graceful pallium of the Roman matron never seems to have changed. When Macready at Drury Lane produced Julius Caesar, he nearly created an émeute and revolution amongst the ladies by insisting that they should abandon the then fashionable THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 37 “bustle,” which, as Sam Slick said, was “like a camel's hump in the middle of a woman's back,” and prevented the classic pallium from falling gracefully. The angry tragedian how- ever had his way, and the ladies appeared charming in the proper costume. Were fashion always graceful, its frequent changes might be excused. No one objects to the varieties which the gardeners' art pro- duces in our flower-beds and conservatories. In this case, as says Shakspere, who is wise upon flower-growing as all else, art aids nature, may doth mend it rather, for “the art itself is nature.” But this is not the case with the inartistic art—if it can be called art—of the tailor and milliner. The leaders of fashion, whoever they may be—and it is impossible to say who they are—are certainly not artisti- cally educated. A young queen or the Princess of Wales may become, in some sort, a leader; but either of these, we presume, is dressed by her modiste rather than dresses herself, so we have again to seek the real leaders. Again, either or both may be women of bad taste. One may be tall, and the dresses which adorn her would look very badly on a short woman, and vice versd. This 38 THE BURDEN OF LIFE difficulty might be met by proper distinctions, but ladies have two maxims which apply to all the objections of men. One is that one may as well be out of the world as out of the fashion; another, that they are really obliged to buy what the dressmaker will make and sell them, and that, as to bonnets and hats, they are made by the hundred or thousand, and that therefore it is Hobson's choice with them—that or none. As women reach middle- age or become more sensible, we believe that this tyranny of fashion is a real grief to some few. And this leads to the question, Are women to blame for the follies of fashion ? Can they emancipate themselves from them? If it be a law of nature it will be useless to write against it or rebel against it. And, to clear the way, let us readily own that woman has every right to her beauty, and to cultivate and set off that beauty as much as possible. It is and will be, we presume, until the end of time, her great property, her force, her strength. If she enters a convent, or a re- ligious order in the Church of Rome, she does as the Roman vestal virgins, whose lives and vows she imitates, did, and sacrifices her THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 39 beauty, as she thinks, to God by cutting off her hair and binding up her face. This may be very Pagan and mistaken—and we think it is so—but it is plain that it involves a Sacrifice which she has a right to make, just as she has a right properly to adorn herself. What she should do is to do so wisely and lastingly; a constant change involves a con- stant expense, and, what is worse, a constant devotion of mind to frivolous subjects. The fact that the Roman matrons and the Jewish women at the time of the Judges—for afterwards, with Jezebel and the strange women introduced by the Kings, “they painted their faces and attired their heads and looked out of the window,” after the fashions—were great and good advisers and prophetesses would seem to prove that when emancipated from this ridiculous thraldom woman does really progress. The thraldom is no less bitter and heavy because it is ridiculous than Swift's Gulliver's being loosely bound because he was tied down by thousands of pack-threads instead of a dozen strands of cart-rope. These many little cares eat away all great resolves, and are just as trouble- some. The dandy who gives his mind to his 40 THE BURDEN OF LIFE boots, collars, and trousers does as much as Millais and Tennyson, who give their minds to their art and care little how they dress. Women would certainly grow wiser without such cases; and as certainly, except in the Holy Land, woman has everywhere submitted to the great Juggernaut of fashion or adorn- ment—for the ladies of the upper classes of India, Persia, China, and Japan are as much given to the care of personal adornment as the Parisian, London, or New York belles. Mr Mattieu Williams thinks, as we have shown, with us that a revolution in the fashions, and an abandonment of the follies and fluctuations of dress, should precede the education of the mind, if indeed they would not form a very great and important step to ensure the real advancement of women. It is absurd to suppose that woman would lose any of her attractions by this. She might choose the most attractive and prettiest dress possible, and stick to it or change it if she liked once in two or three years. Men would hardly notice the change, for they look at the women and not at the gowns and ribbons, of which they understand little or nothing. All they know or desire to know is that, THE FOLLIES OF FASHION 41 dressed modestly, to them a girl looks very pretty—and some girls, like Quakeresses, are most fascinating in the ugliest or plainest costumes—indeed all regular-featured girls are so. The first ghost to be laid is that menda- cious spectre that persuades women that they dress to please the men. They dress to please themselves and to outshine other women; and when they have laid this ghost wisely and lastingly they will have made a great advance. CONVENTIONALITY. IN that portion of the globe where two people, meeting, greet each other with the genial process of rubbing their noses together, the proud and the rich are satisfied with giving their poorer brethren a nasal touch; but two old friends will rub their noses on each side, to and fro, like as a butcher sharpens his knife. In our supremely civilised land, Dives, when rather uppish, will not offer his hand to lower acquaintances; and the nobility offer only two fingers to their poor relations. They bow to the custom of what sailors call “tipping the fin;” and, literally, they shake hands as would a fish. We have known great men— very great men, in their own opinion—who afforded us only one finger to shake hands with—an index, in more senses than one, of the esteem in which they held the wondering young fellow whom they patronised. And in the old school we have heard that it was the 42 CONVENTIONALITY 43 custom of such people—gentlefolk, no doubt, but not of the highest school—to wave and waggle their hands at persons whom they cared little for; as much as to say, “Fellow, keep your distance — we are on speaking terms, and that is enough.” As a rule, how- ever, the magical clasp of hand, by which one can tell so much, is conventionally observed all over the civilised world; and in America, where everybody is equal to everybody else, the President stands in his reception-rooms every New Year's day, and shakes hands with all the crowd that streams in—sometimes with two thousand persons in one day— until his arm aches from the thumb to the shoulder-blade. About this custom there is little to be said. As a greeting, hand-shaking is as good as any other—much better than nose-rubbing; for even Abraham Lincoln's nose must have been dislocated at a levee, had that custom pre- vailed in America; and any observant man or woman can generally tell a friend or an enemy by a handshake. People whom one meets suddenly do not put on these masks; and much may be learned by the frigid way in which one is greeted if thought to be a 44 THE BURDEN OF LIFE bore, and the warm way in which a true friend will salute one. We have made this reference to America, because we recently met in an American reading book—a work which can be highly recommended as a whole — two or three sentences which “give us pause.” “True politeness,” we are told, “is not a compli- ance with an arbitrary custom ; ” and “Our common forms of compliment are most of them extravagant hyperboles, such as, ‘Your obedient servant,’ ‘Yours to command,' etc.” What would this pundit say of “Yours very truly,” “Yours faithfully;” of the French, “Yours wholly,” Tout & vous; or the formal “Accept, sir, the assurances of my highest estimation " ? These, indeed, he would say, are hyperbolical. The fact is, they, and a dozen others like them which might be cited, are the ways of the world. How can we avoid them ż We write “Dear Sir” to a man who may be only dear in the sense of being expensive to us, and whom we may charitably wish far away at Wagga - Wagga. We are the obedient servants of our coal merchant or butcher, because it is our duty to be civil and polite— CONVENTIONALITY 45 indeed, to honour all men. We are the “humble servants” of some, and we memori- alise the House of Commons we have elected with a “petition,” which we subscribe, “And your petitioners will ever pray, etc.,” without intending to put up any especial prayers for this honourable assembly. As for the House itself, never was any free corporation—and it is infinitely freer than any Republican House can be—such a stickler for old forms. It is full of conventionalities, and Mr John Bright, the most advanced of all Liberals, is —we respect him for it—the most rigid as to the honour of the House. To sit and take notes, to speak without first catching the Speaker's eye, to break through any form, is something highly wrong. To be called by one's own name, as “Sir Charles Dilke,” instead of the Honourable Member for Chelsea, is a stigma. “Sir,” may say the Speaker, “I will name you!” To call another Member by his name is a dreadful infringement of courtesy; and to us all these conventionalities seem very admirable. They are silken chains that keep persons in order, and are to be regarded, not as fetters, but as ornaments. The military members are “gallant colonels,” 46 THE BURDEN OF LIFE the law members are “learned,” every single representative—Mr Odger, if he should be elected—is “Honourable,” and the highest Tory and most courteous gentleman would be the first to call him so. It would be a sad day for England were these conventionalities passed by ; but there is no likelihood of that, for we are sure that the House of Commons would be the last to give up its proper rights and privileges. The wise men of the world see this, and the lowest citizen is pleased with proper courtesy. If there is one thing that true religion does more than another, it is that it softens asperi- ties. A rude man, coarse in his words and his manners, cannot be called a Christian. Are we not enjoined to love as brethren, to be kind and courteous ! When John Wesley's followers were insisting upon that which their leader afterwards was too good and wise to require, some open unmistakable signs of conversion, a poor man asked one of his “preachers” to tell him in what state he was. “Have you no sign of conversion ?—do you not feel you are saved ?” “No,” said the petitioner, timidly. “Then you are on the road to Hell, and are the child of the Devil,” CONVENTIONALITY 47 said the preacher as he rode away. There was no Christianity in that answer. Let us have a thousand empty conventionalities rather than such brutalities. Of all the signs of degradation in the French mob and in the Commune, the utter forgetfulness of politeness, and the sudden adoption of brutal rudeness, were the most certain and sure. Beaten by the Versaillese, some of the soldiers of the Commune turned and fled. They were led to execution—in itself, perhaps necessary—with their coats turned wrong-side out, and with this detestable label hanging round their necks, “It is permitted to spit in their faces.” And some wretches, amongst them Frenchwomen, availed themselves of the permission. “I have never seen,” wrote a missionary priest, who had been five-and-twenty years in China, “amidst all the barbarian populations, such low and brutal faces as I saw in the crowd that surrounded La Roquette and murdered the hostages.” Poor creatures | They had been taught that licence was liberty, that religion was hypocrisy, that goodness was mere sham, and that government was tyranny. Shall we wonder at their miserable degrada- tion ? 48 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Let us own, then, with all wise men, that conventional politeness is absolutely a virtue, because it is a necessity. “Gentlemen who live together,” says Rochefoucald, “must be polite to each other; ” and Lord Chesterfield follows in the same strain, and in one of his letters gives the following excellent advice to his son: —“Know, then, that as learning, honour, and virtue are absolutely necessary to gain you the esteem and admiration of mankind, polite- ness and good-breeding are equally necessary to make you welcome and agreeable in con- versation and common life. Great talents, such as honour, virtue, learning and parts, are above the generality of the world, “who neither possess them themselves, nor judge of them rightly in others; but all people are judges of the lesser talents, such as civility, affability, and an obliging, agreeable address and manner; because they feel the good effects of them as making society (or life) easy and pleasing.” This is very wisely and admirably expressed; and it is so true that a little reflection will call to mind how much plea- sure an easy and good-natured address always gives, and how much pain is caused by rudeness and boorishness. “Good - natured CONVENTIONALITY 49 politeness,” says a Bishop, “is the best half of Christianity; and certainly he who at the end of life can reflect that he never uttered a rude word, or gave pain to any poor man or woman whom he addressed, would lie more easily than he whose presence was felt because of his sneers, and whose address was remembered because of its cutting sarcasm.” And there are men, and women too, whose tongues seem not to have been made of flesh and blood, but to have been forged like steel swords—only to wound. As some ways of the world are pleasant and useful, so there are some that are silly and hurtful, and others that are curious. How curious are the conventionalities that make Sailors always careless, jovial, and farcical when on shore Of course these peculiarities are exaggerated in fiction, but they exist in reality. Why should artists and (some) authors wear long hair, and generally defy the world's ways? And why should parsons and Dissenting ministers dress in black, and ape each other, the Romish priest being now the favourite pattern, and the Anglican divine and Nonconformist following him, not very far from each other ? Why, again, should a “sister- I) 50 THE BURDEN OF LIFE hood” disfigure itself in its dress? Why should, in the Roman Church, religious people wear as many distinctive uniforms as the army of any emperor alive : In a very curious book, Specimen Monachologiae, we find all the monks described as if they were members of a lower creation. Thus the Dominican is described as “unbearded, head shaven, feet slippered, clothed in tunic of white wool, with reversible hood (cucullo versatili), hands folded, and scenting good wine and heresies from a distance.” The difference given between a layman and a monk is that the former reasons and speaks, the latter jabbers and howls; the former thinks, the latter imitates and follows in circles; the former walks with head erect, the latter with chin to chest, and looks fixed upon the ground. We do not adopt this satire save to ask why uniformity and similarity, the plainest and most unmistakable distinction, should be necessary in a faith which expressly tells us to do all our good works secretly, and to fast as if we did not fast. How is it that conventionality in matters of faith always gets the better of faith ?—that form is like a gold chain, as some great Father said, CONVENTIONALITY 5] but like a gold chain that strangles true religion ? In other walks of life the ways of the world serve her well. Uniform in the Army and Navy does well; and if “the hood does not make the monk,” the uniform really does make the soldier. Conventional piety is very bad; the goodness that is assumed is generally of the most rotten description—as unlike the real thing as can be ; but conventional bravery has more than once stood people in good stead. A celebrated colonel, who had obtained many decorations and a cross of honour, owned that, unless with his regiment and in uniform, he was the biggest coward possible. “Monsieur,” said a French officer under Turenne to his colonel, “why do your legs tremble so ''' “Because,” replied the other, “they know very well into what confounded dangers my heart will carry them.” Rochefoucald has an ex- cellent little chapter — so we may call it, for it is not like his shorter maxims—upon the different sorts of valour—how some had a valour which carried them into action, some had that which did not crop up till the middle of the battle, others that which sustained them at the end of the fight; some 52 THE BURDEN OF LIFE soldiers were good behind walls or ditches, or any shelter, however small; others only brave at charges and open assaults; some feared swords, and some bullets. Few, very few, were brave in the night, or under sudden attacks. But that kind of valour was got by discipline. Rochefoucald was not only an admirable gentleman, a duke of high line- age, but a fine soldier; and what he says agrees with the opinion of the little Corsican lieutenant, who certainly could not be con- sidered of “blue blood.” “Few people,” said Napoleon the Great, “have got what I have got—the two o'clock of the morning valour; I have that, and that is how I con- quered.” He never hesitated on account of modesty, but he spoke truth. He had a splendid valour when in health; when sick, he was timid and blundered : but at the Bridge of Lodi and elsewhere, the two o'clock of the morning courage—that ready for any emergency and enduring through the night —came out strongly. We may concede, then, that there is a certain conventionality in the bravery of soldiers, just as there is in the politeness of shopkeepers. So there is in their brutality. CONVENTIONALITY 53 When held in hand and under control, no one is more subservient, mild, or meek than a good soldier. In peace, whether here or in Paris, Johnny Raw plays with the babies, carries home the washing, and courts the servant girls; but when infuriated, during a siege, or when allowed to have his will, the brutality of the man is something dis- graceful to humanity. In the Birkenhead, the record of the loss of which is as noble as that of the most desperate battle ever fought, the soldiers stood to their arms and went down slowly to their deaths, so that the women and children might be saved. “Present arms ' " the officers saluted with their swords. It was as if they said, “We die for you !” and, from the drummer to the colonel, every man died as firmly as any sainted martyr on the rolls of faith. And yet those same men, in the streets of a town taken by assault, after many of their com- rades had fallen, would have acted like fiends. It was their duty to be good, and they were good at the right time. Con- ventionality does much. Even filibusters, and burglars, and such Swaggering ruffians, are vilely coarse and brutal because it is 54 THE BURDEN of LIFE the fashion with them to be so. Lord Byron has described a silken, polished kind of pirate — - “He was the mildest-mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat;” and Shakspere's Hamlet finds out that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least, I am sure, it may be so in Denmark.” Let us own that, of the two, if the harsh ruffian is the less dangerous, the smooth one is the more pleasant. After being conven- tionally a villain, he might, by force of reason, be persuaded that it was much easier to be good, and that amongst the pleasant ways of the world is the one which it has of esteeming honesty, and making, with all its shortcomings, the ways of goodness honour- able, and the paths of rectitude peaceful. MAKING LOWE. IN spite of a prosaic age, a Court in abnormal retirement, hard times, insolvent banks, abundance of rogues, roughs with a strong hand, professional thieves, law-breakers, and murderers, and ticket-of-leave men out with- out leave, magistrates who imprison children and let rogues go free, certain clergymen who neglect to preach peace and charity, but are happy when the parish is in a turmoil about a pitiful symbol—nonsensical if only a symbol, idolatrous if more ; in spite of New Women who have taken the place of Girls of the Period, and Frisky Matrons, and all the accusations pointed against women in the Saturday Review years ago—yes, and in spite of “fellows” who only like their clubs, and cannot marry on six hundred a year, there is an old custom that will never go out of fashion, and that is love-making and falling in love. It is well that it is so. There is 55 56 THE BURDEN OF LIFE nothing so divine in life as love. Life with- out love is a mere burden, or rather a mere nonentity; unless we love we know nothing that is delightful. We can know that we eat, that fire burns us, that a stone would break our thin skulls; but all the beautiful intuition, the freemasonry of life is gone : without love there is no life. There is perhaps no need of enlarging on the necessity of love, unless we do so on the principle of enforcing good old truths that constantly get obliterated in a time-serving age, and as constantly get resuscitated and made fresh. Its immense use as a force, a purifier, a regenerator, is proved by its universality. It exists everywhere, and by no human means has man been able to crush it. He has done everything he can to do so. He has made woman his slave, degraded her till she has become hideous; he has used her as a beast of burden, as does the noble savage ; he has fattened her like a Christmas prize beast, under the equally mistaken idea of increasing her charms; he has imprisoned her in a seraglio and covered her face with a nose-veil, which allows only the eyes to be seen, while her beautiful form he has MAKING LOVE 57 covered with huge wrappings till she looks like a sack; but he has not killed Love. In other parts he has taken a more cunning way; he has declared that human love is sinful, that it destroys life, that man was created only for the service of God, and that Love must be given only to Him. In that man has succeeded only by diverting the passion from the human to the Divine, and cloisters have echoed with impassioned hymns, in which the Saviour and the Saints have been addressed with the warmth of living and human lovers. Take as an in- stance (for the assertion may probably shock and astonish some of our readers) the life and writings of that passionate Quietest, and, let us here hasten to say, that most excellent and truly pious woman, Madame Guyon, some of whose hymns Cowper has trans- lated. The Divine Idea is addressed with all the warmth and fervour of a human object of passion. It is not sufficient for her that Solomon, in his song of songs, thus makes the Divinity address the Church upon Earth: — “Que vous étes belle, ma bien aimée ; que vous etes belles, vos yeux re- semblent ceux des colombes.” She talks of 58 THE BURDEN OF LIFE “unions et embrassemens divines,” and breaks out into songs as rapturous as those of Béranger on a very ordinary woman : “Ne m'abandonnez pas, mes Soeurs; Fnvironnez-moi de ces pommes Qu' on trouveau jardin de l’époux Ah 1 cachez-moi de tous les hommes, Et que je sois seule avec vous !” This is considerably more like love-making than our mystic English verse—“Stay me with flowers, comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love ; ” but it will serve to show what we mean. Men and women, having love in their hearts, must have it out. There are some who do not feel the passion. The cold in clime are somewhat colder in blood; but yet even in England, in Methodist and Church hymnals, there are passages that can be quoted as full of passionate love-making, which, in the hands of such a writer as the Rev. Sydney Smith, when he wrote his review of Methodism, would have made strongly against them ; and these passages are in the hymn-books of men of whom Sydney says truly, they “are always desirous of making men better than human nature intended them IMAKING IOWE 59 to be, and more religious than it is possible.” When this is tried on, a certain distortion of human nature must occur. Educate a girl above her strength; let her sit up late and get up early, sit upon narrow forms and learn lessons which she does not comprehend, but gets by heart, and you will distort her spine, as well as distort her mind. Let her be natural, cool, wise, work sufficiently, and play sufficiently, eat and drink sufficiently, and she will grow up like a young tree— beautiful, as the old Jew said, with rare poetry, “And the Jews, Heaven has blessed them, and does bless them ; for it loves their children purely and most deeply, as the polished corners of the Temple of God.” The things then to be done in this essay are, first, to lay down, as utterly undeniable, and not wanting in proof– 1. That love is God’s law, and Nature's necessity. 2. That it is His way of replenishing and re-creating the world, and is therefore holy, pure, and right. 3. That following an implanted sense or instinct, it will work itself out, rightly or wrongly, just as a potato will grow, unless 60 THE BURDEN OF LIFE you kill the potato. If you bury the plant at the bottom of the spiral tube or worm of a still, the germ will follow the light, and come up like a cork-screw; nothing will prevent its coming. 4. That, therefore, it is the most manly, wholesome, and honest way to get your love done in the time of love, to be open in mak- ing it, to follow your instinct or affinity, and to submit to the rules of society. There are Some people who sneak to marriage as they would to a pawnbroker's, as if there were something to be ashamed of; whereas, of love everything is so true, so beautiful, and so pleasant, that the only thing one has to do is to be proud of it. The first axiom we will hardly touch upon here, because we have exhausted it above. Why this powerful passion should be im- planted in man, and rarely, if ever, found in other animals, we do not know. Some birds form a temporary attachment to their mates; but as a rule the race of birds, or of beasts, or of fishes, is continued without any feeling of attachment, and without any of that ecstatic perturbation of mind which man experiences. Philosophers have some of them MAKING LOVE 6] rejected the passion. Plato, in his Republic or Ideal Commonwealth, suggested a com- munity of wives, so that all the children of the State should start fair and be equally educated, without any of the harmful results of private and extreme motherly love; but the universal feeling has been that the suggestion has been a blot upon Plato's system; indeed it has been again and again cited as a proof that a philosopher cannot be a governor, and that Plato knew little of the realities of life. Of the second axiom we need say nothing. God's law being to man an inevitable necessity, must be holy, pure, and good. The third is included in the second, and has been argued above, and proved by certain citations. Love will break out everywhere and at any time. Lord Byron says that he fell violently in love at nine years of age. School boys and girls have an analogue of love at very early years. They get fond and jealous of each other. Stabbing, heart-breaking, and suicide have been the consequences. Little girls of eight and nine are not only natural and accom- plished flirts, drawing and attracting men and boys to notice and to pet them, but 62 .THE BURDEN OF LIFE they will talk and babble love nonsense, pet names, and the little language of lovers to their nurses and their dolls. We may, there- fore, pass over and accept our first, second, and third propositions. There remains now only the fourth. This, then, addresses itself to the title, “Making Love.” Can love be made 2 This is the question of Polly in the Beggars' Opera — “Can love be controll’d by advice'. Will Cupid our mothers obey? Though my heart was as frozen as ice At his flame 'twould have melted away.” And so in effect sings poor Polly—“I thought it best to marry and be done with it.” Then cries Mrs Peachum, “All the hopes of our family are gone for ever !” It is the usual cry with mothers and fathers; and Polly's excuse is the excuse of a thousand others—“I did not marry for honour or money, as 'tis the fashion, coolly and deliberately; but I love him.” “Love him!” cries the vulgar mother; “why, 'tis worse and worse. I thought the girl had been better bred 1’ That is, Mrs Peachum is one of those vulgar souls who fancy that in utterly restraining Nature—in MAKING LOVE 63 kicking it out of doors, in fact—lie the wisest behaviour and the most graceful action; whereas they really do lie in controlling it. “Can love be controll’d by advice 2" We think it can ; for it is in itself so noble a passion, and seeks so truly nobility in others, that it would seem almost miraculous if it were deceived. It is sensitive, far-seeing, as quickly to be influenced as a tube of mercury or the sensitive-plant, and, therefore, it is eagerly influenced towards good. What we have often asserted in our essays is true of almost all lovers: they fall in love with an ideal, not with the real man; and it is the awakening to reality that makes too many people so very unhappy. When the golden image turns out to be coarsely-gilt clay, when the ideally brave man is really a coward, then it is that woman feels what misery is; and when man finds not the neat, bright, in- dustrious girl, ready to hang upon his words and to raise herself to his height, but the lazy slattern, lazy in mind and body, unable to give or to communicate pleasure, but jealous and envious of those who do—one who is incapable of placing a generous construction 64 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE on any act, and always ready to put on it a mean and an ignoble one—then indeed is man ready to break out with Milton's Adam into loud lamentation upon man's fate in marriage, to urge that “innumerable disturbances on earth’ come through “this sex.” “For either He never shall find out fit mate but such As some misfortune brings him, or mistake, Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain Through her perverseness, but shall see her gain’d By a far worse; or if the love, withheld By parents, or his happiest choice too late Shall meet, already link'd and wedlock bound.” Milton's own experience added a bitterness to this passionate burst; but it is to be questioned whether a little more quiet per- ception on his part, or certainly on that of his wife, would not have avoided all the misery. The fact which we want to impress upon people is, that marriage is not an accident, but the most important business of life; that, like all businesses, it must be seriously engaged in ; that the common haphazard way of getting “hooked to,” as the Yankees have it, in detestable slang, is the fruitful parent of misery, folly, poverty, drunkenness, MAKING LOVE 65 broken homes, and murders and suicides untold. Two young simpletons fancy they like each other; they meet and talk, and others talk about them ; and then the man fancies that he is bound to marry; and he does so. The majority of men take a wife with less foresight and trouble than they would take a house or buy a horse. This is not complimentary to woman, but it is true. On the side of the man it may be urged that, through the luxuriousness of Society, he has not that strong propulsion towards marriage which he otherwise would have ; and that, if he really be a marrying man, he is never allowed free access to his future wife without being asked his intentions. He seldom sees a young lady au naturel, she is disguised with the sauce piquante of society, trotted out with her show tunes, trots out her show talk, exhibits all her paces, and the man buys. As for woman, she seldom chooses for her- self, which is a pity; for, in reality, the only emancipation women want is the right of choosing husbands, not of merely rejecting offers. As she has a much more delicate perception, an acuter selfishness, and a less worn and more generous appreciation of E 66 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE what is noble and good than man has, she would certainly choose more wisely; while man, being obliged to await in his turn, would become more noble, generous, and better fitted to be the husband and father than he is now. As for the way of making love, which they now have on the stage and in novels, it is contemptible. The Lord Dundreary silliness, the acceptance of love, the mere flirtation without heart and without wit, the pretence that people fall into or are dragged into marriage, and that a man is infinitely to be pitied who takes a wife, is so miserable and pitiable, that it is not worth mentioning, were it not that it is one of the ways of making love. THE CUSTOM OF KISSING. DID Adam kiss Eve in Paradise ? That is a question which the learned Rabbins—to whom, in the old days of Peter Bayle, the widely- -read M. le Clerc referred—and even that solver of all doubts, Thomas Aquinas himself, have hardly settled. Persons who take the world as if it had always been the same, and who think that hot rolls and mince-pies were served up in the Ark, and who, absorbed in the present, forget all progress, quite overlook the fact that kissing is certainly a human invention, and that a great number of people in the world—shall we say half, or content ourselves with a modest quarter ?—never kiss or think of kissing. The hero-heart of the bravest of the brave—Nelson—turned to his friend Captain Hardy as he died, and nearly his last words were, “Kiss me, Hardy.” So, too, Shakspere makes two of his English heroes in battle kiss ere they die—and a great 68 THE BURDEN OF LIFE French painter, in picturing a battlefield, shows “the two friends”—les deua, Omis— lying side by side with a manly arm round an equally manly neck, as if they two had kissed and died, brave brother officers. Othello, after the heroic murder to which his sin-hating soul urged him, finds out how he has been deceived and his noble nature played on, and shows not only his penitence, but abject and sacrificial sorrow for his deed and reverential love for his victim. Creeping up as his life- blood ebbs away, he stammers out over her marble lips, “I kissed thee ere I killed thee! No way but this, killing myself, to die upon a kiss " But these are noble and exalted natures; to them this meeting of the lips symbolises a meeting of souls. There are others who think that there is something base in kissing, or, if not base, weak and unmanly. When Ancient Pistol, Bardolph, and the ragged crew who attend Falstaff are about to depart for the wars, Pistol permits Corporal Nym to take a tender leave of his wife. “Touch her soft mouth, and march,” he says heroically. But the honest corporal is above kissing; he hurries away with “I cannot kiss —that is the humour of it.” Many a boy is THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 69 as ashamed of being kissed by his sisters or mother as was Corporal Nym. Many a courtship passes without a kiss—even without the chaste salute permitted in France, on the cheekbone or corner of the eye. The aborigines of New Zealand and Australia, never kiss—the latter, now dying out, are by far too miserable and brutal to think of doing so. A traveller who had lived for more than fifteen years on the western side and in the interior of Africa never saw a Negro and Negress kiss. They are pictured as very fond and affectionate in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and as kissing with true warmth and gusto, but in their native state “never,” says our authority, “did I see a Negro attempt to kiss a Negress, or show any sign of affection or caress; nor did I ever see a Negro mother caress or kiss her babe.” It was worth undergoing the slavery of the White to progress under his tuition as the Negro race has done. There is in the Corn- hill for March 1876 an account of an Episcopalian Methodist meeting, which shows us the Christianised Negro as worthy to set an example to his White brethren and as an estimable, excellent, and learned man, truly 70 THE BURDEN OF LIFE a “man and a brother;” but he is a very different being from the uncivilised Central African or the Negro from the Gaboon. We need hardly say that the poor frozen-out Patagonians and the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego do not kiss; nor, we presume, do the Eskimos, who can hardly approach each other for their fur wrappings, and whom Sydney Smith talked of as “congealed Laplanders, who had one happy moment in their lives, and that was when they died, and who, therefore, showed a certain alacrity in dying.” Surely kisses are like corn, and do not grow with the blue noses and chapped lips in certain high latitudes. As for the noble Indians whose great achievements lay in Scalp-raising, they were far above kissing, Hiawatha and Campbell's poem notwith- standing. And we have grave doubts, Moore's Lalla Rookh, Phillip's Persian Tales, and Byron's Bride of Abydos notwithstanding, whether a grave Turk indulges in marital kisses. Turks are, we know, contented with a certain form of kissing, of which that eccentric writer, Mr Butler Johnstone, M.P., much approves; but it is of the coolest kind. It is the temenas, or Salute, made by bringing THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 71 the right hand first to the forehead and then to the lips. But it is his own right hand that the Turk kisses or touches with his lips—a form of salute, says Mr Johnstone, “not only graceful, but full of respect and deference for one's neighbour. Compare this with the Frank custom of indiscriminate shaking hands —that odious form of moral corruption, hypocrisy, and inamity from which scarcely a corner of Europe is now free—a form of inanity, because giving the hand has a meaning, inasmuch as it is a pledge, and when no pledge exists it is practical non- sense.” Hardly so. The handshake, which French Ultramontanes also abuse as a sign of liberalism, which is gaining ground in France, is the survival of a very old sign that two warriors meet on equal grounds, the right hands extended and emptied of the sword—at once a sign of peace and fellow- ship. The hatred of Teutonic and Protestant customs peeps out in Mr Butler Johnstone's assurance that the Jesuit Fathers in China told him that the “entire non-success of Protestant missionaries there, and their failure to acquire the slightest influence over the population, were to be attributed solely 72 THE BURDEN OF LIFE to the abominable custom of shaking hands.” They go on to say, what Mr Johnstone even thinks, simple gentleman, that the good people of England may deem an exaggeration, “ that, if ever there should be a massacre of Christians in China, it will be chiefly owing to the introduction and practice of this custom"—not kissing, as by the French, but English hand-shaking. But Mr Johnstone overlooks the fact that there has already been a massacre, and not of English Protes- tants, who were safe, but of French nuns, an abbé, and priests, excellent persons, and true martyrs, but not hand-shakers, and certainly of the Romish Society of Jesus. Miss Weppner, who knew the nuns, relates the story in her recent book of travels. To return to Adam and Eve. If our first parents, as Mr Darwin and the advanced thinkers assert, were anthropoid apes, emerging, not from a Garden of Eden, but from a Paradise of Brutality, the question of kissing is settled once and for ever. Monkeys with no lips can grin and jabber, but they can neither Smile, nor laugh, nor kiss. Those who are on the side of the angels, and believe THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 73 in the far more probable story of the separate creation of man, may refer to Milton's noble poem, as a proof that Adam delighted in kissing Eve. And, as we are surrounded by daily wonders, we may as well listen to the inspirations of a poet as to the wild guesses of a “scientist.” The one is as much a creation of fancy as the other—the second is merely the prosaic creation of a want of faith, while the first is the outpouring of great and noble faith. Of the two extremes, let us choose the better. Milton certainly defends wedlock and its chaste beauty and joy admirably in his picture of the first pair of lover - husband and sweetheart- wife— “He in delight Both of her beauty and submissive charms Smiled with superior love . . . . And pressed her matron lip With kisses pure. Aside the Devil turned For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Eyed them askance.” After this follows that attack upon priestly celibacy which Milton, a learned theologian, was well able to make. It is only the 74 THE BURDEN OF LIFE hypocrites “who austerely talk” against marriage— “I)efaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all. Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain But our destroyer, foe to God and man?” With Milton enforced single life is, as it is with St Paul, a mere “doctrine of devils.” Certainly it has produced some devilish work. How such embraces and sweet-lip service survived the Fall history declares not. If we believe a legend, the austere Romans must have forgotten the connubial kiss, since it is said that the custom of a husband's greeting his wife with a kiss arose from the selfish desire of the suspicious creature to ascertain whether Mrs Martius or Caius or Sextus had been drinking wine, for it was a grave offence, worthy of divorce, to steal the key of the cellar of the absent husband, and to tap one of his amphorae. But, if the Romans—which is doubtful—introduced that mean way of indirectly finding out their wives' misdemeanours, the Jews, an older people, wisely indulged in the custom of kiss- ing; and there are several kinds of kisses to be found chronicled in the Old and New THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 75 Testaments—those of reverence and subjec- tion to a Superior, of love and affection, of spiritual submission and adoration, of idola- trous reverence, of traitorous cunning—as Joab's kiss to Amasa and of Judas's kiss to Christ—of carnality and wickedness, and of holiness. The critical spirit of the world of course interpreted the innocence of kissing in its own way; and it is instructive to note the remarks of Peter Bayle and of Montaigne on the subject. Bayle, who in his critical and Historical Dictionary, delights to fly off at a tangent, and to two lines of text in large type to give half-a-dozen columns of notes in smaller lettering, shows his varied reading and learn- ing on this subject sub voce Puteanus, a German scholar who, having educated a young Italian gentlewoman, wrote to his friend that he would not suffer her to let herself be kissed, for that, he says, “is danger- ous to Italian girls. Our Flemish beauties may do it without hazard; they do not even understand that there are any love-lessons in ogling and kissing; and, for that reason, I have taught her our own tongue and all our customs, except kissing.” Upon this Bayle 76 THE BURDEN OF LIFE appends note upon note, quoting the learned Kempius and his curious treatise De Osculis (upon kisses), in which the learned professor, writing on Temperance—one of the four cardinal virtues — thinks that it includes temperance in kissing. The custom of kiss- ing other persons' wives, widows, and maidens, indulged in in the Low Countries and else- where, he thinks unwise and dangerous. “Why should it be allowed,” he says, “when persons pay one another a formal visit 7” Why, indeed? “Is it,” he asks, “strictly conformable to the laws of chastity ?” Of course it was a very ancient custom ; but the learned Kempius refers to Socrates, who debates everything, and says humorously that, in his opinion, kisses are like the bites of little spiders, which cause strange pains. “By the Gods,” cried Xenophon, “that is to attribute a strange power to kisses | Those creatures spit out their poison when they bite l’ “Certainly,” said Socrates, “I know that very well; but do you think that such love-kisses are not poisonous because you do not see the venom ? Know that a fair woman is a more dangerous animal than a Scorpion, for that can only hurt us when it touches us; THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 77 but beauty wounds us without coming near us.” Poor, beautiful woman She fares little better at the hands of Socrates than at those of Solomon, who, in his collection of Proverbs, has said much the same. It will be instructive to mark that the highest morality and purity in the heathen and the Christian are much the same. Kempius supports Socrates with Seneca, who, it seems, said that “a maiden was accused of impudence because she received a kiss.” How dreadfully careful mankind is in all ages of other people's morality We English, true Teutons and Flemings, were, in our happy innocence, for a long time very free with our kisses. When Erasmus stayed here, the little keen-eyed, humorous observer was delighted with our innocent custom of kissing. He liked Englishmen, their freedom, their generous courtesy, their learned colleges in which he stayed, and especially their countrywomen. He wrote to Faustus, telling him that if he knew what a treat awaited him he would fly over here with wings at his feet if his gout permitted him. “To mention only one pleasure,” he says, “here are nymphs beautiful as angels, lovely 78 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and debonair. Your Muses are not to be compared with them. And they have a custom never sufficiently to be praised. Wherever you go you are welcomed with kisses from them all; when you depart, your farewell is as endearing; return, and you meet with the same welcome. Do they take leave of you, they kiss you; wherever you go you feast on rosy lips; all places you enter are full of kisses; and, had you but tasted how soft, how sweet, how fragrant they are, you would not desire to live like Solon ten years, but till death in England.” Well may Luther call Erasmus a sly fox This custom of kissing is accounted for amongst Northern nations—the Russians and the Greek Church generally give everybody the Paschal kiss on Easter Day — by the superior innocence of the people, or, if you like, their greater coldness. Byron sings out lustily— “The cold in clime are cold in blood— Their love it scarce deserves the name ; But mine was like a lava flood That bursts through Ætna fire and flame.” And where such was the case the kiss was THE CUSTOM OF KISSING 79 Soon banished. It lingered for a long time with us; it was a common greeting in the days of Charles II. and even of Queen Anne, as we can gather from old plays. Perhaps the French Revolution and the greater naughti- ness of manners which led to that outburst did away with the Christian greeting—that holy kiss of peace which had for so long a fitful survival. Between betrothed persons it had a great significance. Half the donations of a man who died before a complete marriage at Naples belonged, says Bayle, to the fiancée if she had given him a kiss, but not unless. Shaking hands superseded kisses, as the round hat superseded the feathered chapeau bas—it was a sign of equality, of liberalism, and of progress. And it was quite as well. Of course there is the nice aspect of kissing, but there is also the nasty one. It was not only hurtful to their modesty—if indeed it was so as a general custom—but very unpleasant to the ladies for them to be obliged to hold up their mouths to every coxcomb who visited them with a couple of footmen behind him, or with a title tacked to his name—for we may be sure that they did not kiss below rank. The tradesman's wife or daughter, on the contrary, 80 THE BURDEN OF LIFE was kissed right and left by everybody who visited her of equal or superior rank—a very unpleasant tyranny surely. Kissing is all very well, as the old lady said who, in the well-known proverb, kissed her cow, but you must like the person you kiss. Indiscriminate kissing, romping, hoydenish and hobbledehoy kissing, is altogether vulgar, foolish, gross, and objectionable. To married persons kisses should be sacred. Shakspere, who always touches the high-water mark of purity and goodness, makes his truest and best husband say that he gives back, after long travel and absence, the kiss his wife gave him, and that his true lip had “virgined it e'er since.” Would that every absent husband could pay a compliment at once as true, beautiful, noble, and enchanting to his wife How thoroughly happy are they who can do so In this chivalrous truth, this preservation of the sanctity of marriage, Virtue is indeed and pre-eminently her own reward. THE WANE OF LOVE. THE use of philosophy, reflection, and educa- tion, is to correct those wild and foolish impulses of Nature which the new school of poets, with Mr Swinburne at its head, would have us obey. That school may be termed the Nature school, and has the great merit of being very distinct. It has power, and will always have power, with the young. It appeals to a very widespread—nay, an almost universal feeling. We are all of us like the sulky boy in the story, who cried out, “I like to do as I like, I do.” We want to enjoy life while we have it, and we take no account of our small capacities, our finite powers, because we entertain infinite desires. It was quite natural, therefore, of the poet to exalt lust into a beatific power, and to declare that man had a full right to liberty and enjoyment. Nay, it was perhaps natural for him to speak to Christ as the “pale F 8] 82 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Galilean” who had poisoned the sources of Pleasure, and at whose breath “the world had grown gray”—to ask Him tauntingly, con- cerning the loves, music, and the pleasures— “More than these wilt Thou give, things fairer than all these things' Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may ? For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.” “Let be,” he cries, like a drunken sailor, half asleep, and ready to perish with the ship; “shall a man not take his ease ? Shall he not enjoy himself?” Very plainly, and very naturally, this school breaks out into an honest protest against the folly and tyranny of hypocrisy, asceticism, sanctitude, ignorant methodism, and that parody of religion which makes life unlovely. It is probably in con- templating such life as this that he cries:— “What ailed us, O gods, to desert you For creeds that refuse and restrain Come down and redeem us from virtue, Our Lady of Pain l’” Here the cry is plain enough. It is virtue THE WANE OF LOVE 83 that is the matter; it is in the way, just as the Roman youth, when they wished to indulge in libertinism, found that Cato the Censor was an unpleasant presence. A little while before, in the same poem, the author is very bold and fluent against restraint : “Love is beautiful,” he says, “but ‘Love is more cruel than Lust,' for no thorns go as deep as the roses”; he then tells us that our joys are ensnaring — “Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.” So that any one can see that between this school and marriage there is a great gulf of dislike. A sweetheart is taken away by time and turned into a “corpse” or a “wife,” either being equally hateful. “Desire,” he says, “is more than the wisdom of years” (Poems and Ballads, p. 184), and worship is to take place “in the twilight, where virtues are vices,” where “the fume of thine incense abounded to sweeten the sin” (ibid., p. 185); so that there really is, in the writings of this school, now much applauded and talked of by young ladies 84 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE with great gusto, no disguise whatever. Sin is to be worshipped because it frees us from restraint [?]. There is a curious, perhaps un- designed, coincidence between the suggestion that this renewed old faith is to be carried on in the “twilight,” and the sacred declaration that certain people love “darkness rather than light,” for their own reasons; and the mourn- ful regret that those whom we desire and love as sweethearts are turned into corpses or wives is so plain that he who runs may read. With this new school, marriage itself is attacked; with its votaries of either sex it must be on the wane. The free or half-free debates which have taken place on these matters have, in certain classes, made marriage distasteful to the male sex. When its restraints were felt as chains, and a “wife’ became as loathsome as a “corpse;” when the young men were advised to “sport with light loves in the portal”— for after all “Hell might be Heaven,” and the “tares” of the Saviour “grain” (Poems and Ballads, p. 195)—it was no wonder that a life of hard duty became dull, and that they seriously asked, “Can we marry on three hundred a year?” i.e. would it not THE WANE OF LOVE 85 be better to spend it on ourselves? At the bottom of all this was a vile selfishness that is to be seen. Following close on it is a worldliness equally to be despised. Marriage, which is not only the regenerator but the purifier of the world, must be hated by the thoroughly selfish worldling, because it re- strains, and because it limits, to some extent, not only unlawful but ordinary freedom. We can understand, therefore, the wane of a desire for marriage everywhere spring- ing up ; and, foolishly enough, this distaste has been intensified by women and the Women's Movement, which last undertook to place woman in direct antagonism to man. Instead of making her more fitted, more able, accomplished, and capable as a wife, woman was to be deprived of what little charm and fitness she had in that way. She was to become, not the queen of the home, but , the professional person—a sort of shop hoyden or factory hand, not very clever even to work the loom which man had invented, and quite out of place at home. Or, as man had perfected printing, she was to become a printer, and return wearied and dazed with ..long hours, hot rooms, and gas, to her home, 86 THE BURDEN OF LIFE to be waited upon by brothers or sisters; or, rising in the scale, she was—heavily weighted by every kind of natural impedi- ment—to Snatch from man the result of his studies in medicine and surgery, and to occupy the advanced posts that he had won. It was not pretended, it is not asserted, that she can surpass man in inventiveness, or in originating anything; and it is undoubtedly true, that in singular instances in the belles- lettres—that is to say, in fiction and some kinds of poetry—and in painting, she equals him. But, as exceptions only prove the rule, it would have been wise to let these exceptions occur and occur again, even more frequently, as they may under the higher education of women, without citing them as a rule to prove that woman is man's equal, and thereupon basing a law to put her in his place. It would, it seems to us, be a singular way to educate a man who must follow only one profession, to teach him the elements of many. A homely proverb tells us that he who is Jack of all trades is master of none; and Englishmen have a very natural dislike to, or rather a suspicion of, people THE WANE OF LOVE 87 who are “too clever by half.” If we look to politics, art, or literature, we can count upon our fingers in a few seconds ten or twenty instances of men who have not fully succeeded in life because they were fairly successful in so many branches. The man who paints a little, acts a little, draws a little, understands a little of a dozen lan- guages, hunts, shoots, dances, plays at billiards, reads or declaims, likes cricket, croquet, boating, and sings a good song, may be a very pleasant fellow, an amusing companion, and all that is sociable; but he is not likely to be chosen as the guide, philosopher, and friend of thinking persons upon important matters. When these varied accomplishments meet in a woman, we are by no means sure that they enhance her value in the eyes of man. As a rule, women who are so very clever are not thought to be pleasant companions. Some persons say that men dread a clever woman, and that they like pretended inno- cence; they love “dolls,” and do not want to be guided by a wife who knows too much. Hence, according to Mr Thackeray, all women are hypocrites, because they find it to their 88 THE BURDEN OF LIFE advantage to pretend to know less than they really do know. We think that this is very untrue, and, amongst all the unjust things which have been said against man, that this is one. We can easily see what sort of woman the best men admire, since they have left us their ideals; and we may rest assured that ordinary men love just the same patterns, only a little less perfect. No one will pretend that the women of Scripture or the heroines of Shak- spere are fools. The modern ideal lady is said to be as brave and constant, as she is pretty and graceful. All that man really seeks is his full supplement, his “dearer and his better half.” He has a great and innate belief in the goodness of woman. He loves to listen to her conversation ; he believes in her guilelessness and her innocence. As a son and a brother, he has a firm belief in his mother and sister. He likes to be advised and guided by them. As a husband, it would be absurd to affect belief that he dares not cherish and love his wife. There is such a word as “henpecked,” and such an adjective as “uxorious;" and a very large percentage of English and German husbands—and other THE wane OF LovE 89 nationalities no doubt may be included— may be classed as under the control of their wives. This is quite natural, and indeed inevitable. The more sensible mind of the two bears its sway, and has its way. When, therefore, an antagonism between the sexes is fostered on one side by the fleshly School of poetry, because it desires to make a woman a plaything, and on the other by those who wish to displace woman from that which centuries of experience has proved to be her proper sphere, we may foretell, how much soever we may lament it, some decrease in the true affection which is the bond of union between the sexes. The probability is that this will be but temporary; but unfortun- ately these temporary displacements in the balance of the world carry much evil in their train. j There is yet another aspect in which the wane of love in marriage is to be looked at, which is more widespread, and perhaps more sinful in its results. It is that which will occur, and has occurred, in all societies, and which, depending upon individual cases, can- not be cured by any movement of society. There is a time of life in which single men 90 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and women feel most acutely the burden of celibacy, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five—when they awaken to their own loneliness, their want of sympathy with others, and the want of love in others towards them- selves. There is also a desire of building up a home, the proper wish to be the head of a family, the natural and irrepressible longing for paternity. Even the empty selfishness of modern society, the coxcombical pretence which affects to view every duty as a burden and a bore, cannot annihilate such feelings. There they are, and there they will remain until the world's end. Fashion and folly may be strong, but Nature is stronger. A parallel feeling with this dissatisfaction at loneliness, and almost antithetical to it, is a certain distaste for marriage which occurs with many couples after they have been a few years married, and when the novelty of their position has worn off. As the Roman Catholic priest is content with the romance of religion, the power of his Church, and the belief that he has devoted his life to a noble system which battles against the world while it alleviates the ills of life, so the young married couple are delighted with the novelty THE WANE OF LOVE 91 of their position, with their new house and furniture, and the accession to the full duties of citizenship during the early years of wedlock. But as the priest awakes to the emptiness of his position, and perceives that his cure abounds with trials and troubles, that his words are not listened to nor his example followed, and hungers in his lonely house for the companionship of a wife and the love of children, so man or wife awakens, or perhaps both awaken, to the reality of being wedded to uncongenial mates: they are mated, not matched; soul does not answer unto soul, nor heart to heart. The generous is tied down to the sordid; she who would soar is given for life to him who grovels; the faithful soul marries a spirit which is sceptical, the noble is wedded to the ignoble, and the faults which politeness concealed, or passion was blind to, stand out one by one in their native ugliness. Then it is that married people indulge in that fatal fault of becoming critical upon each other. The very word is a warning. A judge—and a critic is one who judges— must banish all love, and love is essential to married happiness. The ancients were not 92 THE BURDEN OF LIFE wrong in picturing Cupid as blind. Immedi- ately he pulls off his bandages he is found to have very sharp eyes; and then it is that Eros—love or desire—flies, and Anteros takes his place. As we have before said, men and women, when they do feel love, love not a reality, but an ideal; and, as a rule, truth or reality in human nature is not very beautiful to look upon. This wane of love in married life is very seldom equal on both sides. The wife, as having quicker perceptions, per- haps, soonest awakens from her day-dream. If the husband is a man of talent, he may be the first. “I awoke,” said Lord Byron, “from an ugly dream, to find myself married l’” That sentence was never written by a lover. Tennyson pictures an awakening of a wife who does not love, listening to the rain upon the roof, and watching the long shadows on the wall, while the husband lying by her side snorts with stertorous breathing— “Like a dog he hunts in dreams.” Can there be a picture of more blank and desolate misery : It is only equalled by that of a husband, whose love has died out, THE WANE OF LOVE 93 trying to fan the flame, and to rekindle the ashes of a lost love. It is curious that this essay, which was begun some little time back, should be finished just as one of the saddest examples of the results of this dying out of love should be given to the world. The Rev. J. Selby Watson, M.A., has been reprieved from the gallows, but sentenced to penal servitude for life, for the murder of his wife, a lady whom he had long loved, and his letters proposing marriage to whom were read, to prove how admirably and honourably the poor scholar had acted. This gentleman left on his study table a scrap of Latin, evidently referring to his unhappy life:– “Saºpe olim amanti, semper amare nocet’ “To one who erst has loved, 'tis baneful to love on ; ” or, in perhaps plainer prose, “Often, to one who loved a long time ago, to continue to love has proved hurtful.” By this the poor scholar intimated, as he confessed at the trial, into what terrible passion he was driven by a wife who doubtless, hardly sympathised with his position, his troubles, and his trials; and yet this couple so well concealed their differ- 94. THE BURDEN OF LIFE ences, that a servant who had lived with them for years never knew of their once openly quarrelling. But the wane of love had begun, and had continued, and married life was a torment. In one of Webster's fine plays a character defines marriage to be as with those who deny purgatory— “'Tis either heaven or hell—there's no third place in it;” and, when love has departed, it is indeed a hell. There is some comfort that with men and women of sense such a wane of love need not take place. The service of the Church of England has not only the most holy and sublime form for the solemnization of marriage, but it has in that service the most admirable and wise homily upon keeping marriage happy and pure that ever was written. The man and woman take each other “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part ;” or, in the woman's vows, to love, cherish, and to obey. There are others equally wise to be found there. Let the married act according to the spirit of that THE WANE OF LOVE 95 noble service, and their marriage will indeed be heaven, a oneness of life on earth, leading to a far better companionship in the next world. As for the “critical spirit,” if ever that comes into the house by the door, break its neck, and throw it out of windows. Criticise Government, your neighbours, even your friends, if you must criticise—but your wife or husband, if you are wise, never, THE CEREMONY AND THE RITE OF MARRIAGE. “OF all actions of Man's Life,” says Selden, not so wise even in his day in this saying as in others, “his Marriage does least concern other people, yet of all actions of our life 'tis most meddled with by other People.” " Now it is our purpose merely to indulge in a pleasant anecdotal talk concerning the English ceremony and rite of Christian Marriage, so we will not turn aside to dis- pute with the learned Selden, the glory of the English nation as he truly was. But we must disabuse the popular mind of a prejudice. The meddlers who will interfere if they can in every action of a man's life, who will insist upon his drinking water when he soberly enough desires wine, on his eating bread and carrots when he wishes for flesh meat, on his -º-º-ºr * * * * Table Talk, 1st ed., 1689, CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 97 wearing a chimney-pot hat when he prefers a sensible soft felt slouch hat, and so on, make themselves very busy with marriage. So do our relations; and, thus far, Selden is right. When Tom marries, his affectionate brother Jack is highly indignant, because his (Tom's) wife does not please Jack. Tom did not marry to please Jack, but to please himself; and Jack's interference is deemed intrusive and impertinent. Yet Jack would have a ready answer for anyone who should upbraid him ; why, he would ask, should he not be concerned in what is of such vital importance to his brother ? In other respects, too, a man's marriage is an event of great moment to other people. Shakspere, so wonderful in his insight, touches upon this topic in Hamlet's harsh affected madness towards Ophelia—“Get thee to a Nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” When Selden lived, England maintained about six millions, and huge portions of the land were untilled though fertile; now we have upwards of thirty millions, and it is a momentous question what mouths we have brought into the world to swallow up the available food. “Least concerns other G 98 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE people,” quoth Selden; most concerns other people, say we tax-payers. Here you and we shall be taxed to educate and to keep in order, or to furnish with the means of emigrating, any number of hungry young citizens who are brought into the world by fathers and mothers who frequently are but boys and girls, and really cannot take upon themselves the responsibilities of bringing up their own children. Look over London, and as you mark the enormous number of its orphan asylums and other charities for chil- dren, consider how much better all would be with our starving and crowded population if a little care and foresight, a little more continence and chastity, a little more honest looking to the end, were practised amongst our labouring classes. In Prussia, a wise and a very populous nation, a man is not allowed to marry until he is twenty-two, and can look forward with confidence to being able to maintain a wife and a family. So far so good. We are such advocates for marriage that we would tax bachelors heavily; but we would tax more heavily, nay, we would separate and punish, two young people who from bad health, deformity, misery, poverty, and CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 99 disease, could raise only a progeny of beggars. In Ireland, in consequence of the State's not paying the Roman Catholic priesthood, the livelihood of that priesthood depended chiefly on marriage and christening fees. Hence the women were tutored into being the chastest in Europe, and the men into seeking very early marriages. The result of this was, that in 1848, before the famine and emigration, Ireland had a population of eight millions of souls, or about four millions more than the land can support, exhausted as it is by want of proper manure, and by driving property and capital out of the kingdom. The popula- tion, with its increase, is now about five millions; so that within that time, counting for increase and decrease, certainly six millions of human beings must have been improved off the face of the earth by famine, low fever, hunger, disease, or something like it. It would be madness to accuse either the rich people or the Government of this result. A man who will marry before he can decently and honestly support his wife is the worst of rogues. Mark what the Fool says in “Lear” about this. Undertaking duties he cannot perform, his whole life becomes a miserable 100 THE BURDEN OF LIFE * * > © struggle; marriage, instead of a blessing, is a galling tyranny, and the epigram upon the misery of the married Adam becomes not an ill-natured satire but a truth: “Whilst Adam slept, Eve from his side arose; And his first sleep became his last repose.” Otherwise, properly undertaken, marriage is itself a holy state, full of comfort and consola- tion, the stability of nations, the safeguard of society, the parallel on Earth of the Church in Heaven, the refresher and peopler of king- doms, the reservoir of Saints, soldiers, and wise men; for from a holy marriage these are born. Does anyone imagine that from the unhallowed matches of the kennel and the gutter spring great men, teachers, poets, sages, and leaders of nations ? From poor men—ofttimes from very poor families—do our great men arise, but not from the waifs and strays, the derelict, the diseased, the un- canny, and the dolts of the human race. Marriage therefore, is holy, and its cere- monies and observances should be holy and decent, too. All good men have thought so, and never given their hands, and their hearts with them, without a reference to God. In • * * , sº * & - º + º C. * , tº- CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 101 all nations and in all times this has been the rule; and indeed it is almost only in Christian Britain, and of course America, that society has allowed two people to run into a ten- foot-square office, and there, by means of a mumble of three minutes, before an old official—sometimes a stupid one—a printed form, and an inkstand, make two selves into one self—man and wife However, the vast and overwhelming majority of men and, more especially, of women (God bless them for it !), prefer being married in the Established Church to the maimed rites of the dissenters' chapel, or the contemptible and unholy per- formance of the registrar. It will not be out of place, then, if we endeavour to explain the raison d'être and the peculiar beauty and excellence of our Church service. Herein the wise Selden tells us, “If you would know how the Church of England serves God, go to the Common Prayer-Book, and consult not this or that man.” It is by the offices in this book that at least three out of four marriages of the whole number are made ; and of the other fourth, the Roman Catholic offices are so similar to ours—ours being naturally derived from the primitive, through the Roman, 102 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Church—that what we say will concern nearly all. In the earliest Christian times—seeing that Christ Himself sat at a marriage feast, and blessed it with His presence and an abundant miracle, furnishing to a great village feast (to which no doubt almost the whole district was bidden) no less than 170 gallons of pure and most excellent wine—in the earliest Christian times marriage was a holy ceremony. Ter- tullian (3rd century) tells us that in his time marriages were published in the church before they were solemnized. This is the proper way; and it is now, we are happy to say, fashionable ; for any Jack and Jill can be married by licence; whereas it implies that you are respectable and known people, and of fixed parentage, to be asked thrice, being “of this parish.” The banns — a curious word—is from the barbarous Latin bannum, an edict. The old phrase was interrogore banna, to consult the edicts, translated by us into the “asking :” hence people say, “So-and- so has been asked in church.” This being done publicly and before the Church, i.e. the Christian congregation, the woman was pro- tected from being deceived ; the status of the CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 103 man was pretty well known. It was not done in a corner, nec sine trind denuntiatione publică in ecclesiá, nor without three open declarations in church. After thus openly and in the daylight announcing their purpose, people could be married at any time of the day. But the parsons, to get more money, instituted a licence; and at one time, not more than a hundred years ago or so, there were unfrocked parsons who would marry any one in a tavern in Fleet Street after dinner, when the bride- groom was drunk, and the bride was drugged, if she had money and was to be decoyed. Hence, by Act of Parliament, marriages were rightly directed to be solemnized before twelve o'clock in the day. Formerly, it would seem, the man and woman about to be married stood before the church door. Thus, in the Manual of Sarum we find the words “Statuantur vir et mºulier ante ostium ecclesiae, coram Deo, et Sacerdote, et populo" (Let them be placed before the church door, in the presence of God, the priest, and the people). After the Reformation their position seems to have been altered to the body of the church, and it is now the custom (whence 104 THE BURDEN OF LIFE commencing we know not) that the married couple shall stand before the communion-table in the chancel, the most sacred place in the building. In the 45th Psalm, 10th verse (Prayer-Book translation), it is said—“Upon thy right hand did stand the Queen in a vesture of gold.” Hence with the Jews for many centuries—even down to the present day—the woman stands at the right hand of the man, and is accompanied by one parent who gives her away, her father, or some one deputed for him. This person in the Middle Ages was called the para- nymphus, and he, or his representative, the father, takes the same place with us. Amongst all peoples, especially amongst the Jews, Greeks, and Romans, a crowd of people accompanied the bride and bridegroom to the altar, singing epithalamia or bridal songs, some of them of a character that would not be tolerated at present. At the altar with us—which some snobs, as Mr Thackeray has it, call the “Highmenial Haltar,” but which has nothing to do with Hymen, a heathen god—the woman stands at the left hand of the man, to be symbolically, it is supposed, closer to his heart. The first CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 105 part of the ceremony is called the espousals, and may be made very beautiful and picturesque, especially if people will act naturally, and not like Mr Lilly vick and his stagy wife, who walks up the church with tragic mien and a stride like Lady Macbeth. The man is furnished with a ring of gold, the only remains of the gifts presented to the wife by the Romans, as a sign that she was made the queen of the home. When before the altar, the clergyman, priest, or minister, addresses those present with a short and admirable homily on the duties, nature, and office of marriage, which is not to be under- taken lightly. He urges those present, for the last time, if they know any just cause or impediment why the couple should not be married, now to declare it, or for ever to hold their peace. Much of this is in the Sarum Manual : “Si quis ea: vobis sciot, dºc., modo confitedtur.” Then comes a lesson upon what marriage is for, “instituted of God in the time of Man's innocency” (Gen. ii. 18); “Signifying to us the mystical union that there is between Christ and His Church’ (Eph. v. 22, 23); “Commended by St. Paul as honourable in all ” (Heb. xiii. 4). In plain, 106 THE BURDEN of LIFE unmistakable language, as before men and Women, not children, it defines causes and duties. - • Next comes the declaration, also from the Manual of Sarum, where the words are in English, although the service of the Romish Church is, as we think, very unwisely, in Latin. However, that this should be “under- standed by the common people,” and there should be no mistake about it, the Anglicans at a very early date put it in the spoken or “vulgar" tongue; and here it is, to be compared with our vows of the present day : “I, N (nomen, the name of the man), take thee, N (the name of the woman), to be my wedded wyf, to have and to holde, fro this day forwarde, for bettere for wors, for richere for porere : in sykenesse and in hele : till deathe us deporte ; and there to I plight thee my trouthe.” Meanwhile, the man with his right hand holds the woman with her right hand, she consenting. The reading now is (but we scarcely know whether it be an improvement or a corruption, being rather inclined to the old form) “till death us do part,” which CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 107 differs in essential meaning from “deathe us departe.” As a proof of the equality of the sexes, and the freedom of woman in this contract—which some very advanced ladies declare to be a bondage to woman—after the man has made his vow he lets go the woman's hand, and she takes his, repeating in the Sarum. Manual a form somewhat different from ours, and vowing a fit and holy, indeed a good-natured obedience. “I, N, take thee N (this is now altered to N and M, which hardly admits of explanation. M may stand for mulier, a woman ; but, un- fortunately, it is the man who is addressed as M. Some people suggest N and M, Nicholas and Mary, the two most common English names) to be my husbonde, to have and to holde, fro this day forwarde, for bettere for wers, for richere for porere ; in Sykenesse and in hele: to be bonere (bonnaire, good- humoured) and buxom in bedde and at borde, tyll dethe us departe; if Holy Chyrche it wol ordeyne, and thereto I plight thee my trouthe.” Troth and truth are the same words; departe (really to separate) occurs again, and this was altered in the Savoy conference of 108 THE BURDEN OF LIFE 1662 to please the Dissenters, who were then all married in churches. The man then, taking the woman by the hand, gave her a ring. Now we place the ring upon the book, whence it is given to the woman ; then the priest takes the ring and delivers it to the man, who places it on the fourth finger of the woman's left hand, saying, “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship,” &c. The first clause, says a writer, very concisely promises fidelity; the second, personal honour and respect, which every man owes to his wife; the third, equality in estate and maintenance. I thee wed; wed means pledge, and worship, in Saxon wearthscype, means worthiness: hence, we call a magis- trate, your worship; it denotes generally, as used in our version of the Bible (Luke xiv. 10), to honour. The word as it stands has been constantly objected to by those who do not understand it ; and it might perhaps be fairly altered. In 1661, the Dissenters strongly objected to it, and the bishops promised to alter it, but somehow omitted to do so. The objection is that the word “worship” is detailed to signify adoration to God. So Lord (and in Latin 'tis the same, CEREMONY AND RITE OF MARRIAGE 109 Dominus) is used for God, and for a Lord Mayor or any other master. With the ring the man gave, as far down as Edward VI.'s time, gold and silver with the espousals, as symbols of endowment. After this the marriage is complete; but there follows many an admirable counsel and holy prayer. The Sarum Manual gives a curious reason why the ring should be on the fourth finger of the left hand which is pretty, if now exploded: “With this rynge I thee wed, and this gold and silver I thee give,” &c.; “with all my wordly cathel I thee endowe; ” then in Latin there follow these directions: “Then the groom shall put the ring on the thumb of the bride, saying ‘In the name of the Father;’ next on the second finger, saying ‘In the name of the Son;' then on the third, saying ‘In the name of the Holy Ghost;’ then on the fourth, saying “Amen.” There he shall leave the ring, because in physic there is a certain vein which proceeds thence to the heart (quadom vena procedens usque ad cor).” There are other symbols in the veiling of the bride, &c., which have degenerated into a milliner's fashion; but we have said enough to show that marriage is no mere civil contract, such I 10 THE BURDEN OF LIFE as hiring a servant or taking a house ; on the contrary, that it is a mystical and constitutive and creative union, whereby a new state and relation are entered into, somewhat of a Sacrament, and never lightly or carelessly to be undertaken. THE WOMEN'S WAR. WHILE the world wonders at the atrocities of the Turks perpetrated on the Bulgarians— people “very much like the English,” exceed- ingly attached to their wives and children, fond of Sunday-schools, by the way, and of building school-houses, and of rearing teachers, who are there proficient—while the world wonders and grieves at the apathy of Eng- land, and sees, in a cruel, brutal, but terribly indubitable and questionless manner, the supremacy of Man vindicated—we are called by some ladies to go over the now stale arguments for the equality of Woman. And, in referring to the atrocities of armed Turks and Circassians, or of the Turkish or Moslem villagers—who, as is more probable, formed into a rude militia, are the authors of these crimes—as one of the proofs of the actual and undoubted ruder strength of man, we are quite aware of the imputation under Ill 112 THE BURDEN OF DIFE which we shall lie. We shall be told that we are the advocates of brute force. To which we shall reply, with Mr Bounderby, that “what we want is facts.” It is of no use arguing with an eighty-ton gun. When one is reasoning upon a matter, one goes to the concrete. The question is, Can woman hold her own against a man 2 The partner- ship must be in some measure dissolved if she is to be his rival. Force is certainly a factor or a figure in the sum, just as beauty is; in fact, the very beauty of woman, her delicacy of feature and form, her ability to expand and to blossom into loveliness, have been created by the force of man. Where man has not force or strength, he is just as brutal and more dully and stupidly cruel than women say man is at the best, and woman is in a degree worse and weaker, and “as ugly as sin.” The feminine drudges of Patagonia and the squaws of the Apaches and the Sioux are worn and made frightful by the severity of the weather no less than that of their husbands, and fall before the Superior strength of man into worse than bond-slaves and con- cubines, just because the men are not strong enough to find a way out of their barbarism. THE WOMEN’s WAR II 3 It is certain that the women of barbarous nations put forward no claim to do the hunting, or to spend long nights in frost and snow on the war-trail; but when, by preaching of Christianity, or the impact of civilisation, such nations have been raised to the level of England and America, the probability is that we shall have a squaw squalling for Women's Rights—i.e. for woman to fill the place of man—just as we have the ridiculous vision in the “States”—that country of extremes— of Negro ladies (?) occupying the platform of Mrs Victoria Woodhull, and claiming for woman all the supposed delights which God's commandments forbid, and which the wisest and best of saints know to be the destruction of the soul in the next world, as well as the fruitful source of what —to use Solomon's words—is “rottenness of the bones” in this. Still, if any benefit were to be conferred on humanity by the change of place and of sex which women—very few women, cer- tainly not more than a very small decimal of one per cent. of women—demand, we and others would at once advocate it. Fiat justitia ruat colum / But, since the facts are these, that, if you educate a thousand young H 114 THE BURDEN OF LIFE women as doctors, you displace a thousand young men, with probably seven hundred wives and two thousand one hundred children whom they would maintain, merely to get a thousand rather inferior for a thousand fairly efficient doctors, we may be excused for not seeing “the force of the argument.” We cannot look at things as Miss Becker does, with one eye wide open to what women selfishly think will benefit themselves, and the other eye shut to reason, progress, know- ledge, and fairness. Ask doctors' wives what they think of medical women ; And it is not argued that the woman practitioner will excel the man. That at least cannot be. Whether as waitress or as poetess and paintress—if we may coin a word — although there are admirable single exceptions, woman, as a rule, does not equal man. The person who says that woman excels man simply tells what one must call—there is no other name for it— a lie, and a very patent lie. As we repeat for the tenth time, women, who are univer- sally more educated than men, and more generally educated than men as cooks and musicians, always play a poor second or third fiddle as cook or musician. We need hardly THE WOMEN’s WAR 1 15 say that when man enters into competition with woman as a tailor or seamster he entirely beats her. No woman can make a riding-habit like a tailor. It is no fault of hers and no virtue in him. A horse of sixteen hands—with equal spirit—must beat the horse of twelve hands high, just as a sixty-inch bicycle, equally well ridden, must exceed in speed one of fifty inches diameter. You cannot argue against arithmetic or mathematics. One must not quarrel with demonstrable facts. With these preliminary cautions, we lay before our readers some very well-written observations entirely on the other side which have been sent to us by an advocate of Women's Rights, one whose name is well known and whose pen is continually exercised in defence of Woman and in attack of Man. This lady does not hesitate to put forward not the mental, but the bodily strength of women as a proof that they are the equal of men, in reply to an assertion of ours which we should think contains a self-evident fact. “In Savage natures,” we say, “where the want of educa- tion in both sexes puts them more on a par, the males are more forceful and intelligent.” 116 THE BURDEN OF LIFE As a proof that this is not wholly true—and few general assertions can be true all round— this lady-writer refers us to Canon Kingsley's Christmas in the West Indies—and we very gladly give the words, begging our readers to weigh well and consider their value. “The Negro women,” says Kingsley, “are without doubt on a more thorough equality with the men than the women of any white race. The causes, I believe, are two. In the first place, there is less difference between the sexes in mere physical strength and courage; and, watching the average Negress, one can well believe the stories of those terrible Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey, whose boast it is that they are no longer women, but men. There is no doubt that in case of a rebellion the black women of the West Indies would be as formidable, cutlass in hand, as the men. The other cause is the exceeding ease with which, not merely food, but gay clothes and ornaments, can be pro- cured by light labour. The Negro woman has no need to marry and make herself the slave of a man in order to get a home and subsistence. Independent she is for good and evil, and independent she takes care to THE WOMEN’s WAR 117 remain.” Again, our authoress says—“At the banquet given by the Lord Mayor on March 30, 1874, Sir Garnet Wolseley said, ‘The ladies here will be pleased to hear that the women were better than the men. When I first read that the King of Dahomey had female warriors, I was amused ; but I can fully appreciate his feelings now, and consider he showed great wisdom in choosing women instead of men.’” Our authoress also adds that “all through the Ashantee War we read of the superiority of the women to the men.” Yes, but that superiority was in the docility which made them excellent camp-followers and good porters and carriers. The Ashantee warriors might have taken a widely different view from this. And, again, how about the deterioration of the males where the females of a race are put forward to do hard work : This should be considered or else we shall be landed in the difficulty that in seeking to do a problematical and indeed a very questionable good we perpetrate a real evil. But we are not disposed to take the dictum of the benevolent Canon in the way it is represented, and in which surely he never meant it to be taken. He speaks of I 18 THE BURDEN OF LIFE the “slaves of men,” meaning their wives. Was that his reading of the ordinary Briton's wife 2 The most chivalric of men, he had formed the highest ideal of a true lady, and would hardly wish to see her degraded to the posi- tion of a Jamaica Negress, herself an excep- tional product of a very exceptional Act, or two Acts—primarily, that relating to the Slave Trade ; secondly, the Emancipation Act. It was hardly worth while to ruin a colony in order to make the women of the Negro race independent of the men, and able easily to buy the only two things upon which they had set their minds, food and gay clothes. Every one remembers Mr Carlyle's picture of Quashee—who will not work— living upon the few cereals and the plentiful pumpkins which the soil will produce if tickled by a hoe, because the seeds have been left there by the white man's labour. And here again we find the alleged superiority of the Negress purchased at the deterioration of the Negro. It is scarcely possible, we believe, to exaggerate the laziness, raggedness, and general vice of the Negro of Jamaica. It is hardly worth while, again we say, to ruin the THE WOMEN'S WAR 119 men, to make them step down from the angelic stature of Mrs Stowe's Uncle Tom to the degraded “deviltry,” as Mr Josh Billings would term it, of the present black holders of some of the West India Islands, merely to produce Amazonian women, who would be “formidable, cutlass in hand.” That we can quite believe. If our opponent will read some of the histories of Hayti, she will learn how formidable the women were to their poor French victims; and, if she wishes to parallel the cruelties of the Negroes, she will have to search amongst the stories of border-raids and massacres, where the squaws of the Red-men looked with a wild delight on the tortures inflicted by themselves and their husbands on the whites. She may vary this proof of equality with, or superiority to, the males by recalling the gentle offices done to the naked bodies of the Swiss guards by the Dames de la Halle in the French Revolution, and the gay festivities of the Tricoteuses and the Crocheuses of the same period. The fact is that in following us to the savage women our opponent has gone too far, she proves too much ; and, moreover, the step is one backwards. We do not want that ; we 120 THE BURDEN OF LIFE object to reduce the woman to the wild creature who can spear the otter and prepare the train-oil and blubber-lamp of the Esqui- maux, and who plumes herself on an equality of misery and degradation. Argue as long as you like, you will not plane away a fact with sharp words; that fact is that brutal man, by his religion and his chivalry—matters in which women had no hand—has elevated woman to the highest point of honourable precedence accorded to the weaker and more delicate : that in doing so he has reaped the reward of the good and generous, and has marvellously improved woman, who in her turn has risen to the height of the great argument, and improved her joint ruler and brother. A step backwards to antagonism with man, to a rude scramble for the loaves and fishes, is simply to be dreaded, and by women more than men; for we can tell the sex that if the struggle becomes earnest they will not win. Lastly, we repudiate Kingsley's assertion that women are “obliged to marry for a subsistence.” The lady who argues with us at once adopts this, and falls into a trap. If it be a fact, what becomes of love, honour, the THE WOMEN’s WAR 121 bloom of young desire, the purple light of love? What becomes of chastity ? The man you marry you love or you do not love. If you do not love him, you sell yourselves, as Doctor Johnson says, for three meals a day and a bed at night. The price is simply larger; but you become a hireling. That some marriages are unhappy does not prove that women are forced to marry. The marriages of heiresses and of women with money, who are not so “forced,” are proverbially more unhappy than those of girls who, like the wife of the Vicar of Wakefield, have nothing but health, good looks, and goodness to recommend them. The way to get a happy, good, and contented wife is said in a homely proverb to take one with nothing but clean linen and strict virtue. Women are forced to marry through the two vices of their sex—laziness and love of finery. As for Sir Garnet Wolseley's after-dinner speech, we can only say that, if in earnest, he is more of a soldier than a philosopher; if in jest, that it was a dangerous compliment, but well turned, and that trustworthy travellers tell us that the Amazonian guard is, as one might have supposed, one of the greatest shams out. The 122 THE BURDEN OF LIFE nobles force their daughters on the king ; and he, to get rid of superfluous wives, drafts them into a rude regiment. And, after all, our antagonist agrees with us—nay, does not say so much as we say in favour of her sex. All that she claims is that she and the friends on whose behalf she writes “do not believe that men and women are equal in the sense of being exactly alike, but that, while men in general possess some qualities equally important, some in greater perfection than the generality of women, so women, in general, possess some qualities equally important, in greater perfection than men ; so that they may fairly claim to be equal.” Exactly so. Let us shake hands and be friends: solvuntur risu tabula-the argument ends with a laugh. Women and men, not men alone, have, in six thousand years, so far as we have any records, shared the world pretty well between them, and man —even our charming antagonist cannot doubt it—has pushed himself forward because of his heavier brain, his bigger limbs, his tenser muscles, and, in consequence, his larger appetite. It is of no use to abuse him because of this; the bigger engine must THE WOMEN’s WAR 123 consume the most coal. He it was who built ships, cities, quays, tunnelled the mountains, and dug the mine. He it was who sought 'rerum cognoscere causos and made Science. If you believe the Bible, which rebellious women much set aside, as they cannot agree with Moses, think despitefully of St. Paul, “who suffers not a woman" to preach and expound, and do not hold with St. Peter, who lectures the wife as soundly as he does the husband, it was to man that God was mani- fested—it was through woman that man fell. Yet more, it has been by the corruption of woman that the greatest and best of all heroes of history or romance, from Hercules to Samson, from the sons of Aaron to Marc Antony, have fallen, and that nations have been destroyed. Our lady-antagonist finds great confort in Girton College, Merton Hall, and the ladies' classes at University College; she writes that “the higher education of women has made remarkable progress within the last few years,” and quotes from a contemporary, “If a woman, competing at a college with men, can take prizes in Political Economy and Jurisprudence, it is hard she should not be 124 THE BURDEN OF LIFE allowed the chance of a degree in Arts or Laws.” Possibly. She may be very good at acquirement, and she may desire to wear the M.A. or the D.C.L., and be a bi-literal or tri- literal honour woman as she likes; but will it do her good? Will it benefit the world? We can see that it will considerably discount that which should not be discounted—the value of a degree. The country is already finding that “exams.” do not produce competent men; and some wish to return to the pre-competi- tion days when public and other servants were less upstart and, it is said, more efficient. What especial benefit attending classes on Roman law and geology, which our friend parades, may be to young women of eighteen or thereabouts, we do not know. We are brutes enough to own that we should prefer a simple, straightforward English girl with good health to a female prig stuffed full of such distressing accomplishments. THE WAR. "TWIXT MEN AND WOMEN. WHEN Mr Mill, the philosophic member for Westminster, was about to bear the brunt of the contest in an election which cost many hundred pounds, his colleague, the Honour- able Robert Grosvenor, of an aristocratic family, paid from his own purse one-half of the electioneering expenses; but the philoso- pher very rightly refused to pay one penny. “If,” he said to the electors, “you want me to serve, here I am ; but I am not going to pay for the honour of serving you. I give my time, my brain, and such wisdom as God has given me; therefore, it is not right that I should pay.” Herein the electors honourably perceived that he was right, and that the base, beer-drinking multitude who brought in Burdett, Fox, Hood, Sir Cecil Wray, and Sir De Lacy Evans, in the historic days of Westminster, were wanting in sweetness and light. Time was when the beautiful 125 126 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Duchess of Devonshire bought a butcher's vote in Westminster with a kiss, and gave the vote to the people's favourite, Charles Fox. All this is being altered now. We have popular men who are philosophers, and our democracy cries out for a real aristocracy, or government of the aristoi, the best and wiseSt. Foremost amongst those who sup- ported Mr Mill were six ladies who had subscribed fifty guineas each towards his expenses. And why were all the ladies so moved towards this acute philosopher, with his half-shut eyes, and his sharp, narrow, and cutting views of things? Simply because Mr Mill is an advocate of Woman's rights, and amongst other things her right to vote. This mere fact, then, introduces us to an advanced state of things. The old patriarchal government is about to be broken up. Mr John Bull is departing on a long and tedious track; and Mrs Bull, hitherto a very fond wife, with a great belief in her husband, is urged to take her own part and to set up for herself. In America, where new ideas, springing from fresh and untaught brains, work like new beer, and run out at the bung-hole, there is a paper expressly estab- THE WAR 'TwixT MEN AND womeN 127 lished for “Women's Rights,” and this is called the Revolution. Mr George Francis Train, who lies in a debtor's prison here, owns this American print : and Mrs Susan Anthony, and one or two others of her sex, are “on the stump,” as editresses and lecturers, “pushing” the paper with all their might. They visit the White House, get the President to subscribe, trouble all the senators, and use all their pertinacity and impudence to carry forward the new move- ment. Woman is in all political matters to be man's equal. In the Senate, in the pulpit, in the doctor's surgery, and the chemist's shop, at the scholar's desk and in the warrior's camp, wherever Man goes, there Woman will be by his side as his equal. We assure our readers that we are giving Mr Train's and Mrs Anthony's own views very mildly. They possibly, in the heat of argument, put forward their claims far differently. It is hardly so much a claim to equality with Man that lies at the bottom of this “Woman's movement,” as the assertion, which we suspect finds an echo in the breast of almost every woman, that “I’m as good as you, and a great 128 THE BURDEN OF LIFE deal better.” Illogically carried out, this belief, if propagated, will lead to a great deal of trouble ; and it is well, since we have often been the pioneer of thought, to look the matter in the face afar off. Now, hitherto Woman has been regarded by Man as a privileged race. “Give honour to the woman,” says the Apostle, in the gentlest and noblest appeal ever made, “as to the weaker vessel;” and the spirit of his injunction, coupled with the chivalric spirit of the Middle Ages, produced the romantic feeling of deference to the female sex which lasted till beyond the French Revolu- tion. Woman was indeed honoured, not only as the weaker, but as the purer vessel. Man had the rare and beautiful generosity, out of that wondrously loving heart of his, to dress all ideal virtues in the garb of Woman. Faith, Hope, and Charity—all more strongly exhibited by Man—are typified by Woman; Constancy, Justice, Fortitude, the very quarters of the globe, and the divisons of the earth, were pictured as Woman ; only Love and Marriage, the one a boy, the other a rosy youth, flushed “with the bloom of young desire,” remained THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND WOMEN 129 as males. Woman was the Queen of the Tournament and of Home ; the hope, the love, the light of the dwelling, pure as a sister, chaste as a bride, holy as a mother; in all things Man preferred Woman in honour, and swore as a true knight to defend her in all her troubles. It needs, indeed, the impassioned eloquence of Burke to describe what that chivalric feeling towards Woman was, when “ten thousand Swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult”; when there was “a generous loyalty to rank and sex, a proud submission, a dignified obedience, a subordination of the heart, which kept alive even in servitude the spirit of an exalted freedom”; when, throughout civilized mankind, there “was an unbought grace of life, a sensibility of principle, chastity of honour, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, the cheap defence of nations !—the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise — which, he adds, “is gone. The age of chivalry is gone,” he cries; “that of Sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded !” I I 30 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Woman repaid this deference of Man to her by a subordination of the heart, a respect for his good qualities, and a free acknowledg- ment of his capacities. Thus, then, two distinct paths of man and woman were marked out—the man to the plough, the woman to sew ; the man, king of external nature; the woman, queen of the home; man, the patriarch; woman, the mother; the family growing around them. Man was to provide, woman to spend; man to go out into the world and get the money, woman to look to household cares. Thus, man endowed woman with his money, and dedicated his body and heart to her, and she gave herself to him. Man took most of the hard work on himself. He was to be arrested, and the wife was to go free; he was the object of all legal prosecution; the woman, when married, was, in our Norman law term, feme covert; that is, one who was protected from attack by her marriage. “But,” said Burke, “the age of chivalry is gone !” and certainly the accumulation of a number of imperfectly educated colonists in a new world, without the graces of life, with little learning, and with hard necessity staring THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND WOMEN 131 them in the face, has lowered the tone of man towards woman; for rude and Savage people do not treat their wives with grace. In addi- tion to this, there has been an increase of bustle and turmoil, a want of reflection and peace, and the great increase of riches—not from virtuous endeavour and industrious work, but from chanceful and speculative businesses, which look more like gambling than anything else ; all which have seemed to break up the claim of man to greater prowess. Add to this the success of a revolution against recognised authority, the decay of faith, the increase of Rationalism, and (chief of all) the corruption of the rich and the great in Europe, and we may compute at least the chances of the whole of the grace of life being swept away, and of man and woman being brought somewhat into antagonism, as they always will be in rude countries, and ages of simply progressive civilization. There has been another cause, it may be, why the Woman's Rights question has cropped up. Married to a greedy and a lazy partner, the weaker vessel does undoubtedly stand the chance of being wronged; and for these wrongs the law, notwithstanding its boasted 132 THE BURDEN OF LIFE omniscience, has provided no remedy, or at the most, a very troublesome and very ex- pensive one. With the good husband, woman was and is, undoubtedly, in the more favoured position ; and as the old law provided no punishment for parricides, nor contemplated so horrible a crime, so the Church laws seem not to have contemplated the fact that a woman may indeed take a man, not for better or worse, but for all worse and no better. Under these circumstances, woman's wrongs cried loudly for a remedy. Again, civilization brought with it an increase in female popula- tion, because more infant lives are every year saved by Science; and in the struggle for life the weakest, by an unerring law, always falls first. Hence, Society has been for some time, and is now, burdened with many women who do not fit easily into our social economy; who do not know how to work profitably to them- selves or to society; who are perfectly willing to earn their bread, but are too well educated and too proud for domestic servants; who find all other branches of industry overstocked, and who, with every virtue under heaven, may yet be poor things, very much uncared for, very helpless, and very miserable. These facts THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND Wom EN 133 gave a reason for a political cry; and the Woman's Rights question—that of finding a panacea for these many ills—has assumed an importance which cannot be over-estimated. All the State-tinkers and would-be philoso- phers rushed into the mélée as much or more for their own advancement than for the service of Woman, and the cry has become a very loud one, and one very often repeated. Unfortunately, none of these State-craftsmen could discover anything to help Woman so much as the displacement of Man. Women were to be doctors, physicians, chemists, authors, artists, printers, and of many other trades; and those who were already keeping their wives and families by the exercise of these arts and trades not unnaturally objected to the influx of female labour, which has always had the effect of reducing the rate of wages very apparently, without in an equally apparent manner benefitting the community. Like everyone in this world, Woman suffered from the blunders and mistakes of her advo- cates; and we have now arrived at a state of warfare, not inaptly described by the title of this article. To make Woman appear worthy of the position claimed for her, her advocates 134 THE BURDEN OF LIFE asserted so strongly her entire equality with Man, that the formula of this claim might well take that of the nigger's assertion, that he was “eberry bit as good as his white massa, and a great deal better.” And so often was this repeated, that the Pall Mall Gazette was forced to take the somewhat rude step of authoritatively laying down the following three “fundamental principles” —First, that men are superior to women; that is, that we f y * ſ | { y t $ t | { º have more moral, intellectual, and physical strength than they have ; that we know more, feel more, can do more, are their superiors in every sense in which one class of beings can be superior to another. Secondly, that families are in the nature of small governments, and that the constitution of those governments should be monarchical, the husband being king. Thirdly, that family life, the position of a daughter, a wife, and a mother, is the normal and the most honourable course of life for women in general; that women who do not ollow it should be regarded as exceptional f persons, and that the law of the land should b e based upon principles adapted for the case of those who do, not for the case of those who THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND woMEN 135 Our readers, especially those who have read our essays for some time, will recognise in these words our old teachings, but put in a much more gentle way. Equal as souls, equal in the value of their respective duties, equal in the sight of God and the angels, men and women undoubtedly are ; but equal as active agents, as workers in the world, they un- doubtedly are not ; and all good women, all wise women, will say so. The lady who wrote under the name of George Eliot, Miss Mar- tineau, Sappho, George Sand, Lady Mary Montagu, and a hundred others, are equal in intellect to first-rate men : but exceptions only prove the rule: in the mind market, in poetry, literature, inventions, chemistry, music and cooking, the multitude of men far Sur- passes the multitude of women. One hardly need say that the brusque assertions of the Pall Mall produced a number of letters from outraged ladies. The assertion that men have more “moral strength” than the women produced a torrent of abuse; and yet it is true. Women, as a rule, are more virtuous than men, because a much laxer morality is allowed even by nature—and certainly by society—to Man than & ; | 4 * $3. 136 THE BURDEN OF LIFE to woman. But then the passions of woman are, as a rule, less strong. When they are stronger, and when the very tight chain of society is removed, woman is every whit as bad as man. While the worst truth that can be said of her is that the morals of any state never depend upon the example of woman, but upon the practice of man : even woman's notion of what is right and wrong has been dictated by man, and is in no way originated by woman. As to actual “goodness,”—that God alone can determine. Man has, as we know, clothed his ideal of virtue in a female form ; and so much has this obtained, that from Vishnu, Diana, and Hecate, to the Virgin Mary, the cultus of Woman has been the history of the world. But, as is usually the case, man's works in that way have been opposite to those of God; and the worship of Woman has always led to wretchedness and terrible wickedness. Allowing, then, that its three propositions are right, the journal we have quoted would take a very high hand with the Rights of Woman question. It would insist, that when two persons ride on a horse, one must ride first ; the one who THE WAR 'TWIXT MEN AND Wom EN 137 should do so is he who can best guide and govern it : that is man. The law, then, must do one of three things as regards married people:—1. Allow them to separate when they like. 2. To order the husband to obey the wife. 3. To order the wife to obey the husband. Presuming that it finds it best and more reasonable to do the last, then it follows that women should be excluded from the suffrage for the sake of their husbands and sons; and single women should be excluded therefrom for the sake of the married women. Everything should be done, in fact, to put an end to the antagonism between Man and Woman, for the natural aim of both is marriage; and anything which renders men and women distasteful to each other renders marriage either difficult or impossible. Nor in marriage does man by any means get the best of the bargain. Waiving the sin which too often accompanies a bachelor existence, it is in many instances more com- fortable than the life of a married man. “It hath in it more of sweetness,” says an old writer, if more of selfishness. Good husbands, that is to say, eighty married 138 THE BURDEN OF LIFE men out of a hundred, undertake by far the harder part of the contract. To make sufficient to support the wife and educate the family, they are continually at work, unless they happen to be of the upper few thousand who can afford to live with- out work at all. The wife, directly she marries, is lifted to the social position of the husband, and is endowed with his goods. If she has the trouble of the family in her early life, she is peculiarly fitted to meet that trouble, has certain affection, watchfulness, and love given her, and the peculiar joy of maternity. One of the great signs of the decay of women is the continual complaint against the “family” that we hear from women, the hatred even of little ones, the dread of having children, and the care of children. If hens could speak, and cackled forth their disgust at laying eggs and hatch- ing chickens, should not we be angered at the ridiculous creatures? Are some of our fine ladies, who want to do man's preaching, teaching, doctoring, and politics, a whit less ridiculous because they are bigger? Marriage is the natural and normal condition of woman. She has everything to gain by it, and nothing THE WAR 'TWIxT MEN AND womEN 139 to lose ; and the more she fits herself for it, the better and happier woman she will be. But were Mr Mill, and Mr Shaw Lefevre, and the rest of them, to alter the relationship of the sexes, and make the interests of Man and Woman not identical, but separate, marriage would become not the holy indissoluble thing it is, but a contract to cohabit during pleasure; and by this, says the Pall Mall, and we echo its opinion, “women would lose out of all comparison more than men if a calamity which would degrade the whole human race could be said to be more injurious to one sex than the other.” Wherever the laws of marriage are relaxed, woman gets the worst of it. It is to her interest, and she well perceives it, to hold marriage rather as a sacrament than as a mere civil union. Such unwomanly women as Susan Anthony and “Dr.” Mary Walker do more harm to their sex than hundreds of absurd or angry men. Christianity forbids woman to preach, and subjects woman to man; there is no mistake about that. If woman rejects the teachings of Christianity she must also reject the benefits whichit has con- 140 THE BURDEN OF LIFF, Y. | lt\ ferred upon her. It forbids her to preach, or to go on the stump for politics; but it makes her the equal, the wife, and the sister-queen of man; it exalts her far above the women of Jewry; and how far above the women of Mahometanism, or Hindooism, or of any other false faith, such as Utilitarianism or Rational- ism, it is impossible to say. If she wisely takes her place, so full of grace and glory as it now is, we shall hear little more of these unwomanly ranters about “rights” which do not exist; if she, on the contrary, will continue to listen to these women in trousers, we shall hear more disastrously of the “War 'twixt Men and Women.” EY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS. WE cannot make the world good, virtuous, strong - minded, and happy all at once. “Believe me,” said a wise man, “ error also has its virtues and its pleasures.” It is true the wise man was Voltaire, but Solomon before him had centuries earlier told us to be not righteous over-much. Do not let us flaunt the finery of our tinsel goodness before weak eyes so as to dazzle them. That is about what we are told, and what we find rather hard to do. Every man seems to think he can find out a by-path, like that wrong- headed person in Bunyan's great allegory who nearly led Christian and Hopeful into destruction. The episode is so fine that we will recall it. Christian had become tired of plodding along the king's highway, and deter- mined to take a “short cut,” for “the way 141 142 THE BURDEN OF LIFE wº was rough, and their feet tender by reason of their travels.” (Every word of this marvel- lous passage should be weighed and digested; for all more or less get tired of the monotony of goodness.) “But on the left hand of the road was a pleasant meadow, with a path in it, and, looking over, Christian cried out, ‘Here is the easiest going; come, good Hope- ful, let us go over.’ ‘But how,’ asked Hopeful, “if this path should lead us out of the way?’” (If a few of those who “go over” were but seriously to ask that question 1) The way- farers, however, finding it went along by the wayside—such paths always do—went over, and saw a man walking (and his name was Wain Confidence), and they called after him, and asked him whither it led. And, of course, he answered, “To the celestial gate.” (Mr Wain Confidence usually gives the best of answers.) But presently it grew very dark, and the travellers could not see their way, and they lost sight of him that went before. And presently they heard a cry and a struggle, “and he that went before (Wain Confidence by name) fell into a deep pit, made by the prince of those grounds to catch vain- glorious fools withal, and was dashed to pieces BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 143 with his fall.” Here we will leave the pilgrims standing horror-stricken and per- plexed, pausing only to set in a paragraph Bunyan's wonderful piece of art-work; for he, like Shakspere, was a born artist and writer, and critics may carp at him as they please— they will never write as he wrote:– “Now Christian and his fellow heard him fall, so they called to know the matter, but there was none to answer, only they heard a groaning. Then said Hopeful, ‘Where are we now !' Then was his fellow silent, as mis- trusting that he had led him out of the way.” Now, it is just because social Utopias do lead people “out of the way” that we propose to glance at a few of the schemes prevalent here and in America. We must premise that it is our reason and experience alone that object to them. We too have been in Arcadia, and are Utopian. We should not have objected, had we then been alive, to have joined the Pan- tisocracy, arranged by Coleridge, Southey, and the Cottles. We have a liking for a society where all shall work, all be equally generous, equally forgetful of self, equally industrious. Such a society is ideal. It would be at the same time pleasing to God and beneficial to 144 THE BURDEN OF LIFE man. But it has to be established, and we do not think that it can be in our present state. It would be blessed indeed to live where there should be no war and no law, no leading into captivity of the state, of debt, or of sin, no poor and no complaining in our streets. And we would pay due honour to the hearts of those men who have tried the experiment, even though they have failed. It is great even to fail in a great cause. And what can be greater than to endeavour to make all good, free, and happy even in this world—except it be to teach them to be happy in that which will succeed and endure when this shall have passed away ? Let us then take social reformers, even when opposing the faith, at their own valua- tion. That is at least as wise a resolve as to take them at other people's. In Mr Noyes's History of American Socialisms—which social- isms, by the way, like most things American, sprang up in France and England before they reached the shores of the Spread Eagle—that gentleman, the founder of the Oneida Com- munity—who has embodied the researches of a Mr Macdonald, an ex-Socialist—tells us that he believes that there have been eighty BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 145 experiments made, some of them on a very costly scale. The basis of all of these, more or less, has been religion, and all, more or less, have been failures. Mr Noyes thinks that success or failure does not depend upon religion, but upon an economical law. And in saying this, or, in other words, that social reform does not depend upon a noble senti- ment, but upon policy or selfishness—disguise it how one may—Mr Noyes does not seem to See that he has settled for ever the question as against himself. For, if selfishness can be subordinated for a time to the general good, the very success of the experiment will in time produce so strong a shoot of individual Selfishness that it will subordinate the general. The biggest and most flourishing sucker from the rose-tree will at last kill the parent stem. Ask a gardener if this be not the case in the vegetable kingdom. The most purely religious community was that founded by the Rev. Adin Ballou, in 1841, at Milford, Massachusetts. It was a Church of Christ, with no creed “but a simple declaration of faith in the religion of Christ as He taught and exemplified it, and of acknow- ledged subjection to all the moral obligations K 146 THE BURDEN OF LIFE of Christianity.” Here were width and breadth and ample verge and scope enough. Ministers and clergymen ploughed and fed flocks of sheep and herds of swine; merchants and barristers dug and hoed ; ladies who had Scarcely known the insides of their own kitchens cooked and worked to prepare the common meals. No one was master, all served the rest. The most refined young ladies, who had been waited on by dandies and beaux, took their turn, and waited on the general company. For a time all went merrily. It was as good and pleasant as a pic-nic. But it lasted for only three months. Then the intelligent, the industrious, the skil- ful, and the strong saw that they might work while the lazy, the stupid, the unskilful, and the weak enjoyed their work. Every week several hours were set aside for music and recitation and science lectures. But musicians and lecturers said that music and Science were of greater value than hand-labour. Knowledge took arms against benevolence. “Mechanics, whose skilled work brought two dollars to the common stock, would only work half the time of those who could only earn one.” So some one stepped in and bought the common BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 147 property, and the thing failed. But others sprang up. The idées of Charles Fourier, that Columbus of Socialistic discovery, as some- body has called him, had spread from France into England. “That any one out of Bedlam should have followed Fourier has always seemed to us one of the most curious facts in the history of opinion,” says a writer in the Canadian Monthly, to whom we are indebted for some of our facts. But it was just because of Fourier's plan that the people followed him. He was precisely like the boasting fellow (Vain-glorious by name) of Bunyan. His “ideas,” passing by such follies as making lemonade out of sea-water, were that the system of regulating the passions, which is the basis of all philosophies and religions, was utterly wrong, and that we should conquer our passions by indulging them | Such, indeed, is the apple of Sodom which is, more or less, the fruit of all phalansteric associations. It is dust and ashes in the mouth ; it can only attract the vigorous and the libidinous; it is the rock of all societies; it attacks the owner- ship in the husband which is the special Safe- guard of the wife, and of woman as the weaker sex; it weakens, undermines, and corrupts : 148 THE BURDEN OF LIFE it is the old weapon of the Devil resharpened and refurbished, and with a political edge put upon it. It divides the bones and marrow of society, and reduces a living body to a help- less thing, soon to fall into a state of rotten- ness and death. By the side of this wretched French Fourier- ism, the offspring of the Revolution of '93, there arose an impossible asceticism indulged in by the Shakers and other communists, which was just as unhealthy. This was the entire abnegation of marriage, which, if possible, would be more accursed, since it would reverse the will of the Creator, and destroy the whole of mankind. Of course the leaders of such movements no more believed in their dogmas than the Pope believes that he is an infallible censor of religion and morals. These are days in which it is a man's duty to speak the truth. That St Paul should refer all to Christ, and say that he spake nothing of himself, is natural and holy; we can believe him. But that Father Noyes, Mother Girling, the prophet of Utah with some fifty wives, and Pio Nono, when cursing the Protestant Churches as worse than the temple of Venus, should believe that they BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 149 speak truth, is simply incredible. Modern society, which believes little, tells a lie if it says that it believes that ; it does so out of laziness, or it is under the curse of a strong delusion, and in either state is to be rejected. Nevertheless, these modern Utopias give us some humiliating facts, if Mr Noyes is to be credited. Amidst those who claim to be the sharpest people in the world, Noyes tells us that the following existed in 1870 : Beizel's Community, aged 156 years, at one time rich, has money at interest still. Shaker Com- munity, aged 95 years, 18 large Societies, many very wealthy. These are strictly celi- bate; no children are permitted to be born; it follows, therefore, that they must be recruited from outside. The Zoar Community, 53 years old, and wealthy; the Snowberger, 49 years old, and well off; the Ebenezer Community, 23 years old, the largest and richest in the States; the Janson, 23 years old, and wealthy. Here are six out of, say, a hundred attempts, and, as will have been seen, we take the testi- mony of a person very much interested in them. Were we to quote what is to be said against them—indeed to be culled out of their own books, as Father Noyes's Circular of 150 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Oneida Creek—we might be indicted for foul writing. This Oneida community, which was brought prominently before the public a few years back in a mischievous book by an English writer, was founded in 1847 by the Rev. J. Humphrey Noyes, a clever man and a good organiser. He preached elective affinities, and found many followers. By the rules of the Society the marriage tie is totally disregarded ; and yet side by side with such a practice stand the hypocritical declarations that the Bible is implicitly believed ; that the society is held together by Father Noyes's love of Christ ; and that the members wait on special acts of Providence, as does Mother Girling. Moreover, they denounce inquiry and scepticism, and assert that they are Perfec- tionists (!), having no “form " of worship, forms such as the Lord's Prayer, a very familiar “form,” being against Perfection. Christian marriage, and all that is connected with it, as not agreeing with the liberty of woman, is considered hateful to God and man. The Society at Oneida numbers 201; and a nobleman who visited and studied the in- habitants, and from whose lips we have these BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 151 particulars—and much more that we will not print—says that there are one or two very handsome and educated women amongst them. In other communities the women are common- looking, coarse, miserable, and degraded. The few children born at Oneida are provided for in common nurseries; the relationship of father and mother is destroyed, as being selfish. The children are fine, the nurseries excellent and beautiful; the babies are, in fact, brought up as we should rear pigs or poultry, scientifically, and they thrive well. We say nothing against that. No aunt, grand- mother, or mother is permitted to ruin diges- tion by confectioners' or druggists' messes. There is something to be learnt here. The Oneida people all work and employ hired labour; their chief industry is, for the women, making preserves (tinned peaches), and, for the men, wooden traps. At Brooklin, Lake Erie, there is a curious, and, we believe, perfectly pure community living under a “prophet” named Harris,” described by Lawrence Oliphant as of great sanctity, and as urging him “to live the life.” * Since this was written, discovered to be an impostor.—ED. 152 THE BURDEN OF LIFE The property is all entrusted to the hands of the “prophet,” and, if we are to believe Mr Oliphant, an earnest and good man, not unwisely. The scheme seems that of separa- tion from the world, and families living under the bishopric or presidency of one whom they believe to be wholly religious. We could fill two essays with this subject ; but we will not say much more. What is the cause of those communistic desires' No religion with one grain of sense in it can support them ; they allure, they look pleasant, but are by-path meadows all over. They are eminently unjust, and they are great breeders of rogues and vagabonds. It is fortunate for the common sense of mankind that all communists— exceptions proving the rule—appeal to the passions of ill-regulated youth and manhood as an attraction and as a bond. And a strong bond it is. He or she once associated with such folly can hardly go into society again; the mischief done cannot be repaired. The causes of such irrationality are not far to seek. They are lawlessness, restlessness, discontent of life, the tedium born of it, the noble hatred of the dulness and hypocrisy of much of our society and home life, and the BY-PATHS AND MODERN SOCIAL UTOPIAS 153 dreary, maundering existence that many of us undergo. Indeed, we fain would look, like poor Christian, at the pleasant by-paths. And not unusually there is added to this hanker- ing a spice of romance. Hawthorne, in his Blithedale Romance, his best work, has sketched one community which he joined, and which was a miserable failure. This was Brook Farm, at Foxbury, and the Socialists, of which Hawthorne was one, were readers of Emerson and Carlyle, dreamers of Utopia, people who were to make the world better at a “dead lift,” filled with Emersonian gas— perfect balloons without ballast. “I rejoice,” says Hawthorne, “that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved.” But he himself was a dreamer. The men and women whom he joined were angular creatures, crooked sticks which would bend in the bundle —many masters, no servants. Their trial was a pic-nic. Half the members worked, while the other half sketched them from the windows. The women had ideas of freedom. The men fancied they were saints and martyrs, whom all would follow ; they were old enough to be tired of ordinary pursuits, and young enough to dream of golden joys, Arcadia, and a life 154 THE BURDEN OF LIFE all pleasure and honesty. They fancied that this idea of a beatific socialism, which should avoid all the stones in the road of life had been growing with them for years. But they were but masqueraders, after all; this yeasty afflatus was but self, self, self—nothing else but self. The Devil got the better hand of them, and ousted them out of their fools' paradise, as he did Adam, by the aid of WOIOla, Il. What is to be deduced from all this 2 What is there to add—what counsel is there to give 2 Let us begin our Utopias at home; reform ourselves first ; do that which is good for a single day. Our highest models lie around us in the plain, good, simple men and women who live their lives, and who suffer and endure without offence. Our duties, our happiness, are close about our feet; our laws are in our consciences; and the words of God—they are enough for us. If we follow them, we shall not stand asking, with Hopeful, where we are now, when “it began to rain and thunder in a very dreadful manner, and the water rose amain.” WISDOM AND LEARNING. WE overheard two grave old gentlemen the other day, each “of some seventy summers,” as novelists phrase it, disputing as to wisdom, knowledge, and learning; and although successful in their professions, wise enough to have made fortunes, ambitious enough to have sent their sons to the universities, yet these two cantankerous old boys would hold that the three words had the same meaning. Now, to every thinking man the distinction is, or should be, apparent enough. A man may be a learned man, and not a wise man; he may be wise, and not learned ; he may know a great deal, and yet be neither learned nor wise. Wisdom is the highest quality a man can have—it is God's gift ; learning is acquired by those who have the proper capacity; knowledge is also acquired, but differs from learning in many points. “No man,” says the learned Selden, “is the wiser 155 156 THE BURDEN OF LIFE for his learning; it may administer matter to work in or objects to work on, but wit and wisdom are born with a moºn.” Wit, again, differs from either; for there are men who are neither learned nor wise, yet very witty. And the distinction ought to be easily seized upon and clearly comprehended, since the three words are all good sound English ; and happily both our writers and speakers are now beginning to cling to their own tongue, and not to flavour their sentences with outlandish words. It would be a curious history—if one could get it well written—which should treat of those writers who have despised the common tongue and tried to make their books fine with phrases of which they understood but half the meaning, and their readers, perhaps, but a quarter. This is an old reproach. Robert of Gloucester tells us that there never was a people in the world save the English who despised their own speech.* “Ich wene ther ne be man in world contrayes none That me holdeth to her kunde speche bote England one.” Although, he adds, that it is well if a man * Robert Gloucester, v. i. p. 364, WISDOM AND LEARNING 157 knows something more than his own tongue —“Vor the more that a man con (knows), the more worth he ys;” and, indeed, this is true, presupposing that the learned man knows how to use that learning. But the true use of learning is only to be derived from wisdom, or a combination of wit and wisdom. Wit will get a man out of a scrape, wisdom will prevent him from ever falling into one. Wit may make a man a very pleasant companion, though he may be a bad man and an untrue friend; wisdom will make a man a good man, a pleasant if a silent companion, and always a true friend; for wisdom teaches manners, probity, the art of living ; it induces piety, uprightness, points out the straight course, persuades him to cultivate virtue and to reject vice, and shows its possessor, as in a glass, the consequences of folly. And all this a man may have, and yet be a very plain, unlearned fellow ; and at the same time a learned man may be a little better than a fool. Learning seems to us to be like mercury in medicine: in skilful hands it can accomplish almost anything; in unskilful ones it can only hurt the patient. And when a man of a naturally foolish disposition 158 THE BURDEN OF LIFE is gifted with the ability to acquire, there is no knowing what he may not do to render learning ridiculous. To try to square the circle, to find out the philosophers' stone, and the aqua vitae, a few drops of which should make an old man young; to discover, as one wise mariner has it, “a north-west passage to the southern hemisphere,” are some few of the follies of the wise. Swift, in his journey to Laputa—a monument of wholesome satire on men—has pointed out some few risible instances. “There was a man,” said he, “in the academy of Lagado who had been for eight years employed upon a project for ex- tracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vessels hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw and inclement winters”; another was at work endeavouring to calcine ice into gunpowder; and a man born blind was endeavouring to teach blind people to distinguish colours by touch and smell so as to mix them for painters. Some were trying to condense air into a dry and tangible substance; and one artist was endeavouring to persuade people to sow the land with chaff, wherein he declared the true seminal virtue to be con- WISDOM AND LEARNING 159 tained, as he demonstrated by several experi- ments, which, says Swift drily, “I was not skilful enough to comprehend.” Another, by rubbing young lambs all over with a mixture of some gums and minerals, was “endeavour- ing to prevent the growth of wool, and he hoped in a reasonable time to propagate a breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom.” Although Swift is more than suspected of borrowing much of this ridicule from Rabelais, who had, long ere the author of Gulliver was born, applied the same kind of ridicule to the foolishness of learned men, he no doubt took many of these notions from the transactions of our own learned body—the Royal Society —which, even when it boasted Sir Isaac Newton as one of its members, was plagued with the wildest propositions of learned fools. And this kind of folly is much increased by the credulity of the learned, who, knowing many wonders possible, easily believe in others; for learning opens a man's mind to faith, and to the reception of other truths than those he has learned; whereas ignorance is almost always obstinately incredulous. Moreover, the learned and the half-learned may be sometimes very foolish ; but they are 160 THE BURDEN OF LIFE of a generous nature, and constantly perme- ated with a desire to impart what they do know. There is a kind of learned man who is too often an unpleasant fellow, such as he who, having mastered the titles and the outsides of books, and perhaps some of the contents of them, but not the spirit of the author, seems to be tricked out in all the livery of learning, and to know everything, and yet knows but little. Such a man is the terror of young authors, and is generally clever enough to impose sufficiently on booksellers, so as to pass his opinions, and to get the conduct of some magazine, paper, or review. It is unknown what mischief such a man as this will do, and too many of such men really seem at the head of the reviews of the day.” They take a pleasure in finding out the mis- takes and errors in a composition ; never its beauties, its intent, and its true purpose. They are worse to an author than gad-flies to a horse in summer; they sting him all over. * My father, I feel sure, would have qualified his opinion, and have thought the critics of to-day in many instances over-anxious to find genius in the works of new authors.-ED. WISDOM AND LEARNING 161 They send to a publisher for a book on purpose to abuse and maltreat it ; they garble the extracts, or place them in a false position, to show their own wit; they really write a review—and almost all present reviews, with some honourable exceptions, are so written— merely to prove how clever they are, and not to guide the public to a useful and meritorious work, and to warn it from that which is a mere piece of empty bombast and sham. One cause of this foolishness, for it is nothing more, lies in a critic taking up a book which he does not understand, and, as he cannot well begin with a confession of his own ignorance, dealing with it in a haut en bas style, as if he really understood the business, and the author did not. Many most tender hearts have been wounded, many most valuable lives lost, by the follies of men, who otherwise were very clever. It is believed (for it has never been contra- dicted) that Lord Brougham wrote that review in the Quarterly which embittered the life and hastened the death of John Keats. We, in common with many others, would be glad to see a contradiction to this assertion. It must be dreadful to reflect upon that review, to which posterity has long ago given L 162 THE BURDEN of LIFE the lie; for perhaps, of all the poets who flourished in the last generation, Keats was the purest, the freshest, and the best. Of such learned men we may speak as Bishop Earle does of the pretender to learning—“He hath taken pains to be an ass, though not to be a scholar, and is at length discovered, and laughed at.” For those learned men who make mistakes, a long and patient reading of Bacon's Novum Organum should be advised. It is not by opposing Nature, not by extracting Sunbeams from cucumbers, and procuring naked sheep, that a man grows wise; but it is by being the minister and interpreter of Nature by observation, and by following strictly in the path laid down by her, that he grows to be truly learned. Bacon's Method of Induction should be a revelation to keep learned men always in the right path. As learning is an acquirement, properly, indeed, a temporary thing, an invention of Man's, it is never to be compared to wisdom, which is a gift of God's. A man may be learned on mere books, on the colours and blazon of heraldry, on the genealogies of kings, the classification of shells, the etiquette WISDOM AND LEARNING 163 of the Court, and a dozen other frivolities, perfectly right and proper in their way, but of little use to anybody. The acquirements of language, by some treated as real learning, may enable a man to pass at a university, but it will not help him in his curacy in any part of England. And, by the way, it is only a university education that can teach a man of how little use that education too often is. Learning often narrows a man's sphere. That acute thinker, Jean Paul Richter, says very truly : “A learned man is only useful to the learned; the wise man is equally useful to the learned and the simple. The merely learned man has not raised his mind beyond that of others; his method of judging is not more acute; his remarks not more fine and delicate, nor his deeds more noble and beautiful than those of others.” In fact, of learning it may be said, as Butler in Hudibras says of Logic— “For all that's taught by Logic's rules Is but the naming of his tools.” As a perfect knowledge of fencing cannot give a man bravery, or manliness, so learning never gives him wisdom. It does not show I64 THE BURDEN OF LIFE itself in the precepts of the schools, nor in a perfect remembrance of a rule of grammar; but it deals with causes, and remembers effects. Again, learning puffs a man up. Wisdom always makes him humble, even when he most triumphs by that wisdom. “Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop Than when we soar,” says Wordsworth, a very wise and deeply reflective poet, and the sentence is worth repeating over a hundred times, that it may remain for ever in the memory. “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall,” is the inspired prose root of that sweet English verse. Learning may conduce to a man's pleasure; indeed it must do so, for it affords him ways to pleasant avenues of thought and vistas of knowledge, and occupies his mind healthily. But more than this, it enlarges his self-conceit, and allows his time to pass pleasantly in self- contemplation; for it is a very seductive, tickling thing that contemplation of one's own cleverness and superiority. When Dogberry assumes the magistrate's gown and sits in judgment, he does it with more importance WISDOM AND LEARNING l65 than the wise judge, who, covering his face with his robe, prays God to inspire him with a true judgment. There are plenty of learned Dogberries, who, mounted on the pedestal of their thoughts, look down upon the world. “Watt —who's Watt 2" asked a college don; “I never heard of him. He never edited a Greek play.” Yet Watt's wisdom thought out the steam-engine and revolution- ised the world. So the Austrian generals, learned in the old art of war, perfect in the rules of the book which taught them when, how, and where to enter on a campaign, how to withdraw their troops, how to commence an engagement (“O sir, we fight by the book l’’), opened their learned eyes in amaze- ment when the young Buonaparte, throwing all the rules of the military colleges at de- fiance, advanced into Italy in mid-winter and beat up their quarters, and beat them. A too strict adherence to learning makes some men appear very ridiculous. Hazlitt has written an essay on the ignorance of the learned: it is so vast a subject that it requires a volume. Learning can aid wisdom in this way: it can give a man more space, more opportunity of being wise and good. “It will teach a man 166 THE BURDEN OF LIFE to do, as well as to talk, this wisdom,” said Seneca. It does not show itself so much in words as in a mastery of will, appetite, pas- sions; of behaviour, it concerns the whole life : and when once in a man, seldom departs from him. Socrates found it most with poor people and workmen. When he came amongst the professors of the arts, he found that they were obstructive rather than instructive, and by his system of question and answer soon proved that they were very ignorant. Then he went amongst the lower people and found that it rather resided there than elsewhere; not that these men were not led away by folly, but that humbleness conduced to wisdom, and pride took from it. And he himself, the wisest man who lived, was little regarded, and judicially murdered for his wisdom. For although utterly simple, never offensive, lowly and quiet, this quality has a great knack of angering fools. As Sydney Smith said of Jeffrey's looks, there are some men who are felt to be “indecently wise"; that is, they have a larger share than it is fitting they should have. The sublimity of wisdom is so to act that we repent not of our acts; or, to use the better WISDOM AND LEARNING 167 words of Jeremy Taylor, “to do those things living which may be desired when dying.” What an awful life that was of Lord Roches- ter's, but almost atoned for by his long and painful death, and his confession to Bishop Burnet of his wretchedness and folly. In the midst of his wild career, writing to his once friend, Edward Howard, he penned the words —“Oh, Ned, “Thou damn’d antipodes to common sense !” What an antipodes to wisdom must he have thought himself! He told Howard that old age and experience, hand in hand, would— “Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he had been in the wrong.” Is there a more melancholy sentence in the language than that ? Let us only take that to ourselves, and what a condemnation it is Rochester, as he lay upon his death-bed, felt all this, knew how vain all had been, and how great a fool he had been himself. There is surely never any worse fault in man than the deliberate selection of folly; and yet 168 THE BURDEN OF LIFE folly we accept every day; the nation de- liberately does it, whole peoples do it and perish. Folly—known as folly, bragging that she is folly—shaking her cap and bells, and twirling about in her parti - coloured garments, rejoices in the midst of the people because she is a fool; and Wisdom too often “uttereth her voice in the streets,” but “no one regardeth her.” It will be well if a few of us turn to listen to the despised one. Before the awful Presence of God the little wisdom of man is small indeed, but yet it is pleasant in His sight as the blue Forget- me-not or the small Celandine may be grati- fying to man. The wisest of us are but poor creatures. “The wise man,” says the oracular Carlyle, “is but a clever infant spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity,” but yet he is a wise man. And we all of us can be wise if we like ; there is no more doubt of that than that we can see or can walk straight—blind men and cripples ex- cepted. We have only to try to be wise; we all have feeling, observation, and an in- tense self-interest, which only want turning the right way. Let us get wisdom first ; WISDOM AND LEARNING 169 learning may follow or not, we shall take it for what it is worth. Ofttimes our brain reels with the confused jargon of the schools; but we are never tired of the quiet grace of wisdom. Ofttimes learning leads us into pitfalls, into Snares, dangers, and quagmires: wisdom never does. Too often the lamp of learning shines but to betray, while gentle wisdom calmly soothes the rubs and troubles of the heavy life. Our choice then surely should lean to the one, not to the other; and to attain it we have only to take with us that which Wordsworth so wisely recommends. To supplement it we should also lay hold of the teachings of Revelation. “Up, up,” cries the poet, to the too much striving student, “up, up, and quit your books, or surely you'll grow double !” “Enough of Science and of Art: Close up those barren leaves: Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.” GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE. NoTHING is more interesting for a student of human nature and of imaginative literature than to study Shakspere in close connection with Plutarch, from whose “Lives” he took most of his Roman plays. An ill-natured and dull man would say that Shakspere was a great plagiarist; his plots were not his own, and some of his dialogue is copied very closely from the Greek original. But he touched nothing which he did not improve, so that from the mists of Plutarch we have the wondrous characters of Brutus and Cassius. Of Cassius, Plutarch says merely, “Caesar had some suspicion of him, and he even said one day to his friends, “What think you of Cassius? I do not like his pale looks.’” Another time when Antony and Dolabella were accused of 170 GooD SENSE AND gooD NATURE 171 some designs against his person and govern- ment, he said, “I have no apprehensions from those fat and sleek men; I rather fear the pale and lean ones.” - - From this bare sketch we have the noble Brutus, eaten up with a hungry love of his country and of what is noble and true, with sorrow at seeing the downward course she was taking, and with noting the success of the base and despicable. Contrasted with this character, we have the lean and hungry Cassius, very human, very brave, sometimes noble, but put in action by envy and personal feelings. How closely Shakspere follows Plutarch, while he improves him, we can see in this sample —He calls to Antony (Act 1, sc. ii.), “Antonius !” His friend answers him, “Caesar.” Then the great man speaks:– > - “Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry looke; He thinks too much : such men are dangerous.” Antony, upon this, comforts Cesar with the assertion that Cassius is not to be feared; that he is a noble Roman and well inclined; 172 THE BURDEN OF LIFE but the assurance does not quiet Caesar, who cries out— “Would he were fatter; but I feare him not : Yet if my name were lyable to feare, I do not know the man I should auoide So soone as that spare Cassius. He reads much, He is a great obseruer, and he lookes Quite through the Deeds of men. He loves no Plays, As thou dost, Antony; he heares no Musicke: Seldome he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock'd himselfe, and scorn’d his spirit, That could be mou’d to smile at any thing. Such men as he are neuer at heart's-ease.” Here, then, in the words and spelling of the folio edition of 1623, is a masterly descrip- tion of a man who is greatly deficient in good nature and good humour. He may be, and in the instance of Cassius he is, a man greatly above the ordinary run of men who creep about the world, fall in love, marry, have children, and die. But Cassius is not a happy man; he is eaten up with a fervid indigna- tion of wrong, and his deep feeling prevents his genius from doing the good it should do. Such men as Cassius may have many admirers, but they have few friends; they may gain or GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE 173 seem to gain their end, but they ruin their CallS6. And it is only from certain standpoints that such men, however great they may be, can be called men of good sense. The world unquestionably gives us many occasions to be angry with it. We may try to do good, yet the world will not accept our teaching. We may be conscious that the world is hurrying on in its race of detestable folly, and that it will bring itself to destruction, just as Jonah was aware of God's threat against Nineveh ; and in a less sure way Lord Chesterfield foresaw the French Revolution of 1789 ; and Victor Hugo, Prévost-Paradol, and others predicted the certain collapse of France, and of the ruin to which Imperialism, terrible vice, and slavish adulation would bring Paris and France. In Prévost-Paradol's last works there is an absolute prophecy of the domination of Germany, under certain circumstances. These came round, and the conquest of France is now all but complete. But if Prévost-Paradol had kept possession of his undoubted good sense and some of his good nature, he would not have slain himself in Washington, but would have lived to help his country. This is, how- 174 THE BURDEN OF LIFE ever, an extreme case. Few of us are called upon to advise a whole nation ; but each of us is a prophet in a small way; and each of us sees a family or a person quietly taking the wrong course, and settling down to ruin and misery. How then are we to do good —to do what country people call the “best good” to such persons? Certainly not by losing our good temper and good sense; not by crying out “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield !” as did Fox the Quaker, and then sulking with the Almighty because He did not cause the earth to swallow up that city. No ; the proper course is to enter gently into the con- fidence of the misguided man, and quietly and gently turn him into the right path. Let us especially give our advice with good nature. When we do so, we are the more likely to succeed. * After Doctor Martin Luther had published his admirable translation of the Bible, he found that people did not at Once take it up, and he complained that “the world was much more wicked than he could have imagined.” He had freed Germany from the tyranny of the Pope, had given it God's Word; and yet, with all this spiritual freedom and true religion GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE 175 before it, the land was slow to advance. The fact is, Luther was impatient. Could he have lived till now to look at Germany, and con- template the vast impulse to free thought which has resulted from his labour, he would probably think that he had dome too much instead of too little. It was not good-natured on the part of Luther to charge the whole world with wickedness: it was the result of impatience; it was contrary to good Seſ) Se. Good nature, while forbidding us to do a thousand ungracious and really foolish acts, forbidding us to exult over the folly or the failings of others, prompts us to do many little things, which seem to be the result of far-seeing and excellent good sense. Thus it was that Franklin remarked that if we walked out on a frosty morning, we could see where the good-natured people lived by the ashes thrown before their doors. Yes; not only good-natured, but very sensible ! (1) If they themselves went out of doors, their first steps, always the most dangerous, would be safe. (2) No accident would occur before their doors, and no injured person would be quartered upon them. (3) No poor man or woman, 176 THE BURDEN OF LIFE lamed for life, would be chargeable to the parish. A selfish man might give you a dozen more reasons why this simple act of good nature should be set down to foresight, wisdom, or even cunning. In fact, good nature is so intimately bound up with good sense that we often cannot distinguish one from the other. A plain old woman, in King George the Third's day, coming into a Bath assembly, found only one young lady amongst many, who rose to make way for her and give her a seat. Presently in came the Master of the Ceremonies, Beau Nash, King of Bath, who recognised the old lady as a Princess, and declared that the young one who rose up was the best-bred woman in the room. And this plain young country-bred person was taken in hand and advanced to a place in Court for her act of simple good nature. “Oh, what a deep designing minx l’ cried others: “she knew her Royal Highness, while we did not.” But so far from having known the feeble, plain old princess, the young lady had only exercised that grace and beauty of the mind of which we write, and of which a great poet once said, “Good sense and good nature, you may talk as you like, gentlemen, GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE 177 but you will find it so, are never separated ; though the ignorant world, to be sure, thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candour, is the product of right reason.” It is not to be supposed that good-nature, valuable as it is, is always an artificial product, and that he who possesses that inestimable gift evolved it, as the German did his elephant, out of his own “inner consciousness.” To be born good-natured is better than to be born a duke, and we are quite conscious that the one state is equally the gift of God with the other. Good-nature is the result of a very happy constitution, which by some magical alchemy educes comfort from the most melancholy positions, and finds consolation and happiness where others see only misery and despon- dency. He must have been a good-natured man who invented that very beautiful Spanish proverb, quoted by Sancho to comfort his master—“There's sunshine still upon the wall”; meaning, that if evening was coming on, and darkness with its troubles was immi- ment, still there was some spot in life gilded with comfort. That great but at present un- appreciated poet, R. H. Horne, in his Orion, M 178 THE BURDEN OF LIFE has also a good-natured line, for which we thank him — “There's always sunshine somewhere in the world’; which is as wise as it is kindly and true. A man who can realise this truth may be a troubled, but he will be a happy man. “There is scarcely a single trouble within the experience of our fellow-creatures that I have not tasted,” said one such ; “yet the belief in the good and the beautiful has never forsaken me : it has been medicine to me in sickness, riches in poverty, and the very best part of all that delighted me in health and success.” By some perversity in mankind, which Luther would have assigned, as he did every- thing of an evil kind—plague, sicknesses, ill- health, and disease—to its introduction by a personal devil, good-nature has never yet been held in proper esteem by the world. From Goldsmith's comedy of The Good- Natured Man, to the last caricature in the most stupid of comic publications, we shall find good-nature laughed at, and regarded as obstinate, blunder-headed selfishness, or ill- GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE 179 nature delightedly recognised as genius, talent, weight, and power. “What shall we call it—folly or good-nature ? So soft, so simple, and so kind a feeling, It only shows the weakness of the heart”— Terence asks in one of his comedies, and the best praise obtained by one who acts thus in these sharp days is, “Oh, he's such a good- natured fool!” Smart reviews, written, as the notorious razors were made, merely to sell, have been acting for some years as if ill- nature were identical with genius. How many essays have we been treated with, which, were we to accept them as truth, would make us think all women frivolous and bad, if not actually vicious !—all mothers venal themselves, and ready to sell their daughters!—all authors stupid, untaught, and incapable of thought, except the writer of the review l—all statesmen dull to the honour and interest of their country, except the few whom the party delights to honour !— all tradesmen Vulgar, upstart, and purse-proud, snobs when they have earned a competency, and cheating adulterators in the process of | achieving that great end —all parsons and 180 THE BURDEN OF LIFE ministers clever hypocrites, canting professors; or if in earnest, dull fools Does not this sentence describe the tactics of the ordinary essayist in many of our leading papers? Do these gentlemen ever think of the command- ment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”? Or do they think that truth would, after all, make but a dull review “My dear sir,” the editor of one of these once said to a writer, “if you praise a good book, you please only one man, and that's the author; if you cut up the same book, you will please a hundred; we all like to see another man abused.” So to feed the ancient grudge between man and woman, and between woman and her own sex, we have those acrid essays which set our teeth on edge, and make us fancy that we are living in times such as are described in the tenth Satire of Juvenal. But this kind of food does not agree with us any more than a continual diet of acids, which makes the flesh sore and the bones brittle. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” This continual fault-finding and scolding may be pleasant at first, but it soon reduces us GOOD SENSE AND GOOD NATURE 181 to the state of the lean and hungry Cassius. We are no longer good easy men, that “sleep o’ nights.” We trust no one, because we carp at all. Our army cannot defend us; our fleet is unable to sail; our banks will break ; our trade is rotten ; our Prime Minister does not know what he is about ; even our clergymen are uncertain of the truth ! What a pleasant state of belief to arrive at 1 Is it not that to which we are all gradually drifting through a thorough want of good-nature and good sense ? The truth the most valuable of all, the kernel of the nut, lies, like all kernels, in the middle; but there is much to be said upon the simply good-natured view, which would assign to this age no pre-eminence either in stupidity, crime, or sin; but would take it as one of the links in the vast chain of progress, somewhat weak and disturbed, but big with grand teachings, and with many noble, earnest men, working straight ahead, humbly content to do their duty, and happy in their work. Good-nature will excuse their failings and admire their hardly-won successes; and good sense will, after their death or while they live, look upon both sides, and taking the Sunshine with the shade, the failings with the virtues, give honour where honour is due. MOTHERHOOL). MAN as well as Woman being a very stupid animal, dissatisfied, blundering, wondering, restless, not grasping the present, but always looking at the future with an ungrateful kind of hope, or to the past with an equally foolish regret, it is well that an Almighty Power has so fixed his boundaries, that to him, as to the sea, He has said, “Hitherto shalt thou go, and no farther; ” for if a man could do anything he chose, what would he not do 2 “You command,” says the Latin proverb, “the hungry Greek to fly into the skies, and he does it.” Man is that Graºculus esuriens, always panting to be what he is not. “Oh,” says the errand-boy without grace, education, figure, or brains, “oh, if I were only one of these soldier-officers, what a swell I should be l’ “Oh,” cries the officer, who finds small pay, life in barracks, and constant 182 MOTHEREIOOD g 183 drill not very pleasant, “oh, if I were only a small shop-boy, with only the cares of the day before me, just carrying out soap and candles, how much better I should be l’’ Bothered by theological difficulties, the poor parson wishes he were a farmer, and in the harvest field. The farmer looks to the cool parsonage house, and wishes he were a clergy- man. All this, given in different words, is to be found in Horace — “Mascenas, what's the cause that no man lives Contented with the lot which Reason gives, Or chance presents?” f The first murderer wished that he had chosen to feed the innocent sheep, instead of having to plough the stubborn land. Reflecting upon this, we should be very thankful that our powers of change are finite. Mrs Holt, in that capital novel of George Eliot's, Feliac Holt, thanks Heaven for small and out-of-the-way mercies. “There are mercies,” the poor woman repeats (after some preacher, no doubt), “where you didn't look for 'em ’’; and then she “ thanks God in His mercy for making her live down a back 184 THE BURDEN OF LIFE street.” Well, there may be much in that: certainly we have to thank God that men and women must be men and women still, until the chapter of this mortal life is brought to its ordained end, or we should have no women left. People are so dissatisfied with their lot that almost any woman that you ask would be a man if she could; and failing this, women will assume the garb and attri- butes of the other sex, and live, externally at least, as men. . There is not only the instance of many female sailors and soldiers, but of a female surgeon, Inspector of Her Majesty's military hospitals, who died a few years ago, and who had passed as a man in barracks and in battle. Then there are modern instances of women acting as coach- men, grooms, and men-servants, and living for years undetected as men. But we find no instance on record of a man who has passed himself off as a woman, except for a momentary trick. Hence we may presume that, as a rule, men are supposed to have much the best of the bargain, not only by themselves, but by women, in the disposition of the sexes. We, therefore, may “find mercies where we did not look for them,” MOTHERHOOD 185 in the fact that, do what they will, women cannot in one body turn themselves into Iſleſ). Of course Womanhood, even as it is now conducted, has some advantages. We have not all of them on our side. Madame Carlo- witz declares that, intellectually at least, Woman is better than Man. “Woman,” she cries indignantly; “what is woman but educa- tion ? Education is woman. Woman is educa- tion. Only let us bring up our daughters as we bring up our sons, and the women would far surpass the men.” Madame Flora Tristan seems to entertain the same opinion. “Oh that Woman could receive another education 1" she cries; “if, instead of being brought up like Odalisques to please and to serve, Women were fitted to fill the sublime part of inspiring and guiding that companion for whom God has destined her Human intelligence would then increase more in one century than it has in the long course of the past generations; harmony would reign in the bosom of society, because there would then be restored the proper equilibrium between the muscular strength of Man and the intelligence of Woman.” Which assumes that Woman is 186 THE BURDEN OF LIFE much cleverer than man : a fact which doctors and experience deny. But shift the burden how you will, God will have His world peopled, and men cannot be mothers. Now, is there not some peculiar honour in motherhood 7 May not Woman find something to console herself in her peculiar vocation ? Is there any reason why a hatred of children should grow up in the breasts of female philosophers? Is the posi- tion of Woman so hard a one 7 “Alas!” says a French woman writer, “the part that Woman has to play is a very hard one (le ºróle de femme est bien dure); ” and, echoing her complaint (and as we think, very wickedly echoing it), George Eliot says, “God Almighty was very cruel when He created Woman.” The Mother is, of the two parents, not , originally, but immediately, the most closely connected with the offspring; and to the Mother falls generally by far the largest share of affection. Five-and-twenty volumes might with little trouble be filled with the Sweet and charming things that have been said about Mothers. From the philosopher to the novelist, almost all poets and MOTHEREIOOD 187 literary men have delighted to praise their Mothers:– “A Mother is a Mother still: The holiest thing alive,” sang a great poet, as if he could not praise a mother sufficiently, except by repeating her title. So, again, in our common tongue we run into platitudes and repetitions in praising Mothers. “Ah,” cries an old gossip, “a man can have only one mother ”; and the apparent silliness of the sentence does not detract from its pathos. A Frenchman, as a rule, believes only in the supreme virtue of one woman; for being of a nation of gallants, he fancies he can lay siege to and conquer all women, old or young—but one; and that woman is his mother. This being he regards through life with a reverential, if not with a religious affection—considerably modified, we may be sure, by the daily sight of Mary the Mother with the Infant Christ, in churches and in pictures and books of devotion. In plays, in poems, in newspapers, and even in tracts, this love for the Mother constantly peeps out. “Oh ciel !” cries the hero in a play, as he gazes on a picture; “oh ciel / c'est ma mère/ 188 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Ange adorable, běnis ton fils/’ and he kneels in rapture. A modern English writer shows scarcely less love — “My father was—no matter—I, his son, Live to detest, not love. But oh, my Mother, let me speak of thee, Whom I shall reverence till life shall flee; Patient and loving, gentle and refined, Thine the pure heart and sweetly simple mind. Though sorrow press'd thee, and sharp want assail'd, Thy faith, thy hope, thy courage never fail’d.” We need not quote more. Cowper, on seeing his mother's picture, gazes on it and cries, “Oh that those lips had language l’ And there is not a little boy in a public school that does not remember, with a swelling heart, the last soft pressure of his mother's hand, the shilling or sovereign gently slipped into his, the dear soft kiss and kind word, and that inexpressibly sweet atmosphere of one whom he so loves, and who so loves him. Darwin the naturalist (not the one now alive, but he who has long since been dead) used to say that the ideas of beauty which we connect in statuary and pictures with the bosom of beauty, arose from our dimmed but MOTHEREIOOD 189 grateful recollections of first drawing thence our sustenance, of being pillowed there in our baby sleep, of being soothed by the pressure of a mother's breast. This theory has been laughed at, but it is far from folly. “Dick,” said a brave soldier, as he felt life ebbing away, “Dick, my boy, I'm dying. Before I go, cuddle me as mother used to.” And putting up his poor, weak head, he died. Lord Nelson, who dearly loved his mother, turned, when dying, to his friend Captain Hardy, and said, “Kiss me, Hardy’; well remembering, no doubt, a dearer kiss that he had received in his infancy. And in the hospitals of Scutari, the wounded men, even in their tormenting thirst and pain, were gentle as children as the nurses walked about amongst them. “They put me in mind so of dear mother,” said one, as he turned to kiss the very shadow of Florence Nightingale as it fell upon his bed. Now, even sentimentally, it is a grand thing to have inspired such a devotion, and almost any woman can do so if she be wise. The heart of a child opens to a mother's love as a flower opens to the sun. The mind of a child is as wax to her touches, and she can 190 THE BURDEN OF LIFE mould it how she chooses. She may demand higher education for women ; but she must please to remember that education and capacity are not one and the same thing; nevertheless she herself has the moulding of the future world. What can we men do against the women—we who are bound down to our desks, tied to our miserable métiers of teaching, writing, painting, sailing, fetching, carrying, butchering, speculating, cheating, trading, chaffering, cheapening, and making money—what can we do against woman, who has a child's heart in her hand, and the long days of infancy and childhood (and days are so long then, and so short now) to teach her children in 1 Our first prayers are taught us by our mother's lips; by her our first impulses are given us ; let her give us an impulse to honour woman, to love her, and to do justice to her, and who shall uproot it ! It is in the most important years of our lives that woman's influence is most prevalent and most felt. Now if woman rightly knew what power is, she would be proud enough of that which she has, and would scarcely demand more; for, in addition to its being in itself tremendous, MOTHEREIOOD 191 it is exactly fitted to her, not only to her intellectual but to her physical faculties. Un- happily she has the same faculty for under- rating that which lies plainly before her that her companion man has. It is a very bad sign that Motherhood should almost cease to be esteemed, and in Some instances despised. Of old it was held a peculiar honour. To become a mother in Israel was indeed the prime object of a woman's life. To be child- less was to be disgraced. The rash vow of Jephtha did not grieve his daughter so much as the idea of dying unmarried and childless. Universally, it has been a matter of rejoicing when a man child, or a child, had been born into the world. “How am I to regenerate France 2" asked Napoleon, as he revolved in his mind the terrible difficulties which beset his adopted country. “Sire l’ replied the wisest woman of her age, Madame de Staël, “give us more mothers”; as if she had said, “Don’t let us have those feeble, fribbling vicious women —those intellectual dilettantes, who play at poetry, and art, and politics—those restless, yearning, unquiet spirits, who find fault with everything, who learn how to destroy but who know not how to build; but give us those 192 THE BURDEN OF LIFE noble-hearted and noble-minded women, who with a willing heart first learn the fiat of the Almighty regarding their sex, and having learnt it, purposely keep it ; nourishing and teaching man, watching the feeble steps and the budding mind of the child ; instilling, at the time when the mind is plastic and the heart bent towards good things, the love of truth, sweetness, and honour, and bringing up for the world's use the most valuable things the world can ever see — men and women of a superior quality.” Madame de Staël was right. France had warriors, soldiers, generals, statesmen, artists, manu- facturers, merchants, politicians, mayors, even beadles and policemen ; all that she wanted was Mothers—such mothers as that noble woman was of old who, being asked where were her rich gems, her bracelets, armlets, and gorgeous brooches, led forward her two noble boys, and proudly answered, “These are my jewels " Great as the honour and glory of Mother- hood is, and widely as the instinct of honour to maternity is spread over the whole earth, the sentiment, like any other, requires culti- vation. When Women are intellectually MOTHEREIOOD | 93 vigorous, and are held in honour, they become good Mothers; when they are degraded, or bought and sold, they degenerate in this holy office, whether in Turkey or in the vulgar Cockney imitation of that land of polygamy which that arch-impostor, Brigham Young, carried on in Mormondom. The Women there were shy and sad; they ran away from the guests just as servants do who, when sitting in the parlour, are suddenly surprised by the appearance of their master. They were essentially careless and bad Mothers, not caring probably to rear up the child of a man who had other children by other wives living in the same house. The children were especially rude, uncouth, rough, and head- strong; they had, indeed, never been under proper control. American boys, as a rule (and all new colonies present the same features), are rough and wild enough ; but the Mormon boys and girls beat them by many degrees. The Mormon Mothers, being swindled and cajoled into emigration, and all being of the lowest agricultural or town class—it is needless to say that there was not one lady amongst them — were hardly Mothers at all. They bore children, and N 194 THE BURDEN OF LIFE then sank into middle age and insignificance. In sad truth, these poor dupes were neither Wives nor Mothers. Of course, to real thinkers it will be un- necessary to say that all this carelessness and its results are to be found in all poly- gamic countries. The Princess Belgiojo-so, who observed them, and lived with the great ladies of the harem for some time, says: “The Mothers have no true tenderness and love for their children, and the latter don't care much for that. The boys consider their mothers as servants; they order them about ; scold them for their carelessness or their negligence; and I don't think that they con- fine themselves always to words. As to modesty, that beauteous and virginal cloth- ing of the earliest age, it does not exist, either in the children or in those who surround them. This life entirely destroys respect for the female parent, while it often gives birth to the saddest and vilest passions which can animate the human breast.” These two facts, we leave to the considera- tion of our female readers. They cannot be ignorant of the questions which are agitating all England and America of the endeavour MOTHERHOOD 195 to change the sphere of Woman; and the hints thrown out in this essay will perhaps enable, them to meet and argue upon certain foolish data which are advanced by those who “go in " so strongly for “Women's Rights,” and for enlarging the sphere which belongs to Woman. BOYS. WE may presume that Nature is stronger than fashion, and that in spite of the newest folly of the day, or the most special policy of the Prime Minister; so that there is yet re- joicing when “a man-child is born.” We are not to be overborne by the concentrated selfishness of the age. This selfishness de- velops itself in many ways—in the pity which is lavished by the childless ones upon those who may have a family; in the comedy burlesque which represents some good old fellow of fiction—say Artemus Ward, as not the highest exponent of that art—as having “an addition to his family,” which he cannot sup- port, but still as chronicling the event as “Joy in the House of Ward,” or as talking about his “Betsy Jane” in a fond and foolish manner, and being held up to a mild ridicule because he is a father. In spite of such quips and quiddities, in spite of worse troubles and trials, 196 BOYS 197 children are one of the blessings of the world; and generally, justly or unjustly, boys are preferred to girls. Certainly boys are very different from girls. In spite of the advocates of the equality of the sexes, and of those who maintain that all the variation in man and woman is external or dependent upon education, most fathers and mothers will concede that the boy is singularly different from the girl. There are more of his sex born, and consequently more die. He is more difficult to rear. Strong as he is in early life, he breaks down more easily, is more subject to fever, and being much more adventurous and more careless, he catches cold more frequently; and colds in our country, sooner or later, mean death. A cold may mean pleurisy, congestion of the lungs, or consumption ; and, these are ailments which slay the strongest of us. Again, boys have a madnesss in their veins for damp clothes, wet shoes, and fatal follies which lead to their destruction. If you were to lead a string of ten boys past a puddle, nine of them would long to put their dry shoes in it; and Londoners may mark every day in some out- of-the-way street, a bubbling fireplug, which a 198 THE BURDEN OF LIFE boy delights in stopping with his foot, so as to squirt the water comfortably up his own trousers or slyly into the faces of his admiring comrades. All boys seem to take to the water as naturally as young Newfoundland dogs. The delight with which a male baby of four will make its way to a puddle is only to be explained on the theory of Monboddo, the phraseology of which is doubtless borrowed from Shakspere, that we have “an ancient and fish-like nature within us.” The theory is weakened when we remember that this love is hardly shared by the girls; any boy will rush to wet his clean pinafore at a pump, but a little girl will think twice ere she will spoil her finery. The other element, as the ancients called it, fire, has an equal attraction for the embryo man. Byron has commemorated the Supreme joy of “an infant as it gazes on a light”; this joy is dim if compared to that which takes possession of a boy's head when he becomes proprietor of a box of lucifer matches and an ounce of gunpowder. In the dull old days before lucifers, boys contented themselves with Smouldering brown paper, burnt sticks, slow-matches, and touch-paper. Anything in BOYS I99 the nature of fire-works delighted them. Miserable little cannon with touch-holes as large as their muzzles, old pistols, fire-locks, guns that luckily would not go off, and ex- plosives in the shape of crackers and squibs, were and still are as dear to a boy's heart as a painted toy and a looking-glass are to that of a Savage. Young mothers, especially those who have sprung from a family of girls, are curiously distressed when they find out the latent differences between the sexes. More adven- turous, restless, turbulent, and aggressive, larger eaters, and ruder in their natures, the beings they give birth to sometimes alarm such delicate mothers. Yet they intercede with the fathers, and often beg mercy for the “young pickles.” The more open, or perhaps we should say the more pronounced, character of the boys, leads women into the mistake that they are more selfish than girls. This we believe is an error. All young things are necessarily selfish, since they are eager and unreflective. Nations in their turbulent youth are just as much so as the individual boy; and the selfishness of the girl is, perhaps, as strongly marked, though it be differently 200 THE BURDEN OF LIFE shown, and is certainly more cleverly concealed. The toys which please a child are succeeded, says Pope, by others in his youth “a little louder, but as empty quite.” The boy, as we know, has a love and a devotion for the heroic, or, in other and more accurate words, for self-distinction. When of an affectionate nature, this desire takes an amiable turn ; but from the young Nelson who left his ship in the Arctic regions and followed a bear across the ice-floes, on purpose “to get a skin for his mother,” to the young Napoleon, who at school planned a snow fortress and commanded the besiegers, the desire is actually distinction. Young Coleridge would dispute and argue at sixteen as he did at sixty; the boy De Quincey taught a lady Greek, he being fifteen and she above thirty, so that she might read the Testament and understand theology; and the young Watt, as we learn by the incident made familiar to us by so many pictures, stopped up a tea-kettle's spout to ascertain the force of steam. In these cases the boy is indeed “father to the man.” But there are others in which it is as well that he is not so. If there be one universal delight of boys, it is BOYS 20| mischief or destruction. Like jackdaws, monkeys, and magpies, the child who is “father to the man” will always be pulling down or building up. He belongs to the order of Destructives. He is worse than the sapeur, of which the French song tells us, “Rien n’est sacré pour un sapeur-r-r /* Nothing can be kept from the meddling fingers of a boy. He will ruthlessly pull to pieces the orange flowers of a bride's bonnet ; he will peer behind every screen, make a hole in the bellows to see whence the wind blows, and cut off the head of his little sister's huge doll, to find out by what means the eyes move. He is a slave to his insatiable curiosity. He will spoil a roasting-jack to find out how it turns round, and dig up his father's sweet peas to find out what they do “when they begin to grow.” Wordsworth has poured out the vials of contempt upon the curious SO/VO/nt, as— “One that would peep and botanise Upon his mother's grave.” The curious boy would, perhaps, without the slightest feeling of compunction, study 202 THE BURDEN OF LIFE anatomy from his father's skull. It is not that the boy has not feeling; he is without that experience which softens and refines and makes it powerful. A love for the heroic is prevalent enough in boy-nature, but this takes too often a form which may be delightful to the boy, but can- not be so to the man. His sense of humour, which consists in tying a rope across the hall, so as to trip up old grandfather, in throwing red-hot half-pence to burn the fingers of poor beggars, and in barking at the heels of nervous old ladies like an infuriated dog, is paralleled by his sense of power. He would always be a king. “Paint me,” said the young Chatterton, “like an angel with a trumpet, to blow my name all over the world.” Like Bottom the weaver, the ambitious boy would play all sorts of characters; but “his chief humour is for a tyrant; he could play ’Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in,” as that clown expresses it. If not Alexander, however, he would play the Robber. A boy loves to be “a robber”—the “robber’ of romance of course. The boy figures himself as the hero of the fight; he dances with Claude Duval, and fires his pistol in the face of the advancing soldiers with Dick BOYS 203 Turpin. This love of adventure is not confined to low and untaught boys. A lady of birth, and leader of fashion, ay, and of intellect too, had three sons—two at Eton, in the lowest forms, and one under a tutor. The fond mother, anxious to “teach the young idea,” gathered these precious nestlings round her on the sofa one holiday, and explained that her fortune was small, and died with her, and that these three noble boys of hers would have to undertake noble work; in fact, they would have to go out into the world as their father had done, and win their way. “Yes, mamma, yes,” cried the earnest little fellows, fully comprehending the mother's plan. Her eyes glistened as she listened to their willing good- ness. Visions of one as a general, another as a judge, a third as a bishop, swam before her. “Well, my darlings,” she said, “you are good boys to be so willing to work. What would you like to be 2 " The young voices, without a pause, without a moment's hesitation, chorused “Freebooters, mammal" It seems to us—who have observed, and, we hope, understand boys—to be a very common mistake to suppose that they are always happy. We certainly—and it says much for the good- 204 THE BURī)EN OF LIFE ness of the human and undegenerate heart— remember our pleasant days, and forget the unpleasant ones. Our minds, like the sun- dial, only take note of the sunshiny hours, and bear no record of the clouds and storms; but from what we remember of our own boyhood, we believe that manhood can chronicle no bitterer grief than that of our youth, and that the tender heart was not less liable to be wounded because it was so tender. Let us look to one who, with a master hand, has laid bare what he, as a boy, thought, felt, and suffered. Even when he was so small as to find it somewhat awkward to scrape his shoes at a dame-school, lest he should get his plump little leg over the scraper, the boy Dickens noted, felt, and suffered, and from these suffer- ings drew some of his most admirable pictures. Mark how he notes the tyranny of the masters at schools, and the tender, regretful thoughts and piteous recollections of a boy in that novel which is his own autobiography. When Dickens grew up to be, like Tennyson's “Plump Head Waiter,” “A somewhat pottle-bodied boy That knuckled at the taw,” BOYS 205 the same trouble accompanied him. It would be useless to say before him, as many unthink- ing people do to lads generally, “Oh, he's a boy—don't mind him”; he heeded everything. His grief at being placed with poorer and lower boys to work; his pride, which, when he found his comrades followed him, to see where he lived, made him walk up to a respectable door and knock; his anguish at his father's devil-may-care jollity in the debtors' prison, can all be read. These sorrows were burnt in, like the letter D on a deserter's shoulder, on the heart of Dickens. He said, truly enough, he never could forget them, though it was only after the grave had closed over him that they were revealed. The life of De Quincey affords corroborative evidence of the feelings of boys — acute, intense, and not all happy ; and it does more —it reveals that not only has a man “a boy's heart within the man's,” as he must have if he be good, but that the intellectual boy has a man's heart within the boy's. Perhaps of all charming writing, none surpasses that of De Quincey, who is so clear, lucid, pretty in finish without effeminacy, strong and yet gentle in his style, that it is a pleasure to read him even 206 THE BURDEN OF LIFE when he is not at his greatest. When but a babe he made a balloon with his brother, and wrote a tragedy, in which a difficulty occurred, all the characters being executed at the end of each act. The perplexity thus occasioned caused “Sultan Amurath" to be abandoned. He was Major-General of an imaginary army, commanded by his brother, who used to write reports and read them to the housekeeper, causing much pain to Thomas when he an- nounces a humiliating defeat, or when it was said that “the Major-General behaved with a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery.” He was then elevated to the throne of an imaginary king- dom—that of Gombroon—and threatened with war and annexation by a superior potentate, his brother. “How, and to what extent,” asked his brother in a despatch, “did I raise taxes on my subjects?” The boy Prince de Quincey was speechless and sleepless from this despatch. If he declared, as his free soul wished to declare, that he abhorred taxation, and scorned to take his subjects' money, the superior potentate would know that he was left without a standing army, and would at once annex his kingdom ; if he confessed to BOYS 207 raising taxes, his high-flown belief in Utopian freedom was gone. Our readers will find immense humour in realising this difficulty, as acting on the brain of an imaginative and very clever boy, who was not yet much above nine years old. Some of the followers of our demagogues, who wish us to carry on the business of an ancient kingdom without taxa- tion, know less at fifty of political economy than this boy did. De Quincey was of a gentle, retiring nature, and was thankful that he was never subjected to “horrid, pugilistic brothers,” but that he was brought up with the gentlest of sisters. Whether we should not—at least till a boy is ripe for a public school—have mixed schools, in which the stronger nature of the boys should work to advantage upon the weaker nature of the girls, making them handier and more active, and the observant, gentle nature of the girls react upon the roughness and recklessness of the boys, is a question that needs to be debated. In Devonshire and Cornwall we hear of these mixed schools, which are found to be of the greatest service. Such schools should, how- ever, be strictly supervised, and the pupils only remain together in class. It is held as a 208 THE BURDEN OF LIFE rule that the emulation which rises in a boy's heart when he finds himself beaten in his lessons by a girl has a good effect upon him. It has been said that, in acquiring learning —not in using it, but merely in the cram, or accumulation of it—girls are more ready than boys; than some boys they may be ; but the assertion will not hold good as regards boys generally. Boys have not only great freshness of mind, which leads to invention, but immense imita- tion. In Lancashire, amidst the spindles and the wheels, we have heard of a five-year-old constructing a model over-shot water-mill, and of boys attentively observing the work of piston and crank when they were but four. “Amongst us, sir,” said a workman, “boys' minds run on machinery.” This arises from imitation—imitation akin to the love which French boys exhibit for guns, swords, bayonets, and hussar caps, or to the action of Sam Weller's son, young Tony, in taking a pipe and a pot, and sitting with his dumpy fat legs wide apart, and saying, “Now I’m grand- father 1" We may be sure that use becomes second nature, and that, after a time, Lanca- shire will readily produce more machinists and BOYS 209 France more soldiers. Our engineers as well as our engines are all over the world, and are always to be relied on ; and the bellicose nature of the Gaul is to be recognised for the last ten centuries of history, and is pretty well known too. But it is not the imitative, nor the inven- tive, nor the bright boy that always turns out a genius. We do not know what “report " was made of William Shakspere in the Strat- ford Grammar School, but we do know that Byron and Peel—schoolfellows, by the way— were not very brilliant, and that Scott was noted as a dull boy, and Smollett as one care- less and full of mischief, and always with a “stane in his pouch,” probably to throw at a window. Very seldom, unless watched with a tender care, is the master-passion of a boy's heart seen. And that is why so many square boys are put into round holes and made miser- able for life. But surely the drift is visible enough. Old Nickleby the miser, as Dickens tells us, began at school to lend halfpence on interest, and to carry on a money-making trade in marbles. In after-life he developed into a skilful and money-lending attorney. One little boy we knew who carved a slate-pencil O 210 THE BURDEN OF LIFE into an idol, and made his enemy worship it, so that—such was the deep revenge of the child—the said enemy should be for ever lost, has turned out one very earnest for the faith. Most children of the “male persuasion” in “the two sexes of man” have really as intense a desire for something—if you can only find out what it is—as had Haydon and Turner, the painters, a desire for art. That of the first was simply an ill-regulated ambition without power; that of the second, a lowlier and more steadfast ambition ; and we see the different results in the lives of the two men. It will be well if fathers—as did the father of Sir David Wilkie—try to find out what their boys want to do and can do ; for, if put to that, they will, like that great painter, make happy and useful men. KINSFOLK AND RELATIONS. WHEN the “Amateur Casual” was spending his miserable night in the wards of Lambeth Workhouse, amidst blasphemy and bestiality, which seem to be with low natures the certain and accursed products of extreme poverty, he heard two poor men, heedless of the tramp's oath, or the brutal song of the patterer, disputing, or rather not disputing, but mentioning, with some applause, that fine old word “kindle.” This was, at any rate, a curious circumstance, that, amidst so much poverty, dirt, and misery, in the very centre of a circle composed of rogues, thieves, and ne'er-do-wells, two respectable waifs and strays should have drifted, and, regardless of noise and the bald, wicked chat of their companions, should solace themselves, not with prayer, or pious ejaculation, but, like two old philosophers, with a reference to the beauty and meaning of an Anglo-Saxon or German word. 2ll 212 THE BURDEN OF LIFE The poor gentleman in the casual ward, who had but dry bread for his supper, and who was subjected to have even that snatched from him, was quite right. “Kindle" is a fine old word. It is expressive of warmth, of gene- rosity, of affection. It has a number of fine old words hanging to it—kin, kind, kindly, kindred, kinship, kinsfolk, kinsman, and kins- woman. Some, indeed, refer kin from the Gothic kun, and Anglo-Saxon cenhan, to beget, to bear, to produce, and hence the verb to kindle; while the same verb, with its other meaning, to ignite a fire, they derive, with Skinner, from the same word as candle, in the ancient Danish kindil, but as this plainly comes from the same root, we need not run any further away from our subject. Most of us, then, throughout life, are sur- rounded with beings who may be described relatively to us only by one word, and that an offshot of the casual's fine old word kindle. They are our kinsfolk. Of late years some fine people have introduced the word “rela- tions” instead of kinsfolk; but it is but a lame invention. A man's wife's sister's brother is his relation; is related, brought back to or connected with him by a certain link, but KINSFOLK AND RELATIONS 213 his own brother is his kinsman. To say a man is a relation is a general way of speaking of the person's connection with you, while you have still further to specify that he is your cousin or your brother. “Consanguinity, or Telation by blood,” says Blackstone, “or af. finity, or relation by marriage, are canonical disabilities to contract marriage.” A man's relations, moreover, may be relations in trade or other business, and indeed the word is so general, that unless it had been long, and meaningless, puzzling to little boys, and ap- parently fine in the mouths of weak women, it is hard to say how it should have been adopted, almost to the driving out of the proper and really beautiful word. Even Charles Lamb has adopted it, in writing his fine essay on “Poor Relations.” How any one can be a poor relation or a rich relation in the true sense it is hard to say. One can be poor in our bearing towards another, and one can indeed be a poor kinsman or woman, in which case people will not be very ready to know you ; or a rich kinsman, when, on the contrary, the scandal goes, your friends will very quickly find you out. In spite of all the ill-natured things that 214 THE BURDEN OF LIFE are said against one's kinsfolk, probably every man, except he be a very cross-grained one, is glad that he has them. Blood is thicker than water; and although well-to-do and selfish people may ask why it should be so, and why a man should be hampered all his life by his kinsfolk and relations, yet the better part of mankind feel a certain warmth when they greet a cousin, and really do love their family and the ties it brings with it very much. The best part of man, that is, woman, is always a stickler for “relations,” as she calls them. If her husband or her father be only the six- teenth cousin of an earl, or be descended from or related to, as most of us by a course of nature must be, any rich or excellent person, woman remembers it. She is a great genea- logist. From a man's father one seldom hears to whom one is of kin; but from our mother we remember all our great consanguinities—how we are related to the Pograms, and that some- thing of the Pogram nose is observable about us; or how our great-great-grandmother being a Jobson, we have certainly a Jobson mouth. The love of tracing a descent, and of registering the particular “blood” which flows in our veins, seems natural to woman. In the EINSFOLK AND RELATIONS 215 curious autobiography of Johnson, which is but a fragment, he notes that his mother was fond of telling him of her kinsfolk, and of one Mrs Harriots. “She was my mother's rela- tion,” he adds; “he (his father) had none so high to whom he could send any of his family. . . . My mother had no value for his relations; indeed, those we knew of were much lower than hers. This contempt began very early, I know not on which side, but as my father was little at home, it had not much effect.” Pope, also, refers to his mother and her family; and with some men of genius it seems to have been a settled belief, no doubt inculcated by the estimable old ladies them- selves, that their mothers were very much better born than their fathers, and that they were at least noble by umbilical descent. The reason of all this is, that woman thinks a good deal more of kinship than man does. If a man be well off in the world, he has an ungrateful way of looking down at and despis- ing his poor relations, and some public in- structors are very humorous about such people. It has become the fashion even for the State to “cut” the poor relations of Eng- land, such as indeed was Denmark, and to 216 THE BURDEN OF LIFE talk of the trouble and expense of our colonies, forgetting that from them we receive many reciprocal advantages, and that it will be a sad day for Mother England when she is left alone in the world. So, too, we carry this feel- ing into private life. “I was once introduced,” says a writer, whose character can be desig- nated by four letters, “to literally a cartload of cousins, of whose existence I had not the remotest idea. I had never seen them before, and, thank God! I am not at all likely ever to see them again; and, therefore, our emotions at the interview were not specially exciting.” And as he goes on, the reasons for his selfishness, most unblushingly put forward, appear in full force. “But if such a colony of cousins were to come and plant a colony just a mile from my house, just fancy our anxieties I should be called upon to be the introducer, the sponsor, and the guarantee of people of whom I knew nothing. Fancy such a burthen being laid upon one's shoulders, and being called an unnatural brute if one refused.” Unhappily for this person, such a burthen is laid upon a great many shoulders. The near- est kinship that we can have is that of our parents, and for each one of us have been RINSFOLK AND RELATIONS 217 performed those kindly offices without which we should not have existed. A great many men never repay the world the affection which has been expended upon them ; and the com- plaint from man and woman, that they would they had never been born, is by no means uncommon. Children are proverbially un- grateful to parents, and this ingratitude arises probably from the fact that they never fully realise, until it is too late, all that their own parents have done for them. When they have children of their own around their knees and at their board, they then know what constant watching and affectionate care chil- dren demand, and have, from the very nearest of their kinsfolk. Of old, people used to rejoice in their circle of friends, and Goldsmith tells with pride the story of a French knight, who presented him- self to his king at the head of twenty fine sons, and claimed a reward for having done so much for France. The childless woman in patri- archal times was reproached; but to-day we think differently from the patriarchs, and pride ourselves on having no incumbrances. So it is with kinsfolk and relations. People are delighted while they are young and powerful, 218 THE BURDEN OF LIFE \ or rich, in thinking that they have no rela- tions to be a drag to them, or to bother them. But these despised people are of great use to us in forming our characters. The sole son or the sole daughter is not only often spoilt, but must certainly have much less experience and a smaller range of information, sympathy, and affection, than he or she who is surrounded by brothers and sisters; who, not petted, but checked and scolded, and who has to take a fair chance with the rest of the family. Brothers and sisters are indeed always valu- able, and it is usual to find an immense deal of affection subsisting between them through life, in spite of the selfishness of the age. Occasionally we hear in England of a brother letting his sister go to the workhouse, just as you hear in America of a boy who wept when his father was drowned, because he (the father) had the boy's jack-knife in his pocket; but there is usually one brother in a family who will devote himself to his sisters, and will do all that he can to set them forward in life ; nay, the manliness and devotion of this brother is frequently very wonderful, for, by degrees, as we exert ourselves generously, our selfish- ness dies down and disappears. KINSFOLK AND RELATIONS 219 More often than a brother, a sister will devote herself to a family, and will work for it, beg for it, fight for it, yes, and even lie for it in the most thorough way. She believes in it in all its troubles, and clings closely to the old gang of kinsmen and kinswomen, through good and evil report—more often through the latter; for respectable and good families seem unable often to elicit such affection as bad and ne'er- do-well ones. When such a devoted sister marries, the husband is pretty sure to be bored with the ever-recurring story of the virtues of the family. Eighteen hundred years ago Martial wrote an epigram, as coming from some poor fellow who had married a Roman lady, a sister of the Gracchi, or the Scipios, or other great family, and Tom Browne very neatly translates it and adapts it thus. The lady was always bragging of the achievements of the family— “Still taking forts and burning ships in harbour, I wish your ancestor had been a barber 1’’ and many a quiet civilian, who has married into a military set, is ready to repeat the wish. For in the majority of cases, even when a man does honour his own relations, he shows 220 THE BURDEN OF LIFE no mercy to those of his wife. “A wife's relations,” said one, sententiously, “are a man's natural enemies,” and the perils which a poor fellow has to undergo from his mother- in-law have been so often set forward in cari- catures, in farces, and stupidly funny books, that all the world is bored by the narration. Very often, however, his wife's mother is a man's best friend and adviser, and often, too, she will side with her son-in-law against her own child—an almost Superhuman piece of just dealing and impartiality. That the mother-in-law and sister-in-law may be some- times encroaching, it would be useless to deny ; but five times out of ten such rela- tions are very useful, kind, and good to the young couple, which has all the world before it, and which hardly knows which way to take. Why, except that the age has grown selfish, people should object to cousins, it is not easy to say. One reason may be, that in the “family” everything is pretty well known, and the maker of a colossal fortune, or the inheritor of a lordly name, is looked upon at his own simple worth. Cousins of proud men have an awkward habit of recollecting ante- KINSFOLK AND RELATIONS 221 cedents which may, or may not, have been very pleasant. They remember when the millionaire swept out the shop, or when the nobleman was a nasty vulgar little boy at school. The quarrels between the sons of great families are proverbial: more than one son of a noble house leaves his home never to enter it any more, and with a settled hate of the family. Poor people as well as poor nations agree better, because adversity binds people together, while prosperity renders them jealous and disunites them. Thus the Scots, whose earth is smaller and soil poorer than that of the English, are much fonder of their kith and kin, and stick together more closely; and the Swiss and Irish, compara- tively poor people, love their kinsfolk with an enduring and almost pathetic vigour. The selfishness which would disunite us from such ties is, like all other selfishness, short-sighted and foolish. It is a sign of a man's worth and integrity in any state of life, when we find him surrounded by his kinsfolk. To look upon one's cousins, if poor, as incum- brances, and if rich, as those who may be flattered and cajoled because they may possibly leave some money behind them, is 222 THE BURDEN OF LIFE unfortunately by far too common, but it is purblind and detestable. It is indeed ill waiting for dead men's shoes, firstly, because they very seldom descend to us; and, secondly, because when they come they are frequently not worth having. No man is required to burden himself beyond his power with work- ing for great hulking lazy relations. The best service he can do them is boldly to push them off into the world, and teach them the beauty and benefit of self-help. But if a man be whole-hearted and cheery, he will delight in the good fortunes and pleasant faces of his kin; he will feel that there is something strong in the tie of blood, that around the home which only a few years ago must have been a common one, the affections of the heart still cling; he will therefore help, advise, console, and push forward his kinsfolk, and realise the truth of the exclamation of the Hebrew poet—“How good a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” LAZINESS. “THE Supreme service which Mr Ruskin has done to this generation has been that of teaching them to honour men and things— not for what they seem to be, but what they are as respects candour and justice, accuracy and truth.” This sentence from an out-of-the- way organ of a particular trade is notable for this, that it is acute and true, and that it indicates a wide-spread education when we find a well-written and thoughtful essay on Ruskin in a magazine devoted to the interests of tobacco. And we may add to the critic's observation, that the service done by Ruskin, Carlyle, the author of Self-Help, and other writers—they are not a few but many in this great country—lies not alone in their constant laudation of truth, candour, manliness, and uprightness, but in the special honour which they have paid to the working man, and to true and honest work, even if its end be mis- 223 224 THE BURDEN OF LIFE taken or misdirected. Through them we live in a land in which, did not the devil's agents find out seductive and opposing vices, the workmen chiefly would be honoured. In the old times he who did no work had little regard with us. “A gentleman, a spaniel dog, and a salt-box,” says a contemptuous proverb, “are to be found near the fire"; and were it not the increased love of mediaevalism, glitter, grandeur, and finery, in which a certain amount of lassitude and laziness seems to be demanded, perhaps the workers would still be honoured for themselves and not for what they produce. Men are surely above bees, and not to be reckoned merely because they bring home yellow dross. Honour such by all means, but honour those, too, who work at home and guard the hive and make the cells. Society, always stupid, does neither. How often do we see a hard-working father and mother, who have made the home and the house, and ren- dered it possible for their sons and daughters to be ranked with those above them, despised by the educated puppets whose education they have slaved for Yet Society would seem to delight in the drones of the second generation, who differ only from true drones in the gayness LAZINESS 225 of their coats, and to despise the poor old father who is the pure but unpolished gold. The observation is so trite that its gist and core have been used up in comedies and farces; it was true when Coleman wrote, as true as when Plutarch penned his Moralia. Laziness, then, is despised only where it brings on to the stage its constant companions, poverty and disrespect. Otherwise, when it appears to advantage, in the pretty languid lassitude of a fine lady, or in the affected grace of a Sir Charles Coldstream, it is well enough. When, in the glowing verses of Robert, Lord Lytton, we see a lady of whom he can write— “The folds of her wine-dark violet dress Glow over the sofa, fall on fall, As she sits in the air of her loveliness With a smile for each and for all,” we can pardon a good deal of such vice; but we should be shocked at its exhibition in a servant, or the mother of a family, or a peasant girl. And yet it is bad in all. It is a vice that eats like a cancer, and that breeds like a rat or a white mouse; it absorbs and swallows up other vices that have something of activity and nobleness in them—and that P 226 THE BURDEN OF LIFE is the only good about it. But in return for this good it is the mother of all vices; it is the nurse of envy, hatred, and malice ; it gives rise to discontent and to great unhappiness— indeed we know of no deeper dissatisfaction than that arising from one's own inactivity. Whether sins of omission are as bad as those of commission is a question, but there is no ques- tion about the keenness with which an honest mind feels what it has left undone. In nine cases out of ten it cannot be done again. In the old story of Roger Bacon's brazen head, that wise man is represented as being so astonished at his own powers, when he had raised the brazen head with prophetic power to life, that he forgot to question it, and the head, calling out “Time was, time is, time has passed,” fell and dashed itself to pieces. Of what use was the wizard's regret 2 Time had passed; and that time passes by so quickly and so uselessly must be put down to laziness. Another evil of this vice is its prevalence. The person who writes against it is perhaps as lazy as the people whom he lectures, although he has won a name for industry, and can show a goodly number of chips in his workshop. But his life, like that of most of us, has been a LAZINESS 227 continual struggle with, and continual protest against, laziness. The most industrious of us do not find it pleasant to turn out of bed on a winter morning, nor to rise and do the work of the world; and yet, if it were not done, if it were not for the perpetual activity and ceaseless work of some, creation itself would, as we may put it, freeze itself into chaos. Industry alone keeps the world going ; in- dustry is light and heat—indolence, cold and darkness. Happily we can all see this in others, if not in ourselves. The mistress hates laziness in her servant, the servant in her mistress—the master in his man, the man in his master. We all reverence the active, energetic man; he inspires us as he bustles about, he strikes fire into the dull flintiness of our natures, he makes us better by his presence, while a lazy one makes us worse. For, as an iceberg or a mass of cold stone will extract the caloric from warm and lifeful objects near it, so a truly lazy person will somehow steal the industry away from others. His example is as catching as an epidemic, and as bad. Another evil in this vice is its seductiveness. A small indulgence in it is so pleasant that we each and all of us succumb many times 228 THE BURDEN OF LIFE during the year to its blandishments. We can- not “watch and pray”; we must fall asleep. We persuade ourselves that our indolence is a necessity for our health, or a habit which has a certain gentlemanly air about it, or the quiet of a good heart. “The best of men have ever loved repose ; They hate to mingle in the filthy fray, Where the soul sours and gradual rancour grows, Embittered more from peevish day to day. “E'en those whom Fame has lent her fairest ray, The most renowned of worthy wights of yore, From a base world at last have stol’n away : So Scipio, to the soft Cumaean shore Retiring, tasted joy he never felt before.” This quotation from Thomson will let us into another secret of laziness. It often arises from wounded pride. When Scipio retired to the soft Cumaean shore, or when any other leader of men “retired from business,” from Charles W. to the Prime Minister, we may believe that he had a quarrel with the world. His pride was touched, and laziness came to the rescue. Why should he bother himself about the many-headed, many-voiced, and most heedless and hard-hearted multitude : Scipio throws up his consulship, and Timon retires to the LAZINESS 229 Seashore; one fancies that he enjoys himself, the other eats roots and raves at the world. But the world is too strong for us. An illustrious statesman leaves the arena of politics. He has done the State some service, but he feels that it has hardly been estimated at its value. Still he makes a great mistake if he imagines that the world cannot get on without him. The chorus of voices is so great that the best may be silent without being missed in the harmony. The world is of more importance to the best of us than we are to the world, how much soever we may flatter ourselves. Indolence in these cases acts as an anodyne. We wrap ourselves up in it as in a cloak, to keep away the cold of isolation, and we take our revenge in ceasing to do good. But there may be, on the other hand, some virtue in laziness, or in what is much the same, a spring of content, a quiescent satisfaction, which at any rate lets other people alone. The heart which can say “Rest and be thank- ful” may belong to a lazy body, but it is not a bad heart; nor are the most contented, and it is said, the laziest people in the world, the Irish, by any means the worst—in fact they claim to be, and we are quite willing to allow 230 THE BURDEN OF LIFE them to be, the warmest-hearted people on earth. They are certainly most pleasant and charming, and therefore we would say a word for their laziness. It certainly does not arise from greediness. An Irishman, if he can raise sufficient to feed himself and his family, shows a magnificent content which a monarch might envy, and in vain. It is as often the result of a wet climate and a sad experience. Man is more often the creature of bad weather than people suppose; and an Irishman who is not sur- rounded by pushing, bustling, grasping Anglo- Saxons, Scots, or Americans, and who, poor fellow, is not educated in the “Try, try, try again "school, exhibits at once his faith and his weakness by looking to Heaven for help, and not getting it. Then he sits down in despair, and men call him lazy. But place the same man in the midst of ardent work- men, and he will work with the best. Hence the common remark that the Irish do the most work out of their own country. Certainly Irish female servants, if treated with kindness and affection—and, considering what we all owe to servants and what Christians profess, all servants should be so treated—will often LAZINESS 231 remain for life with a family, and will exhibit not only excellent, but generous and noble qualities. They have their likes and dis- likes—and who has not ? They do not like slights or insults to their faith—and who will not say the same concerning his own 2 They love a kind word and gratitude for hard and constant work—and we confess that we are very Irish in that. If it be a weakness—and perhaps it is—we share it to the fullest extent. A frequent source of laziness, both in poor and barren climates and in those which are profuse and generous, is thoughtlessness. The British, as apart from the Irish, are kept up to the mark by a land which is very kindly if one will only feed it, cultivate it, and work it thoroughly, and by a climate which does not permit the farmer to make mistakes. It is of no use for him to plough when he ought to be clearing his crops, nor for him to look after his weeds when he should be harvesting his wheat. The Spaniard and the Negro have lands which, as Jerrold said of good Mother Earth, have only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest. Hence they are as lazy from ease and in- dolence as the Esquimaux is from despair 232 THE BURDEN OF LIFE in the Snow, and the Irishman from vexation at the continual humidity of his earth. Sure to be supplied, they take no note of time and let the world slide. How many of us would like to do the same : What the poet says of cruelty may be said of idleness too— “Time to me this truth hath taught— 'Tis a treasure worth revealing— More offend by want of thought Than from any want of feeling.” But the worst of the matter is that this laziness, begot of want of thought at the proper time—of heedlessness in fact—is a procreative vice and has a large family. If you neglect one duty, you will another; fritter away one hour, and you will waste two ; delay a day, and a week will not suffice you. Lie in bed to-morrow morning an extra ten minutes, and mark if that time does not run into twenty. Laziness is absorbing—like Saturn, it swallows its own children. Climate has much to do with this vice, if it does not wholly produce it in a race. The great belt of industry which runs round the world may be as thoroughly and as easily defined as the Gulf Stream. It lies almost LAZINESS 233 entirely in the temperate zones, and ceases both in extreme heat and extreme cold. At the same time the vice is relative ; whole races seem absorbed by it, and in otherwise industrious nations certain families will inherit and cultivate it generation after generation. It is not, however, from the lazy races—so strong is the force of example—that we find any great worker spring. It is from the British and German and French races that the work of the world proceeds. It is not the Esquimaux who has pierced nearly as far as the North Pole, nor the African Negro who has penetrated into the centre of his own vast continent, or the Chinese coolie who has set afoot that vast system of Chinese emigration which may possibly revolutionise Central America. It is the ceaseless, restless Teutonic and Celtic brain that has done all this, and to which every discovery worth having, every ingenious application, and every great im- provement is owing. But, besides being a matter of climate, lazi- ness, or its opposite, industry, is a matter of religion and of government, but chiefly of the latter. Formalism and fatalism are great aids to laziness; for earnestness, like goodness, lives 234 THE BURDEN OF LIFE only in the heart, and will ever keep moving. If, however, like a Buddhist, you can pray by turning a cylinder, or if, by jabbering like a Dervish seven prayers, seven times a day and counting them off on a rosary, you believe you can please God, it is not likely that you will be up and doing, and learn to labour and to wait. The Turks, in body and in brain, in muscle and in facial angle, as fine a race as any in Europe, have succumbed to a fatalism which has destroyed their energies more than the freest indulgence in the wine which they abjure, or in that sexual vice which they per- mit, polygamy. And indeed, if fatalism or destiny be right, of what use is work “Leave it all to Allah,” says the Turk; “it is against His will to fly from the cholera.” He submits, finds that he is periodically scourged, folds his hands when his rulers tyrannise over him, and, from a moving, propagating, active people, imbued with the motive-power of faith, the Turks sink to be an incubus to the lands they have conquered. Where are those con- querors, the followers of the Caliph Omar, in whom Gibbon delighted as he chronicled their slaughter of the Christians? What has be- come even of those romantic pirates in whom LAZINESS 235 the poet Byron delighted, the free rovers, free robbers, whom he has portrayed in his Corsair and Giaour? A hundred years ago Christendom debated in its senates and its coffee-houses the inroads of the Turks and the policy of the Sublime Porte. Laziness arising from fatalism and bad government has made the Grand Turk a figure of scorn, which waits to be forced into Asia by the indignant pressure of Europe. The cure of laziness in man and nation, when it has not gone too far and become chronic, lies with faith, hope, and a just government. Let a man know that he has some reward to work for—that he is preparing a fund for himself, or that he will be benefit- ting some one else—and you will arouse him to action; and, once aroused, he may easily be kept going. It is quite true that no one can make twenty-four hours out of twelve, but laziness can reduce the twenty-four to six. On the other hand, industry finds secret helps and a strange power arising from itself. It is not long ago that an essayist in a high-priced weekly review, writing against early rising, brought against it the charge that it made the early riser good-natured and insufferably con- 236 THE BURDEN OF LIFE ceited with himself. So it does. That is one of the effects of industry—it sets a man abreast of his work and ahead of the world. And the reverse holds good too. The wife or daughter who comes down late to breakfast, who dawdles and loses time in the morning, is very rightly in a bad temper with herself, and unjustifiably so with the whole world. She makes a false step in the morning, and does not retrieve it all day. The one way to retrieve it is to determine on instant and vigorous action. Laziness is a great giant, a very Goliath, armed and terrible; but he is not so hurtful as he looks, if we march out to slay him. He, like Goliath, and the spleen, his production and result, can be slain by the slightest action— “Fling but a stone, the giant dies.” The difficulty with most of us is to summon up resolution, and to fling. DOMESTIC ECONOMY. How few people consider the meaning of the word “Economy.” We talk of social economy and political economy and the Economy of Human Life — a very well- named book by the way—and our wives speak of having been economical when they mean, or very nearly mean, that they have been parsimonious, not to say stingy. “Mr Brown, I can assure you,” says Mrs Williams, “always struck me as being a very economical man.”—“I’m hang'd l’ cries Mr Williams. “Hush l’ says his wife. “I’m dashed, then, if ever I saw the colour of his money !” Alas, in these hard times this stinginess, this parsi- mony, this cheese-paring, is economy, though it originally had nothing to do with it. Economy is in fact the house-law (from otkos, a house, and vôpos, rule—house-rule, or man- agement); so that any one who should under- take this task—that of economy—would be 287 238 THE BURDEN OF LIFE able to govern well the house. Ben Johnson, that learned bricklayer, who always uses his words well and properly, speaks thus of one of his characters:— “A kind of laborious secretary To a great man (and likely to come on) Full of attendance, and of such a stride In business, politique or economick, As—well, his lord may stoop to advise with him.” “Household economy,” a phrase often used, is, therefore, a pleonasm, and actually at the head of our article is one too, for “domestic,” of course, relates to Domus, a house; in English — an embracing and vigorous language — House-Law would thoroughly well signify “Domestic Economy”; and it would be almost superfluous, had we not fallen on the days of fine-ladyism, to do that which we are about to do—to insist upon every woman's having a full and sufficient knowledge of that House-Law, of all that concerns the important and very wide kingdom over which woman is sooner or later called to rule. If there be anybody who fancies that there is anything ridiculous in this knowledge, let him go far hence. In one of Leech's caricatures there is DOMESTIC ECONOMY 239 a picture of a young swell who enters a club dining-room, where they have to cater for various tastes, and who asks what there is for dinner. Amongst other dishes the waiter says, “There's shoulder of mutton, sir, quite hot, just up.”—“Shouldah o' mutton l’ cries the noble young fellow, in alarm ; “why I always thought they made glue of shouldar o' mutton.” People thought this comic, and laughed; ignorance was deemed the right thing for a gentleman. So in Mr Robertson's comedy of School a young officer is exhibited in a most amiable light as not knowing where or how milk is obtained —“I always thought it was kept on the premises; no, I mean that they drew it from a well.” This sentence always tickles the “swells” and fine ladies immensely. But the real gentlefolk are not so ignorant. Lady Palmerston, who always wrote her own invitation tickets to innumerable assemblies, being wife of the Prime Minister, also looked over all her tradesmen's bills, checked them, and paid them. She, when one of the most charming of women, a lady - patroness of Almack's and at the very top of fashion, knew what a shoulder of mutton was, and 240 THE BURDEN OF LIFE where milk came from. In Queen Elizabeth's time, the lady's boudoir overlooked the hall and the kitchen, and the lady readily assumed all the duties of looking over the house, the expenses of servants—in short, of domestic economy. In Greek life, in Roman life, it was the same. The assumption of igno- rance which fine people think sits so well upon them is quite a modern innovation, no doubt the result of laziness, and flattered into life by tradesmen and servants who are interested in the ignorance of their masters and customers. The cook, who is indignant if the mistress enters “her kitchen,"—and they are fond of claiming a kind of property in that very necessary apartment—is on a par with the tradesman who once told a customer, when he objected to the workmanship and design of the furniture he was looking at, “Well, I'll tell you what, sir; you know too much for any gentleman.” As if knowledge was reprov- able ! As times go, knowledge of these things gets more and more necessary; for the dispenser of money is just as important as the earner; in fact, the province of the wife is that of wisely spending and Saving money. She ought to know the value of all DOMESTIC ECONOMY 24.1 that comes into the house, the quality as well as the quantity of the coal that cooks the meat, as well as of the meat itself. In the innumerable little things which are re- quired in a house, and which are important as costing a great deal of money in the aggre- gate, there is much to be saved and much to be wasted. Servants who can change often, and who, not having to pay for things out of their own pocket, are frequently very wasteful, regard economy in little things as meanness; and yet in all things, from the wood that lights the fire to the soda and blue used in the family wash, there is a constant waste going on in most households. An Indian arriving in England from a part of Hindostan where salt was very dear in con- sequence of a tax upon it, was surprised at the way in which our salt was wasted. Look again at soap boiled away, wasted, and not very seldom thrown down the sink, where it may do the mischief of stopping up a pipe. But from little things to great, waste goes on in English households. We waste enough meat to feed all the poor, and we enrich our dustmen by not infrequently throwing away a silver spoon or a fork into the dust-bin. Q 242 THE BURDEN OF LIFE The men who live by groping in the mud in our sewers prove how many valuable things are thrown down the sink. But the losses occasioned by carelessness are trifling compared with those which arise from ignorance. How many thousands of tons of coal are uselessly and in ignorance allowed to blaze away every year ! When shall we have stoves built that will consume their own smoke 2 – smoke being merely unconsumed coal, and the very essence of heat if burnt. How many pounds of good meat are rendered tasteless by improper cookery “We can never attain,” says Dr Lyon Playfair, “the benefits which the dis- coveries of Science are calculated to bestow on mankind, until women are taught domestic economy rationally, and not empirically. Women are the feeders as well as the mothers of men; and if our ladies would but devote a small portion of the time which they expend in exercising their fingers in playing scales on the piano to study, it would serve them well when they experience the ‘joy that a man child is born into the world'; they would more seriously fulfil the solemn duties which they have to perform, and would give to the DOMESTIC ECONOMY 243 world successive generations more fitted to accomplish the purposes of the great God who created them.” In the latter part of this sentence, Dr Playfair hits upon a very important part of economy. The movement for making lady doctors may do some good if it eventually teaches us to instruct our ladies in some knowledge of anatomy and some of the sim- plest rules of health. A knowledge of cookery is not so necessary because it will produce nice dinners and cheap dinners, as because it will give us dinners easily digested and whole- some. How many men's health and temper are ruined by bad and inefficient cookery, it is impossible to say. A properly fed man is healthy, merry, and able to work. The bravery of the soldier in war lies in the camp kettle. The greatest observer in the world makes a French nobleman before the battle of Agincourt declare that the English would fall an easy prey to the French because they “were shrewdly out of beef.”; and one of the greatest generals and the wisest men always looked, he said, to two things—the stomachs and the shoes of his soldiers. The letters and despatches of this general, the 244 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Duke of Wellington, are full of complaints, threats, and quarrels with the Government at home on account of the inefficiency of the commissariat officers. “If you want your soldiers to fight well,” he said, “you must feed them well”; and again and again he declared that the sick-list would never be so full if the soldiers were better fed; other soldiers, he reiterated, may fight when half-starved, but you must feed Englishmen. Things badly and inefficiently cooked are in a degree wasted. A wise old gentleman always looked, he said, to one thing—and that was, whether his servants could cook a potato. Simple as the matter is, it is not in every house which a man enters that he can get a properly cooked potato, and one badly cooked is both distasteful and unwholesome. With other vegetables, matters are perhaps worse; and the working-man, poor fellow, suffers worse than all. Greens look brown, French beans turn yellow and tough, rump steaks are raw and tough, or hard and overdone, potatoes are waxy, and the pudding indigestible under the destroying fingers of a lazy, non-observant wife, who is too careless to learn, and too ignorant to cook properly. “You wonder,” DOMESTIC ECONOMY 245 said an officer of health to us one day, “that the working-man is cross and does not much care for his home; what pleasure does it give him 2 what comfort does it afford ž You should see as many of these homes as I do ; go in at dinner-time and see the meat spoilt and the vegetables tasteless, the table without a cloth, the hearth untidy. Go to a public- house ! Why, of course they do. You may rail as much as you like about drunkenness; but let me tell you that a comfortless home is at the bottom of more of their drunkenness than you can imagine.” There is too much truth in this assertion. Among the many admirable things which the Baroness Burdett Coutts has done, none was better than her establishment of schools of cookery and household management. The fate of the poor is hard enough indeed, but it is capable of much improvement, and at their own hands. Much of the discomfort, so mournful in its effects, yet so easily relieved, people hardly try to remedy, because they do not know the extent of the evil. For many years the Irish peasant lived contentedly with a huge dunghill outside his cabin door. Every summer his children and he suffered from fever, 246 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and the poor fellow said his prayers devoutly, and expected to be cured as it were by a miracle; but the cure lay in clearing away the dungheap and in draining the land ; and so the happiness of many a family lies in the simple and honest knowledge of domestic economy. We have spoken of the knowledge of anatomy and the laws of health as necessary to a mother. It is astonishing how grossly ignorant most ladies are content to be on these points. Some time ago the most barbarous inventions existed for the purpose of torturing babes. As the flat-headed Indians wrapped up the heads of their children between boards until the skull expanded, not laterally, but only at the fore- head and the back of the head, and the head resembled a long egg, so our mothers swathed and tied up their poor babies, almost as soon as they were born, in an indefinite quantity of yards of cloth. A child's heart is very small, but it must beat ; a child's ribs are thin and weak, but they must expand ; if you put your finger, or even a hair, upon the escapement of a lever watch you stop it; and many a babe's life has been stopped by being too tightly bandaged. “My poor baby was put down by DOMESTIC ECONOMY 247 my side, and I slept,” said a young mother, “ and when I awoke it was dead.” No wonder : the poor little heart had not room to beat, the young lungs had not space to expand. A doctor has suggested that the best way for very young children to sleep is to lie packed in bran, and some old nurses have made a great outcry at the novelty; but consumption, narrow chests, and a thousand ills, would be avoided by abandoning the bandages. As we grow up there are plenty of Snares laid for us by the ignorance of our mothers, those excellent ladies having been taught when young how to catch birds, but not how to build cages. There is not only the improper food, the want of lime and bone- making material in food, the want of exercise, but the want of proper clothing. A doctor in New York some time ago made a large fortune by curing colds and consumption in young people, especially in children and young girls. His secret, which he published, was, after all, a very simple one. He clothed the poor little naked legs and arms; he made the extremities warm, and let the blood circulate freely; and his young patients lived to be thankful to him. 248 THE BURDEN OF LIFE There are many other matters in domestic economy which will suggest themselves to our readers. Of old, a “notable woman" was not a rare thing; and one who knew how to buy a cow or to sell butter was indeed a prize to her husband. Solomon's description of the wife who is a crown of glory to her husband— whose sons as well as himself are clothed with the work of her hands—is no bad description of a woman who thoroughly understands domestic economy. What we have said is sufficient to show that there will be quite enough for any woman's intellect to master and comprehend; and the utility of the sub- ject will surely be a plea for its nobleness. The field is indeed wide; and upon its proper cultivation depends the happiness of many millions. Fine-ladyism has been the bane of our young and old people. Not to know, and to pretend not to know, is very silly. Ignor- ance is based upon idleness, and makes it an excuse; but the times are coming, if indeed they are not now upon us, when such an excuse will not be admitted—indeed, will be laughed at, as it deserves to be. Nor will any wise man interfere with the study of Domestic Economy, should a daughter DOMESTIC ECONOMY 249 or a wife earnestly apply herself to it. No man need fear that his wife will be the worse, although she will be strong-minded, with that strength which overcomes ignorance. Nor need there be any jealousy between the sexes. Woman is in her own province when she is studying the best management of a house; and the more she studies it, the better wife and more admirable member of society she will make. (Half the quarrels which spring up between young couples arise from the simple fact that the wife finds out that she has undertaken much more than she can do; not because the duty is hard or unpleasant, but because she really does not understand what to do. A wife nowadays, wrote a friend who was but recently married, hardly appears to be fit for her place. “Bless me, I didn't know !” —“What will this cost 3'→"What are we to do 3’—“Dear me, how soon the money goes ' " are cries not unknown to the ears of husbands. Mr Dickens has tried to picture such a wife in his “ Dora,” who buys a huge Salmon weighing about eighteen pounds for two persons, and has oysters brought up to table without being opened. This may be childlike and innocent to read about ; but a 250 THE BURDEN OF LIFE young wife is no longer a child, and ignorance of common duties, which begins in the dis- comfort, and too often ends in the ruin, of a husband, is by no means innocence, but detestable and deplorable selfishness. CONCEIT AND WANITY. SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE, in addressing a literary institution, did well to speak of conceit and vanity as vices of the age; for, of vain and puffed-up persons, perhaps the self- educated product of a literary institute seems the most startling and obnoxious—and this from a very natural cause. He is ambitious, or he would not attempt; he is clever, or he would not succeed in learning; he is far above his fellows; and his instructors, if he be not entirely self-taught, are not far removed from him. Hence the admirers of Emerson, and of many other aspiring lecturers, who roam at large through the vast circle of the knowable, who know little deeply, but who know a great deal, are full of conceit in its modern and bad sense, and think so highly of themselves that they are like the American farmer, and “Would shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it honour to his majesty.” 251 252 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Such are the gentlemen who at the mature age of fourteen write to editors of forty, and tell them, “I shall not condescend to argue with you,” or who offer to write leading articles for the Times, and advise the Premier how to Settle the Eastern Question in a moment. Such lads are often of good stuff, and turn out well when, after much tribulation, they are “ground down”; but it is fair to add that kings, either of intellect or of less spiritual and more potential majesty, do not feel honoured by their rough familiarity. Sir Stafford Northcote, for one, did not. When Douglas Jerrold was asked to define dogmatism, he said it was puppyism grown up. And this kind of conceited puppyism the leader of the House of Commons saw too much of “I believe,” he said, “that there is no intellectual disease so mischievous in the present day as the disease of vanity. . . . A man will get up in the House of Commons and make a speech he has no occasion to make for the mere purpose of getting his name before the public.” And with what effect Sir Stafford told us, speaking of victories on the very point of being gained having been thrown away because “Some leading member CONCEIT AND WANITY 253 has made a speech obviously unnecessary.” And then the speaker tossed up a cap which some will fit upon the ready head of an illus- trious but somewhat theatrical woodcutter, who appears on the terrace of his palatial home, clad in the rustic garb of the stage woodman, shirt open at the throat, knee - breeches, practical axe and billy-cock hat, and in the intervals of his labour, before a densely- packed audience, eloquently orates, “leaning on his weapon.” “I could mention men,” said the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, “making themselves constantly conspicuous entirely through an inordinate and ill-regulated vanity. One man—I won't mention his name here—is undoubtedly of very great ability. He takes very great pains with what he does, but he is of such childish vanity, of such unreasonable conceit, that he will rather make himself conspicuous by doing the most absurd things than not be noticed at all. These men are kept up in their follies by the manner in which people (the public) look at display and public appear- ances. They triumph — such triumphs are easily won—but are they worth having 3" Can the question be asked ? These men 254 THE BURDEN OF LIFE however, who push and strive and creep into the fold keep other and better men away. If an Athenian boor, one Bottom, is allowed to play the lion as well as the lover, the heroine, the tyrant, and even the wall and moonshine —the largest as well as the smallest characters in the play—it seems obvious that many other actors will have to do nothing. It is one of the results of overcrowding and hurry, of living fast, and of not living conscientiously, that weak natures (which, by the way, may be very clever and capable natures, fluent of expression, and skilful, if not wise) are forced to put themselves forward because they fear that, unless they do so, they will not be heard. Now it was one of the proofs of greatness in M. Thiers that he, to use a French phrase, “effaced himself,” when he thought his country demanded it. For sixteen long years he was “ nowhere.” Like Sir Robert Peel, he “snuffed himself out " because he knew that he would be lighted again. In one of his colloquies Landor makes Wordsworth say to Southey, in relation to the inferior poetlings of the day —the Anna Matildas and the Della Cruscas, who were in everybody's mouth—“Let you and Istand aside whilst this crowd passes by.” CONCEIT AND WANITY 255 It is a proud speech, but not a vain speech. The crowd has passed with them, and all their rivals—of that sort at least—are forgotten. It must be remembered, however, that vain and little men cannot wait—they are, as the village tragedian says to his vassal, “mere worrrr-m-s of the hour"; they are like Anacreon's fly, whom Francis Fawkes has so delightedly pre- served for us; their life is but a summer— they are born and gone. Not being con- spicuous from their size and force, they must wriggle about to make themselves known. If no one else praises them, they, like Dr Hill, whom Kit Smart satirised, must do it them- selves— “Hill puffs himself. Forbear to chide ; An insect vile and mean Must first, he knows, be magnified Before it can be seen.” The epigram is cruel, but, to say the least of it, it was deserved. It is said that Lord Brougham was so morbidly vain that he circulated a report of his own death, and read more than one obituary with which, by the way, he was not well pleased. In our own day Albert Smith was more than once killed in the papers on 256 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Mont Blanc ; but that was perhaps for ad- vertising purposes. One cannot in a bad sense call that conceit which is founded on real merit. There are some excessively swollen and proud speeches in history which smack of conceit, but which are so true that one at once accepts them as the proper thing. There is Caesar's announcement —“ Veni, vid, vici.” He did come, see, and conquer, and we cannot deny it. There are Nelson's confident predictions—but then he knew his own heart, his ships, and his men. There is Wellington's attested assertion when he heard—months before he had selected the site of the battle in case the move should be taken—of Napoleon's march on Belgium— “Bonaparte little knows what a licking he is sure to get.” There is Horace’s “eacegi monu- mentum aere perennius”; but then his works are, as he said, more durable than brass. Shak- spere's promise of eternal fame, Byron's threat as a stripling to cover the Scotch Reviewers with immortal ridicule, Disraeli's declaration that some day the House of Commons should hear him, and Thiers's boast that, although his voice was stridulous and too weak to rise above the noise of the representatives, there CONCEIT AND WANITY 257 would come a time when France would be hushed to listen to it, are all, too, out of the category of conceit, or at least of vain or empty conceit, because they were wrung from their speakers in moments of intense feeling, and amounted to prophecy, because they were built upon self-knowledge. A man who can run sixteen miles in an hour is not conceited because he says so after having proved it. When, however, a poet (we believe he was a most amiable man, and he was certainly a popular preacher) of the calibre of Robert Montgomery poses as Milton, and writes a continuation as it were of Milton's grandest exploit, the creation of Satan, or when an ambitious young statesman shows that he is quite ready to command the Channel Fleet or dance like Cerito at a moment's notice, he deserves the cruel criticism of Macaulay and the far kinder witticism of Sydney Smith. Other persons bear a kind of midway reputa- tion. It would perhaps be wrong to call an eminent Liberal leader a conceited man, although he has constituted himself as a universal umpire, and pronounces glibly upon that which many think he cannot possibly understand. Still he knows so much that, |R 258 THE BURDEN OF LIFE while his want of modesty is to be deplored, his assumption is to be understood. Yet even in great men such restlessness is the cause of much mischief and a bitter un- happiness. We may depend upon it that the world does not love a busy, bustling, all-doing person, any more than a student loves a blue- bottle. Macaulay himself seems to have been a very amiable man, but by some of those who have met him the fact is very difficult of realisation. Miss Martineau thought he had no heart; his republication, against his best friends' wishes, on the attack of the poet Montgomery almost proved this; and Charles Sumner, in his Memoirs, declares that he was rude, thoroughly forgetful of others in his talk, and positively oppressive. “Macaulay is a tremendous machine for colloquial oppression,” he cites from Sydney Smith, “his memory prodigious, but for ever ‘dinning away,’ until his admirers were tired out. I confess that I have,” says Sumner, “a great admiration of his talents. They are great and magnificent powers; but I wish he had more address in using them, and more deference for others.” Again, what shall we say of the conceit of Jeffrey altering the style CONCEIT AND WANITY 259 of the great writer, Thomas Carlyle, and that not in a petty article and instance, but in one of his noblest and most laborious efforts, the Life of Burns; and of Brougham, who, after inviting an American barrister to talk on the codification of law, takes up the stranger's precious moments in abusing his contem- poraries, and in showing his wonderful know- ledge of art in the drawing-room and of the intricacies of cookery in the dining-room ? No wonder that Lord Ellenborough was applauded for his sneer at Brougham that, if “he knew a little, only just a little, of law, he would know a little of everything.” There can be no doubt that Brougham's imprudent and impudent haste, and over-estimation of himself, not only destroyed his reputation, but, when imported into his decisions as Chancellor, made wiser lawyers gasp and stare, and did an immense injury to hundreds of suitors. Everywhere there seems to be, if we credit Sir Stafford Northcote, an impatience of control and a conceit and vanity which bode ill for England if they are allowed to get too much ahead. Barristers who have never con- ducted a case, sit in judgment on judges who 260 THE BURDEN OF LIFE for days and weeks have given their best attention to it; doctors who only peruse the report of a patient, are ready to reverse the judgment of those who have attended on the case ; land-lubbers who sit at home at ease assume that they can navigate dangerous straits with Safety; and club-house and pot- house quidnuncs pronounce upon the honest and painstaking experience of ambassadors abroad. There is too much talking, too much discussion. The Church is over- whelmed with a flood of congress and con- vocation talk. The clergy meet, and, feeling like a bund, or guild, or trades-union, take counsel against the laity. There is a Scientific and Social Congress every year, and each person at the silly season trots out and airs his pet theory to admiring male and female dilettanti, who have each a nostrum for all the ills of humanity. The silent man imagines he is lost. One must be heard, or see one's name in print. And the worst follies of the members of the Commons' House are perpetrated after the session closes by extra-parliamentary utterances in the silly season. From what we have seen of the French elections, we can only say with great CONCEIT AND WANITY 261 grief that Englishmen in this matter are inferior to the French peasant, who does his voting without vanity or conceit, silently and with dignity. Our liberty and license have given us rotten eggs, dead cats, and live “lambs”—that is, truculent ruffians ready to knock down a voter and kick up a row for half a sovereign a day. We have also beer and bribery, so far as it can be carried on, and the gentle stimulants of local committees at which every pushing fellow airs his import- ance and talks to his own delight, if not to that of his neighbours. There is a continual flutter and buzz of floating opinion in the brain which is death to reflection. The same takes place in America, where our cousins of the true flesh-and-blood family likeness “orate,” “walk round,” and “stump” the country till they have stumped nearly all the first-class men out of Government. Perhaps in America the first incentives to be a “politician" were conceit and vanity. So much have they prevailed that, like Pharaoh’s lean kine, they have eaten up all the patriotism or other good qualities, and the word “politician" is synonymous with rogue or adventurer. 262 THE BURDEN OF LIFE As Ovid wrote a Remedium. Amoris after discoursing learnedly on the Art of Love, and as old Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, brings forward his “remedies for this and other discontents,” so one ought to offer some short and easy method of escape from these plaguesome follies. But it is always a hard matter to successfully suggest that which is easy, because the patients, like Naaman, think their own rivers the best, and will not wash in the waters at hand. The only true remedy for these serious follies is reflection. No man can add an inch to his stature or an extra ounce to his brain, and, if he be a clown, the more restless and lively he is, the more will he be observable—that is all. Even Lord John Russell, with all his immense cerebral activity, found out that there was a time to “rest and be thankful,” and to trust to others to carry on the work. We may each of us do so very safely. Admirable as we may be in our own little circle, the world at large will get on very well without us. The vain and conceited, however, accept this truth generally, but for- get it when applied personally. To them it is bitter when brought home. We laugh at the King of Spain who said that if God had CONCEIT AND VANITY 263 consulted him He would have made the world more skilfully, or at Louis XIV., who assured his courtiers that the Almighty thought twice before He damned a person of his condition; yet we each of us imagine that we are more necessary than others, that we could set things to rights if we only had our way, and that our sins have a peculiar excuse. We shall be wise to keep such opinions to ourselves. If even very clever men injure themselves by too much speaking (and it would be a pretty historical exercise to count over those who have fallen victims to their own tongues and pens), the ordinary man slays himself out- right. Humility is not a popular virtue, but it seldom wounds its owner, and often saves him enormously; whereas vanity and conceit have slain their tens of thousands. THE DANGEROUS CLASSES, AND THE BREAKING UP OF AUTHORITY. IT seems to be conceded that there is, and has been for some years, a change in English government and in society. The governing classes have lost that cheap defence of nations —prestige and respect; the governed classes have lost what was equally precious to them and to the nation—obedience to their governors, and faith in the governing powers. This is not to be wondered at ; and for the result, both parties are to blame. Govern- ment has been too much in the hands of party, and public spirit has in some measure died out. Every petty squabble has been reported, and too often has it been perfectly apparent that the struggle has been, not for the public weal, but for the possession of place, Those who are in power are invariably misrepre- sented by those who are out of power; and newspapers, simply because they are of a 264 THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 265 different party complexion, invariably look with ill-nature, if not with scorn, upon the acts and engagements of the party to which they are opposed. This is so very unwise, so very untrue, that the wise men of the nation may well mourn. It is all very well to pro- nounce an eulogium over the grave of Peel, of Cobden, of Brougham; but what if, in their lives, you, Mr A., as a public writer, have, with all the force of your practised pen, tried to misrepresent them | Englishmen, as a rule, love their public men ; and public men, as a rule, deserve well of the nation. But it does not follow that authority is not weakened by these constant attacks. It is materially weakened. Every day we hear of selfishness, love of power, and a dozen miserable aims, alleged as the mainspring of Tory rule ; on the other hand, blindness, selfishness, and imbecility are attributed to the Whigs. The rich are represented as tyrant, the working- men as ignorant and arrogant; class is arrayed against class; and underneath the well-to-do people—the workers with brain and hand, and the possessors of property, capital, or industry—there is a huge, Seething mass of people, who live by beggary, dodging, 266 THE BURDEN OF LIFE charity, and crime; who mark what is going on, and live in hatred of all, quoting the assertions of each against each as they come down to them impregnated with the black spirit of hate. If we get for a while out of the atmosphere of party, we shall find those who can ap- preciate the nation. Let us take two extreme men, the Count Montalembert, a Roman Catholic of the high school, and Louis Blanc, a revolutionist of 1848, and a strong opponent of Louis Napoleon's Government. Both were students of England ; both have lived with us: lived for years in this sacred asylum of all banished foreigners. Now, both these men can hardly find terms whereby to express their strong admiration of England. Monta- lembert thinks her Government the wisest, the freest, and the greatest in the world. He declares that the aristocracy of England is the only aristocracy which exists. It leads public opinion, he says ; it wisely balances and con- siders reform ; it stays and checks a hasty change; wherever there is any good move- ment, there you find an English lord at the head. Beaten over and over again, these reforming lords never quit their hold, till, at last, public opinion becomes irresistible. THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 267 The wise Government knows that the time has come to yield: a measure is passed, and another advance in liberty is given, which is never lost. The English never look back, he says, and never do anything in haste : hence, their advance is a real advance, a real gain for them and for the world ; and their progress is not wavering, but real. Louis Blanc, on the other hand, admires English liberty from another standpoint : he was with the people. He did not think we ought to hang even murderers; and he probably fancied that everybody ought to be as rich as everybody else ; that is, he was an advanced Liberal. His admiration was chiefly for our free speech, free Parliament, our perfect liberty of saying or doing anything not against the laws which we ourselves have made. He admired our working-men, their patience, their sagacity, their industry. Of course he did not like their drunkenness and their thriftlessness, and he gives us plenty of hard rubs for our shortcomings in art, and our deficiency of taste; but he was with us, heart and soul; and to the paper for which he wrote he constantly sent flattering pictures of things that are in England, and that are 268 THE BURDEN OF LIFE not in France. Take a third view, that of the American bishops, who came over to the Pan-Anglican synod. You hear in certain papers of a tyrant Church, and of lazy parsons; but these bishops could hardly find words to express their admiration of our churchmen, our deacons, deaconesses, charities, and general management; of the respect shown everywhere to the clergy; of their high character, proved by so few crimes ever being brought home to the body of a hundred thousand men, selected haphazard; of the love shown by the various Churches and flocks to these men ; and of the ardent devotion of most clergymen to their duties. In fact, in the eyes of these gentlemen, so well qualified to judge, the Establishment in our grave old England seemed rather to savour of a Para- dise, which had long been left behind in their favoured land. “Good Heavens !” cried an American to an English statesman, “what are you doing? foregoing long-established privi- leges, levelling the upper, without improving the lower, intrusting the vote to the very class of people who have ruined us ! Pray pause !” The better class of American papers contain the same warning, — a warning, we THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 269 hope, needless. We only cite these things to prove to thoughtful working-men that the truth is not all on the side of the demagogues. In every class there are those who love the people well, and who believe (nay, know) that advancement must be gradual, that every change is not an improvement ; on the con- trary, that the first step towards anarchy is the taking off of salutary checks, which only restrain the evil-doers, and which never can hurt good, people. The whole history of labour in this country proves that the individual workman can raise himself to any height he chooses. We believe that under no circumstances can legislation raise whole masses of men in influence and position. An attempt to do this always throws back the workers for fifty years at least, and too often ends in revolution. To leaders who, for the sake of selling their papers, persuade men other- wise, we may address the warning voice to King Arthur, in Tennyson's noble Idylls — “Well is it if no child is born of thee, The children born of thee are sword and fire, Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws, The craft of kindred, and the Godless hosts, Of heathen, swarming o'er the Northern Sea.” 270 THE BURDEN OF LIFE And this “red ruin, and the breaking up of laws,” seem coming fast upon us. As a high- class journal pertinently remarks, our politi- cians do not look to measures for the people's good so much as to measures of partizanship. “The storming, the badgering, or the defence of the Treasury Bench would almost seem the daily work, the main business of politicians. The supply of the people's needs, the redress of the people's wrongs, the control of the people's faults and passions, are only oc- casional and intrusive interruptions to the monotonous oscillations of the party pendu- lum !” Can we wonder if people get tired of the sharp invective of Disraeli, the ill-tempered, ponderous speeches of Gladstone, the vivid eloquence of Bright, when they find all these fireworks let off for mere display ! What does the man who loves his country care for Whig or Tory? All he wants is the man who will govern best. If England is run upon a quicksand and ruined, John Bull may well exclaim, with the dying Mercutio, “A plague o' both the Houses ' " or parties; and if the public, who pays for all, finds the head of the nation absent, the City, and that large collec- THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 271 tion of towns round about it called London, unimproved, the working classes unemployed, capital lying idle, the people untaught, chil- dren uneducated, the railway companies masters of the public, the very Thames em- bankment “jobbed” by a railway running through it, vested interests triumphant over the poor and the parish, what wonder if the public gets disgusted with its “representa- tives” or “leaders” Parliament should be an arena wherein the good of the people is fought for, not for the display of the ambi- tion of the individual. But while these high and mighty personages have been struggling, while Gladstone has been looking sulky, and Disraeli has been wonderfully caustic, the dangerous classes below have grown more and more dangerous. Two remarkable changes, said the Pall Mall Gazette, have come over us. The turbulent and rebellious, those who seek to violate the laws and to set authority at defiance, have become far more daring than of yore; and the agents of law and authority, “its myrmidons,” as some term them, have grown relatively less bold and efficient. The roughs are both stronger and bolder than the police / In fact, 272 THE BURDEN OF LIFE society is only safe, because the respectable people know how to combine; and the roughs are such rascals, and so dishonest to each other, that they don't know how to do so. If, taught by those accursed penny numbers which boys read, any genius were to arise amongst them who had talent sufficient to amalgamate the various bands of thieves, as the directors desire to amalgamate the railways, London might be plundered with impunity. The police, held in check or massacred, would be helpless | Many years ago the City militia regiment marched to the Park for inspection, and was surrounded by a mob, which, being very numerous, and seeing no police, took the opportunity of robbing, plundering, and ill-treating every man and woman it met. Strong men were pinned against doorways, and robbed in a minute; helpless women were stripped of everything valuable. Before Wigan rioters, the police and magistrates retired baffled. London Government offices have been invaded by a lot of dirty Fenian tailors and traitors, who have there held a committee, and passed a vote of censure | These, and a dozen other occurrences which would not be suffered by THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 273 any other people in the world, testify pretty well how low we are fallen. Nor are these the only symptoms of the “breaking up of laws.” A man who doubtless confessed to his priest that he had blown up and slain twenty-five people at the very least, is greeted with “cheers” as he steps on the gallows; and the hangman, who is just as honourable an officer as the Lord Mayor or sheriff, is yelled at and hooted out of sight ! A thief taken in the very act of stealing is cheered by the mob; and the policemen who are vindicating God's law against theft are pelted . A newspaper, the Universe, a Roman Catholic print, calls the murderers of Sergeant Brett—a most honourable man, slain while doing his duty—martyrs; and thus speaks of Barrett, the wretch who murdered the poor creatures at Clerkenwell: “Michael Barrett was hanged; we will say no more, but God rest his soul!” thus indicating an intense but concealed approval of him ' Yet the Roman Catholic Church holds with us and the Psalmist in condemning murderers. It is, however, not only the badly-educated and too often brutal rough, nor the violent class paper, that aids and abets this terrible S. 274 THE BURDEN OF LIFE loose way of thinking, but it is a “flabby and maudlin sentimentality on the part of society, which shrinks from inflicting the indispensable severity of punishment; then the physical and Ostensible force required to defend peace and order must be everywhere quadrupled. If the roughs are not controlled by terror of the law, they will have to be controlled by actual material weapons, by greater numbers and superior arms to their own, by revolvers in the hands of multiplied constables, and by the Sabres and muskets of the military; and the process will be found a far costlier and more Sanguinary one in the end. Until the whole- Some dread of punishment, and a conviction of the absolute certainty of defeat in case of resistance—which are ‘the cheap defence of nations'—shall have been re-established in the minds of the ‘dangerous classes,” every mob which ventures to defy the law and its agents must be dispersed and repressed at any cost of life or money, and with that prompt and peremptory severity which is the truest and the earliest mercy.” So far the Pall Mall Gazette. How often have we uttered the same sentiments, almost in the same words ! The other change in the character of crime THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 275 depends naturally upon the change in the public as regards crime. We have broken loose from our old landmarks; we keep not the sound path of the old roads; and the “roughs” or “dangerous classes” (and we must remember that they are distinct classes, just as the industrious, the working, or the middle classes are), take advantage of our leniency. In pitying the murderer we condone his crime; in fact, we do not so often condone as forget it, until a barrister, trained in the ways to make “the worse appear the better reason,” Smoothes away the offence and makes (to his own great wonder- ment) the murderer appear a victim to society or bad, education, or possibly a brave fellow with a slight irregularity of conduct. This change is in the brutality and magnitude of crime. A man at Todmorden is forbidden to court a servant-girl until she is older. He, therefore, out of revenge, murders four people —three of them, the clergyman's wife, servant, and newly-born babe, perfectly innocent of the slightest offence against him A man knocks down a woman who, as he fancies, has spoken against him, and jumps upon her, injuring her for life; policemen are so brutally kicked, 276 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE merely for quelling a street fight, that they die, or are cripples for life; and so on. Well, these murderers are either let off by “a feeble- minded jury,” to quote a contemporary, or else, when condemned, a powerful party per- sistently bullies the Home Secretary until they are pardoned. The consequence of this false mercy is a continued increase of crime, and a further rise in the chances of crime accom- panied by impunity. Brutal ruffians may not calculate closely, but they see the result; and what this result is statistics will tell us. We will quote a table of crime, for 1866, to show what chance the criminal has; it is based on the authority of Blue Books, and cannot well be overset:—“Indictable offences committed, 50,000; persons apprehended for ditto, 27,000; sent to trial for ditto, 19,000; convicted, 14,700. It is believed, moreover, that on the average, nine out of ten offences committed escape detection altogether.” The statistics of murder are still more agreeable—to murderers. “Verdicts of murder by coroners' juries, 272; murders reported by police, 131; persons apprehended for these, 124; committed for trial, 94; actually tried for murder, 55; found guilty, 26; hanged, 12.” That is, not one THE DANGEROUS CLASSES 277 person hanged for every ten murders un- deniably committed, and not one in five is found guilty. Or, in other words, because we choose to spare one man who has broken the laws of society, of Nature, and of God, and who has plainly forfeited his useless, nay, dangerous life, we subject ten innocent and useful persons, not to death by the law, but to death, brutal and cruel death, by the law- breaker—the murderer. The above subject is very painful, very dark, and very sad ; but it is necessary that the thinking, industrious, useful, and innocent community for which we write, and from which juries are so often drawn, should well ponder the undeniable facts which we have felt it our duty to present to our readers. APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN. THE parable of the Pharisee and the Publican is one which comes home to most of us. We do not like to condemn, since we are warned not to judge—that is, not to look critically or with an ill-natured eye upon the sins of others. Indeed, a very strong blessing—one of those, thank God, which make Christianity more homely, more easy, and more sweet than the creeds of any Church under heaven—is pro- nounced upon our observance of that divine rule, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged ; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.” Wondrous promise of a golden reward for our silver charity Lovely, calm, and starlit are the heavens opened to us by such gracious words. Well will it be if we always keep them before us! But at the same time governance of life must be carried on. As the old English legis- lator of Massachusetts said, when all his 278 APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 279 fellows believed that the world was coming to an end, “Gentlemen, let us go on with the previous question, and, if God comes, let Him find us at our work.” Our answer must be the same. The world will end to-morrow for many thousands, but in the meantime they must work and live, and eat and drink, and in their dealings they must judge and be judged. There must be a line drawn be- tween the pity felt for sin, the consciousness of guilt in ourselves, and the necessary steps taken to repress crime. It will not do for the policeman who is ordered to arrest all drunkards to consider too closely whether he is not fond of “a little drop" himself; it would be an odd palliation if, when a magis- trate let off a boy-thief trained in the way of crime, the dispenser of justice were to say that when he was a schoolboy he himself robbed an orchard, Mr Charles Reade, the novelist, makes a very effective scene between two visiting justices on that very point. We think this line has long been overstepped in popular literature—nay, that absolutely the sins of St Giles's have been condoned and patronised, and the peccadilloes of Picadilly have been widely condemned. But let our 280 THE BURDEN OF LIFE readers walk St Giles's as we have walked it ; let him ask the poor shopkeeper and stall- keeper inhabitants of, and taxpayers to, the parish of St Giles who it is that robs them ; let him watch the boy of five and six, taught to prowl and steal like any Indian ; let him notice that chains and wire-work netting are passed over boots and potatoes, and that pork and other vendibles are watched with a cat-like patience by the shopkeepers; and let him hear the cries of the poor children even, who are stolen to be stripped of a miserable frock or pair of worn socks, and we doubt whether he would feel much pity for the little thieves whose heads hardly reach the bar of the dock, and who “chaff” the policeman with a precocious wit. At any rate, if we pity the thief, let us blame the system ; and, while we regret and own our weakness, let us be just, and, while punishing the thief, at the same time seek to remedy our own shortcomings. Shakspere, for his own great purposes, is never greater or more fully inspired than when he attacks hypocrisy and guilt; and his trumpet tones have been echoed and re- echoed in favour of the guilty poor and APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 281 against the guilty rich. But it was for a purpose almost purely artistic-—his art being so wondrously high that even Johnson, Pope, and Voltaire could not see it—that he wrote; and in three great plays, each one a monument for any nation or people, a monument which will endure as long as the English language is spoken or read, heavenly pity for guilt and scorn for hypocrisy are poured out like a torrent. These plays are Timon of Athens, King Lear, and Measure for Measure. No sermon ever preached, whether by Chrysos- tom, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bossuet, could equal twenty lines of these outpourings. “Look with thine ears,” cries the mad Lear to the blind Gloster; “see how yon justice rails upon yon thief. Hark, in thine ear: Change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” It is only poverty that is punished; the rich man escapes, the poor man is held a prisoner: “Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.” And these men in office, who look so well and wise, who are they? “Take six hundred and 282 THE BURDEN OF LIFE fifty-eight well-dressed men who pass Temple Bar every day, and put them in the House of Commons, and they'd govern the nation as well as its present representatives,” said John Bright on one occasion. He was Shaksperian in his utterance. What says Timon 2 “Raise me this beggar, and denude that lord: The Senator shall bear contempt hereditary, The beggar native honour.” It is only the office and the clothes that people bow down to ; they cannot pierce to the spirit of the man within. The blockhead that moves his head in the pulpit and reads what he never wrote is corſsidered talented and learned; it is his gown and his place, his college hood and his bands. Lear would strip them off—and he was a fool for his pains. “Off, off, you lendings!” he cries, but his own Fool had before this reproved him. “When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass on thy back over the dirt ; thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away.” Little indeed APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 283 We see then that Shakspere, supreme in wisdom, while he pierces guilt with one probe, cuts folly with a lancet. Sinful we may be, but we must not condone sins; we must not sit down with the thief, and share with the harlot. We have had too much compassion poured upon all of these. Mr Dickens, whose inner life and sympathy with the poor we now fully understand, since he was brought up as a boy to tie up pots of blacking, with a father possessed of but little moral stamina, lived triumphantly through all temptations, and raised himself and his family. That was the greatest of all his works, and let us give him due honour for it. But unfortun- ately his tender heart makes him continually call upon us to pity the vagabond, the thief, and the burglar. The only one of his creations that he seems to hate—for he is ever con- sistent in his plea for the criminal—is Fagin the Jew—the merry old gentleman who kept a thieves' school; and who knows what might not be said for Fagin' If any one is the victim of circumstances, a Jew “fence ’’ is. Was he not once a boy, brought up to and taught dishonesty? Did he not belong to a people whom prejudice had driven to the byways 284 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and outskirts of society, and who had for centuries been forced almost to deal in petty and second-hand wares? Were the chains that bound him not as strong as, or stronger than, those that bound Nancy, the mistress of Bill Sikes 2 Dickens is as severe upon the alderman who condemns a thief as if he (Dickens) were supreme judge. “Come, alder- man, balance those scales. Throw me into this one—the empty one—no dinner, and Nature's founts in some poor woman dried by starving misery and rendered obdurate to claims for which her offspring has authority in holy mother Eve. Weigh me the two, you Daniel going to judgment, when your day shall come.” This is “bewtiful langwidge ’’; yet we do not feel guilty when we condemn it, and plead that it is never the starving honest woman who steals. Dickens is paralleled by many other novelists. Lord Lytton revels in guilty heroes, and comes to a climax when a judge on the bench sentences his own neglected son to death. This may be very well, but it seems to us very false. Why are we always to blame society Why pity and weep over Sikes the murderer? Pray for him if you like—there is APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 285 no one for whom our prayers are more heartily put up than for those victims of sin; they are our brothers, bound by stronger chains than we, but they have fallen ; Heaven help them—but the world must judge them. Even so wise a man as Mr Thackeray fell under the blight of this folly. All our guilt, he seems to say— for once abandoning all cynicism and satire, and giving vent to a sentence which would have pleased that dry old anti-Christian Jeremy Bentham—is the effect of circum- stances not our own. “Give me a chain and a red gown, and put a pudding before me, and I could play the part of alderman very well, and sentence Jack after dinner. Starve me and keep me from books and honest people, educate me to love dice, gin, and pleasure, and put me on Hounslow Heath with a purse before me, and I will take it.” But a gleam of sense breaks out at the end. “And you will be deservedly hanged,” say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing. “I don't say no,” says the wise author; “I can’t but accept the world as I find it, including a rope's end as long as it's in fashion.” Elsewhere he has regained his senses fully, and satirises Bulwer with a cruel ferocity as wholesome as it is hearty ; and his 286 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Becky Sharp, with stinging satire, says, “I think I could be a good woman with five thousand a year.” Of course one must dictate to Providence, and then we can be good. This is bad morality, at any rate. The apostles never consented to such, and true humility owns that goodness cannot be the result of mere fortune, or else we should have no virtuous poor, who are, indeed, the salt of the nation and of the earth. And One way to make the salt lose its savour is to treat all alike, and equally reward and hold up to honourable esteem Jack Horner, who in- dulges his appetite, steals pies and tarts, and gets into prison, and Tom Manly there, whose appetite is just as good as Jack's, but who subdues it. “There are not fifty honest men to one thief l’’ we have heard a would-be defender of crime explain. Thank God we know there are, and many more — and those are they whom we would help and aid. If society were what these apologists for crime would make it, we should not have a button on our coat or a tooth in our heads. And it is as cowardly as it is unwise to lay the blame on circumstances. As for our good brothers APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 287 and virtuous sisters, are they to be put at this deadest of dead levels 2 Is there no merit in the man who brings up his honest family on mere bread and water, and does not submit to temptation ? Is there no blessing to be given on the virtuous girl who is pure, and poor, and badly clothed, and without ribbons and laces and flaunting satins, and sham jewellery, and sham beauty, and a sham laugh, and the devil's wages in her pocket 2 Are God's men and women to be always at a discount, and the officers of the Devil's regiment to strut and be admired, and be bewept when the policeman taps them on the shoulder ? Is vice always to be thought clever and goodness dull ? When it is written on the eternal heavens how straight and narrow is the way of goodness, and how clever we must be to keep a balance, are we to be thought dull fools if we try to keep this narrow and difficult path, and the gay, young, selfish worldlings, who skip gaily into sin to indulge themselves, to be lauded as geniuses, and to be wept over by fond mothers as if they were the Josephs or Benjamins of the human family Commend us the man who can be good upon little means and narrow 288 TEIE BURDEN OF LIFE fortunes through life. Pity we must and may give the unfortunate and the guilty, but we must uphold those who stand upright— “'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall. I not deny, The jury, passing on the prisoner's life, May, in the sworn twelve, have a thief or two Guiltier than him they try. What's open made to justice, That justice seizes.” And it must always be so. It is our business to rescue from crime, to pity and to help those who fall into crime, to consider whether the nearness to vice and sin which want of fortune, friends, and proper education produces, is not an extenuating circumstance in the sinner or the criminal; but it is not our business or our duty to be always apologising for those who slide away from us, and who take the down- ward path. Every one of us is tempted or tried to the utmost of his strength. The judgment of Hercules between Ease or Pleasure and Duty is a fable which as a reality is being perpetually re-enacted. It is useless to say to a man, “You are very comfortably off; had you been worse off, you might have been a thief”; it is a truism, a platitude, and an APOLOGISTS FOR CRIME AND SIN 289 insulting one. Of the thousands of clerks in London, every week or so two or three fall into crime and purloin or forge. Is Society to pity those alone Of the working-men, thou- sands bring up their families honestly and well, and tens drop into vagabondage and dis- honesty; honour the good, say we, pity the fallen, but do not condone their crimes. “But for the grace of God,” said an old preacher as he saw a criminal on the way to the gallows, “there goes Hugh Peters!” repeating his own name. Very true, very humble; we cannot deny God's grace, but we should not be right if we perpetually blamed Society, or education, or circumstances, and not the criminal. It is our business to be good—it is fully within every man's power. We see every day the stupid and the weak resisting temptation, and the clever and the strong falling. It is but just, as a French writer hints, that every time a man is stopped by robbers or fired at by assassins, he should feel an immense anger, not at the robber or the murderer, but at the government of the place and the parish priest : yet for all that, such criminals must be punished; otherwise we might as well put away the police and the judge, and deliver T 290 THE BURDEN OF LIFE society up to chaos again. Apologists for crime are now fashionable enough; some wild and guilty genius is the hero of almost every novel, and one of our first writers has, as we know, tried to whitewash Pontius Pilate and apologised for Judas Iscariot. This utter con- fusion of right and wrong may be a sign of the latter days; if so, it is mournful, painful, and universal. But to us it seems perverted charity and miserable weakness, a sinking of the heart and a clouding of the conscience, from which he who standeth firmly on the old ways should pray to be delivered. THE DEATH-DEALING LAW. THERE are two reasons why a man who is not a Christian, in its fullest acceptation, fears Death : the one is because he suspects Annihilation, and the other is because he more gravely suspects Punishment; and neither of these he is very willing to undergo. If you were to ask the men you meet, and could get a serious answer from them, you would find that about one-half would prefer a terminable punishment to annihilation. We say a serious answer, because, however paradoxical it may appear, the question is itself so deep, that half of those questioned would at once shirk it with a joke, into which they would relapse as a sort of relief. But Death is itself regarded as a very natural thing by Nature herself. It is extra- ordinary to any one, even to one of the most comprehensive mind, what a prodigality of death and dead forms there is about us. If 291 292 THE BURDEN OF LIFE we stand on London Bridge we may be said to be surrounded with life, but then we stand upon death. The granite under our feet represents myriads of living forms; the very dust we tread on once had life; the flowing river below us teems with corruption and death; in the air above us myriads are dying too. The clothes we wear, the shoes we tread in, once lived ; from the umbrella we hold, to the sole of our shoe, all had life. The very wood and cordage of the floating ships, nay the coal that feeds those black and puffing steamers, so busy and so life-like in their quick motions, represent the principle of life, of light; and not only that, but life itself in its lower forms. But we have more life still. It has been said that an Irish bull is the essence of wit ; it is because that figure of speech represents a deep paradox. Here is an instance : In this world there is actually more death than life. That seems impossible, because to be dead implies to have lived; but yet, how many seeds are sown and never produce life l—how many flowers never grow to seed l—how many apples fall from off the healthiest tree l—how many thousand animals die ere, as an Irish THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 293 bull says plaintively, they are born 1 Nature is prodigal everywhere ; nowhere so prodigal as in the kingdom of death; so prodigal in- deed, writes Tennyson, that— “I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear, - “I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.” “I stretch lame hands of Faith,” he continues —of faith, which is but that of a child crying in the dark, and with no other language but this cry. Such is the consideration which the prodigality of Nature deathwards forces on a great thinker. But if Nature is prodigal, man is prodigal too. He spends his life in toil and strife. He throws it away in battle; he wastes it in vices; he expends it in unnecessary work; he uses it up in unhealthy employment; he cares for nothing so much, and for nothing so little, as life He will take any amount of 294 TELE BURDEN OF LIFE chances against it. What possible business, let us ask, had that brave English surgeon on board the Alabama, when he went down with the wounded crew, trying to save them ? Why, his very appointment to the ship a year or two before, was, in fact, a sentence of death ; and yet he knew it not What had the quarrel been between North and South to do with him, that he should give his life for it ! That which his sympathies had with every brave man. He followed them, and so he died. He was prodigal of life, because he was a brave man, doing his duty in that state of life to which his duty (as he read it) called him. We will take it then that the two pro- positions before us—that Nature is prodigal of human life, and that men themselves are prodigal of it too—are fully proven. But life is yet of value; that is, of value to the individual; and to him, much more so than to the State. So little indeed does a State value the life of the individuals which form it, that every now and then we find statesmen and philosophers growing alarmed at the super- abundance of population; that is, of life amongst them. They write books and long treatises to prove that population grows THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 295 necessarily into over-population, and that it is an evil which must be cured artificially. Mr Malthus's book is well known. He was a benevolent clergyman, who attributed half of our political and social evils to the Super- abundance of life; and, although he hinted, indeed, that emigration was a remedy, still, in his day, it was only carried out on a very small scale; and he suggested many checks to superabundance of people, such as late marriages, and that also of placing the power or permission to marry in the hands of the State. Mr Buckle and others, following in his wake, have asserted that Scotland, a poor country for agriculture, and somewhat barren, and Ireland, a fertile but small land, were each of them so over-populated, that war, emigra- tion, or any process which could empty them of people, was to be looked upon rather as a blessing than as a curse, and, at any rate, as a natural necessity. That a country may be over-populated is very true. The mutineers who rebelled against Lieutenant Bligh in the Bounty, at the end of the last century, took refuge in one of the uninhabited Friendly Islands. Having procured wives from the neighbouring islands, they remained there in 296 THE BURDEN OF LIFE peaceful and industrious security for about twenty-eight years; in which time they had so multiplied, that the island was too small for their support, and, when discovered, they were obliged to be taken away by the Govern- ment, and replanted on Norfolk Island. Had not this been done, the inevitable struggle for life would have ensued, in which the law of might would have proved to be right, and the weaker would have been necessarily sacrificed. This may be pleasing to a philosopher of the school of Mr Darwin, but it is not so to a philanthropist. We have been apparently, so far, out of our way to establish these facts; first, that Nature decrees death very freely, and that she cur- tails life, either in the bulk or in individ- ual instances; secondly, that where society chooses, she also takes up the rule of Nature and condemns men to death in the bulk, by occupation, trade, or war. A very striking instance of this may be seen in a nation which claims to be the most advanced in the world; for which, by the decree of the people, General Grant marched out against a brave foe, and fighting with prodigious valour, in four weeks lost, according to our last accounts, eleven THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 297 hundred officers and ninety thousand men, on one side only What the inevitable slaughter on the other side is we do not know. Now, it is true that we have many men who argue against war. They say it is not philo- sophical ; that it proves nothing ; that it actually effects nothing in the long run; and that it is essentially unchristian. This is all so very true that even warriors do not gainsay it. They merely reply to the argument by an assertion that war is human, and, because human, is universal. They might quote David, who does not forget to thank God for “teaching his hands to war and his fingers to fight.” But when we come to the taking of life in individual instances by the duello, which was once an honourable private war, indulged in upon certain occasions and under certain rules, or to the execution of the death- dealing law by the Civil Power, then certain philanthropists step in, and cry to us that life is sacred. This is somewhat curious ; and it will be well to look into the matter. It has been wisely ordained in England that, as a rule, no criminal shall die except he be guilty of murder. Formerly, as we know, persons were hung for a variety of crimes 298 THE BURDEN OF LIFE against property; but now life alone is con- sidered to demand life; and there are many of us who deny that the law has any moral right to take life even from a murderer. This notion, which has been widely ventilated by many literary men, men of greater sympathy for those suffering pain than perhaps acutely logical powers, has spread not only in England but in France; and there is a society in Paris as well as in London for the abolition of death, or, as people call it in legal slang, capital punishment. It is to be observed, that in England we really have no “capital” punish- ment, as the murderer with us does not lose his head, but dies the most pleasant and easy death which can be discovered, a death so far from being painful that suicides undertake it on their knees without rising. Mr Douglas Jerrold, Mr Charles Dickens, and others, gentlemen wielding powerful pens, and capable of drawing picturesque scenes, threw themselves into this argument con amore, and henceforward the newspaper reporter began to draw sad pictures of the condemned man, and to excite pity on his behalf. The convicted murderer was also called the “victim of the law,” a totally THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 299 untrue phrase in its application. One bene- volent philanthropist, Mr Wright, devoted his whole time, such was his craze, in visiting murderers. Prison chaplains vied with each other in their kindness to them ; and when the last “sad ceremony” was performed, the crowd who viewed the execution was usually described as brutal, low, beastly, and so forth; and every movement of the murderer was reported, so that a false and a most injudicious sympathy was created in his favour. Now this was all wrong, all false, all untrue, and unworthy of the English nation. It is related that when La Pommerais was to be executed in June 1864, for coolly poisoning a relation whose life he had insured (he repeated the crime, after having successfully escaped in one case), a deputation waited on Louis Napoleon, begging him to spare his life. The deputation argued that human life was sacred, and that it should never be taken. “I quite think so,” said the Fmperor, “and I am quite ready to respect human life ; but let Messieurs the Murderers begin first.” But the murderers will not begin ; and we think that, apart from this argument, we have no right to show sympathy with them. We 300 THE BURDEN OF LIFE think that Mr Wright, and all such philander- ing philanthropists, were very foolish, wrong- headed men; and when we remember that so debased a wretch as young Edward Hocker, who murdered a fellow-sinner, and who was at only twenty-two years of age so debased, so hypocritical, so brutal, that he was a dis- grace to humanity, had sympathy shown him by women, whose sex he had outraged, and by men, one of whom he had slain in a cowardly way, we are at a loss to understand it. Hocker was like Barnardine— “ Unfit to die, and most unfit to live.” So again was Palmer; and in arguing about the punishment of such men all fictitious sympathy should be put aside. We should argue by reason, not from feeling. But towards a man condemned to die, a fictitious interest is generated. Low and cheap papers, published on Sunday, actually derive a great deal of their revenue from those who buy them to read about crime. A “good murder,” as the “trade” phrases it, will send up their circulation by thousands; last details will keep up the interest; and, as we have said, the crime of the guilty wretch is lost THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 301 sight of. No one thinks of the murdered person, of the family he or she belonged to. Portraits are made of the murderer—why not make them of him with all the horrors of his crime about him : Do not let us have any half-truths; if we could only show the dirty wretched steps the man took towards his crime, his ungoverned temper, his brutal lust for gold or for possession, we should have little sympathy for him. Let us, however, now put him out of the question, saying this merely as the truth, that anything more patient and mercifully just (always leaning for the prisoner) than a trial for murder in England it is impossible to conceive ; nor, all things con- sidered, is there anything otherwise than praiseworthy in the plain, simple execution, free from romantic or official glitter, or, so far as we have seen, in the behaviour of the much- abused crowd, which is always impressed, and always, at the time of execution, decent and decorous. The sight is horrifying only in imagination ; nothing that can be seen can possibly shock anyone. In this our plan differs of course materially from the guillotine in Paris, or the garrotte at Madrid and in Vienna. It is remarkable that death by the law 302 THE BURDEN OF LIFE can only be looked upon as a vindication of the sacredness of life. “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed also ": this is the Mosaic law ; and it also takes human life for a hundred other crimes which we very properly punish in a different way. The great moral lesson really does some good to those who see it, since they see therein the only actual approach to Eternal Justice that they know of; for the lower classes very justly say that if a man is punished by trans- portation, one does not know what becomes of him. Beyond this—which is a very important point—the execution has another effect. The classes who witness it are those from which murderers would otherwise spring—that is, generally. The thief, pickpocket, and low ruffian fear the law, and, therefore, do not commit murder. The execution has, there- fore, a deterrent effect; for, from Lord Ferrers to Palmer, and others, we shall find that those who dare to break into the “bloody house of life” are above the lowest class. A great deal of unnecessary abuse of the poor and the untaught might have been spared us if this had been considered. A death punishment, therefore, is to be regarded THE DEATH-DEALING LAW 303 as moral, vindicatory, and preventive; it should not be vindictive any more than other punishments; nor, from its nature, can it be ameliorative. It has been said that “the very worst thing you can do with a man is to hang him.” This is doubtful; but if it be true, a murderer is just the man to do the very worst thing to. Directly a man has dared so to sin against God and against man as to commit murder, he is utterly useless to society. The great question is, whether we are to put him out of society as a warning to others, by a solemn death, or to put him out of society by keeping him in an expensive prison ? Is it worth while, in fact, to employ ten good, honest, and clever men—you cannot do with less—all their lives in watching, working for, feeding, and clothing one murderer? No one proposes a “ticket of leave” for a murderer; no one has yet been so philanthropic as to imagine that a man, with a homicidal mania once indulged in, should be allowed to walk quietly about our streets, parks, and back gardens. Where mercy can be shown it should be shown ; there is little doubt of that. At present our judges are very wise, lenient, \ \ 304 THE BURDEN OF LIFE and merciful; and with many the complaint is, that murderers escape rather than that too many are executed. The deadliest crime against our fellows, it will yet be the most deep-rooted. It cannot be wholly banished by education, for the rich and the educated are guilty of it, and under less extenuating circumstances than the poor. Leniency towards it will do harm, as we see that it has done in one form of it—infanticide— which, having been treated very gently, has increased amongst us terribly. On the whole, we believe that the power of condemning to death for murder should be left in the hands of the Executive. Certainly, life is of all things most precious, and to lose it is the greatest punishment of all. The murderer has cruelly, without warning, but often with long consideration on his part, inflicted this punishment; and to him, justly, his crime should be brought home, for he dreads nothing so much as that which he has inflicted— “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ! . . . The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise.” DEATH FOR DEATH. IT is, perhaps, a proof of civilization in a nation when it grows tender-hearted. It is a greater proof of civilization when its laws are respected and it has learnt to grow just ; for justice is the highest attribute of Man, simply because it is the essential property of God. For being God, being so far removed from us, even in spiritual contrast farther than the Sun is from the Earth, He cannot regard the difference of rank, nor the splendour of genius, nor the weight of a name ; but as evenly as He throws His sunlight over the earth, as freely as He scatters flowers and sweet rain and life-giving light in every corner of the globe, so must He show His justice. It is only the hope of His justice that makes life palatable to the miserable. It is that which makes the brave man live on. It is not the dread, but the hope of something after death, which shall make these odds all even, that makes the good man steer straight onwards, 305 U 306 THE BURDEN OF LIFE doing good without present reward—teaching, loving, aiding, helping, hoping, that not in this world but in the next there will come a day when the sunshine of God’s just approval shall fall upon his upturned and happy face. Equally also the knowledge of God's eternal justice strikes the criminal with dread. He may for a time oppress the weak; he may commit secret sins; he may wallow in sensuality, or he may be so lucky in his roguery, that with the very money he has unjustly gained he may buy impunity, honour, even renown, comfort and splendour. But in the midst of this the cry is “Sleep no more.” God is just; the time of mercy may be past; at any rate your Judge cannot pardon those who ne'er repent. You have had all your own way in this world; but even-handed justice must meet you in the next. You cannot extinguish the clamours of this dire unrest by an appeal to mercy, for you are met by the calm logic which Young has put into one tremendous line — “A God all mercy is a God unjust.” It becomes then a question whether a Govern- ment can afford to be all mercy, whether it does not increase crime by a lethargic and DEATH FOR, DEATH 307 soft method of punishment. Our laws, which have been founded on the Roman laws, have been very much modified by the laws of the Jews as contained in the Old Testament, upon the truth of which depend all our hopes, and, it is needless to say, all our morality and knowledge of ethical law. Now these laws, given to Moses by God, are by no means what is called humane; at least they are not so in the modern sense. In the higher sense they are so, because they are so absolutely just. “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise,” is of the very spirit of Christ, Christlike. Inversely, these dread- ful and bloody laws, as Mr Gilpin and the rest of the humanitarians would not unlikely designate them, inculcate that very spirit. Now look at Leviticus xxiv. 17-22, and read it carefully, and see if you cannot find out its true mercy. “And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death. And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast. And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done, so it shall be done to him ; breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth : as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so it shall be done to him again. And 308 THE BURDEN OF LIFE he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it : and he that killeth a man, he shall be put to death. Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God.” Now we are strangely fashioned enough to say that herein is a magnificent piece of merciful justice, and that society would be better served if the law were adhered to, more to the letter, than it is. Let us here remember that “killing" means murder (the Hebrew has it, “smiteth a man to his death”), and that all these punishments are enacted against those who spitefully and cruelly do the deeds named. The Americans, it is asserted, were years ago—for we believe the custom has disappeared—fond of gouging or forcing each others' eyes out. What more just punishment, what more effective deterrent, than to gouge out the brute's eye who did this ' If a man causeth a blemish—breach for breach. Some of our Glasgow and London Irish, in tiger-like rage, tear off an ear or bite off a nose. Let the same thing be done to them; and if the bad were not taught a great lesson, and nose- biting and ear-splitting did not entirely cease in those quarters, we would forfeit our own. In man's heart—even in the hearts of these DEATH FOR DEATH 309 wild creatures—God hath implanted a sense of justice ; and the lesson of justice taught like that would be the grandest deterrent ever made; for laws enacting punishments have two objects: you may place either of them first, they are so evenly important. The first is to deter others from committing like crimes, and thus to save society by the lesson that you teach. The second is to carry out the cause of justice, and to punish the criminal. Let no man be weak enough to fancy that a spirit of revenge enters into any law, although so wise a man as Lord Bacon said that “Revenge was a kind of wild justice,” and thus dignified revenge ; he was too wise to degrade justice. Justice is impossible without feeling; it is above revenge. We no more revenge the death of a man by the death of his murderer than the fire revenges itself on the child who puts his hand into it. There stands the law; there stands a preci- pice : fling yourself from the latter, and you surely die; infringe the former, and commit murder, and you not only slay your enemy, but you murder yourself. The common people, wiser than the philanthropists, recol- lect this, and acknowledge it. That man, they say, has put a rope round his own neck. 310 THE BURDEN OF LIFE Calcraft does not hang him ; the jury does not send him to the gallows; the judge does not sentence him to death. “We make the world we live in, and we weave About us webs of good or ill, which leave Their impress on our souls.” Long before the jury sat, or the council learned in the law had prepared that absurd and tear-compelling appeal so fraught with sentiment that it makes us sick, the un- governed fool, the licentious, swine-like nature, the lazy, covetous burglar, or the brutal, loaf- ing garrotter, who prefers a life of laziness and crime to one of innocence and hard work, had woven the rope, prepared the scaffold, and hanged himself—at an immense expense to the country. Truly, hanging is the worst use you can put a man to, except that which he has before put himself to—MURDER. When a man has done that, he has done everything which renders his own life of no worth. Would you make him work? Who would profit by his gains ? Would you maintain him in idle- ness? Who is to guard, to nurture, to instruct, amuse, feed, doctor, physic, feel the pulse of a murderer, and gently soothe in mercy that sick thing which had no mercy on its victim, DEATH FOR DEATH 3II which foully and with violence did to death another, or which, as some lately have done, hung for weeks over their victim, slowly dying down in pain and torture ? Mercy to a murderer is repugnant, as we have seen, to God, and dangerous to man. It is, above all, unjust to the murdered person, whom sentimental philanthropists always forget. It induces crimes like these, because murderers cling to the last chance of escape; it indeed is criminal in itself. For, says a noble and most thoughtful dramatist,- “The sin that breaks the bloody house of life Repentant tears can never wash away; And, to be short, the evil is as great To pardon such a sin as to commit it.” Unfortunately, philanthropy, love of man, as it is well named, like other loves, turns to effectual hurt when not properly directed. The philanthropists years ago found our criminal laws very bloody, and they did good service by purifying them. Luckily they stopped short of murder; but they wiped the criminal calendar a great deal too clean. It was very wrong to hang a man for stealing a sheep; it would have been better had he been whipped, made to earn the value 312 THE BURDEN OF LIFE of a sheep, and the expense he put the owner to, and then set free. But we are too squeam- ish for whipping; that was cruel, brutal, of course: so the tender-hearted people let Bill Sykes and his vile companions knock about all London, until they took to brutally chok- ing the life out of people by the garrotte. Then came John Bull with his panacea of knuckle-dusters, daggers, a collar full of needles, to prevent being choked ; a glove full of nails, to grasp the hand of the choker; pistols for one shot, revolvers for seven ; more police, to be paid for by the victims' It was of no use ; blackguardism ran riot, as it always will if you let it, until some ruffians nearly choked to death a Member of Parliament, and then they restored whipping in jails—and the crime immediately ceased. It is perhaps a curious thing for a philan- thropic mind to contemplate that objection to pain in their own bodies that people have who have no objection to it in or on the bodies of others. Mrs Brownrigg, who whipped two female 'prentices to death, was very much terrified at her own death, and probably would not at all have liked being whipped to death. King Theodore, who had im- prisoned captives for years, shut them in DEATH FOR, DEATH 313 cages, and worried them considerably, was frightened into suicide because he thought we should do the same by him. “I would have murdered that man,” said a garrotter to Inspector Tanner, “but I was afraid of being choked /" In one of the Swiss cantons the punishment of death was abrogated, and murders (for even those virtuous and innocent mountaineers, the Swiss, murder) immediately increased to an alarming extent. So much for the statement that legal execu- tions, or death for death, do not have a deterring effect. We must remember that there is a Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, and that it has an energetic secretary, and that this Society prepares statistics, reasons, and accounts, naturally biassed with their way of thinking, while the men who really want simple justice done have hardly any organ, or at least are not in a compact body enough to defend themselves from the imputation of barbarity and cruelty which has been freely thrown at them by the philanthropists. Happily, however, the House of Commons, which is yet full of men of robust good sense, and is, on the whole, fit and worthy, in spite of the aspersions of its most radical and 3.14 TELE BURDEN OF LIFE eloquent member, has recently been called upon to decide on this case: Shall we still keep God's law, and require death for death Ž or shall we condone the murder, and let the murderer live, an imprisoned pensioner, at the public expense ? Mr John Stuart Mill, a philosopher of whom, even when dissentient from him, no one feels the courage to speak with anything but respect, is happily Member of Parliament for Westminster, elected at the people's expense, and an exponent of their feelings. He cannot be thought an inhumane man, for he absolutely wished to punish Governor Eyre, and is the chief prosecutor of that gentleman. But what said he In a speech in which he pulled the argument of Mr Gilpin and the philanthropists into the merest shreds, he told them that, instead of doing good to their clients, they were doing harm—that they were even more cruel than the hangman. “There was a point at which they should stop. When there had been brought home to any man by conclusive evidence the greatest crime known to the law, and attendant circumstances suggested no palliation of guilt, no hope that the indi- vidual, notwithstanding the past, might not be unfit to live—nay, probably, would not DEATH FOR DEATH 315 repeat his crime—in that case it did appear to him that to deprive the criminal of life, of which he had shown himself unworthy, was the most appropriate, and certainly the most impressive, mode in which society could mark the penal consequences which the safety of human life attached to murder. He vindi- cated this punishment on the very ground on which it was commonly attacked—namely, as being incomparably less cruel than what was proposed as its substitute in the case of aggravated murder—namely, imprisonment, with hard labour, for life. Had it been con- sidered what sort of a life that was 2 The punishment was not inflicted if it were a sham ; but if it was what it professed to be, he could not but think that it would become so shocking that it would be almost impossible to enforce the penalty after the memory of the crime had grown dim. Instead of sub- jecting a man to the short pang of a rapid death, to immure him in a living tomb, to condemn him to hard, continuous, and most monotonous labour, debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and without hope, was a torture of the most terrific intensity.” Then, rising in his tone to a prophetic warning, he talked of the time which some 316 THE BURDEN OF LIFE philanthropists had promised, when Home Secretaries would shrink from their duty of signing a death-warrant, and when juries would always recommend to mercy. “If so,” he said, and said truly, and we cannot make his words go too far, “it would be a fatal victory, by producing an enervation and effeminacy in the general mind of the country. For what but effeminacy could be so much shocked by taking away a man's life as by depriving him of all that makes life valuable % Was death, after all, so dreadful ? Was it —not the object of all education to teach us to despise death ; It was not right to cultivate too great a sensitiveness of conscience upon this point. In olden time men were too ready to give their lives and to take away those of others without adequate reason; but, on the other hand, many persons of the present day appeared likely to fall into the other extreme, and be ready to deprive the law of its last punishment. It was said that it was an absurdity to suppose that we could expect others to respect human life when we ourselves destroyed it. But would not the same argument apply with equal force to all other punishments? When we sentenced a man to imprisonment, were we not inflicting DEATH FOR, DEATH 317 human suffering ?—yet, could it be said that by doing so we were showing a want of regard for human suffering, and were therefore en- couraging others to inflict it ! To deter by means of human suffering, was the very end of human justice. The rule was laid down that murder should not be committed, and he who violated that rule forfeited his right to live.” We need not add more to this. The House was convinced ; and, happily for England, only twenty-three Members were found weak enough to vote for continuing life to those who had rendered themselves utterly unfit to possess the glorious gift — the most wonderful and most precious gift of the Almighty—life itself. For it is time now that firmness, boldness, truth, and justice should assert—in short, Christian Govern- ment should assert—itself. It was so in the Roman world, for St. Peter tells us to obey the laws, to “fear God,” to “honour the king”; for he says “Governors are sent by the Lord for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of them that do well.” Then by effeminacy, softness, a wrong way of looking at things, we abrogate the law of God, and deserve to be punished for contempt of His commandment. WILL. THE mystery of the human will has engrossed the enterprise and ingenuity of the strongest, clearest, and ablest thinkers of all ages, and it remains inscrutable. Is it free or enslaved ? Is man his own master, or the subservient creature of good and evil powers and influences outside himself? If he controls his own con- duct in life, how comes it to pass that one half of his days are spent in vain regrets for the wrong he does and the mistakes he makes in the other half—that evil deeds are no sooner repented than repeated, errors committed again and again, in the face of many bitter experiences, with a spirit of self-sufficiency or wantonness 3 Questions like these have perplexed the student of human nature in every clime and phase of culture, and, setting aside certain narrow-minded and obviously unsatisfactory hypotheses, which neither dispel the mystery nor quell anxiety to get at the 3.18 WILL 319 truth, the world is no wiser now than in the old days when an apostle complained, “For what I would, that do I not ; but that I hate, that do I.” Nevertheless, it may be possible to approach somewhat nearer to a solution of the enigma, and in many practical ways prove useful, if we can only obtain a definite notion of what the will is, whence it springs, how it works, to what influences it is amenable, and under what conditions it retains the sceptre of self-government, and when and how it is most likely to be dethroned, either enslaved for the passing moment or banished from its kingdom. “Will” is one of those little words with big meanings upon which half-an-hour's patient and serious attention may be wisely bestowed. Will is, in fact, the expression of desire. This is the sort of will and wilfulness we find in children. They long for an object, and, as far as they are concerned, they will have it. Later on in life what, for want of a better term, we call intelligence, gives a new charac- ter to will. It is still desire, but experience and reason render it self-restrained and judi- cious. The passionate wilfulness evinced in striving to grasp the iridescent halo of a candle-flame has been toned by the experience 320 THE BURDEN OF LIFE of burnt fingers; while the wilful earnestness with which the child struggled to penetrate looking-glass-land has been corrected by the discovery that things are not always what they seem. The adolescent will is desire cul- tured and subdued by contact and acquaint- ance with facts. The process of education proceeds more or less rapidly until, when maturity is reached—if that point be at- tained — the judicious faculty comes to be the chief characteristic of mind, and resolu- tion founded on judgment is the paraphrase of the monosyllable, “will.” Capricious desire dies out, mere longing is not gratified, thought, purpose, intention replace impulse. The development differs with the individual both in regard to the progress made and the point reached, but the truth we are chiefly con- cerned to bring out is manifest; it is the same will or desire which grows up with the body from birth to manhood, and the qualities of the fully-developed faculty are those which have been imparted to it by the culture it has received. It follows from what has been said that this will which plays so prominent a part in the production or advancement of human happiness is, in fact, a passion or impulse it WILL 321 should be the first purpose of life to educate, to strengthen, to endow with reason and the faculty of restraint. There is no higher or more potent part of mind than will ; nor, except in morbid con- ditions of the mental system, is it ever passive or subservient. A “resigned will” is either one of the most powerful of wills—a will that conquers desire and resolves to be submissive —or it is a fine name given to a feeble state of mind in which indifference produces the semblance of docility, in the last degree con- temptible. When people do what they will not, they in fact give way to a corrupt impulse under a false pretence. The metaphorical con- ception of “another will” in the members “warring against the will of the mind” is a philosophic embodiment of the subjective experience. The judicious faculty has not been trained to the perfect self-mastery of passion or impulse. The natural cravings or propensities are not held in subjection by judgment ; desire is passion - ridden ; the animal instincts are not adequately under the control of intelligent and rational thought. A man knows a thing is wrong and yet he does it; but he acts wilfully—the will of his X 322 THE BURDEN OF LIFE carnal appetite, or purely animal propensity, is triumphant. In other words, the will—for there is only one will, though, for the sake of making the matter more simple, it is some- times spoken of as two wills—just as a man is said to be beside himself—is not informed or instructed, and at the same time strengthened, up to the point of being able to act on the lines laid down by principle instead of being hurried on blindly by impulse. The fault, the responsibility, the fundamental error, lies in the neglect to train the will for the duties of sovereignty. There is nothing to excuse the omission or to condone the consequence. It is vain to plead temptation; when a man is tempted, “he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed.” Any attraction or influence outside the individual must be dependent upon something within his nature for its power to exercise a constraining influence. Except there be appetite, the sight of food creates loathing rather than desire. It is then idle to talk of being seduced by temptation. The pretence is the refuge of weak minds, the excuse of moral cowards, the men and women with strong propensities which they wilfully gratify, but for which they would fain be held WILL 323 excused, because, forsooth, some being or power external to themselves tempted them. The figment—for such it is—of outside in- fluence is infinitely mean and contemptible. Will is desire. It springs from a longing to gratify some impulse. It works by determin- ing the mental and physical forces to a particular end. It is amenable to all natural influences, stirred within, or operating from without. It is also capable of being so instructed and informed by education, know- ledge, and experience as to be controlled in its action by considerations wholly intellectual. It retains the sceptre of self-government throughout life unless consciousness is sus- pended or the mind becomes diseased. Except under these two last-named conditions, con- duct is voluntary and admits no excuse. A weak will is, in other words, a wanton will, dallying with duty, and seeking a cover for wrongdoing in the pretence of being misled. It is of the highest moment to get this truth about will rightly understood. The greater portion of the evil and mischief done in society and the world is committed under the consoling sense of irresponsibility. Men and women cheat their consciences, and quiet 324 THE BURDEN OF LIFE the still small voice of wisdom in their hearts with unctuous confessions of failures for which they hold themselves hardly accountable, but for which they are nevertheless highly culpable. There is no more melancholy or humiliating spectacle than that presented by a sane and even intelligent man or woman with eyes lowered and head bowed lamenting the weak- ness of human nature, and pleading inability to resist some impulse to an evil deed or the neglect of duty. So far from confession wiping out the fault, it adds insult to injury. Forgiveness can never efface a wrong. Nothing can undo that which has been once done. If the penalty of a crime or error is intercepted, that does not in the smallest degree, or in any sense, touch the fact that an offence has been perpetrated. The sorrow that springs from the fear of punishment for guilt incurred is unworthy the heart of an intelligent creature ; and the sorrow for guilt, the only grief that tends to improvement, cannot be assuaged by pardon, Gratitude will fill the heart, but gratitude is at best a selfish instinct — nothing to boast of or glory in. Joy, in the only true sense, can- not spring from forgiveness, unless it be WILL 325 thankfulness for rescue from some error, not because punishment will be escaped, but because, the eyes being opened to a fault, it may be henceforth avoided. This rejoicing in which the will takes part is one in which a man may go on his way to better courses; any other rejoicing is vain. A “religion”— falsely so called—which promises a pardon for every fault, and glorifies confession as a part of repentanee, is one of the cunningly devised fables by which false prophets traffic in the mingled vice and credulity of the sin- loving multitude, who would rather pay for their evil pleasures than abandon them. It matters nothing whether the promulgators of this pestilent creed call themselves Romanists or Anglicans, it is the ruin of more lives, and the fostering parent of more evil and im- morality, than any one of the incentives to wicked and vicious conduct commonly recog- nised. A matter-of-fact creed and a robust view of life and its obligations are the needs of the day. The sentimental notions which prevail are essentially enervating. The cum- ulative effect of experience is sacrificed by a system of confessing and being forgiven 326 THE BURDEN OF LIFE with the intention of starting afresh. All the momentum of self-improvement is lost if, the instant a fault is committed, the offender can shake off the sense of wrong- doing and begin anew. What is so easily wiped out will readily be repeated. The secret knowledge that an evil deed has been atoned throws something into the scale of impulse when the occasion for its repetition recurs. The pleasure of self-gratification has been enjoyed and the sense of the guilt attending it relieved ; why not repurchase the enjoyment at the same price 2 We are not writing platitudes, but arguing man to man in these pages; and we say this is how such a doctrine of forgiveness acts on the mind. It is idle to urge that it should not produce the effect described. The fruits of the fallacy are apparent on all hands. The goodness that remits a punishment is one thing. Properly appreciated, as it very seldom is, the benevolence of pardon may inspire grati- tude. In this sense forgiveness may be preached with impunity, perhaps with benefit. In the way of relieving the conscience of its burden, the hypothesis of forgiveness is the fruitful power of fresh wrongdoing. It is WILL 327 upon this presumption that the majority of respectable transgressors of every natural law rely. Men and women have no hesitation in attaching themselves to a faith which imposes few inconveniences, and in practice cuts them off from nothing save the irksome consciousness of having done amiss. No wonder wilfully erring folk boast that they never knew happiness until they joined a “Church " which ministers such kindly help to their infirmities and made the path of sin so easy and plain. It would be well if another Luther could arise to wake the world from its slumber of senseless credulity, and stir Christendom from end to end with warn- ing denunciation of the deceivers and the deceived. The churches are crowded where this false doctrine is preached Well may it be so. It scarcely needs the additional attraction of an ornate ritual, or the per- formance of the “mass in masquerade,” to lure silly and sinful souls into the toils of a snare so cunningly laid. Common sense recoils from the contemplation of a device by which the wickedly wilful, rather than the unwary, are entrapped. In the religion of common life, in personal 328 THE BURDEN OF LIFE conduct, in social intercourse and policy, will is the supreme governor of the mind. The hypothesis of involuntary action must be dis- missed. If a particular course be taken, it is, in fact, because it is preferred. The assertion that some other line of conduct could have been followed introduces an “if” or “but,” which, being interpreted, means that, in the presence of a particular inducement to do something known and felt to be wrong, the course actually taken was the most consonant to desire. We may admit that judgment was arrayed on the other side, that conscience warned the offender ; but what is that admission but a new arraignment of the indi- vidual on the ground that his will has never been so trained or informed as to link it with the faculty of judgment, and give it a claim to be described as an “intelligent will” This may be the fault of education, or the dwarfing and crippling effect of vice; but, explain it as we may, it is a culpable and grave defect, which in no way condones any error of conduct to which it may give rise. A strong will in a sound mind constitutes the secret of moral health. Those who would be well and happy must also be wise; and WILL 329 one of the first steps to wisdom is to cast aside fallacies and call things by their right names. The ostrich buries his head in the sand and shuts his eyes to danger. In this practice he is only fulfilling a reptile instinct which the history of development explains. In pleading the weakness of his will as an excuse for his wrongdoing, man wilfully blinds his eyes to facts forced upon him by his self-consciousness. Every time he yields to “temptation” he not only per- forms an act of volition, but he is conscious of the precise moment when — after that skirmish of argument and feint of resistance with which a weak mind preludes its surrender to the impulse of evil desire—he wills to yield. And, when so acting, man has not the excuse of the silly bird. He does not conform to a natural instinct; his plea is less tenable than that offered by Eve. The mother of our race admitted that it was when she saw the fruit was pleasant to the eye and to the taste— when, in fact, her desire was awakened—she willed the transgression and committed the offence. The sophistry of plausible evil-doers in these more enlightened times has less of candour to commend it; forsooth they cannot 330 THE BURDEN OF LIFE help it—they err all unwillingly when they offend A truce to idle fables and puerile conceits about the will of man and his responsibility. We repeat, no sane man or woman is excused for wrongdoing by the weakness of a will that never once ceases to sway the mind, except in moments of un- consciousness or disease, from the cradle to the grave. There is no escape from that incubus of responsibility which the possession of a will casts on the character, in the pretence that its sovereignty may be suspended, or its controlling authority impaired. These disabilities occur only when the mind itself is disabled and no question of responsibility could be seriously entertained. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND. “BEGINS in sadness, but thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” So wrote one of our true poets upon that peculiar temper which creeps over a man of genius perhaps more often than over a dullard, which envelops a nation and a people, which, it is said, will even afflict horses and dogs, and infect flocks as if they had all eaten of the insane root, as the Greeks feigned they had. The exigencies of rhyme demanded perhaps that “madness” should close the line. It is singularly fit and true —and truth is a quality verse often hits where prose gambols and misses; “badness” would have rhymed as completely, yet it would have been only partially true; both succeed despondency if too much indulged in—and it is a delightful thing at first to indulge in, a somewhat similar pleasure to 331 332 THE BURDEN OF LIFE that of opium, and almost as soothing, but in effect perhaps the more ruinous. The opium Smoker or eater may possibly tear himself away from his pernicious habit; the habitual selfish and gloomy despondent seldom or ever does. It is a foul fiend, this unseen spirit which attacks lower natures and lower times, lower peoples and weaker kings and governors, rather than the higher and purer ones, It is a miasma which settles on low lands, and is dispelled by the breezes of mountain-tops that give a fairer and a farther outlook. It settled down on the nation about the time of him who is called, with surely more satire than truth, the “Merry Monarch "–at least it came down upon good and thoughtful men, while the very excitement of the masses proved their misery, as one may see in the Memoirs of Pepys and of Evelyn. It fell upon France with an iron grip just when Louis XV. thought he was in his zenith, and it was followed by the madness of the Revolu- tion. It settled again upon France several times—notably after ’48 and before the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon—and it is falling like a pall now. When the fit is national, THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 333 it precedes a great political disturbance or perhaps war; and it differs from personal melancholy in that it is by no means an amabilis insania—a delicious madness—for it is one of the most uncomfortable of national fits. To us, a grumbling, but by no means a desponding, nation, the fit is a misfit. Some persons it cloaks all round, and they bury themselves in it in a proud humility. It gives them somewhat of a tragic air; and, as such people love to polish up themselves with a blacking-brush and to hug themselves in their gloom, we must allow them to do it. A continued and very bad fit of it is a sure sign of decadence in man or nation. Just at present, as in the days preceding the Crimean War, the fit of despondency and of self-depreciation is pretty strongly upon England and Scotland, as it is always upon Ireland. Some of the most advanced spirits —“cosmopolitan critics and lovers of every country but their own”—have, in spite of every good and sound argument, insisted that the country is ruined, and that the people are going to the dogs. Grumbling Army men and captains out of work, who stand on the 334 THE BURDEN of LIFE steps of the United Service and Army and Navy Clubs, generally add their free and—it certainly should be, considering that they are part of it—most unbiassed opinion that “the Service is going to the deuce.” Nor are these melancholy prophecies confined to such men. A busy gentleman, a working-man himself, writes from the midst of a very large, prosperous, and self-created business—“I should like to write you a consoling letter, but what shall I say? Is it any consolation to know that trade is awful, that this country is rapidly going to the dogs, is already the laughing-stock of Europe, the plaything of, America? Exports have fallen off, imports \ have doubled and are paid for out of capital; we are eating our heads off, and shall soon collapse as a nation. The British workman may be thanked for it all. And yet,” he adds “I think our country is the very best under the sun.” - He certainly is not alone in that last opinion — witness the crowds of German, French, Italians, and other foreigners, who give a very practical effect to their opinions by settling here; witness, too, the flocks of our own emigrants, who return, like Noah's THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 335 first dove, to the ark of their country, unable to find a settling-place for their feet—and, being the best of actual countries, it seems rather unnatural that the best should fall below the worst. However, clever people tell us we are going to be ruined—advanced people, you know—and they have told us so many years ago—and, if persistency in a wrong could make it right, they are bound to be true. Mr Matthew Arnold, a fine poet, who has emptied all the promises out of Isaiah, and all faith out of the Testament, and who is, consequently, very popular with certain schools of thought, tells us that the whole world is going, or has gone, to the metaphorical dogs. The whole world lies forlorn, he writes. But surely we may traverse such dicta. The world does not lie forlorn ; it is very far from being so in its wildest and wickedest portion ; and its good portion cannot be so, for “forlorn" means more than “melancholy”—it means forsaken and abandoned by God. And Mr Arnold, by the mouth of Empedocles the philosopher, who committed suicide by throwing himself into the crater of Vesuvius, tells us that we have no reason to believe that there are any gods or that there is any Heaven —for, he says, 336 THE BURDEN OF LIFE “being weary does not prove that we have where to rest”—and he twits us—somewhat obscurely—with— “Fools, that so often here Happiness mock'd our prayer, I think, might make us fear A like event elsewhere— Make us fly, not to dreams, but moderate desire.” This last line is a laggard which is not linked sweetness. But how if witnesses for the defence assert that happiness does not mock our prayers ? There is plenty to be found. Of course much will depend upon what are called prayers. When a man says that there is “no ground to affirm that there are gods,” or a God, that there is no place of rest, and that, as we have been deluded on earth, so we may look to be cheated of Heaven, or in Heaven, if there be one, his prayers can hardly be very hearty. The little street-boys know better than that. They do not cut capers before a blank window, and cry, “Hi, you, sir, if you are there, chuck us down a 'a'penny, if you 'ave wun " On the contrary, they study the faces of the passers-by, and THE SLOUGH OF DESEPOND 337 will not beg of the Quilps, Sampson Brasses, and Ralph Nicklebys, but run after the brothers Cheeryble, whom they can trust with a sure instinct. So we are wisely assured that “they who seek God must first believe that there is a God.” It is as it should be ; they who believe in prayer find it efficacious. As the world is so dreadfully out of joint— truly it might be better, but so it might have been at all times—England is, we are told, very badly off. She has finished her work. From the times of the Reformation and the "Armada—a short three hundred years—no nation has done so much. In arms, arts, science, trade, politics, inventions, discoveries, travels, colonisation, political and social reform, her labours have been Titanic. No country of ancient or modern times can com- pare with her; and in so short a time, with so generous an impulse, and with such endur- ing effect have her benefits been made, that it is probable no country ever will. It is not very likely, it strikes us, that this faithful and religious nation will be deserted, or will not still be guided ; but advanced minds think otherwise—that she, not comprehend- Y 338 THE BURDEN OF LIFE ing the voices of her greatest golden-mouthed SOIOS— “Stupidly travels her round Of mechanic business, and lets Slowly die out of her life Glory and Genius and Joy.” And, as she does this, her son Matthew Arnold arraigns and scolds her—“the weary Titan, with deaf ears and labour-dimmed eyes,” “Staggering on to her goal, Bearing, on shoulders immense, Atlantean, the load, Well-nigh not to be borne, Of the too vast orb of her fate.” Surely, however, while we admire so fine and statuesque an image in poetry, we may doubt its truth. A humorist remarks on the rhyme which attests that an old hen “used to lay two eggs a day, and on Sundays she lay three,” that it sounds very well for poetry, but that he will bet it is not true. So we may add that, while our machinery is wonderfully prolific, and our labourers are skilful and industrious, statistics prove that we are rather underworked than overworked. Certainly no labourers are better paid, or THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 339 fed, or work shorter hours. Let any one read Mayhew's Germany—often not a re- liable authority, it is true, but in this case it is—to note how miners, farmers, and indeed all classes work, and let him go to France to see how they work there. No doubt we work with a will, but not distressfully. As for the “too vast orb of our fate,” we can only say that, if we do not bear it now, we are far weaker than were our fathers, Count the relative numbers and poverty of England in the days of Elizabeth, with Spain, Parma, the Pope, and France against her, and those of any coalition now. Just look at her during the American War—France, Russia, her revolted Colonies, and the European system of excluding English goods against her. What an “orb " had she to bear then I But she neither feared nor quailed, and in- deed did not seem to know how to do so. Go back to Queen Anne's days — Ireland disturbed, the conquering Louis against us, Prussia, including Germany, then merely bought off by subsidies only less costly than a war. Turn again to later days, those of the Crimean War, with a friend whom we half distrusted, and who finally made peace 340 THE BURDEN OF LIFE on his own behalf and sold us; with the Smaller Northern powers afraid, Russia loom- ing like a giant, trade distressed, the peace party rampant, America but half friendly, and indeed perfectly ready to supply the Emperor of Russia with ships or matériel. Yet with tremor and anxiety, well to be dis- tinguished in the excellent third volume of the Life of the Prince Consort, just then and most opportunely published, the nation went like a champion into the lists. The book, issued at an important juncture, should be read widely. The Queen gave expression to the noble feeling of the English, when certain well-meaning religionists proposed a “Day of Humiliation.” “Not so,” wrote Victoria to her Archbishops and Prime Minister; “we do not seek war, but rather by all means to avoid it.” “The Queen therefore hopes that this will be reconsidered carefully, and a prayer substituted for the Day of Humiliation. Were the services selected for these days of a different kind from what they are, the Queen would feel less strongly about it; but they always select chapters from the Old Testament and Psalms, which are so totally inapplicable, that all the effect such occasions THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 341 ought to have is entirely done away with. Moreover, to say—as we probably should— that the “great sinfulness of the nation has brought about this war,’ when it is the selfishness and ambition and want of honesty of one man (the Emperor of Russia), and his servants, which have done it, while our conduct throughout has been actuated by unselfishness and honesty, would be too manifestly repulsive to the feelings of every one, and would be a mere bit of hypocrisy. Let there be a prayer expressive of our great thankfulness for the immense benefits we have enjoyed, and for the immense prosperity of the country, and entreating God's help and protection in the coming struggle. In this the Queen would join heart and soul.” Nobly written, and like a Queen—and, if true then, how much truer are such words now ! If we were grateful to Heaven in the days of Cromwell, when we defied France, threatened Italy, and held the hands of the massacrers of Piedmont, led the counsels of Europe with less than a third of our present population and less than a hundredth part of our present resources, with Ireland ablaze, half England disloyal, how should 342 'THE BURDEN OF LIFE we feel now Ż But no one then talked of arraigning England as a tired Titan, when, as Macaulay says, “the English people first proclaimed those mighty principles which have penetrated into the depths of American [the reader may add Indian, Australian, and Colonial] forests, which have roused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand years, [add now Italy, a vast united free kingdom, and parliamentary France, in its birth-throes], and which from one end of Europe to another have kindled an un- quenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors with unwonted fear.” Considering all things, national tremor and despondency should have no basis here ; and at this time they should be supplemented by national faith and trust. Personally, despondency is a feeling which hardly pays in man or in woman. A melan- choly, despondent man, who enters a room as if he always brought a fog in with him, and a woman who, like Mrs Gummidge, is a “poor, lone, lost widow,” are not cheerful companions, and the shoulders that are turned to them are but cold. They are poor things. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 343 The rain-water poet who dribbles like the eaves'-dripping on an inverted slop-pail may be most musical, but he is certainly most melancholy. He is weak and tetchy: great poets are calm and serene. Look at Milton, fallen upon evil days, when every base and crawling nature was triumphant. Sickness and suffering, blindness, neglect, and poverty, domestic strife and misunderstanding, pro- scription, abuse, and ingratitude of children, none of these disturbed his calm and noble soul, which, in his darkness, dwelt in inner light. “But for us,” says Mr Matthew Arnold—alas, how different from the guide and counsellor, Dr Arnold, to whom he has addressed noble verses l—we “live too fast and are too harassed to attain even Words- worth's sweet calm or Goethe's wide and luminous view” — and they, great poets though they be, are distinctly below Milton. But the reason is as obvious as that which the man found who, complaining of his stopped watch, unexpectedly discovered that he had not wound it up. Nor Milton, nor Wordsworth, nor Goethe ever thought of the rush, hurry, wicked gossip, and sceptical babblement that most now delight in. He 344 THE BURDEN OF LIFE who runs as hard as he can towards the North Pole must not be surprised if he does not reach the Equator. It is to be noted: that this Slough of Despond besets the young and the beginning of life, as the unerring instinct of the inspired tinker taught him ; for, following the dictates of an infallible genius —the only infallible thing in the world, because God-given—he makes the filthy pool lie at the very outset of his journey. It is a very “miry slough in the midst of a plain —such a place as cannot be mended, for it is a place where the scum and filth of sin continually do run, and they who wallow therein are grievously bedaubed.” Still the infatuated ones imagine that they show a strong mind by getting into it ; whereas the real virtue lies in getting and in keeping out." What is specially to be avoided is the getting out like Mr Pliable, on the wrong side—“on that side of the miry slough which was next his own house"—for, if so, we return easily to our follies, and are still not possessors of our own souls, but the fools of two grisly giants—Time and Terror. THE END. 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