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Erewhon (Revised Edition)
by Samuel Butler
September, 1999 [Etext #1906]
****The Project Gutenberg Etext of Erewhon, by Samuel Butler***
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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1910 A. C. Fifield edition.
EREWHON, OR OVER THE RANGE
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The Author wishes it to be understood that Erewhon is pronounced as
a word of three syllables, all short--thus, E-re-whon.
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
Having been enabled by the kindness of the public to get through an
unusually large edition of "Erewhon" in a very short time, I have
taken the opportunity of a second edition to make some necessary
corrections, and to add a few passages where it struck me that they
would be appropriately introduced; the passages are few, and it is
my fixed intention never to touch the work again.
I may perhaps be allowed to say a word or two here in reference to
"The Coming Race," to the success of which book "Erewhon" has been
very generally set down as due. This is a mistake, though a
perfectly natural one. The fact is that "Erewhon" was finished,
with the exception of the last twenty pages and a sentence or two
inserted from time to time here and there throughout the book,
before the first advertisement of "The Coming Race" appeared. A
friend having called my attention to one of the first of these
advertisements, and suggesting that it probably referred to a work
of similar character to my own, I took "Erewhon" to a well-known
firm of publishers on the 1st of May 1871, and left it in their
hands for consideration. I then went abroad, and on learning that
the publishers alluded to declined the MS., I let it alone for six
or seven months, and, being in an out-of-the-way part of Italy,
never saw a single review of "The Coming Race," nor a copy of the
work. On my return, I purposely avoided looking into it until I
had sent back my last revises to the printer. Then I had much
pleasure in reading it, but was indeed surprised at the many little
points of similarity between the two books, in spite of their
entire independence to one another.
I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat
the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin's
theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my
intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any
attempt to laugh at Mr. Darwin; but I must own that I have myself
to thank for the misconception, for I felt sure that my intention
would be missed, but preferred not to weaken the chapters by
explanation, and knew very well that Mr. Darwin's theory would take
no harm. The only question in my mind was how far I could afford
to be misrepresented as laughing at that for which I have the most
profound admiration. I am surprised, however, that the book at
which such an example of the specious misuse of analogy would seem
most naturally levelled should have occurred to no reviewer;
neither shall I mention the name of the book here, though I should
fancy that the hint given will suffice.
I have been held by some whose opinions I respect to have denied
men's responsibility for their actions. He who does this is an
enemy who deserves no quarter. I should have imagined that I had
been sufficiently explicit, but have made a few additions to the
chapter on Malcontents, which will, I think, serve to render
further mistake impossible.
An anonymous correspondent (by the hand-writing presumably a
clergyman) tells me that in quoting from the Latin grammar I should
at any rate have done so correctly, and that I should have written
"agricolas" instead of "agricolae". He added something about any
boy in the fourth form, &c., &c., which I shall not quote, but
which made me very uncomfortable. It may be said that I must have
misquoted from design, from ignorance, or by a slip of the pen; but
surely in these days it will be recognised as harsh to assign
limits to the all-embracing boundlessness of truth, and it will be
more reasonably assumed that EACH of the three possible causes of
misquotation must have had its share in the apparent blunder. The
art of writing things that shall sound right and yet be wrong has
made so many reputations, and affords comfort to such a large
number of readers, that I could not venture to neglect it; the
Latin grammar, however, is a subject on which some of the younger
members of the community feel strongly, so I have now written
"agricolas". I have also parted with the word "infortuniam"
(though not without regret), but have not dared to meddle with
other similar inaccuracies.
For the inconsistencies in the book, and I am aware that there are
not a few, I must ask the indulgence of the reader. The blame,
however, lies chiefly with the Erewhonians themselves, for they
were really a very difficult people to understand. The most
glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual
inconvenience; neither, provided they did not actually see the
money dropping out of their pockets, nor suffer immediate physical
pain, would they listen to any arguments as to the waste of money
and happiness which their folly caused them. But this had an
effect of which I have little reason to complain, for I was allowed
almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and
they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter.
I must not conclude without expressing my most sincere thanks to my
critics and to the public for the leniency and consideration with
which they have treated my adventures.
June 9, 1872
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
My publisher wishes me to say a few words about the genesis of the
work, a revised and enlarged edition of which he is herewith laying
before the public. I therefore place on record as much as I can
remember on this head after a lapse of more than thirty years.
The first part of "Erewhon" written was an article headed "Darwin
among the Machines," and signed Cellarius. It was written in the
Upper Rangitata district of the Canterbury Province (as it then
was) of New Zealand, and appeared at Christchurch in the Press
Newspaper, June 13, 1863. A copy of this article is indexed under
my books in the British Museum catalogue. In passing, I may say
that the opening chapters of "Erewhon" were also drawn from the
Upper Rangitata district, with such modifications as I found
convenient.
A second article on the same subject as the one just referred to
appeared in the Press shortly after the first, but I have no copy.
It treated Machines from a different point of view, and was the
basis of pp. 270-274 of the present edition of "Erewhon." {1} This
view ultimately led me to the theory I put forward in "Life and
Habit," published in November 1877. I have put a bare outline of
this theory (which I believe to be quite sound) into the mouth of
an Erewhonian philosopher in Chapter XXVII. of this book.
In 1865 I rewrote and enlarged "Darwin among the Machines" for the
Reasoner, a paper published in London by Mr. G. J. Holyoake. It
appeared July 1, 1865, under the heading, "The Mechanical
Creation," and can be seen in the British Museum. I again rewrote
and enlarged it, till it assumed the form in which it appeared in
the first edition of "Erewhon."
The next part of "Erewhon" that I wrote was the "World of the
Unborn," a preliminary form of which was sent to Mr. Holyoake's
paper, but as I cannot find it among those copies of the Reasoner
that are in the British Museum, I conclude that it was not
accepted. I have, however, rather a strong fancy that it appeared
in some London paper of the same character as the Reasoner, not
very long after July 1, 1865, but I have no copy.
I also wrote about this time the substance of what ultimately
became the Musical Banks, and the trial of a man for being in a
consumption. These four detached papers were, I believe, all that
was written of "Erewhon" before 1870. Between 1865 and 1870 I
wrote hardly anything, being hopeful of attaining that success as a
painter which it has not been vouchsafed me to attain, but in the
autumn of 1870, just as I was beginning to get occasionally hung at
Royal Academy exhibitions, my friend, the late Sir F. N. (then Mr.)
Broome, suggested to me that I should add somewhat to the articles
I had already written, and string them together into a book. I was
rather fired by the idea, but as I only worked at the MS. on
Sundays it was some months before I had completed it.
I see from my second Preface that I took the book to Messrs.
Chapman & Hall May 1, 1871, and on their rejection of it, under the
advice of one who has attained the highest rank among living
writers, I let it sleep, till I took it to Mr. Trubner early in
1872. As regards its rejection by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, I
believe their reader advised them quite wisely. They told me he
reported that it was a philosophical work, little likely to be
popular with a large circle of readers. I hope that if I had been
their reader, and the book had been submitted to myself, I should
have advised them to the same effect.
"Erewhon" appeared with the last day or two of March 1872. I
attribute its unlooked-for success mainly to two early favourable
reviews--the first in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 12, and the
second in the Spectator of April 20. There was also another cause.
I was complaining once to a friend that though "Erewhon" had met
with such a warm reception, my subsequent books had been all of
them practically still-born. He said, "You forget one charm that
'Erewhon' had, but which none of your other books can have." I
asked what? and was answered, "The sound of a new voice, and of an
unknown voice."
The first edition of "Erewhon" sold in about three weeks; I had not
taken moulds, and as the demand was strong, it was set up again
immediately. I made a few unimportant alterations and additions,
and added a Preface, of which I cannot say that I am particularly
proud, but an inexperienced writer with a head somewhat turned by
unexpected success is not to be trusted with a preface. I made a
few further very trifling alterations before moulds were taken, but
since the summer of 1872, as new editions were from time to time
wanted, they have been printed from stereos then made.
Having now, I fear, at too great length done what I was asked to
do, I should like to add a few words on my own account. I am still
fairly well satisfied with those parts of "Erewhon" that were
repeatedly rewritten, but from those that had only a single writing
I would gladly cut out some forty or fifty pages if I could.
This, however, may not be, for the copyright will probably expire
in a little over twelve years. It was necessary, therefore, to
revise the book throughout for literary inelegancies--of which I
found many more than I had expected--and also to make such
substantial additions as should secure a new lease of life--at any
rate for the copyright. If, then, instead of cutting out, say
fifty pages, I have been compelled to add about sixty invita
Minerva--the blame rests neither with my publisher nor with me, but
with the copyright laws. Nevertheless I can assure the reader
that, though I have found it an irksome task to take up work which
I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am
ashamed of, I have done my best to make the new matter savour so
much of the better portions of the old, that none but the best
critics shall perceive at what places the gaps of between thirty
and forty years occur.
Lastly, if my readers note a considerable difference between the
literary technique of "Erewhon" and that of "Erewhon Revisited," I
would remind them that, as I have just shown, "Erewhon" look
something like ten years in writing, and even so was written with
great difficulty, while "Erewhon Revisited" was written easily
between November 1900 and the end of April 1901. There is no
central idea underlying "Erewhon," whereas the attempt to realise
the effect of a single supposed great miracle dominates the whole
of its successor. In "Erewhon" there was hardly any story, and
little attempt to give life and individuality to the characters; I
hope that in "Erewhon Revisited" both these defects have been in
great measure avoided. "Erewhon" was not an organic whole,
"Erewhon Revisited" may fairly claim to be one. Nevertheless,
though in literary workmanship I do not doubt that this last-named
book is an improvement on the first, I shall be agreeably surprised
if I am not told that "Erewhon," with all its faults, is the better
reading of the two.
SAMUEL BUTLER.
August 7, 1901
CHAPTER I: WASTE LANDS
If the reader will excuse me, I will say nothing of my antecedents,
nor of the circumstances which led me to leave my native country;
the narrative would be tedious to him and painful to myself.
Suffice it, that when I left home it was with the intention of
going to some new colony, and either finding, or even perhaps
purchasing, waste crown land suitable for cattle or sheep farming,
by which means I thought that I could better my fortunes more
rapidly than in England.
It will be seen that I did not succeed in my design, and that
however much I may have met with that was new and strange, I have
been unable to reap any pecuniary advantage.
It is true, I imagine myself to have made a discovery which, if I
can be the first to profit by it, will bring me a recompense beyond
all money computation, and secure me a position such as has not
been attained by more than some fifteen or sixteen persons, since
the creation of the universe. But to this end I must possess
myself of a considerable sum of money: neither do I know how to
get it, except by interesting the public in my story, and inducing
the charitable to come forward and assist me. With this hope I now
publish my adventures; but I do so with great reluctance, for I
fear that my story will be doubted unless I tell the whole of it;
and yet I dare not do so, lest others with more means than mine
should get the start of me. I prefer the risk of being doubted to
that of being anticipated, and have therefore concealed my
destination on leaving England, as also the point from which I
began my more serious and difficult journey.
My chief consolation lies in the fact that truth bears its own
impress, and that my story will carry conviction by reason of the
internal evidences for its accuracy. No one who is himself honest
will doubt my being so.
I reached my destination in one of the last months of 1868, but I
dare not mention the season, lest the reader should gather in which
hemisphere I was. The colony was one which had not been opened up
even to the most adventurous settlers for more than eight or nine
years, having been previously uninhabited, save by a few tribes of
savages who frequented the seaboard. The part known to Europeans
consisted of a coast-line about eight hundred miles in length
(affording three or four good harbours), and a tract of country
extending inland for a space varying from two to three hundred
miles, until it a reached the offshoots of an exceedingly lofty
range of mountains, which could be seen from far out upon the
plains, and were covered with perpetual snow. The coast was
perfectly well known both north and south of the tract to which I
have alluded, but in neither direction was there a single harbour
for five hundred miles, and the mountains, which descended almost
into the sea, were covered with thick timber, so that none would
think of settling.
With this bay of land, however, the case was different. The
harbours were sufficient; the country was timbered, but not too
heavily; it was admirably suited for agriculture; it also contained
millions on millions of acres of the most beautifully grassed
country in the world, and of the best suited for all manner of
sheep and cattle. The climate was temperate, and very healthy;
there were no wild animals, nor were the natives dangerous, being
few in number and of an intelligent tractable disposition.
It may be readily understood that when once Europeans set foot upon
this territory they were not slow to take advantage of its
capabilities. Sheep and cattle were introduced, and bred with
extreme rapidity; men took up their 50,000 or 100,000 acres of
country, going inland one behind the other, till in a few years
there was not an acre between the sea and the front ranges which
was not taken up, and stations either for sheep or cattle were
spotted about at intervals of some twenty or thirty miles over the
whole country. The front ranges stopped the tide of squatters for
some little time; it was thought that there was too much snow upon
them for too many months in the year,--that the sheep would get
lost, the ground being too difficult for shepherding,--that the
expense of getting wool down to the ship's side would eat up the
farmer's profits,--and that the grass was too rough and sour for
sheep to thrive upon; but one after another determined to try the
experiment, and it was wonderful how successfully it turned out.
Men pushed farther and farther into the mountains, and found a very
considerable tract inside the front range, between it and another
which was loftier still, though even this was not the highest, the
great snowy one which could be seen from out upon the plains. This
second range, however, seemed to mark the extreme limits of
pastoral country; and it was here, at a small and newly founded
station, that I was received as a cadet, and soon regularly
employed. I was then just twenty-two years old.
I was delighted with the country and the manner of life. It was my
daily business to go up to the top of a certain high mountain, and
down one of its spurs on to the flat, in order to make sure that no
sheep had crossed their boundaries. I was to see the sheep, not
necessarily close at hand, nor to get them in a single mob, but to
see enough of them here and there to feel easy that nothing had
gone wrong; this was no difficult matter, for there were not above
eight hundred of them; and, being all breeding ewes, they were
pretty quiet.
There were a good many sheep which I knew, as two or three black
ewes, and a black lamb or two, and several others which had some
distinguishing mark whereby I could tell them. I would try and see
all these, and if they were all there, and the mob looked large
enough, I might rest assured that all was well. It is surprising
how soon the eye becomes accustomed to missing twenty sheep out of
two or three hundred. I had a telescope and a dog, and would take
bread and meat and tobacco with me. Starting with early dawn, it
would be night before I could complete my round; for the mountain
over which I had to go was very high. In winter it was covered
with snow, and the sheep needed no watching from above. If I were
to see sheep dung or tracks going down on to the other side of the
mountain (where there was a valley with a stream--a mere cul de
sac), I was to follow them, and look out for sheep; but I never saw
any, the sheep always descending on to their own side, partly from
habit, and partly because there was abundance of good sweet feed,
which had been burnt in the early spring, just before I came, and
was now deliciously green and rich, while that on the other side
had never been burnt, and was rank and coarse.
It was a monotonous life, but it was very healthy and one does not
much mind anything when one is well. The country was the grandest
that can be imagined. How often have I sat on the mountain side
and watched the waving downs, with the two white specks of huts in
the distance, and the little square of garden behind them; the
paddock with a patch of bright green oats above the huts, and the
yards and wool-sheds down on the flat below; all seen as through
the wrong end of a telescope, so clear and brilliant was the air,
or as upon a colossal model or map spread out beneath me. Beyond
the downs was a plain, going down to a river of great size, on the
farther side of which there were other high mountains, with the
winter's snow still not quite melted; up the river, which ran
winding in many streams over a bed some two miles broad, I looked
upon the second great chain, and could see a narrow gorge where the
river retired and was lost. I knew that there was a range still
farther back; but except from one place near the very top of my own
mountain, no part of it was visible: from this point, however, I
saw, whenever there were no clouds, a single snow-clad peak, many
miles away, and I should think about as high as any mountain in the
world. Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect--
only the little far-away homestead giving sign of human handiwork;-
-the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky; the
marvellous atmospheric effects--sometimes black mountains against a
white sky, and then again, after cold weather, white mountains
against a black sky--sometimes seen through breaks and swirls of
cloud--and sometimes, which was best of all, I went up my mountain
in a fog, and then got above the mist; going higher and higher, I
would look down upon a sea of whiteness, through which would be
thrust innumerable mountain tops that looked like islands.
I am there now, as I write; I fancy that I can see the downs, the
huts, the plain, and the river-bed--that torrent pathway of
desolation, with its distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful!
wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with the sad grey clouds above,
and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side, as
though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some lean
and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect,
trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this
gully, and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted
head, that she may hear the distant wailing and obey it. Aha! they
see, and rush towards each other. Alas! they are both mistaken;
the ewe is not the lamb's ewe, they are neither kin nor kind to one
another, and part in coldness. Each must cry louder, and wander
farther yet; may luck be with them both that they may find their
own at nightfall. But this is mere dreaming, and I must proceed.
I could not help speculating upon what might lie farther up the
river and behind the second range. I had no money, but if I could
only find workable country, I might stock it with borrowed capital,
and consider myself a made man. True, the range looked so vast,
that there seemed little chance of getting a sufficient road
through it or over it; but no one had yet explored it, and it is
wonderful how one finds that one can make a path into all sorts of
places (and even get a road for pack-horses), which from a distance
appear inaccessible; the river was so great that it must drain an
inner tract--at least I thought so; and though every one said it
would be madness to attempt taking sheep farther inland, I knew
that only three years ago the same cry had been raised against the
country which my master's flock was now overrunning. I could not
keep these thoughts out of my head as I would rest myself upon the
mountain side; they haunted me as I went my daily rounds, and grew
upon me from hour to hour, till I resolved that after shearing I
would remain in doubt no longer, but saddle my horse, take as much
provision with me as I could, and go and see for myself.
But over and above these thoughts came that of the great range
itself. What was beyond it? Ah! who could say? There was no one
in the whole world who had the smallest idea, save those who were
themselves on the other side of it--if, indeed, there was any one
at all. Could I hope to cross it? This would be the highest
triumph that I could wish for; but it was too much to think of yet.
I would try the nearer range, and see how far I could go. Even if
I did not find country, might I not find gold, or diamonds, or
copper, or silver? I would sometimes lie flat down to drink out of
a stream, and could see little yellow specks among the sand; were
these gold? People said no; but then people always said there was
no gold until it was found to be abundant: there was plenty of
slate and granite, which I had always understood to accompany gold;
and even though it was not found in paying quantities here, it
might be abundant in the main ranges. These thoughts filled my
head, and I could not banish them.
CHAPTER II: IN THE WOOL-SHED
At last shearing came; and with the shearers there was an old
native, whom they had nicknamed Chowbok--though, I believe, his
real name was Kahabuka. He was a sort of chief of the natives,
could speak a little English, and was a great favourite with the
missionaries. He did not do any regular work with the shearers,
but pretended to help in the yards, his real aim being to get the
grog, which is always more freely circulated at shearing-time: he
did not get much, for he was apt to be dangerous when drunk; and
very little would make him so: still he did get it occasionally,
and if one wanted to get anything out of him, it was the best bribe
to offer him. I resolved to question him, and get as much
information from him as I could. I did so. As long as I kept to
questions about the nearer ranges, he was easy to get on with--he
had never been there, but there were traditions among his tribe to
the effect that there was no sheep-country, nothing, in fact, but
stunted timber and a few river-bed flats. It was very difficult to
reach; still there were passes: one of them up our own river,
though not directly along the river-bed, the gorge of which was not
practicable; he had never seen any one who had been there: was
there to not enough on this side? But when I came to the main
range, his manner changed at once. He became uneasy, and began to
prevaricate and shuffle. In a very few minutes I could see that of
this too there existed traditions in his tribe; but no efforts or
coaxing could get a word from him about them. At last I hinted
about grog, and presently he feigned consent: I gave it him; but
as soon as he had drunk it he began shamming intoxication, and then
went to sleep, or pretended to do so, letting me kick him pretty
hard and never budging.
I was angry, for I had to go without my own grog and had got
nothing out of him; so the next day I determined that he should
tell me before I gave him any, or get none at all.
Accordingly, when night came and the shearers had knocked off work
and had their supper, I got my share of rum in a tin pannikin and
made a sign to Chowbok to follow me to the wool-shed, which he
willingly did, slipping out after me, and no one taking any notice
of either of us. When we got down to the wool-shed we lit a tallow
candle, and having stuck it in an old bottle we sat down upon the
wool bales and began to smoke. A wool-shed is a roomy place, built
somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral, with aisles on either
side full of pens for the sheep, a great nave, at the upper end of
which the shearers work, and a further space for wool sorters and
packers. It always refreshed me with a semblance of antiquity
(precious in a new country), though I very well knew that the
oldest wool-shed in the settlement was not more than seven years
old, while this was only two. Chowbok pretended to expect his grog
at once, though we both of us knew very well what the other was
after, and that we were each playing against the other, the one for
grog the other for information.
We had a hard fight: for more than two hours he had tried to put
me off with lies but had carried no conviction; during the whole
time we had been morally wrestling with one another and had neither
of us apparently gained the least advantage; at length, however, I
had become sure that he would give in ultimately, and that with a
little further patience I should get his story out of him. As upon
a cold day in winter, when one has churned (as I had often had to
do), and churned in vain, and the butter makes no sign of coming,
at last one tells by the sound that the cream has gone to sleep,
and then upon a sudden the butter comes, so I had churned at
Chowbok until I perceived that he had arrived, as it were, at the
sleepy stage, and that with a continuance of steady quiet pressure
the day was mine. On a sudden, without a word of warning, he
rolled two bales of wool (his strength was very great) into the
middle of the floor, and on the top of these he placed another
crosswise; he snatched up an empty wool-pack, threw it like a
mantle over his shoulders, jumped upon the uppermost bale, and sat
upon it. In a moment his whole form was changed. His high
shoulders dropped; he set his feet close together, heel to heel and
toe to toe; he laid his arms and hands close alongside of his body,
the palms following his thighs; he held his head high but quite
straight, and his eyes stared right in front of him; but he frowned
horribly, and assumed an expression of face that was positively
fiendish. At the best of times Chowbok was very ugly, but he now
exceeded all conceivable limits of the hideous. His mouth extended
almost from ear to ear, grinning horribly and showing all his
teeth; his eyes glared, though they remained quite fixed, and his
forehead was contracted with a most malevolent scowl.
I am afraid my description will have conveyed only the ridiculous
side of his appearance; but the ridiculous and the sublime are
near, and the grotesque fiendishness of Chowbok's face approached
this last, if it did not reach it. I tried to be amused, but I
felt a sort of creeping at the roots of my hair and over my whole
body, as I looked and wondered what he could possibly be intending
to signify. He continued thus for about a minute, sitting bolt
upright, as stiff as a stone, and making this fearful face. Then
there came from his lips a low moaning like the wind, rising and
falling by infinitely small gradations till it became almost a
shriek, from which it descended and died away; after that, he
jumped down from the bale and held up the extended fingers of both
his hands, as one who should say "Ten," though I did not then
understand him.
For myself I was open-mouthed with astonishment. Chowbok rolled
the bales rapidly into their place, and stood before me shuddering
as in great fear; horror was written upon his face--this time quite
involuntarily--as though the natural panic of one who had committed
an awful crime against unknown and superhuman agencies. He nodded
his head and gibbered, and pointed repeatedly to the mountains. He
would not touch the grog, but, after a few seconds he made a run
through the wool-shed door into the moonlight; nor did he reappear
till next day at dinner-time, when he turned up, looking very
sheepish and abject in his civility towards myself.
Of his meaning I had no conception. How could I? All I could feel
sure of was, that he had a meaning which was true and awful to
himself. It was enough for me that I believed him to have given me
the best he had and all he had. This kindled my imagination more
than if he had told me intelligible stories by the hour together.
I knew not what the great snowy ranges might conceal, but I could
no longer doubt that it would be something well worth discovering.
I kept aloof from Chowbok for the next few days, and showed no
desire to question him further; when I spoke to him I called him
Kahabuka, which gratified him greatly: he seemed to have become
afraid of me, and acted as one who was in my power. Having
therefore made up my mind that I would begin exploring as soon as
shearing was over, I thought it would be a good thing to take
Chowbok with me; so I told him that I meant going to the nearer
ranges for a few days' prospecting, and that he was to come too. I
made him promises of nightly grog, and held out the chances of
finding gold. I said nothing about the main range, for I knew it
would frighten him. I would get him as far up our own river as I
could, and trace it if possible to its source. I would then either
go on by myself, if I felt my courage equal to the attempt, or
return with Chowbok. So, as soon as ever shearing was over and the
wool sent off, I asked leave of absence, and obtained it. Also, I
bought an old pack-horse and pack-saddle, so that I might take
plenty of provisions, and blankets, and a small tent. I was to
ride and find fords over the river; Chowbok was to follow and lead
the pack-horse, which would also carry him over the fords. My
master let me have tea and sugar, ship's biscuits, tobacco, and
salt mutton, with two or three bottles of good brandy; for, as the
wool was now sent down, abundance of provisions would come up with
the empty drays.
Everything being now ready, all the hands on the station turned out
to see us off, and we started on our journey, not very long after
the summer solstice of 1870.
CHAPTER III: UP THE RIVER
The first day we had an easy time, following up the great flats by
the river side, which had already been twice burned, so that there
was no dense undergrowth to check us, though the ground was often
rough, and we had to go a good deal upon the riverbed. Towards
nightfall we had made a matter of some five-and-twenty miles, and
camped at the point where the river entered upon the gorge.
The weather was delightfully warm, considering that the valley in
which we were encamped must have been at least two thousand feet
above the level of the sea. The river-bed was here about a mile
and a half broad and entirely covered with shingle over which the
river ran in many winding channels, looking, when seen from above,
like a tangled skein of ribbon, and glistening in the sun. We knew
that it was liable to very sudden and heavy freshets; but even had
we not known it, we could have seen it by the snags of trees, which
must have been carried long distances, and by the mass of vegetable
and mineral debris which was banked against their lower side,
showing that at times the whole river-bed must be covered with a
roaring torrent many feet in depth and of ungovernable fury. At
present the river was low, there being but five or six streams, too
deep and rapid for even a strong man to ford on foot, but to be
crossed safely on horseback. On either side of it there were still
a few acres of flat, which grew wider and wider down the river,
till they became the large plains on which we looked from my
master's hut. Behind us rose the lowest spurs of the second range,
leading abruptly to the range itself; and at a distance of half a
mile began the gorge, where the river narrowed and became
boisterous and terrible. The beauty of the scene cannot be
conveyed in language. The one side of the valley was blue with
evening shadow, through which loomed forest and precipice, hillside
and mountain top; and the other was still brilliant with the sunset
gold. The wide and wasteful river with its ceaseless rushing--the
beautiful water-birds too, which abounded upon the islets and were
so tame that we could come close up to them--the ineffable purity
of the air--the solemn peacefulness of the untrodden region--could
there be a more delightful and exhilarating combination?
We set about making our camp, close to some large bush which came
down from the mountains on to the flat, and tethered out our horses
upon ground as free as we could find it from anything round which
they might wind the rope and get themselves tied up. We dared not
let them run loose, lest they might stray down the river home
again. We then gathered wood and lit the fire. We filled a tin
pannikin with water and set it against the hot ashes to boil. When
the water boiled we threw in two or three large pinches of tea and
let them brew.
We had caught half a dozen young ducks in the course of the day--an
easy matter, for the old birds made such a fuss in attempting to
decoy us away from them--pretending to be badly hurt as they say
the plover does--that we could always find them by going about in
the opposite direction to the old bird till we heard the young ones
crying: then we ran them down, for they could not fly though they
were nearly full grown. Chowbok plucked them a little and singed
them a good deal. Then we cut them up and boiled them in another
pannikin, and this completed our preparations.
When we had done supper it was quite dark. The silence and
freshness of the night, the occasional sharp cry of the wood-hen,
the ruddy glow of the fire, the subdued rushing of the river, the
sombre forest, and the immediate foreground of our saddles packs
and blankets, made a picture worthy of a Salvator Rosa or a Nicolas
Poussin. I call it to mind and delight in it now, but I did not
notice it at the time. We next to never know when we are well off:
but this cuts two ways,--for if we did, we should perhaps know
better when we are ill off also; and I have sometimes thought that
there are as many ignorant of the one as of the other. He who
wrote, "O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint agricolas," might
have written quite as truly, "O infortunatos nimium sua si mala
norint"; and there are few of us who are not protected from the
keenest pain by our inability to see what it is that we have done,
what we are suffering, and what we truly are. Let us be grateful
to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
We found as soft a piece of ground as we could--though it was all
stony--and having collected grass and so disposed of ourselves that
we had a little hollow for our hip-bones, we strapped our blankets
around us and went to sleep. Waking in the night I saw the stars
overhead and the moonlight bright upon the mountains. The river
was ever rushing; I heard one of our horses neigh to its companion,
and was assured that they were still at hand; I had no care of mind
or body, save that I had doubtless many difficulties to overcome;
there came upon me a delicious sense of peace, a fulness of
contentment which I do not believe can be felt by any but those who
have spent days consecutively on horseback, or at any rate in the
open air.
Next morning we found our last night's tea-leaves frozen at the
bottom of the pannikins, though it was not nearly the beginning of
autumn; we breakfasted as we had supped, and were on our way by six
o'clock. In half an hour we had entered the gorge, and turning
round a corner we bade farewell to the last sight of my master's
country.
The gorge was narrow and precipitous; the river was now only a few
yards wide, and roared and thundered against rocks of many tons in
weight; the sound was deafening, for there was a great volume of
water. We were two hours in making less than a mile, and that with
danger, sometimes in the river and sometimes on the rock. There
was that damp black smell of rocks covered with slimy vegetation,
as near some huge waterfall where spray is ever rising. The air
was clammy and cold. I cannot conceive how our horses managed to
keep their footing, especially the one with the pack, and I dreaded
the having to return almost as much as going forward. I suppose
this lasted three miles, but it was well midday when the gorge got
a little wider, and a small stream came into it from a tributary
valley. Farther progress up the main river was impossible, for the
cliffs descended like walls; so we went up the side stream, Chowbok
seeming to think that here must be the pass of which reports
existed among his people. We now incurred less of actual danger
but more fatigue, and it was only after infinite trouble, owing to
the rocks and tangled vegetation, that we got ourselves and our
horses upon the saddle from which this small stream descended; by
that time clouds had descended upon us, and it was raining heavily.
Moreover, it was six o'clock and we were tired out, having made
perhaps six miles in twelve hours.
On the saddle there was some coarse grass which was in full seed,
and therefore very nourishing for the horses; also abundance of
anise and sow-thistle, of which they are extravagantly fond, so we
turned them loose and prepared to camp. Everything was soaking wet
and we were half-perished with cold; indeed we were very
uncomfortable. There was brushwood about, but we could get no fire
till we had shaved off the wet outside of some dead branches and
filled our pockets with the dry inside chips. Having done this we
managed to start a fire, nor did we allow it to go out when we had
once started it; we pitched the tent and by nine o'clock were
comparatively warm and dry. Next morning it was fine; we broke
camp, and after advancing a short distance we found that, by
descending over ground less difficult than yesterday's, we should
come again upon the river-bed, which had opened out above the
gorge; but it was plain at a glance that there was no available
sheep country, nothing but a few flats covered with scrub on either
side the river, and mountains which were perfectly worthless. But
we could see the main range. There was no mistake about this. The
glaciers were tumbling down the mountain sides like cataracts, and
seemed actually to descend upon the river-bed; there could be no
serious difficulty in reaching them by following up the river,
which was wide and open; but it seemed rather an objectless thing
to do, for the main range looked hopeless, and my curiosity about
the nature of the country above the gorge was now quite satisfied;
there was no money in it whatever, unless there should be minerals,
of which I saw no more signs than lower down.
However, I resolved that I would follow the river up, and not
return until I was compelled to do so. I would go up every branch
as far as I could, and wash well for gold. Chowbok liked seeing me
do this, but it never came to anything, for we did not even find
the colour. His dislike of the main range appeared to have worn
off, and he made no objections to approaching it. I think he
thought there was no danger of my trying to cross it, and he was
not afraid of anything on this side; besides, we might find gold.
But the fact was that he had made up his mind what to do if he saw
me getting too near it.
We passed three weeks in exploring, and never did I find time go
more quickly. The weather was fine, though the nights got very
cold. We followed every stream but one, and always found it lead
us to a glacier which was plainly impassable, at any rate without a
larger party and ropes. One stream remained, which I should have
followed up already, had not Chowbok said that he had risen early
one morning while I was yet asleep, and after going up it for three
or four miles, had seen that it was impossible to go farther. I
had long ago discovered that he was a great liar, so I was bent on
going up myself: in brief, I did so: so far from being
impossible, it was quite easy travelling; and after five or six
miles I saw a saddle at the end of it, which, though covered deep
in snow, was not glaciered, and which did verily appear to be part
of the main range itself. No words can express the intensity of my
delight. My blood was all on fire with hope and elation; but on
looking round for Chowbok, who was behind me, I saw to my surprise
and anger that he had turned back, and was going down the valley as
hard as he could. He had left me.
CHAPTER IV: THE SADDLE
I cooeyed to him, but he would not hear. I ran after him, but he
had got too good a start. Then I sat down on a stone and thought
the matter carefully over. It was plain that Chowbok had
designedly attempted to keep me from going up this valley, yet he
had shown no unwillingness to follow me anywhere else. What could
this mean, unless that I was now upon the route by which alone the
mysteries of the great ranges could be revealed? What then should
I do? Go back at the very moment when it had become plain that I
was on the right scent? Hardly; yet to proceed alone would be both
difficult and dangerous. It would be bad enough to return to my
master's run, and pass through the rocky gorges, with no chance of
help from another should I get into a difficulty; but to advance
for any considerable distance without a companion would be next
door to madness. Accidents which are slight when there is another
at hand (as the spraining of an ankle, or the falling into some
place whence escape would be easy by means of an outstretched hand
and a bit of rope) may be fatal to one who is alone. The more I
pondered the less I liked it; and yet, the less could I make up my
mind to return when I looked at the saddle at the head of the
valley, and noted the comparative ease with which its smooth sweep
of snow might be surmounted: I seemed to see my way almost from my
present position to the very top. After much thought, I resolved
to go forward until I should come to some place which was really
dangerous, but then to return. I should thus, I hoped, at any rate
reach the top of the saddle, and satisfy myself as to what might be
on the other side.
I had no time to lose, for it was now between ten and eleven in the
morning. Fortunately I was well equipped, for on leaving the camp
and the horses at the lower end of the valley I had provided myself
(according to my custom) with everything that I was likely to want
for four or five days. Chowbok had carried half, but had dropped
his whole swag--I suppose, at the moment of his taking flight--for
I came upon it when I ran after him. I had, therefore, his
provisions as well as my own. Accordingly, I took as many biscuits
as I thought I could carry, and also some tobacco, tea, and a few
matches. I rolled all these things (together with a flask nearly
full of brandy, which I had kept in my pocket for fear lest Chowbok
should get hold of it) inside my blankets, and strapped them very
tightly, making the whole into a long roll of some seven feet in
length and six inches in diameter. Then I tied the two ends
together, and put the whole round my neck and over one shoulder.
This is the easiest way of carrying a heavy swag, for one can rest
one's self by shifting the burden from one shoulder to the other.
I strapped my pannikin and a small axe about my waist, and thus
equipped began to ascend the valley, angry at having been misled by
Chowbok, but determined not to return till I was compelled to do
so.
I crossed and recrossed the stream several times without
difficulty, for there were many good fords. At one o'clock I was
at the foot of the saddle; for four hours I mounted, the last two
on the snow, where the going was easier; by five, I was within ten
minutes of the top, in a state of excitement greater, I think, than
I had ever known before. Ten minutes more, and the cold air from
the other side came rushing upon me.
A glance. I was NOT on the main range.
Another glance. There was an awful river, muddy and horribly
angry, roaring over an immense riverbed, thousands of feet below
me.
It went round to the westward, and I could see no farther up the
valley, save that there were enormous glaciers which must extend
round the source of the river, and from which it must spring.
Another glance, and then I remained motionless.
There was an easy pass in the mountains directly opposite to me,
through which I caught a glimpse of an immeasurable extent of blue
and distant plains.
Easy? Yes, perfectly easy; grassed nearly to the summit, which
was, as it were, an open path between two glaciers, from which an
inconsiderable stream came tumbling down over rough but very
possible hillsides, till it got down to the level of the great
river, and formed a flat where there was grass and a small bush of
stunted timber.
Almost before I could believe my eyes, a cloud had come up from the
valley on the other side, and the plains were hidden. What
wonderful luck was mine! Had I arrived five minutes later, the
cloud would have been over the pass, and I should not have known of
its existence. Now that the cloud was there, I began to doubt my
memory, and to be uncertain whether it had been more than a blue
line of distant vapour that had filled up the opening. I could
only be certain of this much, namely, that the river in the valley
below must be the one next to the northward of that which flowed
past my master's station; of this there could be no doubt. Could
I, however, imagine that my luck should have led me up a wrong
river in search of a pass, and yet brought me to the spot where I
could detect the one weak place in the fortifications of a more
northern basin? This was too improbable. But even as I doubted
there came a rent in the cloud opposite, and a second time I saw
blue lines of heaving downs, growing gradually fainter, and
retiring into a far space of plain. It was substantial; there had
been no mistake whatsoever. I had hardly made myself perfectly
sure of this, ere the rent in the clouds joined up again and I
could see nothing more.
What, then, should I do? The night would be upon me shortly, and I
was already chilled with standing still after the exertion of
climbing. To stay where I was would be impossible; I must either
go backwards or forwards. I found a rock which gave me shelter
from the evening wind, and took a good pull at the brandy flask,
which immediately warmed and encouraged me.
I asked myself, Could I descend upon the river-bed beneath me? It
was impossible to say what precipices might prevent my doing so.
If I were on the river-bed, dare I cross the river? I am an
excellent swimmer, yet, once in that frightful rush of waters, I
should be hurled whithersoever it willed, absolutely powerless.
Moreover, there was my swag; I should perish of cold and hunger if
I left it, but I should certainly be drowned if I attempted to
carry it across the river. These were serious considerations, but
the hope of finding an immense tract of available sheep country
(which I was determined that I would monopolise as far as I
possibly could) sufficed to outweigh them; and, in a few minutes, I
felt resolved that, having made so important a discovery as a pass
into a country which was probably as valuable as that on our own
side of the ranges, I would follow it up and ascertain its value,
even though I should pay the penalty of failure with life itself.
The more I thought, the more determined I became either to win fame
and perhaps fortune, by entering upon this unknown world, or give
up life in the attempt. In fact, I felt that life would be no
longer valuable if I were to have seen so great a prize and refused
to grasp at the possible profits therefrom.
I had still an hour of good daylight during which I might begin my
descent on to some suitable camping-ground, but there was not a
moment to be lost. At first I got along rapidly, for I was on the
snow, and sank into it enough to save me from falling, though I
went forward straight down the mountain side as fast as I could;
but there was less snow on this side than on the other, and I had
soon done with it, getting on to a coomb of dangerous and very
stony ground, where a slip might have given me a disastrous fall.
But I was careful with all my speed, and got safely to the bottom,
where there were patches of coarse grass, and an attempt here and
there at brushwood: what was below this I could not see. I
advanced a few hundred yards farther, and found that I was on the
brink of a frightful precipice, which no one in his senses would
attempt descending. I bethought me, however, to try the creek
which drained the coomb, and see whether it might not have made
itself a smoother way. In a few minutes I found myself at the
upper end of a chasm in the rocks, something like Twll Dhu, only on
a greatly larger scale; the creek had found its way into it, and
had worn a deep channel through a material which appeared softer
than that upon the other side of the mountain. I believe it must
have been a different geological formation, though I regret to say
that I cannot tell what it was.
I looked at this rift in great doubt; then I went a little way on
either side of it, and found myself looking over the edge of
horrible precipices on to the river, which roared some four or five
thousand feet below me. I dared not think of getting down at all,
unless I committed myself to the rift, of which I was hopeful when
I reflected that the rock was soft, and that the water might have
worn its channel tolerably evenly through the whole extent. The
darkness was increasing with every minute, but I should have
twilight for another half-hour, so I went into the chasm (though by
no means without fear), and resolved to return and camp, and try
some other path next day, should I come to any serious difficulty.
In about five minutes I had completely lost my head; the side of
the rift became hundreds of feet in height, and overhung so that I
could not see the sky. It was full of rocks, and I had many falls
and bruises. I was wet through from falling into the water, of
which there was no great volume, but it had such force that I could
do nothing against it; once I had to leap down a not inconsiderable
waterfall into a deep pool below, and my swag was so heavy that I
was very nearly drowned. I had indeed a hair's-breadth escape;
but, as luck would have it, Providence was on my side. Shortly
afterwards I began to fancy that the rift was getting wider, and
that there was more brushwood. Presently I found myself on an open
grassy slope, and feeling my way a little farther along the stream,
I came upon a flat place with wood, where I could camp comfortably;
which was well, for it was now quite dark.
My first care was for my matches; were they dry? The outside of my
swag had got completely wet; but, on undoing the blankets, I found
things warm and dry within. How thankful I was! I lit a fire, and
was grateful for its warmth and company. I made myself some tea
and ate two of my biscuits: my brandy I did not touch, for I had
little left, and might want it when my courage failed me. All that
I did, I did almost mechanically, for I could not realise my
situation to myself, beyond knowing that I was alone, and that
return through the chasm which I had just descended would be
impossible. It is a dreadful feeling that of being cut off from
all one's kind. I was still full of hope, and built golden castles
for myself as soon as I was warmed with food and fire; but I do not
believe that any man could long retain his reason in such solitude,
unless he had the companionship of animals. One begins doubting
one's own identity.
I remember deriving comfort even from the sight of my blankets, and
the sound of my watch ticking--things which seemed to link me to
other people; but the screaming of the wood-hens frightened me, as
also a chattering bird which I had never heard before, and which
seemed to laugh at me; though I soon got used to it, and before
long could fancy that it was many years since I had first heard it.
I took off my clothes, and wrapped my inside blanket about me, till
my things were dry. The night was very still, and I made a roaring
fire; so I soon got warm, and at last could put my clothes on
again. Then I strapped my blanket round me, and went to sleep as
near the fire as I could.
I dreamed that there was an organ placed in my master's wool-shed:
the wool-shed faded away, and the organ seemed to grow and grow
amid a blaze of brilliant light, till it became like a golden city
upon the side of a mountain, with rows upon rows of pipes set in
cliffs and precipices, one above the other, and in mysterious
caverns, like that of Fingal, within whose depths I could see the
burnished pillars gleaming. In the front there was a flight of
lofty terraces, at the top of which I could see a man with his head
buried forward towards a key-board, and his body swaying from side
to side amid the storm of huge arpeggioed harmonies that came
crashing overhead and round. Then there was one who touched me on
the shoulder, and said, "Do you not see? it is Handel";--but I had
hardly apprehended, and was trying to scale the terraces, and get
near him, when I awoke, dazzled with the vividness and distinctness
of the dream.
A piece of wood had burned through, and the ends had fallen into
the ashes with a blaze: this, I supposed, had both given me my
dream and robbed me of it. I was bitterly disappointed, and
sitting up on my elbow, came back to reality and my strange
surroundings as best I could.
I was thoroughly aroused--moreover, I felt a foreshadowing as
though my attention were arrested by something more than the dream,
although no sense in particular was as yet appealed to. I held my
breath and waited, and then I heard--was it fancy? Nay; I listened
again and again, and I DID hear a faint and extremely distant sound
of music, like that of an AEolian harp, borne upon the wind which
was blowing fresh and chill from the opposite mountains.
The roots of my hair thrilled. I listened, but the wind had died;
and, fancying that it must have been the wind itself--no; on a
sudden I remembered the noise which Chowbok had made in the wool-
shed. Yes; it was that.
Thank Heaven, whatever it was, it was over now. I reasoned with
myself, and recovered my firmness. I became convinced that I had
only been dreaming more vividly than usual. Soon I began even to
laugh, and think what a fool I was to be frightened at nothing,
reminding myself that even if I were to come to a bad end it would
be no such dreadful matter after all. I said my prayers, a duty
which I had too often neglected, and in a little time fell into a
really refreshing sleep, which lasted till broad daylight, and
restored me. I rose, and searching among the embers of my fire, I
found a few live coals and soon had a blaze again. I got
breakfast, and was delighted to have the company of several small
birds, which hopped about me and perched on my boots and hands. I
felt comparatively happy, but I can assure the reader that I had
had a far worse time of it than I have told him; and I strongly
recommend him to remain in Europe if he can; or, at any rate, in
some country which has been explored and settled, rather than go
into places where others have not been before him. Exploring is
delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not
comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not
to deserve the name.
CHAPTER V: THE RIVER AND THE RANGE
My next business was to descend upon the river. I had lost sight
of the pass which I had seen from the saddle, but had made such
notes of it that I could not fail to find it. I was bruised and
stiff, and my boots had begun to give, for I had been going on
rough ground for more than three weeks; but, as the day wore on,
and I found myself descending without serious difficulty, I became
easier. In a couple of hours I got among pine forests where there
was little undergrowth, and descended quickly till I reached the
edge of another precipice, which gave me a great deal of trouble,
though I eventually managed to avoid it. By about three or four
o'clock I found myself on the river-bed.
From calculations which I made as to the height of the valley on
the other side the saddle over which I had come, I concluded that
the saddle itself could not be less than nine thousand feet high;
and I should think that the river-bed, on to which I now descended,
was three thousand feet above the sea-level. The water had a
terrific current, with a fall of not less than forty to fifty feet
per mile. It was certainly the river next to the northward of that
which flowed past my master's run, and would have to go through an
impassable gorge (as is commonly the case with the rivers of that
country) before it came upon known parts. It was reckoned to be
nearly two thousand feet above the sea-level where it came out of
the gorge on to the plains.
As soon as I got to the river side I liked it even less than I
thought I should. It was muddy, being near its parent glaciers.
The stream was wide, rapid, and rough, and I could hear the smaller
stones knocking against each other under the rage of the waters, as
upon a seashore. Fording was out of the question. I could not
swim and carry my swag, and I dared not leave my swag behind me.
My only chance was to make a small raft; and that would be
difficult to make, and not at all safe when it was made,--not for
one man in such a current.
As it was too late to do much that afternoon, I spent the rest of
it in going up and down the river side, and seeing where I should
find the most favourable crossing. Then I camped early, and had a
quiet comfortable night with no more music, for which I was
thankful, as it had haunted me all day, although I perfectly well
knew that it had been nothing but my own fancy, brought on by the
reminiscence of what I had heard from Chowbok and by the over-
excitement of the preceding evening.
Next day I began gathering the dry bloom stalks of a kind of flag
or iris-looking plant, which was abundant, and whose leaves, when
torn into strips, were as strong as the strongest string. I
brought them to the waterside, and fell to making myself a kind of
rough platform, which should suffice for myself and my swag if I
could only stick to it. The stalks were ten or twelve feet long,
and very strong, but light and hollow. I made my raft entirely of
them, binding bundles of them at right angles to each other, neatly
and strongly, with strips from the leaves of the same plant, and
tying other rods across. It took me all day till nearly four
o'clock to finish the raft, but I had still enough daylight for
crossing, and resolved on doing so at once.
I had selected a place where the river was broad and comparatively
still, some seventy or eighty yards above a furious rapid. At this
spot I had built my raft. I now launched it, made my swag fast to
the middle, and got on to it myself, keeping in my hand one of the
longest blossom stalks, so that I might punt myself across as long
as the water was shallow enough to let me do so. I got on pretty
well for twenty or thirty yards from the shore, but even in this
short space I nearly upset my raft by shifting too rapidly from one
side to the other. The water then became much deeper, and I leaned
over so far in order to get the bloom rod to the bottom that I had
to stay still, leaning on the rod for a few seconds. Then, when I
lifted up the rod from the ground, the current was too much for me
and I found myself being carried down the rapid. Everything in a
second flew past me, and I had no more control over the raft;
neither can I remember anything except hurry, and noise, and waters
which in the end upset me. But it all came right, and I found
myself near the shore, not more than up to my knees in water and
pulling my raft to land, fortunately upon the left bank of the
river, which was the one I wanted. When I had landed I found that
I was about a mile, or perhaps a little less, below the point from
which I started. My swag was wet upon the outside, and I was
myself dripping; but I had gained my point, and knew that my
difficulties were for a time over. I then lit my fire and dried
myself; having done so I caught some of the young ducks and sea-
gulls, which were abundant on and near the river-bed, so that I had
not only a good meal, of which I was in great want, having had an
insufficient diet from the time that Chowbok left me, but was also
well provided for the morrow.
I thought of Chowbok, and felt how useful he had been to me, and in
how many ways I was the loser by his absence, having now to do all
sorts of things for myself which he had hitherto done for me, and
could do infinitely better than I could. Moreover, I had set my
heart upon making him a real convert to the Christian religion,
which he had already embraced outwardly, though I cannot think that
it had taken deep root in his impenetrably stupid nature. I used
to catechise him by our camp fire, and explain to him the mysteries
of the Trinity and of original sin, with which I was myself
familiar, having been the grandson of an archdeacon by my mother's
side, to say nothing of the fact that my father was a clergyman of
the English Church. I was therefore sufficiently qualified for the
task, and was the more inclined to it, over and above my real
desire to save the unhappy creature from an eternity of torture, by
recollecting the promise of St. James, that if any one converted a
sinner (which Chowbok surely was) he should hide a multitude of
sins. I reflected, therefore, that the conversion of Chowbok might
in some degree compensate for irregularities and short-comings in
my own previous life, the remembrance of which had been more than
once unpleasant to me during my recent experiences.
Indeed, on one occasion I had even gone so far as to baptize him,
as well as I could, having ascertained that he had certainly not
been both christened and baptized, and gathering (from his telling
me that he had received the name William from the missionary) that
it was probably the first-mentioned rite to which he had been
subjected. I thought it great carelessness on the part of the
missionary to have omitted the second, and certainly more
important, ceremony which I have always understood precedes
christening both in the case of infants and of adult converts; and
when I thought of the risks we were both incurring I determined
that there should be no further delay. Fortunately it was not yet
twelve o'clock, so I baptized him at once from one of the pannikins
(the only vessels I had) reverently, and, I trust, efficiently. I
then set myself to work to instruct him in the deeper mysteries of
our belief, and to make him, not only in name, but in heart a
Christian.
It is true that I might not have succeeded, for Chowbok was very
hard to teach. Indeed, on the evening of the same day that I
baptized him he tried for the twentieth time to steal the brandy,
which made me rather unhappy as to whether I could have baptized
him rightly. He had a prayer-book--more than twenty years old--
which had been given him by the missionaries, but the only thing in
it which had taken any living hold upon him was the title of
Adelaide the Queen Dowager, which he would repeat whenever strongly
moved or touched, and which did really seem to have some deep
spiritual significance to him, though he could never completely
separate her individuality from that of Mary Magdalene, whose name
had also fascinated him, though in a less degree.
He was indeed stony ground, but by digging about him I might have
at any rate deprived him of all faith in the religion of his tribe,
which would have been half way towards making him a sincere
Christian; and now all this was cut off from me, and I could
neither be of further spiritual assistance to him nor he of bodily
profit to myself: besides, any company was better than being quite
alone.
I got very melancholy as these reflections crossed me, but when I
had boiled the ducks and eaten them I was much better. I had a
little tea left and about a pound of tobacco, which should last me
for another fortnight with moderate smoking. I had also eight ship
biscuits, and, most precious of all, about six ounces of brandy,
which I presently reduced to four, for the night was cold.
I rose with early dawn, and in an hour I was on my way, feeling
strange, not to say weak, from the burden of solitude, but full of
hope when I considered how many dangers I had overcome, and that
this day should see me at the summit of the dividing range.
After a slow but steady climb of between three and four hours,
during which I met with no serious hindrance, I found myself upon a
tableland, and close to a glacier which I recognised as marking the
summit of the pass. Above it towered a succession of rugged
precipices and snowy mountain sides. The solitude was greater than
I could bear; the mountain upon my master's sheep-run was a crowded
thoroughfare in comparison with this sombre sullen place. The air,
moreover, was dark and heavy, which made the loneliness even more
oppressive. There was an inky gloom over all that was not covered
with snow and ice. Grass there was none.
Each moment I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my
own identity--as to the continuity of my past and present
existence--which is the first sign of that distraction which comes
on those who have lost themselves in the bush. I had fought
against this feeling hitherto, and had conquered it; but the
intense silence and gloom of this rocky wilderness were too much
for me, and I felt that my power of collecting myself was beginning
to be impaired.
I rested for a little while, and then advanced over very rough
ground, until I reached the lower end of the glacier. Then I saw
another glacier, descending from the eastern side into a small
lake. I passed along the western side of the lake, where the
ground was easier, and when I had got about half way I expected
that I should see the plains which I had already seen from the
opposite mountains; but it was not to be so, for the clouds rolled
up to the very summit of the pass, though they did not overlip it
on to the side from which I had come. I therefore soon found
myself enshrouded by a cold thin vapour, which prevented my seeing
more than a very few yards in front of me. Then I came upon a
large patch of old snow, in which I could distinctly trace the
half-melted tracks of goats--and in one place, as it seemed to me,
there had been a dog following them. Had I lighted upon a land of
shepherds? The ground, where not covered with snow, was so poor
and stony, and there was so little herbage, that I could see no
sign of a path or regular sheep-track. But I could not help
feeling rather uneasy as I wondered what sort of a reception I
might meet with if I were to come suddenly upon inhabitants. I was
thinking of this, and proceeding cautiously through the mist, when
I began to fancy that I saw some objects darker than the cloud
looming in front of me. A few steps brought me nearer, and a
shudder of unutterable horror ran through me when I saw a circle of
gigantic forms, many times higher than myself, upstanding grim and
grey through the veil of cloud before me.
I suppose I must have fainted, for I found myself some time
afterwards sitting upon the ground, sick and deadly cold. There
were the figures, quite still and silent, seen vaguely through the
thick gloom, but in human shape indisputably.
A sudden thought occurred to me, which would have doubtless struck
me at once had I not been prepossessed with forebodings at the time
that I first saw the figures, and had not the cloud concealed them
from me--I mean that they were not living beings, but statues. I
determined that I would count fifty slowly, and was sure that the
objects were not alive if during that time I could detect no sign
of motion.
How thankful was I when I came to the end of my fifty and there had
been no movement!
I counted a second time--but again all was still.
I then advanced timidly forward, and in another moment I saw that
my surmise was correct. I had come upon a sort of Stonehenge of
rude and barbaric figures, seated as Chowbok had sat when I
questioned him in the wool-shed, and with the same superhumanly
malevolent expression upon their faces. They had been all seated,
but two had fallen. They were barbarous--neither Egyptian, nor
Assyrian, nor Japanese--different from any of these, and yet akin
to all. They were six or seven times larger than life, of great
antiquity, worn and lichen grown. They were ten in number. There
was snow upon their heads and wherever snow could lodge. Each
statue had been built of four or five enormous blocks, but how
these had been raised and put together is known to those alone who
raised them. Each was terrible after a different kind. One was
raging furiously, as in pain and great despair; another was lean
and cadaverous with famine; another cruel and idiotic, but with the
silliest simper that can be conceived--this one had fallen, and
looked exquisitely ludicrous in his fall--the mouths of all were
more or less open, and as I looked at them from behind, I saw that
their heads had been hollowed.
I was sick and shivering with cold. Solitude had unmanned me
already, and I was utterly unfit to have come upon such an assembly
of fiends in such a dreadful wilderness and without preparation. I
would have given everything I had in the world to have been back at
my master's station; but that was not to be thought of: my head
was failing, and I felt sure that I could never get back alive.
Then came a gust of howling wind, accompanied with a moan from one
of the statues above me. I clasped my hands in fear. I felt like
a rat caught in a trap, as though I would have turned and bitten at
whatever thing was nearest me. The wildness of the wind increased,
the moans grew shriller, coming from several statues, and swelling
into a chorus. I almost immediately knew what it was, but the
sound was so unearthly that this was but little consolation. The
inhuman beings into whose hearts the Evil One had put it to
conceive these statues, had made their heads into a sort of organ-
pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and sound with its
blowing. It was horrible. However brave a man might be, he could
never stand such a concert, from such lips, and in such a place. I
heaped every invective upon them that my tongue could utter as I
rushed away from them into the mist, and even after I had lost
sight of them, and turning my head round could see nothing but the
storm-wraiths driving behind me, I heard their ghostly chanting,
and felt as though one of them would rush after me and grip me in
his hand and throttle me.
I may say here that, since my return to England, I heard a friend
playing some chords upon the organ which put me very forcibly in
mind of the Erewhonian statues (for Erewhon is the name of the
country upon which I was now entering). They rose most vividly to
my recollection the moment my friend began. They are as follows,
and are by the greatest of all musicians:- {2}
[Music score which cannot be reproduced]
CHAPTER VI: INTO EREWHON
And now I found myself on a narrow path which followed a small
watercourse. I was too glad to have an easy track for my flight,
to lay hold of the full significance of its existence. The
thought, however, soon presented itself to me that I must be in an
inhabited country, but one which was yet unknown. What, then, was
to be my fate at the hands of its inhabitants? Should I be taken
and offered up as a burnt-offering to those hideous guardians of
the pass? It might be so. I shuddered at the thought, yet the
horrors of solitude had now fairly possessed me; and so dazed was
I, and chilled, and woebegone, that I could lay hold of no idea
firmly amid the crowd of fancies that kept wandering in upon my
brain.
I hurried onward--down, down, down. More streams came in; then
there was a bridge, a few pine logs thrown over the water; but they
gave me comfort, for savages do not make bridges. Then I had a
treat such as I can never convey on paper--a moment, perhaps, the
most striking and unexpected in my whole life--the one I think
that, with some three or four exceptions, I would most gladly have
again, were I able to recall it. I got below the level of the
clouds, into a burst of brilliant evening sunshine, I was facing
the north-west, and the sun was full upon me. Oh, how its light
cheered me! But what I saw! It was such an expanse as was
revealed to Moses when he stood upon the summit of Mount Sinai, and
beheld that promised land which it was not to be his to enter. The
beautiful sunset sky was crimson and gold; blue, silver, and
purple; exquisite and tranquillising; fading away therein were
plains, on which I could see many a town and city, with buildings
that had lofty steeples and rounded domes. Nearer beneath me lay
ridge behind ridge, outline behind outline, sunlight behind shadow,
and shadow behind sunlight, gully and serrated ravine. I saw large
pine forests, and the glitter of a noble river winding its way upon
the plains; also many villages and hamlets, some of them quite near
at hand; and it was on these that I pondered most. I sank upon the
ground at the foot of a large tree and thought what I had best do;
but I could not collect myself. I was quite tired out; and
presently, feeling warmed by the sun, and quieted, I fell off into
a profound sleep.
I was awoke by the sound of tinkling bells, and looking up, I saw
four or five goats feeding near me. As soon as I moved, the
creatures turned their heads towards me with an expression of
infinite wonder. They did not run away, but stood stock still, and
looked at me from every side, as I at them. Then came the sound of
chattering and laughter, and there approached two lovely girls, of
about seventeen or eighteen years old, dressed each in a sort of
linen gaberdine, with a girdle round the waist. They saw me. I
sat quite still and looked at them, dazzled with their extreme
beauty. For a moment they looked at me and at each other in great
amazement; then they gave a little frightened cry and ran off as
hard as they could.
"So that's that," said I to myself, as I watched them scampering.
I knew that I had better stay where I was and meet my fate,
whatever it was to be, and even if there were a better course, I
had no strength left to take it. I must come into contact with the
inhabitants sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner.
Better not to seem afraid of them, as I should do by running away
and being caught with a hue and cry to-morrow or next day. So I
remained quite still and waited. In about an hour I heard distant
voices talking excitedly, and in a few minutes I saw the two girls
bringing up a party of six or seven men, well armed with bows and
arrows and pikes. There was nothing for it, so I remained sitting
quite still, even after they had seen me, until they came close up.
Then we all had a good look at one another.
Both the girls and the men were very dark in colour, but not more
so than the South Italians or Spaniards. The men wore no trousers,
but were dressed nearly the same as the Arabs whom I have seen in
Algeria. They were of the most magnificent presence, being no less
strong and handsome than the women were beautiful; and not only
this, but their expression was courteous and benign. I think they
would have killed me at once if I had made the slightest show of
violence; but they gave me no impression of their being likely to
hurt me so long as I was quiet. I am not much given to liking
anybody at first sight, but these people impressed me much more
favourably than I should have thought possible, so that I could not
fear them as I scanned their faces one after another. They were
all powerful men. I might have been a match for any one of them
singly, for I have been told that I have more to glory in the flesh
than in any other respect, being over six feet and proportionately
strong; but any two could have soon mastered me, even were I not so
bereft of energy by my recent adventures. My colour seemed to
surprise them most, for I have light hair, blue eyes, and a fresh
complexion. They could not understand how these things could be;
my clothes also seemed quite beyond them. Their eyes kept
wandering all over me, and the more they looked the less they
seemed able to make me out.
At last I raised myself upon my feet, and leaning upon my stick, I
spoke whatever came into my head to the man who seemed foremost
among them. I spoke in English, though I was very sure that he
would not understand. I said that I had no idea what country I was
in; that I had stumbled upon it almost by accident, after a series
of hairbreadth escapes; and that I trusted they would not allow any
evil to overtake me now that I was completely at their mercy. All
this I said quietly and firmly, with hardly any change of
expression. They could not understand me, but they looked
approvingly to one another, and seemed pleased (so I thought) that
I showed no fear nor acknowledgment of inferiority--the fact being
that I was exhausted beyond the sense of fear. Then one of them
pointed to the mountain, in the direction of the statues, and made
a grimace in imitation of one of them. I laughed and shuddered
expressively, whereon they all burst out laughing too, and
chattered hard to one another. I could make out nothing of what
they said, but I think they thought it rather a good joke that I
had come past the statues. Then one among them came forward and
motioned me to follow, which I did without hesitation, for I dared
not thwart them; moreover, I liked them well enough, and felt
tolerably sure that they had no intention of hurting me.
In about a quarter of an hour we got to a small Hamlet built on the
side of a hill, with a narrow street and houses huddled up
together. The roofs were large and overhanging. Some few windows
were glazed, but not many. Altogether the village was exceedingly
like one of those that one comes upon in descending the less known
passes over the Alps on to Lombardy. I will pass over the
excitement which my arrival caused. Suffice it, that though there
was abundance of curiosity, there was no rudeness. I was taken to
the principal house, which seemed to belong to the people who had
captured me. There I was hospitably entertained, and a supper of
milk and goat's flesh with a kind of oatcake was set before me, of
which I ate heartily. But all the time I was eating I could not
help turning my eyes upon the two beautiful girls whom I had first
seen, and who seemed to consider me as their lawful prize--which
indeed I was, for I would have gone through fire and water for
either of them.
Then came the inevitable surprise at seeing me smoke, which I will
spare the reader; but I noticed that when they saw me strike a
match, there was a hubbub of excitement which, it struck me, was
not altogether unmixed with disapproval: why, I could not guess.
Then the women retired, and I was left alone with the men, who
tried to talk to me in every conceivable way; but we could come to
no understanding, except that I was quite alone, and had come from
a long way over the mountains. In the course of time they grew
tired, and I very sleepy. I made signs as though I would sleep on
the floor in my blankets, but they gave me one of their bunks with
plenty of dried fern and grass, on to which I had no sooner laid
myself than I fell fast asleep; nor did I awake till well into the
following day, when I found myself in the hut with two men keeping
guard over me and an old woman cooking. When I woke the men seemed
pleased, and spoke to me as though bidding me good morning in a
pleasant tone.
I went out of doors to wash in a creek which ran a few yards from
the house. My hosts were as engrossed with me as ever; they never
took their eyes off me, following every action that I did, no
matter how trifling, and each looking towards the other for his
opinion at every touch and turn. They took great interest in my
ablutions, for they seemed to have doubted whether I was in all
respects human like themselves. They even laid hold of my arms and
overhauled them, and expressed approval when they saw that they
were strong and muscular. They now examined my legs, and
especially my feet. When they desisted they nodded approvingly to
each other; and when I had combed and brushed my hair, and
generally made myself as neat and well arranged as circumstances
would allow, I could see that their respect for me increased
greatly, and that they were by no means sure that they had treated
me with sufficient deference--a matter on which I am not competent
to decide. All I know is that they were very good to me, for which
I thanked them heartily, as it might well have been otherwise.
For my own part, I liked them and admired them, for their quiet
self-possession and dignified ease impressed me pleasurably at
once. Neither did their manner make me feel as though I were
personally distasteful to them--only that I was a thing utterly new
and unlooked for, which they could not comprehend. Their type was
more that of the most robust Italians than any other; their manners
also were eminently Italian, in their entire unconsciousness of
self. Having travelled a good deal in Italy, I was struck with
little gestures of the hand and shoulders, which constantly
reminded me of that country. My feeling was that my wisest plan
would be to go on as I had begun, and be simply myself for better
or worse, such as I was, and take my chance accordingly.
I thought of these things while they were waiting for me to have
done washing, and on my way back. Then they gave me breakfast--hot
bread and milk, and fried flesh of something between mutton and
venison. Their ways of cooking and eating were European, though
they had only a skewer for a fork, and a sort of butcher's knife to
cut with. The more I looked at everything in the house, the more I
was struck with its quasi-European character; and had the walls
only been pasted over with extracts from the Illustrated London
News and Punch, I could have almost fancied myself in a shepherd's
hut upon my master's sheep-run. And yet everything was slightly
different. It was much the same with the birds and flowers on the
other side, as compared with the English ones. On my arrival I had
been pleased at noticing that nearly all the plants and birds were
very like common English ones: thus, there was a robin, and a
lark, and a wren, and daisies, and dandelions; not quite the same
as the English, but still very like them--quite like enough to be
called by the same name; so now, here, the ways of these two men,
and the things they had in the house, were all very nearly the same
as in Europe. It was not at all like going to China or Japan,
where everything that one sees is strange. I was, indeed, at once
struck with the primitive character of their appliances, for they
seemed to be some five or six hundred years behind Europe in their
inventions; but this is the case in many an Italian village.
All the time that I was eating my breakfast I kept speculating as
to what family of mankind they could belong to; and shortly there
came an idea into my head, which brought the blood into my cheeks
with excitement as I thought of it. Was it possible that they
might be the lost ten tribes of Israel, of whom I had heard both my
grandfather and my father make mention as existing in an unknown
country, and awaiting a final return to Palestine? Was it possible
that I might have been designed by Providence as the instrument of
their conversion? Oh, what a thought was this! I laid down my
skewer and gave them a hasty survey. There was nothing of a Jewish
type about them: their noses were distinctly Grecian, and their
lips, though full, were not Jewish.
How could I settle this question? I knew neither Greek nor Hebrew,
and even if I should get to understand the language here spoken, I
should be unable to detect the roots of either of these tongues. I
had not been long enough among them to ascertain their habits, but
they did not give me the impression of being a religious people.
This too was natural: the ten tribes had been always lamentably
irreligious. But could I not make them change? To restore the
lost ten tribes of Israel to a knowledge of the only truth: here
would be indeed an immortal crown of glory! My heart beat fast and
furious as I entertained the thought. What a position would it not
ensure me in the next world; or perhaps even in this! What folly
it would be to throw such a chance away! I should rank next to the
Apostles, if not as high as they--certainly above the minor
prophets, and possibly above any Old Testament writer except Moses
and Isaiah. For such a future as this I would sacrifice all that I
have without a moment's hesitation, could I be reasonably assured
of it. I had always cordially approved of missionary efforts, and
had at times contributed my mite towards their support and
extension; but I had never hitherto felt drawn towards becoming a
missionary myself; and indeed had always admired, and envied, and
respected them, more than I had exactly liked them. But if these
people were the lost ten tribes of Israel, the case would be widely
different: the opening was too excellent to be lost, and I
resolved that should I see indications which appeared to confirm my
impression that I had indeed come upon the missing tribes, I would
certainly convert them.
I may here mention that this discovery is the one to which I
alluded in the opening pages of my story. Time strengthened the
impression made upon me at first; and, though I remained in doubt
for several months, I feel now no longer uncertain.
When I had done eating, my hosts approached, and pointed down the
valley leading to their own country, as though wanting to show that
I must go with them; at the same time they laid hold of my arms,
and made as though they would take me, but used no violence. I
laughed, and motioned my hand across my throat, pointing down the
valley as though I was afraid lest I should be killed when I got
there. But they divined me at once, and shook their heads with
much decision, to show that I was in no danger. Their manner quite
reassured me; and in half an hour or so I had packed up my swag,
and was eager for the forward journey, feeling wonderfully
strengthened and refreshed by good food and sleep, while my hope
and curiosity were aroused to their very utmost by the
extraordinary position in which I found myself.
But already my excitement had begun to cool and I reflected that
these people might not be the ten tribes after all; in which case I
could not but regret that my hopes of making money, which had led
me into so much trouble and danger, were almost annihilated by the
fact that the country was full to overflowing, with a people who
had probably already developed its more available resources.
Moreover, how was I to get back? For there was something about my
hosts which told me that they had got me, and meant to keep me, in
spite of all their goodness.
CHAPTER VII: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
We followed an Alpine path for some four miles, now hundreds of
feet above a brawling stream which descended from the glaciers, and
now nearly alongside it. The morning was cold and somewhat foggy,
for the autumn had made great strides latterly. Sometimes we went
through forests of pine, or rather yew trees, though they looked
like pine; and I remember that now and again we passed a little
wayside shrine, wherein there would be a statue of great beauty,
representing some figure, male or female, in the very heyday of
youth, strength, and beauty, or of the most dignified maturity and
old age. My hosts always bowed their heads as they passed one of
these shrines, and it shocked me to see statues that had no
apparent object, beyond the chronicling of some unusual individual
excellence or beauty, receive so serious a homage. However, I
showed no sign of wonder or disapproval; for I remembered that to
be all things to all men was one of the injunctions of the Gentile
Apostle, which for the present I should do well to heed. Shortly
after passing one of these chapels we came suddenly upon a village
which started up out of the mist; and I was alarmed lest I should
be made an object of curiosity or dislike. But it was not so. My
guides spoke to many in passing, and those spoken to showed much
amazement. My guides, however, were well known, and the natural
politeness of the people prevented them from putting me to any
inconvenience; but they could not help eyeing me, nor I them. I
may as well say at once what my after-experience taught me--namely,
that with all their faults and extraordinary obliquity of mental
vision upon many subjects, they are the very best-bred people that
I ever fell in with.
The village was just like the one we had left, only rather larger.
The streets were narrow and unpaved, but very fairly clean. The
vine grew outside many of the houses; and there were some with
sign-boards, on which was painted a bottle and a glass, that made
me feel much at home. Even on this ledge of human society there
was a stunted growth of shoplets, which had taken root and
vegetated somehow, though as in an air mercantile of the bleakest.
It was here as hitherto: all things were generically the same as
in Europe, the differences being of species only; and I was amused
at seeing in a window some bottles with barley-sugar and sweetmeats
for children, as at home; but the barley-sugar was in plates, not
in twisted sticks, and was coloured blue. Glass was plentiful in
the better houses.
Lastly, I should say that the people were of a physical beauty
which was simply amazing. I never saw anything in the least
comparable to them. The women were vigorous, and had a most
majestic gait, their heads being set upon their shoulders with a
grace beyond all power of expression. Each feature was finished,
eyelids, eyelashes, and ears being almost invariably perfect.
Their colour was equal to that of the finest Italian paintings;
being of the clearest olive, and yet ruddy with a glow of perfect
health. Their expression was divine; and as they glanced at me
timidly but with parted lips in great bewilderment, I forgot all
thoughts of their conversion in feelings that were far more
earthly. I was dazzled as I saw one after the other, of whom I
could only feel that each was the loveliest I had ever seen. Even
in middle age they were still comely, and the old grey-haired women
at their cottage doors had a dignity, not to say majesty, of their
own.
The men were as handsome as the women beautiful. I have always
delighted in and reverenced beauty; but I felt simply abashed in
the presence of such a splendid type--a compound of all that is
best in Egyptian, Greek and Italian. The children were infinite in
number, and exceedingly merry; I need hardly say that they came in
for their full share of the prevailing beauty. I expressed by
signs my admiration and pleasure to my guides, and they were
greatly pleased. I should add that all seemed to take a pride in
their personal appearance, and that even the poorest (and none
seemed rich) were well kempt and tidy. I could fill many pages
with a description of their dress and the ornaments which they
wore, and a hundred details which struck me with all the force of
novelty; but I must not stay to do so.
When we had got past the village the fog rose, and revealed
magnificent views of the snowy mountains and their nearer
abutments, while in front I could now and again catch glimpses of
the great plains which I had surveyed on the preceding evening.
The country was highly cultivated, every ledge being planted with
chestnuts, walnuts, and apple-trees from which the apples were now
gathering. Goats were abundant; also a kind of small black cattle,
in the marshes near the river, which was now fast widening, and
running between larger flats from which the hills receded more and
more. I saw a few sheep with rounded noses and enormous tails.
Dogs were there in plenty, and very English; but I saw no cats, nor
indeed are these creatures known, their place being supplied by a
sort of small terrier.
In about four hours of walking from the time we started, and after
passing two or three more villages, we came upon a considerable
town, and my guides made many attempts to make me understand
something, but I gathered no inkling of their meaning, except that
I need be under no apprehension of danger. I will spare the reader
any description of the town, and would only bid him think of
Domodossola or Faido. Suffice it that I found myself taken before
the chief magistrate, and by his orders was placed in an apartment
with two other people, who were the first I had seen looking
anything but well and handsome. In fact, one of them was plainly
very much out of health, and coughed violently from time to time in
spite of manifest efforts to suppress it. The other looked pale
and ill but he was marvellously self-contained, and it was
impossible to say what was the matter with him. Both of them
appeared astonished at seeing one who was evidently a stranger, but
they were too ill to come up to me, and form conclusions concerning
me. These two were first called out; and in about a quarter of an
hour I was made to follow them, which I did in some fear, and with
much curiosity.
The chief magistrate was a venerable-looking man, with white hair
and beard and a face of great sagacity. He looked me all over for
about five minutes, letting his eyes wander from the crown of my
head to the soles of my feet, up and down, and down and up; neither
did his mind seem in the least clearer when he had done looking
than when he began. He at length asked me a single short question,
which I supposed meant "Who are you?" I answered in English quite
composedly as though he would understand me, and endeavoured to be
my very most natural self as well as I could. He appeared more and
more puzzled, and then retired, returning with two others much like
himself. Then they took me into an inner room, and the two fresh
arrivals stripped me, while the chief looked on. They felt my
pulse, they looked at my tongue, they listened at my chest, they
felt all my muscles; and at the end of each operation they looked
at the chief and nodded, and said something in a tone quite
pleasant, as though I were all right. They even pulled down my
eyelids, and looked, I suppose, to see if they were bloodshot; but
it was not so. At length they gave up; and I think that all were
satisfied of my being in the most perfect health, and very robust
to boot. At last the old magistrate made me a speech of about five
minutes long, which the other two appeared to think greatly to the
point, but from which I gathered nothing. As soon as it was ended,
they proceeded to overhaul my swag and the contents of my pockets.
This gave me little uneasiness, for I had no money with me, nor
anything which they were at all likely to want, or which I cared
about losing. At least I fancied so, but I soon found my mistake.
They got on comfortably at first, though they were much puzzled
with my tobacco-pipe and insisted on seeing me use it. When I had
shown them what I did with it, they were astonished but not
displeased, and seemed to like the smell. But by and by they came
to my watch, which I had hidden away in the inmost pocket that I
had, and had forgotten when they began their search. They seemed
concerned and uneasy as soon as they got hold of it. They then
made me open it and show the works; and when I had done so they
gave signs of very grave displeasure, which disturbed me all the
more because I could not conceive wherein it could have offended
them.
I remember that when they first found it I had thought of Paley,
and how he tells us that a savage on seeing a watch would at once
conclude that it was designed. True, these people were not
savages, but I none the less felt sure that this was the conclusion
they would arrive at; and I was thinking what a wonderfully wise
man Archbishop Paley must have been, when I was aroused by a look
of horror and dismay upon the face of the magistrate, a look which
conveyed to me the impression that he regarded my watch not as
having been designed, but rather as the designer of himself and of
the universe; or as at any rate one of the great first causes of
all things.
Then it struck me that this view was quite as likely to be taken as
the other by a people who had no experience of European
civilisation, and I was a little piqued with Paley for having led
me so much astray; but I soon discovered that I had misinterpreted
the expression on the magistrate's face, and that it was one not of
fear, but hatred. He spoke to me solemnly and sternly for two or
three minutes. Then, reflecting that this was of no use, he caused
me to be conducted through several passages into a large room,
which I afterwards found was the museum of the town, and wherein I
beheld a sight which astonished me more than anything that I had
yet seen.
It was filled with cases containing all manner of curiosities--such
as skeletons, stuffed birds and animals, carvings in stone (whereof
I saw several that were like those on the saddle, only smaller),
but the greater part of the room was occupied by broken machinery
of all descriptions. The larger specimens had a case to
themselves, and tickets with writing on them in a character which I
could not understand. There were fragments of steam engines, all
broken and rusted; among them I saw a cylinder and piston, a broken
fly-wheel, and part of a crank, which was laid on the ground by
their side. Again, there was a very old carriage whose wheels in
spite of rust and decay, I could see, had been designed originally
for iron rails. Indeed, there were fragments of a great many of
our own most advanced inventions; but they seemed all to be several
hundred years old, and to be placed where they were, not for
instruction, but curiosity. As I said before, all were marred and
broken.
We passed many cases, and at last came to one in which there were
several clocks and two or three old watches. Here the magistrate
stopped, and opening the case began comparing my watch with the
others. The design was different, but the thing was clearly the
same. On this he turned to me and made me a speech in a severe and
injured tone of voice, pointing repeatedly to the watches in the
case, and to my own; neither did he seem in the least appeased
until I made signs to him that he had better take my watch and put
it with the others. This had some effect in calming him. I said
in English (trusting to tone and manner to convey my meaning) that
I was exceedingly sorry if I had been found to have anything
contraband in my possession; that I had had no intention of evading
the ordinary tolls, and that I would gladly forfeit the watch if my
doing so would atone for an unintentional violation of the law. He
began presently to relent, and spoke to me in a kinder manner. I
think he saw that I had offended without knowledge; but I believe
the chief thing that brought him round was my not seeming to be
afraid of him, although I was quite respectful; this, and my having
light hair and complexion, on which he had remarked previously by
signs, as every one else had done.
I afterwards found that it was reckoned a very great merit to have
fair hair, this being a thing of the rarest possible occurrence,
and greatly admired and envied in all who were possessed of it.
However that might be, my watch was taken from me; but our peace
was made, and I was conducted back to the room where I had been
examined. The magistrate then made me another speech, whereon I
was taken to a building hard by, which I soon discovered to be the
common prison of the town, but in which an apartment was assigned
me separate from the other prisoners. The room contained a bed,
table, and chairs, also a fireplace and a washing-stand. There was
another door, which opened on to a balcony, with a flight of steps
descending into a walled garden of some size. The man who
conducted me into this room made signs to me that I might go down
and walk in the garden whenever I pleased, and intimated that I
should shortly have something brought me to eat. I was allowed to
retain my blankets, and the few things which I had wrapped inside
them, but it was plain that I was to consider myself a prisoner--
for how long a period I could not by any means determine. He then
left me alone.
CHAPTER VIII: IN PRISON
And now for the first time my courage completely failed me. It is
enough to say that I was penniless, and a prisoner in a foreign
country, where I had no friend, nor any knowledge of the customs or
language of the people. I was at the mercy of men with whom I had
little in common. And yet, engrossed as I was with my extremely
difficult and doubtful position, I could not help feeling deeply
interested in the people among whom I had fallen. What was the
meaning of that room full of old machinery which I had just seen,
and of the displeasure with which the magistrate had regarded my
watch? The people had very little machinery now. I had been
struck with this over and over again, though I had not been more
than four-and-twenty hours in the country. They were about as far
advanced as Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century;
certainly not more so. And yet they must have had at one time the
fullest knowledge of our own most recent inventions. How could it
have happened that having been once so far in advance they were now
as much behind us? It was evident that it was not from ignorance.
They knew my watch as a watch when they saw it; and the care with
which the broken machines were preserved and ticketed, proved that
they had not lost the recollection of their former civilisation.
The more I thought, the less I could understand it; but at last I
concluded that they must have worked out their mines of coal and
iron, till either none were left, or so few, that the use of these
metals was restricted to the very highest nobility. This was the
only solution I could think of; and, though I afterwards found how
entirely mistaken it was, I felt quite sure then that it must be
the right one.
I had hardly arrived at this opinion for above four or five
minutes, when the door opened, and a young woman made her
appearance with a tray, and a very appetising smell of dinner. I
gazed upon her with admiration as she laid a cloth and set a
savoury-looking dish upon the table. As I beheld her I felt as
though my position was already much ameliorated, for the very sight
of her carried great comfort. She was not more than twenty, rather
above the middle height, active and strong, but yet most delicately
featured; her lips were full and sweet; her eyes were of a deep
hazel, and fringed with long and springing eyelashes; her hair was
neatly braided from off her forehead; her complexion was simply
exquisite; her figure as robust as was consistent with the most
perfect female beauty, yet not more so; her hands and feet might
have served as models to a sculptor. Having set the stew upon the
table, she retired with a glance of pity, whereon (remembering
pity's kinsman) I decided that she should pity me a little more.
She returned with a bottle and a glass, and found me sitting on the
bed with my hands over my face, looking the very picture of abject
misery, and, like all pictures, rather untruthful. As I watched
her, through my fingers, out of the room again, I felt sure that
she was exceedingly sorry for me. Her back being turned, I set to
work and ate my dinner, which was excellent.
She returned in about an hour to take away; and there came with her
a man who had a great bunch of keys at his waist, and whose manner
convinced me that he was the jailor. I afterwards found that he
was father to the beautiful creature who had brought me my dinner.
I am not a much greater hypocrite than other people, and do what I
would, I could not look so very miserable. I had already recovered
from my dejection, and felt in a most genial humour both with my
jailor and his daughter. I thanked them for their attention
towards me; and, though they could not understand, they looked at
one another and laughed and chattered till the old man said
something or other which I suppose was a joke; for the girl laughed
merrily and ran away, leaving her father to take away the dinner
things. Then I had another visitor, who was not so prepossessing,
and who seemed to have a great idea of himself and a small one of
me. He brought a book with him, and pens and paper--all very
English; and yet, neither paper, nor printing, nor binding, nor
pen, nor ink, were quite the same as ours.
He gave me to understand that he was to teach me the language and
that we were to begin at once. This delighted me, both because I
should be more comfortable when I could understand and make myself
understood, and because I supposed that the authorities would
hardly teach me the language if they intended any cruel usage
towards me afterwards. We began at once, and I learnt the names of
everything in the room, and also the numerals and personal
pronouns. I found to my sorrow that the resemblance to European
things, which I had so frequently observed hitherto, did not hold
good in the matter of language; for I could detect no analogy
whatever between this and any tongue of which I have the slightest
knowledge,--a thing which made me think it possible that I might be
learning Hebrew.
I must detail no longer; from this time my days were spent with a
monotony which would have been tedious but for the society of Yram,
the jailor's daughter, who had taken a great fancy for me and
treated me with the utmost kindness. The man came every day to
teach me the language, but my real dictionary and grammar were
Yram; and I consulted them to such purpose that I made the most
extraordinary progress, being able at the end of a month to
understand a great deal of the conversation which I overheard
between Yram and her father. My teacher professed himself well
satisfied, and said he should make a favourable report of me to the
authorities. I then questioned him as to what would probably be
done with me. He told me that my arrival had caused great
excitement throughout the country, and that I was to be detained a
close prisoner until the receipt of advices from the Government.
My having had a watch, he said, was the only damaging feature in
the case. And then, in answer to my asking why this should be so,
he gave me a long story of which with my imperfect knowledge of the
language I could make nothing whatever, except that it was a very
heinous offence, almost as bad (at least, so I thought I understood
him) as having typhus fever. But he said he thought my light hair
would save me.
I was allowed to walk in the garden; there was a high wall so that
I managed to play a sort of hand fives, which prevented my feeling
the bad effects of my confinement, though it was stupid work
playing alone. In the course of time people from the town and
neighbourhood began to pester the jailor to be allowed to see me,
and on receiving handsome fees he let them do so. The people were
good to me; almost too good, for they were inclined to make a lion
of me, which I hated--at least the women were; only they had to
beware of Yram, who was a young lady of a jealous temperament, and
kept a sharp eye both on me and on my lady visitors. However, I
felt so kindly towards her, and was so entirely dependent upon her
for almost all that made my life a blessing and a comfort to me,
that I took good care not to vex her, and we remained excellent
friends. The men were far less inquisitive, and would not, I
believe, have come near me of their own accord; but the women made
them come as escorts. I was delighted with their handsome mien,
and pleasant genial manners.
My food was plain, but always varied and wholesome, and the good
red wine was admirable. I had found a sort of wort in the garden,
which I sweated in heaps and then dried, obtaining thus a
substitute for tobacco; so that what with Yram, the language,
visitors, fives in the garden, smoking, and bed, my time slipped by
more rapidly and pleasantly than might have been expected. I also
made myself a small flute; and being a tolerable player, amused
myself at times with playing snatches from operas, and airs such as
"O where and oh where," and "Home, sweet home." This was of great
advantage to me, for the people of the country were ignorant of the
diatonic scale and could hardly believe their ears on hearing some
of our most common melodies. Often, too, they would make me sing;
and I could at any time make Yram's eyes swim with tears by singing
"Wilkins and his Dinah," "Billy Taylor," "The Ratcatcher's
Daughter," or as much of them as I could remember.
I had one or two discussions with them because I never would sing
on Sunday (of which I kept count in my pocket-book), except chants
and hymn tunes; of these I regret to say that I had forgotten the
words, so that I could only sing the tune. They appeared to have
little or no religious feeling, and to have never so much as heard
of the divine institution of the Sabbath, so they ascribed my
observance of it to a fit of sulkiness, which they remarked as
coming over me upon every seventh day. But they were very
tolerant, and one of them said to me quite kindly that she knew how
impossible it was to help being sulky at times, only she thought I
ought to see some one if it became more serious--a piece of advice
which I then failed to understand, though I pretended to take it
quite as a matter of course.
Once only did Yram treat me in a way that was unkind and
unreasonable,--at least so I thought it at the time. It happened
thus. I had been playing fives in the garden and got much heated.
Although the day was cold, for autumn was now advancing, and Cold
Harbour (as the name of the town in which my prison was should be
translated) stood fully 3000 feet above the sea, I had played
without my coat and waistcoat, and took a sharp chill on resting
myself too long in the open air without protection. The next day I
had a severe cold and felt really poorly. Being little used even
to the lightest ailments, and thinking that it would be rather nice
to be petted and cossetted by Yram, I certainly did not make myself
out to be any better than I was; in fact, I remember that I made
the worst of things, and took it into my head to consider myself
upon the sick list. When Yram brought me my breakfast I complained
somewhat dolefully of my indisposition, expecting the sympathy and
humouring which I should have received from my mother and sisters
at home. Not a bit of it. She fired up in an instant, and asked
me what I meant by it, and how I dared to presume to mention such a
thing, especially when I considered in what place I was. She had
the best mind to tell her father, only that she was afraid the
consequences would be so very serious for me. Her manner was so
injured and decided, and her anger so evidently unfeigned, that I
forgot my cold upon the spot, begging her by all means to tell her
father if she wished to do so, and telling her that I had no idea
of being shielded by her from anything whatever; presently
mollifying, after having said as many biting things as I could, I
asked her what it was that I had done amiss, and promised amendment
as soon as ever I became aware of it. She saw that I was really
ignorant, and had had no intention of being rude to her; whereon it
came out that illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be
highly criminal and immoral; and that I was liable, even for
catching cold, to be had up before the magistrates and imprisoned
for a considerable period--an announcement which struck me dumb
with astonishment.
I followed up the conversation as well as my imperfect knowledge of
the language would allow, and caught a glimmering of her position
with regard to ill-health; but I did not even then fully comprehend
it, nor had I as yet any idea of the other extraordinary
perversions of thought which existed among the Erewhonians, but
with which I was soon to become familiar. I propose, therefore, to
make no mention of what passed between us on this occasion, save
that we were reconciled, and that she brought me surreptitiously a
hot glass of spirits and water before I went to bed, as also a pile
of extra blankets, and that next morning I was quite well. I never
remember to have lost a cold so rapidly.
This little affair explained much which had hitherto puzzled me.
It seemed that the two men who were examined before the magistrates
on the day of my arrival in the country, had been given in charge
on account of ill health, and were both condemned to a long term of
imprisonment with hard labour; they were now expiating their
offence in this very prison, and their exercise ground was a yard
separated by my fives wall from the garden in which I walked. This
accounted for the sounds of coughing and groaning which I had often
noticed as coming from the other side of the wall: it was high,
and I had not dared to climb it for fear the jailor should see me
and think that I was trying to escape; but I had often wondered
what sort of people they could be on the other side, and had
resolved on asking the jailor; but I seldom saw him, and Yram and I
generally found other things to talk about.
Another month flew by, during which I made such progress in the
language that I could understand all that was said to me, and
express myself with tolerable fluency. My instructor professed to
be astonished with the progress I had made; I was careful to
attribute it to the pains he had taken with me and to his admirable
method of explaining my difficulties, so we became excellent
friends.
My visitors became more and more frequent. Among them there were
some, both men and women, who delighted me entirely by their
simplicity, unconsciousness of self, kindly genial manners, and
last, but not least, by their exquisite beauty; there came others
less well-bred, but still comely and agreeable people, while some
were snobs pure and simple.
At the end of the third month the jailor and my instructor came
together to visit me and told me that communications had been
received from the Government to the effect that if I had behaved
well and seemed generally reasonable, and if there could be no
suspicion at all about my bodily health and vigour, and if my hair
was really light, and my eyes blue and complexion fresh, I was to
be sent up at once to the metropolis in order that the King and
Queen might see me and converse with me; but that when I arrived
there I should be set at liberty, and a suitable allowance would be
made me. My teacher also told me that one of the leading merchants
had sent me an invitation to repair to his house and to consider
myself his guest for as long a time as I chose. "He is a
delightful man," continued the interpreter, "but has suffered
terribly from" (here there came a long word which I could not quite
catch, only it was much longer than kleptomania), "and has but
lately recovered from embezzling a large sum of money under
singularly distressing circumstances; but he has quite got over it,
and the straighteners say that he has made a really wonderful
recovery; you are sure to like him."
CHAPTER IX: TO THE METROPOLIS
With the above words the good man left the room before I had time
to express my astonishment at hearing such extraordinary language
from the lips of one who seemed to be a reputable member of
society. "Embezzle a large sum of money under singularly
distressing circumstances!" I exclaimed to myself, "and ask ME to
go and stay with him! I shall do nothing of the sort--compromise
myself at the very outset in the eyes of all decent people, and
give the death-blow to my chances of either converting them if they
are the lost tribes of Israel, or making money out of them if they
are not! No. I will do anything rather than that." And when I
next saw my teacher I told him that I did not at all like the sound
of what had been proposed for me, and that I would have nothing to
do with it. For by my education and the example of my own parents,
and I trust also in some degree from inborn instinct, I have a very
genuine dislike for all unhandsome dealings in money matters,
though none can have a greater regard for money than I have, if it
be got fairly.
The interpreter was much surprised by my answer, and said that I
should be very foolish if I persisted in my refusal.
Mr. Nosnibor, he continued, "is a man of at least 500,000 horse-
power" (for their way of reckoning and classifying men is by the
number of foot pounds which they have money enough to raise, or
more roughly by their horse-power), "and keeps a capital table;
besides, his two daughters are among the most beautiful women in
Erewhon."
When I heard all this, I confess that I was much shaken, and
inquired whether he was favourably considered in the best society.
"Certainly," was the answer; "no man in the country stands higher."
He then went on to say that one would have thought from my manner
that my proposed host had had jaundice or pleurisy or been
generally unfortunate, and that I was in fear of infection.
"I am not much afraid of infection," said I, impatiently, "but I
have some regard for my character; and if I know a man to be an
embezzler of other people's money, be sure of it, I will give him
as wide a berth as I can. If he were ill or poor--"
"Ill or poor!" interrupted the interpreter, with a face of great
alarm. "So that's your notion of propriety! You would consort
with the basest criminals, and yet deem simple embezzlement a bar
to friendly intercourse. I cannot understand you."
"But I am poor myself," cried I.
"You were," said he; "and you were liable to be severely punished
for it,--indeed, at the council which was held concerning you, this
fact was very nearly consigning you to what I should myself
consider a well-deserved chastisement" (for he was getting angry,
and so was I); "but the Queen was so inquisitive, and wanted so
much to see you, that she petitioned the King and made him give you
his pardon, and assign you a pension in consideration of your
meritorious complexion. It is lucky for you that he has not heard
what you have been saying now, or he would be sure to cancel it."
As I heard these words my heart sank within me. I felt the extreme
difficulty of my position, and how wicked I should be in running
counter to established usage. I remained silent for several
minutes, and then said that I should be happy to accept the
embezzler's invitation,--on which my instructor brightened and said
I was a sensible fellow. But I felt very uncomfortable. When he
had left the room, I mused over the conversation which had just
taken place between us, but I could make nothing out of it, except
that it argued an even greater perversity of mental vision than I
had been yet prepared for. And this made me wretched; for I cannot
bear having much to do with people who think differently from
myself. All sorts of wandering thoughts kept coming into my head.
I thought of my master's hut, and my seat upon the mountain side,
where I had first conceived the insane idea of exploring. What
years and years seemed to have passed since I had begun my journey!
I thought of my adventures in the gorge, and on the journey hither,
and of Chowbok. I wondered what Chowbok told them about me when he
got back,--he had done well in going back, Chowbok had. He was not
handsome--nay, he was hideous; and it would have gone hardly with
him. Twilight drew on, and rain pattered against the windows.
Never yet had I felt so unhappy, except during three days of sea-
sickness at the beginning of my voyage from England. I sat musing
and in great melancholy, until Yram made her appearance with light
and supper. She too, poor girl, was miserable; for she had heard
that I was to leave them. She had made up her mind that I was to
remain always in the town, even after my imprisonment was over; and
I fancy had resolved to marry me though I had never so much as
hinted at her doing so. So what with the distressingly strange
conversation with my teacher, my own friendless condition, and
Yram's melancholy, I felt more unhappy than I can describe, and
remained so till I got to bed, and sleep sealed my eyelids.
On awaking next morning I was much better. It was settled that I
was to make my start in a conveyance which was to be in waiting for
me at about eleven o'clock; and the anticipation of change put me
in good spirits, which even the tearful face of Yram could hardly
altogether derange. I kissed her again and again, assured her that
we should meet hereafter, and that in the meanwhile I should be
ever mindful of her kindness. I gave her two of the buttons off my
coat and a lock of my hair as a keepsake, taking a goodly curl from
her own beautiful head in return: and so, having said good-bye a
hundred times, till I was fairly overcome with her great sweetness
and her sorrow, I tore myself away from her and got down-stairs to
the caleche which was in waiting. How thankful I was when it was
all over, and I was driven away and out of sight. Would that I
could have felt that it was out of mind also! Pray heaven that it
is so now, and that she is married happily among her own people,
and has forgotten me!
And now began a long and tedious journey with which I should hardly
trouble the reader if I could. He is safe, however, for the simple
reason that I was blindfolded during the greater part of the time.
A bandage was put upon my eyes every morning, and was only removed
at night when I reached the inn at which we were to pass the night.
We travelled slowly, although the roads were good. We drove but
one horse, which took us our day's journey from morning till
evening, about six hours, exclusive of two hours' rest in the
middle of the day. I do not suppose we made above thirty or
thirty-five miles on an average. Each day we had a fresh horse.
As I have said already, I could see nothing of the country. I only
know that it was level, and that several times we had to cross
large rivers in ferry-boats. The inns were clean and comfortable.
In one or two of the larger towns they were quite sumptuous, and
the food was good and well cooked. The same wonderful health and
grace and beauty prevailed everywhere.
I found myself an object of great interest; so much so, that the
driver told me he had to keep our route secret, and at times to go
to places that were not directly on our road, in order to avoid the
press that would otherwise have awaited us. Every evening I had a
reception, and grew heartily tired of having to say the same things
over and over again in answer to the same questions, but it was
impossible to be angry with people whose manners were so
delightful. They never once asked after my health, or even whether
I was fatigued with my journey; but their first question was almost
invariably an inquiry after my temper, the naivete of which
astonished me till I became used to it. One day, being tired and
cold, and weary of saying the same thing over and over again, I
turned a little brusquely on my questioner and said that I was
exceedingly cross, and that I could hardly feel in a worse humour
with myself and every one else than at that moment. To my
surprise, I was met with the kindest expressions of condolence, and
heard it buzzed about the room that I was in an ill temper; whereon
people began to give me nice things to smell and to eat, which
really did seem to have some temper-mending quality about them, for
I soon felt pleased and was at once congratulated upon being
better. The next morning two or three people sent their servants
to the hotel with sweetmeats, and inquiries whether I had quite
recovered from my ill humour. On receiving the good things I felt
in half a mind to be ill-tempered every evening; but I disliked the
condolences and the inquiries, and found it most comfortable to
keep my natural temper, which is smooth enough generally.
Among those who came to visit me were some who had received a
liberal education at the Colleges of Unreason, and taken the
highest degrees in hypothetics, which are their principal study.
These gentlemen had now settled down to various employments in the
country, as straighteners, managers and cashiers of the Musical
Banks, priests of religion, or what not, and carrying their
education with them they diffused a leaven of culture throughout
the country. I naturally questioned them about many of the things
which had puzzled me since my arrival. I inquired what was the
object and meaning of the statues which I had seen upon the plateau
of the pass. I was told that they dated from a very remote period,
and that there were several other such groups in the country, but
none so remarkable as the one which I had seen. They had a
religious origin, having been designed to propitiate the gods of
deformity and disease. In former times it had been the custom to
make expeditions over the ranges, and capture the ugliest of
Chowbok's ancestors whom they could find, in order to sacrifice
them in the presence of these deities, and thus avert ugliness and
disease from the Erewhonians themselves. It had been whispered
(but my informant assured me untruly) that centuries ago they had
even offered up some of their own people who were ugly or out of
health, in order to make examples of them; these detestable
customs, however, had been long discontinued; neither was there any
present observance of the statues.
I had the curiosity to inquire what would be done to any of
Chowbok's tribe if they crossed over into Erewhon. I was told that
nobody knew, inasmuch as such a thing had not happened for ages.
They would be too ugly to be allowed to go at large, but not so
much so as to be criminally liable. Their offence in having come
would be a moral one; but they would be beyond the straightener's
art. Possibly they would be consigned to the Hospital for
Incurable Bores, and made to work at being bored for so many hours
a day by the Erewhonian inhabitants of the hospital, who are
extremely impatient of one another's boredom, but would soon die if
they had no one whom they might bore--in fact, that they would be
kept as professional borees. When I heard this, it occurred to me
that some rumours of its substance might perhaps have become
current among Chowbok's people; for the agony of his fear had been
too great to have been inspired by the mere dread of being burnt
alive before the statues.
I also questioned them about the museum of old machines, and the
cause of the apparent retrogression in all arts, sciences, and
inventions. I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the
state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was
advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned
professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which I
propose to give extracts later on), proving that the machines were
ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become
instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that
of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So convincing was his
reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the
country with him; and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that
had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years
(which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and
strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions under pain
of being considered in the eye of the law to be labouring under
typhus fever, which they regard as one of the worst of all crimes.
This is the only case in which they have confounded mental and
physical diseases, and they do it even here as by an avowed legal
fiction. I became uneasy when I remembered about my watch; but
they comforted me with the assurance that transgression in this
matter was now so unheard of, that the law could afford to be
lenient towards an utter stranger, especially towards one who had
such a good character (they meant physique), and such beautiful
light hair. Moreover the watch was a real curiosity, and would be
a welcome addition to the metropolitan collection; so they did not
think I need let it trouble me seriously.
I will write, however, more fully upon this subject when I deal
with the Colleges of Unreason, and the Book of the Machines.
In about a month from the time of our starting I was told that our
journey was nearly over. The bandage was now dispensed with, for
it seemed impossible that I should ever be able to find my way back
without being captured. Then we rolled merrily along through the
streets of a handsome town, and got on to a long, broad, and level
road, with poplar trees on either side. The road was raised
slightly above the surrounding country, and had formerly been a
railway; the fields on either side were in the highest conceivable
cultivation, but the harvest and also the vintage had been already
gathered. The weather had got cooler more rapidly than could be
quite accounted for by the progress of the season; so I rather
thought that we must have been making away from the sun, and were
some degrees farther from the equator than when we started. Even
here the vegetation showed that the climate was a hot one, yet
there was no lack of vigour among the people; on the contrary, they
were a very hardy race, and capable of great endurance. For the
hundredth time I thought that, take them all round, I had never
seen their equals in respect of physique, and they looked as good-
natured as they were robust. The flowers were for the most part
over, but their absence was in some measure compensated for by a
profusion of delicious fruit, closely resembling the figs, peaches,
and pears of Italy and France. I saw no wild animals, but birds
were plentiful and much as in Europe, but not tame as they had been
on the other side the ranges. They were shot at with the cross-bow
and with arrows, gunpowder being unknown, or at any rate not in
use.
We were now nearing the metropolis and I could see great towers and
fortifications, and lofty buildings that looked like palaces. I
began to be nervous as to my reception; but I had got on very well
so far, and resolved to continue upon the same plan as hitherto--
namely, to behave just as though I were in England until I saw that
I was making a blunder, and then to say nothing till I could gather
how the land lay. We drew nearer and nearer. The news of my
approach had got abroad, and there was a great crowd collected on
either side the road, who greeted me with marks of most respectful
curiosity, keeping me bowing constantly in acknowledgement from
side to side.
When we were about a mile off, we were met by the Mayor and several
Councillors, among whom was a venerable old man, who was introduced
to me by the Mayor (for so I suppose I should call him) as the
gentleman who had invited me to his house. I bowed deeply and told
him how grateful I felt to him, and how gladly I would accept his
hospitality. He forbade me to say more, and pointing to his
carriage, which was close at hand, he motioned me to a seat
therein. I again bowed profoundly to the Mayor and Councillors,
and drove off with my entertainer, whose name was Senoj Nosnibor.
After about half a mile the carriage turned off the main road, and
we drove under the walls of the town till we reached a palazzo on a
slight eminence, and just on the outskirts of the city. This was
Senoj Nosnibor's house, and nothing can be imagined finer. It was
situated near the magnificent and venerable ruins of the old
railway station, which formed an imposing feature from the gardens
of the house. The grounds, some ten or a dozen acres in extent,
were laid out in terraced gardens, one above the other, with
flights of broad steps ascending and descending the declivity of
the garden. On these steps there were statues of most exquisite
workmanship. Besides the statues there were vases filled with
various shrubs that were new to me; and on either side the flights
of steps there were rows of old cypresses and cedars, with grassy
alleys between them. Then came choice vineyards and orchards of
fruit-trees in full bearing.
The house itself was approached by a court-yard, and round it was a
corridor on to which rooms opened, as at Pompeii. In the middle of
the court there was a bath and a fountain. Having passed the court
we came to the main body of the house, which was two stories in
height. The rooms were large and lofty; perhaps at first they
looked rather bare of furniture, but in hot climates people
generally keep their rooms more bare than they do in colder ones.
I missed also the sight of a grand piano or some similar
instrument, there being no means of producing music in any of the
rooms save the larger drawing-room, where there were half a dozen
large bronze gongs, which the ladies used occasionally to beat
about at random. It was not pleasant to hear them, but I have
heard quite as unpleasant music both before and since.
Mr. Nosnibor took me through several spacious rooms till we reached
a boudoir where were his wife and daughters, of whom I had heard
from the interpreter. Mrs. Nosnibor was about forty years old, and
still handsome, but she had grown very stout: her daughters were
in the prime of youth and exquisitely beautiful. I gave the
preference almost at once to the younger, whose name was Arowhena;
for the elder sister was haughty, while the younger had a very
winning manner. Mrs. Nosnibor received me with the perfection of
courtesy, so that I must have indeed been shy and nervous if I had
not at once felt welcome. Scarcely was the ceremony of my
introduction well completed before a servant announced that dinner
was ready in the next room. I was exceedingly hungry, and the
dinner was beyond all praise. Can the reader wonder that I began
to consider myself in excellent quarters? "That man embezzle
money?" thought I to myself; "impossible."
But I noticed that my host was uneasy during the whole meal, and
that he ate nothing but a little bread and milk; towards the end of
dinner there came a tall lean man with a black beard, to whom Mr.
Nosnibor and the whole family paid great attention: he was the
family straightener. With this gentleman Mr. Nosnibor retired into
another room, from which there presently proceeded a sound of
weeping and wailing. I could hardly believe my ears, but in a few
minutes I got to know for a certainty that they came from Mr.
Nosnibor himself.
"Poor papa," said Arowhena, as she helped herself composedly to the
salt, "how terribly he has suffered."
"Yes," answered her mother; "but I think he is quite out of danger
now."
Then they went on to explain to me the circumstances of the case,
and the treatment which the straightener had prescribed, and how
successful he had been--all which I will reserve for another
chapter, and put rather in the form of a general summary of the
opinions current upon these subjects than in the exact words in
which the facts were delivered to me; the reader, however, is
earnestly requested to believe that both in this next chapter and
in those that follow it I have endeavoured to adhere most
conscientiously to the strictest accuracy, and that I have never
willingly misrepresented, though I may have sometimes failed to
understand all the bearings of an opinion or custom.
CHAPTER X: CURRENT OPINIONS
This is what I gathered. That in that country if a man falls into
ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way
before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his
countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and
sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. There are
subdivisions of illnesses into crimes and misdemeanours as with
offences amongst ourselves--a man being punished very heavily for
serious illness, while failure of eyes or hearing in one over
sixty-five, who has had good health hitherto, is dealt with by fine
only, or imprisonment in default of payment. But if a man forges a
cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the
person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own
country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended
at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets
it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe
fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and
visit him with great solicitude, and inquire with interest how it
all came about, what symptoms first showed themselves, and so
forth,--questions which he will answer with perfect unreserve; for
bad conduct, though considered no less deplorable than illness with
ourselves, and as unquestionably indicating something seriously
wrong with the individual who misbehaves, is nevertheless held to
be the result of either pre-natal or post-natal misfortune.
The strange part of the story, however, is that though they ascribe
moral defects to the effect of misfortune either in character or
surroundings, they will not listen to the plea of misfortune in
cases that in England meet with sympathy and commiseration only.
Ill luck of any kind, or even ill treatment at the hands of others,
is considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it makes
people uncomfortable to hear of it. Loss of fortune, therefore, or
loss of some dear friend on whom another was much dependent, is
punished hardly less severely than physical delinquency.
Foreign, indeed, as such ideas are to our own, traces of somewhat
similar opinions can be found even in nineteenth-century England.
If a person has an abscess, the medical man will say that it
contains "peccant" matter, and people say that they have a "bad"
arm or finger, or that they are very "bad" all over, when they only
mean "diseased." Among foreign nations Erewhonian opinions may be
still more clearly noted. The Mahommedans, for example, to this
day, send their female prisoners to hospitals, and the New Zealand
Maories visit any misfortune with forcible entry into the house of
the offender, and the breaking up and burning of all his goods.
The Italians, again, use the same word for "disgrace" and
"misfortune." I once heard an Italian lady speak of a young friend
whom she described as endowed with every virtue under heaven, "ma,"
she exclaimed, "povero disgraziato, ha ammazzato suo zio." ("Poor
unfortunate fellow, he has murdered his uncle.")
On mentioning this, which I heard when taken to Italy as a boy by
my father, the person to whom I told it showed no surprise. He
said that he had been driven for two or three years in a certain
city by a young Sicilian cabdriver of prepossessing manners and
appearance, but then lost sight of him. On asking what had become
of him, he was told that he was in prison for having shot at his
father with intent to kill him--happily without serious result.
Some years later my informant again found himself warmly accosted
by the prepossessing young cabdriver. "Ah, caro signore," he
exclaimed, "sono cinque anni che non lo vedo--tre anni di militare,
e due anni di disgrazia," &c. ("My dear sir, it is five years
since I saw you--three years of military service, and two of
misfortune")--during which last the poor fellow had been in prison.
Of moral sense he showed not so much as a trace. He and his father
were now on excellent terms, and were likely to remain so unless
either of them should again have the misfortune mortally to offend
the other.
In the following chapter I will give a few examples of the way in
which what we should call misfortune, hardship, or disease are
dealt with by the Erewhonians, but for the moment will return to
their treatment of cases that with us are criminal. As I have
already said, these, though not judicially punishable, are
recognised as requiring correction. Accordingly, there exists a
class of men trained in soul-craft, whom they call straighteners,
as nearly as I can translate a word which literally means "one who
bends back the crooked." These men practise much as medical men in
England, and receive a quasi-surreptitious fee on every visit.
They are treated with the same unreserve, and obeyed as readily, as
our own doctors--that is to say, on the whole sufficiently--because
people know that it is their interest to get well as soon as they
can, and that they will not be scouted as they would be if their
bodies were out of order, even though they may have to undergo a
very painful course of treatment.
When I say that they will not be scouted, I do not mean that an
Erewhonian will suffer no social inconvenience in consequence, we
will say, of having committed fraud. Friends will fall away from
him because of his being less pleasant company, just as we
ourselves are disinclined to make companions of those who are
either poor or poorly. No one with any sense of self-respect will
place himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those
who are less lucky than himself in birth, health, money, good
looks, capacity, or anything else. Indeed, that dislike and even
disgust should be felt by the fortunate for the unfortunate, or at
any rate for those who have been discovered to have met with any of
the more serious and less familiar misfortunes, is not only
natural, but desirable for any society, whether of man or brute.
The fact, therefore, that the Erewhonians attach none of that guilt
to crime which they do to physical ailments, does not prevent the
more selfish among them from neglecting a friend who has robbed a
bank, for instance, till he has fully recovered; but it does
prevent them from even thinking of treating criminals with that
contemptuous tone which would seem to say, "I, if I were you,
should be a better man than you are," a tone which is held quite
reasonable in regard to physical ailment. Hence, though they
conceal ill health by every cunning and hypocrisy and artifice
which they can devise, they are quite open about the most flagrant
mental diseases, should they happen to exist, which to do the
people justice is not often. Indeed, there are some who are, so to
speak, spiritual valetudinarians, and who make themselves
exceedingly ridiculous by their nervous supposition that they are
wicked, while they are very tolerable people all the time. This
however is exceptional; and on the whole they use much the same
reserve or unreserve about the state of their moral welfare as we
do about our health.
Hence all the ordinary greetings among ourselves, such as, How do
you do? and the like, are considered signs of gross ill-breeding;
nor do the politer classes tolerate even such a common
complimentary remark as telling a man that he is looking well.
They salute each other with, "I hope you are good this morning;" or
"I hope you have recovered from the snappishness from which you
were suffering when I last saw you;" and if the person saluted has
not been good, or is still snappish, he says so at once and is
condoled with accordingly. Indeed, the straighteners have gone so
far as to give names from the hypothetical language (as taught at
the Colleges of Unreason), to all known forms of mental
indisposition, and to classify them according to a system of their
own, which, though I could not understand it, seemed to work well
in practice; for they are always able to tell a man what is the
matter with him as soon as they have heard his story, and their
familiarity with the long names assures him that they thoroughly
understand his case.
The reader will have no difficulty in believing that the laws
regarding ill health were frequently evaded by the help of
recognised fictions, which every one understood, but which it would
be considered gross ill-breeding to even seem to understand. Thus,
a day or two after my arrival at the Nosnibors', one of the many
ladies who called on me made excuses for her husband's only sending
his card, on the ground that when going through the public market-
place that morning he had stolen a pair of socks. I had already
been warned that I should never show surprise, so I merely
expressed my sympathy, and said that though I had only been in the
capital so short a time, I had already had a very narrow escape
from stealing a clothes-brush, and that though I had resisted
temptation so far, I was sadly afraid that if I saw any object of
special interest that was neither too hot nor too heavy, I should
have to put myself in the straightener's hands.
Mrs. Nosnibor, who had been keeping an ear on all that I had been
saying, praised me when the lady had gone. Nothing, she said,
could have been more polite according to Erewhonian etiquette. She
then explained that to have stolen a pair of socks, or "to have the
socks" (in more colloquial language), was a recognised way of
saying that the person in question was slightly indisposed.
In spite of all this they have a keen sense of the enjoyment
consequent upon what they call being "well." They admire mental
health and love it in other people, and take all the pains they can
(consistently with their other duties) to secure it for themselves.
They have an extreme dislike to marrying into what they consider
unhealthy families. They send for the straightener at once
whenever they have been guilty of anything seriously flagitious--
often even if they think that they are on the point of committing
it; and though his remedies are sometimes exceedingly painful,
involving close confinement for weeks, and in some cases the most
cruel physical tortures, I never heard of a reasonable Erewhonian
refusing to do what his straightener told him, any more than of a
reasonable Englishman refusing to undergo even the most frightful
operation, if his doctors told him it was necessary.
We in England never shrink from telling our doctor what is the
matter with us merely through the fear that he will hurt us. We
let him do his worst upon us, and stand it without a murmur,
because we are not scouted for being ill, and because we know that
the doctor is doing his best to cure us, and that he can judge of
our case better than we can; but we should conceal all illness if
we were treated as the Erewhonians are when they have anything the
matter with them; we should do the same as with moral and
intellectual diseases,--we should feign health with the most
consummate art, till we were found out, and should hate a single
flogging given in the way of mere punishment more than the
amputation of a limb, if it were kindly and courteously performed
from a wish to help us out of our difficulty, and with the full
consciousness on the part of the doctor that it was only by an
accident of constitution that he was not in the like plight
himself. So the Erewhonians take a flogging once a week, and a
diet of bread and water for two or three months together, whenever
their straightener recommends it.
I do not suppose that even my host, on having swindled a confiding
widow out of the whole of her property, was put to more actual
suffering than a man will readily undergo at the hands of an
English doctor. And yet he must have had a very bad time of it.
The sounds I heard were sufficient to show that his pain was
exquisite, but he never shrank from undergoing it. He was quite
sure that it did him good; and I think he was right. I cannot
believe that that man will ever embezzle money again. He may--but
it will be a long time before he does so.
During my confinement in prison, and on my journey, I had already
discovered a great deal of the above; but it still seemed
surpassingly strange, and I was in constant fear of committing some
piece of rudeness, through my inability to look at things from the
same stand-point as my neighbours; but after a few weeks' stay with
the Nosnibors, I got to understand things better, especially on
having heard all about my host's illness, of which he told me fully
and repeatedly.
It seemed that he had been on the Stock Exchange of the city for
many years and had amassed enormous wealth, without exceeding the
limits of what was generally considered justifiable, or at any
rate, permissible dealing; but at length on several occasions he
had become aware of a desire to make money by fraudulent
representations, and had actually dealt with two or three sums in a
way which had made him rather uncomfortable. He had unfortunately
made light of it and pooh-poohed the ailment, until circumstances
eventually presented themselves which enabled him to cheat upon a
very considerable scale;--he told me what they were, and they were
about as bad as anything could be, but I need not detail them;--he
seized the opportunity, and became aware, when it was too late,
that he must be seriously out of order. He had neglected himself
too long.
He drove home at once, broke the news to his wife and daughters as
gently as he could, and sent off for one of the most celebrated
straighteners of the kingdom to a consultation with the family
practitioner, for the case was plainly serious. On the arrival of
the straightener he told his story, and expressed his fear that his
morals must be permanently impaired.
The eminent man reassured him with a few cheering words, and then
proceeded to make a more careful diagnosis of the case. He
inquired concerning Mr. Nosnibor's parents--had their moral health
been good? He was answered that there had not been anything
seriously amiss with them, but that his maternal grandfather, whom
he was supposed to resemble somewhat in person, had been a
consummate scoundrel and had ended his days in a hospital,--while a
brother of his father's, after having led a most flagitious life
for many years, had been at last cured by a philosopher of a new
school, which as far as I could understand it bore much the same
relation to the old as homoeopathy to allopathy. The straightener
shook his head at this, and laughingly replied that the cure must
have been due to nature. After a few more questions he wrote a
prescription and departed.
I saw the prescription. It ordered a fine to the State of double
the money embezzled; no food but bread and milk for six months, and
a severe flogging once a month for twelve. I was surprised to see
that no part of the fine was to be paid to the poor woman whose
money had been embezzled, but on inquiry I learned that she would
have been prosecuted in the Misplaced Confidence Court, if she had
not escaped its clutches by dying shortly after she had discovered
her loss.
As for Mr. Nosnibor, he had received his eleventh flogging on the
day of my arrival. I saw him later on the same afternoon, and he
was still twinged; but there had been no escape from following out
the straightener's prescription, for the so-called sanitary laws of
Erewhon are very rigorous, and unless the straightener was
satisfied that his orders had been obeyed, the patient would have
been taken to a hospital (as the poor are), and would have been
much worse off. Such at least is the law, but it is never
necessary to enforce it.
On a subsequent occasion I was present at an interview between Mr.
Nosnibor and the family straightener, who was considered competent
to watch the completion of the cure. I was struck with the
delicacy with which he avoided even the remotest semblance of
inquiry after the physical well-being of his patient, though there
was a certain yellowness about my host's eyes which argued a
bilious habit of body. To have taken notice of this would have
been a gross breach of professional etiquette. I was told,
however, that a straightener sometimes thinks it right to glance at
the possibility of some slight physical disorder if he finds it
important in order to assist him in his diagnosis; but the answers
which he gets are generally untrue or evasive, and he forms his own
conclusions upon the matter as well as he can. Sensible men have
been known to say that the straightener should in strict confidence
be told of every physical ailment that is likely to bear upon the
case; but people are naturally shy of doing this, for they do not
like lowering themselves in the opinion of the straightener, and
his ignorance of medical science is supreme. I heard of one lady,
indeed, who had the hardihood to confess that a furious outbreak of
ill-humour and extravagant fancies for which she was seeking advice
was possibly the result of indisposition. "You should resist
that," said the straightener, in a kind, but grave voice; "we can
do nothing for the bodies of our patients; such matters are beyond
our province, and I desire that I may hear no further particulars."
The lady burst into tears, and promised faithfully that she would
never be unwell again.
But to return to Mr. Nosnibor. As the afternoon wore on many
carriages drove up with callers to inquire how he had stood his
flogging. It had been very severe, but the kind inquiries upon
every side gave him great pleasure, and he assured me that he felt
almost tempted to do wrong again by the solicitude with which his
friends had treated him during his recovery: in this I need hardly
say that he was not serious.
During the remainder of my stay in the country Mr. Nosnibor was
constantly attentive to his business, and largely increased his
already great possessions; but I never heard a whisper to the
effect of his having been indisposed a second time, or made money
by other than the most strictly honourable means. I did hear
afterwards in confidence that there had been reason to believe that
his health had been not a little affected by the straightener's
treatment, but his friends did not choose to be over-curious upon
the subject, and on his return to his affairs it was by common
consent passed over as hardly criminal in one who was otherwise so
much afflicted. For they regard bodily ailments as the more venial
in proportion as they have been produced by causes independent of
the constitution. Thus if a person ruin his health by excessive
indulgence at the table or by drinking, they count it to be almost
a part of the mental disease which brought it about, and so it goes
for little, but they have no mercy on such illnesses as fevers or
catarrhs or lung diseases, which to us appear to be beyond the
control of the individual. They are only more lenient towards the
diseases of the young--such as measles, which they think to be like
sowing one's wild oats--and look over them as pardonable
indiscretions if they have not been too serious, and if they are
atoned for by complete subsequent recovery.
It is hardly necessary to say that the office of straightener is
one which requires long and special training. It stands to reason
that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically
acquainted with it in all its bearings. The student for the
profession of straightener is required to set apart certain seasons
for the practice of each vice in turn, as a religious duty. These
seasons are called "fasts," and are continued by the student until
he finds that he really can subdue all the more usual vices in his
own person, and hence can advise his patients from the results of
his own experience.
Those who intend to be specialists, rather than general
practitioners, devote themselves more particularly to the branch in
which their practice will mainly lie. Some students have been
obliged to continue their exercises during their whole lives, and
some devoted men have actually died as martyrs to the drink, or
gluttony, or whatever branch of vice they may have chosen for their
especial study. The greater number, however, take no harm by the
excursions into the various departments of vice which it is
incumbent upon them to study.
For the Erewhonians hold that unalloyed virtue is not a thing to be
immoderately indulged in. I was shown more than one case in which
the real or supposed virtues of parents were visited upon the
children to the third and fourth generation. The straighteners say
that the most that can be truly said for virtue is that there is a
considerable balance in its favour, and that it is on the whole a
good deal better to be on its side than against it; but they urge
that there is much pseudo-virtue going about, which is apt to let
people in very badly before they find it out. Those men, they say,
are best who are not remarkable either for vice or virtue. I told
them about Hogarth's idle and industrious apprentices, but they did
not seem to think that the industrious apprentice was a very nice
person.
CHAPTER XI: SOME EREWHONIAN TRIALS
In Erewhon as in other countries there are some courts of justice
that deal with special subjects. Misfortune generally, as I have
above explained, is considered more or less criminal, but it admits
of classification, and a court is assigned to each of the main
heads under which it can be supposed to fall. Not very long after
I had reached the capital I strolled into the Personal Bereavement
Court, and was much both interested and pained by listening to the
trial of a man who was accused of having just lost a wife to whom
he had been tenderly attached, and who had left him with three
little children, of whom the eldest was only three years old.
The defence which the prisoner's counsel endeavoured to establish
was, that the prisoner had never really loved his wife; but it
broke down completely, for the public prosecutor called witness
after witness who deposed to the fact that the couple had been
devoted to one another, and the prisoner repeatedly wept as
incidents were put in evidence that reminded him of the irreparable
nature of the loss he had sustained. The jury returned a verdict
of guilty after very little deliberation, but recommended the
prisoner to mercy on the ground that he had but recently insured
his wife's life for a considerable sum, and might be deemed lucky
inasmuch as he had received the money without demur from the
insurance company, though he had only paid two premiums.
I have just said that the jury found the prisoner guilty. When the
judge passed sentence, I was struck with the way in which the
prisoner's counsel was rebuked for having referred to a work in
which the guilt of such misfortunes as the prisoner's was
extenuated to a degree that roused the indignation of the court.
"We shall have," said the judge, "these crude and subversionary
books from time to time until it is recognised as an axiom of
morality that luck is the only fit object of human veneration. How
far a man has any right to be more lucky and hence more venerable
than his neighbours, is a point that always has been, and always
will be, settled proximately by a kind of higgling and haggling of
the market, and ultimately by brute force; but however this may be,
it stands to reason that no man should be allowed to be unlucky to
more than a very moderate extent."
Then, turning to the prisoner, the judge continued:- "You have
suffered a great loss. Nature attaches a severe penalty to such
offences, and human law must emphasise the decrees of nature. But
for the recommendation of the jury I should have given you six
months' hard labour. I will, however, commute your sentence to one
of three months, with the option of a fine of twenty-five per cent.
of the money you have received from the insurance company."
The prisoner thanked the judge, and said that as he had no one to
look after his children if he was sent to prison, he would embrace
the option mercifully permitted him by his lordship, and pay the
sum he had named. He was then removed from the dock.
The next case was that of a youth barely arrived at man's estate,
who was charged with having been swindled out of large property
during his minority by his guardian, who was also one of his
nearest relations. His father had been long dead, and it was for
this reason that his offence came on for trial in the Personal
Bereavement Court. The lad, who was undefended, pleaded that he
was young, inexperienced, greatly in awe of his guardian, and
without independent professional advice. "Young man," said the
judge sternly, "do not talk nonsense. People have no right to be
young, inexperienced, greatly in awe of their guardians, and
without independent professional advice. If by such indiscretions
they outrage the moral sense of their friends, they must expect to
suffer accordingly." He then ordered the prisoner to apologise to
his guardian, and to receive twelve strokes with a cat-of-nine-
tails.
But I shall perhaps best convey to the reader an idea of the entire
perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people,
by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of
pulmonary consumption--an offence which was punished with death
until quite recently. It did not occur till I had been some months
in the country, and I am deviating from chronological order in
giving it here; but I had perhaps better do so in order that I may
exhaust this subject before proceeding to others. Moreover I
should never come to an end were I to keep to a strictly narrative
form, and detail the infinite absurdities with which I daily came
in contact.
The prisoner was placed in the dock, and the jury were sworn much
as in Europe; almost all our own modes of procedure were
reproduced, even to the requiring the prisoner to plead guilty or
not guilty. He pleaded not guilty, and the case proceeded. The
evidence for the prosecution was very strong; but I must do the
court the justice to observe that the trial was absolutely
impartial. Counsel for the prisoner was allowed to urge everything
that could be said in his defence: the line taken was that the
prisoner was simulating consumption in order to defraud an
insurance company, from which he was about to buy an annuity, and
that he hoped thus to obtain it on more advantageous terms. If
this could have been shown to be the case he would have escaped a
criminal prosecution, and been sent to a hospital as for a moral
ailment. The view, however, was one which could not be reasonably
sustained, in spite of all the ingenuity and eloquence of one of
the most celebrated advocates of the country. The case was only
too clear, for the prisoner was almost at the point of death, and
it was astonishing that he had not been tried and convicted long
previously. His coughing was incessant during the whole trial, and
it was all that the two jailors in charge of him could do to keep
him on his legs until it was over.
The summing up of the judge was admirable. He dwelt upon every
point that could be construed in favour of the prisoner, but as he
proceeded it became clear that the evidence was too convincing to
admit of doubt, and there was but one opinion in the court as to
the impending verdict when the jury retired from the box. They
were absent for about ten minutes, and on their return the foreman
pronounced the prisoner guilty. There was a faint murmur of
applause, but it was instantly repressed. The judge then proceeded
to pronounce sentence in words which I can never forget, and which
I copied out into a note-book next day from the report that was
published in the leading newspaper. I must condense it somewhat,
and nothing which I could say would give more than a faint idea of
the solemn, not to say majestic, severity with which it was
delivered. The sentence was as follows:-
"Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of
labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial
before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty.
Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence
against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such
a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That
sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one
who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so
excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution
which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case
for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a
career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you
upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws
and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated
bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only
twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than
fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful
character; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent
the greater part of your life in a jail.
"It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy
parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which
permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are
the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment
be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon
curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that--
questions to which there would be no end were their introduction
once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt
on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases.
There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this--
namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the
affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that
it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous person,
and stand branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with one of
the most heinous known offences.
"It is not my business to justify the law: the law may in some
cases have its inevitable hardships, and I may feel regret at times
that I have not the option of passing a less severe sentence than I
am compelled to do. But yours is no such case; on the contrary,
had not the capital punishment for consumption been abolished, I
should certainly inflict it now.
"It is intolerable that an example of such terrible enormity should
be allowed to go at large unpunished. Your presence in the society
of respectable people would lead the less able-bodied to think more
lightly of all forms of illness; neither can it be permitted that
you should have the chance of corrupting unborn beings who might
hereafter pester you. The unborn must not be allowed to come near
you: and this not so much for their protection (for they are our
natural enemies), as for our own; for since they will not be
utterly gainsaid, it must be seen to that they shall be quartered
upon those who are least likely to corrupt them.
"But independently of this consideration, and independently of the
physical guilt which attaches itself to a crime so great as yours,
there is yet another reason why we should be unable to show you
mercy, even if we were inclined to do so. I refer to the existence
of a class of men who lie hidden among us, and who are called
physicians. Were the severity of the law or the current feeling of
the country to be relaxed never so slightly, these abandoned
persons, who are now compelled to practise secretly and who can be
consulted only at the greatest risk, would become frequent visitors
in every household; their organisation and their intimate
acquaintance with all family secrets would give them a power, both
social and political, which nothing could resist. The head of the
household would become subordinate to the family doctor, who would
interfere between man and wife, between master and servant, until
the doctors should be the only depositaries of power in the nation,
and have all that we hold precious at their mercy. A time of
universal dephysicalisation would ensue; medicine-vendors of all
kinds would abound in our streets and advertise in all our
newspapers. There is one remedy for this, and one only. It is
that which the laws of this country have long received and acted
upon, and consists in the sternest repression of all diseases
whatsoever, as soon as their existence is made manifest to the eye
of the law. Would that that eye were far more piercing than it is.
"But I will enlarge no further upon things that are themselves so
obvious. You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is
ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this--that if you had been
born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of
when you were a child, you would never have offended against the
laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present
disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in your
parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay
these things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a
consumption is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my
duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall
be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be
criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.
"Lastly, I should point out that even though the jury had acquitted
you--a supposition that I cannot seriously entertain--I should have
felt it my duty to inflict a sentence hardly less severe than that
which I must pass at present; for the more you had been found
guiltless of the crime imputed to you, the more you would have been
found guilty of one hardly less heinous--I mean the crime of having
been maligned unjustly.
"I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to imprisonment, with
hard labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that
period I would earnestly entreat you to repent of the wrongs you
have done already, and to entirely reform the constitution of your
whole body. I entertain but little hope that you will pay
attention to my advice; you are already far too abandoned. Did it
rest with myself, I should add nothing in mitigation of the
sentence which I have passed, but it is the merciful provision of
the law that even the most hardened criminal shall be allowed some
one of the three official remedies, which is to be prescribed at
the time of his conviction. I shall therefore order that you
receive two tablespoonfuls of castor oil daily, until the pleasure
of the court be further known."
When the sentence was concluded the prisoner acknowledged in a few
scarcely audible words that he was justly punished, and that he had
had a fair trial. He was then removed to the prison from which he
was never to return. There was a second attempt at applause when
the judge had finished speaking, but as before it was at once
repressed; and though the feeling of the court was strongly against
the prisoner, there was no show of any violence against him, if one
may except a little hooting from the bystanders when he was being
removed in the prisoners' van. Indeed, nothing struck me more
during my whole sojourn in the country, than the general respect
for law and order.
CHAPTER XII: MALCONTENTS
I confess that I felt rather unhappy when I got home, and thought
more closely over the trial that I had just witnessed. For the
time I was carried away by the opinion of those among whom I was.
They had no misgivings about what they were doing. There did not
seem to be a person in the whole court who had the smallest doubt
but that all was exactly as it should be. This universal
unsuspecting confidence was imparted by sympathy to myself, in
spite of all my training in opinions so widely different. So it is
with most of us: that which we observe to be taken as a matter of
course by those around us, we take as a matter of course ourselves.
And after all, it is our duty to do this, save upon grave occasion.
But when I was alone, and began to think the trial over, it
certainly did strike me as betraying a strange and untenable
position. Had the judge said that he acknowledged the probable
truth, namely, that the prisoner was born of unhealthy parents, or
had been starved in infancy, or had met with some accidents which
had developed consumption; and had he then gone on to say that
though he knew all this, and bitterly regretted that the protection
of society obliged him to inflict additional pain on one who had
suffered so much already, yet that there was no help for it, I
could have understood the position, however mistaken I might have
thought it. The judge was fully persuaded that the infliction of
pain upon the weak and sickly was the only means of preventing
weakness and sickliness from spreading, and that ten times the
suffering now inflicted upon the accused was eventually warded off
from others by the present apparent severity. I could therefore
perfectly understand his inflicting whatever pain he might consider
necessary in order to prevent so bad an example from spreading
further and lowering the Erewhonian standard; but it seemed almost
childish to tell the prisoner that he could have been in good
health, if he had been more fortunate in his constitution, and been
exposed to less hardships when he was a boy.
I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no
unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding
them for their sheer good luck: it is the normal condition of
human life that this should be done, and no right-minded person
will complain of being subjected to the common treatment. There is
no alternative open to us. It is idle to say that men are not
responsible for their misfortunes. What is responsibility? Surely
to be responsible means to be liable to have to give an answer
should it be demanded, and all things which live are responsible
for their lives and actions should society see fit to question them
through the mouth of its authorised agent.
What is the offence of a lamb that we should rear it, and tend it,
and lull it into security, for the express purpose of killing it?
Its offence is the misfortune of being something which society
wants to eat, and which cannot defend itself. This is ample. Who
shall limit the right of society except society itself? And what
consideration for the individual is tolerable unless society be the
gainer thereby? Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for
having been son to a millionaire, were it not clearly provable that
the common welfare is thus better furthered? We cannot seriously
detract from a man's merit in having been the son of a rich father
without imperilling our own tenure of things which we do not wish
to jeopardise; if this were otherwise we should not let him keep
his money for a single hour; we would have it ourselves at once.
For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be
robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our
thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and
our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river,
so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers
with the banks while the flood is flowing.
But to return. Even in England a man on board a ship with yellow
fever is held responsible for his mischance, no matter what his
being kept in quarantine may cost him. He may catch the fever and
die; we cannot help it; he must take his chance as other people do;
but surely it would be desperate unkindness to add contumely to our
self-protection, unless, indeed, we believe that contumely is one
of our best means of self-protection. Again, take the case of
maniacs. We say that they are irresponsible for their actions, but
we take good care, or ought to take good care, that they shall
answer to us for their insanity, and we imprison them in what we
call an asylum (that modern sanctuary!) if we do not like their
answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we
ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less
satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad,
because lunacy is less infectious than crime.
We kill a serpent if we go in danger by it, simply for being such
and such a serpent in such and such a place; but we never say that
the serpent has only itself to blame for not having been a harmless
creature. Its crime is that of being the thing which it is: but
this is a capital offence, and we are right in killing it out of
the way, unless we think it more danger to do so than to let it
escape; nevertheless we pity the creature, even though we kill it.
But in the case of him whose trial I have described above, it was
impossible that any one in the court should not have known that it
was but by an accident of birth and circumstances that he was not
himself also in a consumption; and yet none thought that it
disgraced them to hear the judge give vent to the most cruel
truisms about him. The judge himself was a kind and thoughtful
person. He was a man of magnificent and benign presence. He was
evidently of an iron constitution, and his face wore an expression
of the maturest wisdom and experience; yet for all this, old and
learned as he was, he could not see things which one would have
thought would have been apparent even to a child. He could not
emancipate himself from, nay, it did not even occur to him to feel,
the bondage of the ideas in which he had been born and bred.
So was it also with the jury and bystanders; and--most wonderful of
all--so was it even with the prisoner. Throughout he seemed fully
impressed with the notion that he was being dealt with justly: he
saw nothing wanton in his being told by the judge that he was to be
punished, not so much as a necessary protection to society
(although this was not entirely lost sight of), as because he had
not been better born and bred than he was. But this led me to hope
that he suffered less than he would have done if he had seen the
matter in the same light that I did. And, after all, justice is
relative.
I may here mention that only a few years before my arrival in the
country, the treatment of all convicted invalids had been much more
barbarous than now, for no physical remedy was provided, and
prisoners were put to the severest labour in all sorts of weather,
so that most of them soon succumbed to the extreme hardships which
they suffered; this was supposed to be beneficial in some ways,
inasmuch as it put the country to less expense for the maintenance
of its criminal class; but the growth of luxury had induced a
relaxation of the old severity, and a sensitive age would no longer
tolerate what appeared to be an excess of rigour, even towards the
most guilty; moreover, it was found that juries were less willing
to convict, and justice was often cheated because there was no
alternative between virtually condemning a man to death and letting
him go free; it was also held that the country paid in recommittals
for its over-severity; for those who had been imprisoned even for
trifling ailments were often permanently disabled by their
imprisonment; and when a man had been once convicted, it was
probable that he would seldom afterwards be off the hands of the
country.
These evils had long been apparent and recognised; yet people were
too indolent, and too indifferent to suffering not their own, to
bestir themselves about putting an end to them, until at last a
benevolent reformer devoted his whole life to effecting the
necessary changes. He divided all illnesses into three classes--
those affecting the head, the trunk, and the lower limbs--and
obtained an enactment that all diseases of the head, whether
internal or external, should be treated with laudanum, those of the
body with castor-oil, and those of the lower limbs with an
embrocation of strong sulphuric acid and water.
It may be said that the classification was not sufficiently
careful, and that the remedies were ill chosen; but it is a hard
thing to initiate any reform, and it was necessary to familiarise
the public mind with the principle, by inserting the thin end of
the wedge first: it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that
among so practical a people there should still be some room for
improvement. The mass of the nation are well pleased with existing
arrangements, and believe that their treatment of criminals leaves
little or nothing to be desired; but there is an energetic minority
who hold what are considered to be extreme opinions, and who are
not at all disposed to rest contented until the principle lately
admitted has been carried further.
I was at some pains to discover the opinions of these men, and
their reasons for entertaining them. They are held in great odium
by the generality of the public, and are considered as subverters
of all morality whatever. The malcontents, on the other hand,
assert that illness is the inevitable result of certain antecedent
causes, which, in the great majority of cases, were beyond the
control of the individual, and that therefore a man is only guilty
for being in a consumption in the same way as rotten fruit is
guilty for having gone rotten. True, the fruit must be thrown on
one side as unfit for man's use, and the man in a consumption must
be put in prison for the protection of his fellow-citizens; but
these radicals would not punish him further than by loss of liberty
and a strict surveillance. So long as he was prevented from
injuring society, they would allow him to make himself useful by
supplying whatever of society's wants he could supply. If he
succeeded in thus earning money, they would have him made as
comfortable in prison as possible, and would in no way interfere
with his liberty more than was necessary to prevent him from
escaping, or from becoming more severely indisposed within the
prison walls; but they would deduct from his earnings the expenses
of his board, lodging, surveillance, and half those of his
conviction. If he was too ill to do anything for his support in
prison, they would allow him nothing but bread and water, and very
little of that.
They say that society is foolish in refusing to allow itself to be
benefited by a man merely because he has done it harm hitherto, and
that objection to the labour of the diseased classes is only
protection in another form. It is an attempt to raise the natural
price of a commodity by saying that such and such persons, who are
able and willing to produce it, shall not do so, whereby every one
has to pay more for it.
Besides, so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our
fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one. It is in a
great degree the doing of others that he is what he is, or in other
words, the society which now condemns him is partly answerable
concerning him. They say that there is no fear of any increase of
disease under these circumstances; for the loss of liberty, the
surveillance, the considerable and compulsory deduction from the
prisoner's earnings, the very sparing use of stimulants (of which
they would allow but little to any, and none to those who did not
earn them), the enforced celibacy, and above all, the loss of
reputation among friends, are in their opinion as ample safeguards
to society against a general neglect of health as those now
resorted to. A man, therefore, (so they say) should carry his
profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he
must earn his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if
he be a gentleman born and bred to no profession, he must pick
oakum, or write art criticisms for a newspaper.
These people say further, that the greater part of the illness
which exists in their country is brought about by the insane manner
in which it is treated.
They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the
moral diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a
great reform is impossible till men learn to take a juster view of
what physical obliquity proceeds from. Men will hide their
illnesses as long as they are scouted on its becoming known that
they are ill; it is the scouting, not the physic, which produces
the concealment; and if a man felt that the news of his being in
ill-health would be received by his neighbours as a deplorable
fact, but one as much the result of necessary antecedent causes as
though he had broken into a jeweller's shop and stolen a valuable
diamond necklace--as a fact which might just as easily have
happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to be better
born or reared; and if they also felt that they would not be made
more uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society
against infection and the proper treatment of their own disease
actually demanded, men would give themselves up to the police as
readily on perceiving that they had taken small-pox, as they go now
to the straightener when they feel that they are on the point of
forging a will, or running away with somebody else's wife.
But the main argument on which they rely is that of economy: for
they know that they will sooner gain their end by appealing to
men's pockets, in which they have generally something of their own,
than to their heads, which contain for the most part little but
borrowed or stolen property; and also, they believe it to be the
readiest test and the one which has most to show for itself. If a
course of conduct can be shown to cost a country less, and this by
no dishonourable saving and with no indirectly increased
expenditure in other ways, they hold that it requires a good deal
to upset the arguments in favour of its being adopted, and whether
rightly or wrongly I cannot pretend to say, they think that the
more medicinal and humane treatment of the diseased of which they
are the advocates would in the long run be much cheaper to the
country: but I did not gather that these reformers were opposed to
meeting some of the more violent forms of illness with the cat-of-
nine-tails, or with death; for they saw no so effectual way of
checking them; they would therefore both flog and hang, but they
would do so pitifully.
I have perhaps dwelt too long upon opinions which can have no
possible bearing upon our own, but I have not said the tenth part
of what these would-be reformers urged upon me. I feel, however,
that I have sufficiently trespassed upon the attention of the
reader.
CHAPTER XIII: THE VIEWS OF THE EREWHONIANS CONCERNING DEATH
The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. If
it is an offence at all, it is one beyond the reach of the law,
which is therefore silent on the subject; but they insist that the
greater number of those who are commonly said to die, have never
yet been born--not, at least, into that unseen world which is alone
worthy of consideration. As regards this unseen world I understand
them to say that some miscarry in respect to it before they have
even reached the seen, and some after, while few are ever truly
born into it at all--the greater part of all the men and women over
the whole country miscarrying before they reach it. And they say
that this does not matter so much as we think it does.
As for what we call death, they argue that too much has been made
of it. The mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make
us very unhappy; no one thinks that he or she will escape, so that
none are disappointed. We do not care greatly even though we know
that we have not long to live; the only thing that would seriously
affect us would be the knowing--or rather thinking that we know--
the precise moment at which the blow will fall. Happily no one can
ever certainly know this, though many try to make themselves
miserable by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there
were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting
that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we
could, and which ensures that though death must always be a
bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances be more
than a bugbear.
For even though a man is condemned to die in a week's time and is
shut up in a prison from which it is certain that he cannot escape,
he will always hope that a reprieve may come before the week is
over. Besides, the prison may catch fire, and he may be suffocated
not with a rope, but with common ordinary smoke; or he may be
struck dead by lightning while exercising in the prison yards.
When the morning is come on which the poor wretch is to be hanged,
he may choke at his breakfast, or die from failure of the heart's
action before the drop has fallen; and even though it has fallen,
he cannot be quite certain that he is going to die, for he cannot
know this till his death has actually taken place, and it will be
too late then for him to discover that he was going to die at the
appointed hour after all. The Erewhonians, therefore, hold that
death, like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.
They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over
any piece of ground which the deceased may himself have chosen. No
one is permitted to refuse this hospitality to the dead: people,
therefore, generally choose some garden or orchard which they may
have known and been fond of when they were young. The
superstitious hold that those whose ashes are scattered over any
land become its jealous guardians from that time forward; and the
living like to think that they shall become identified with this or
that locality where they have once been happy.
They do not put up monuments, nor write epitaphs, for their dead,
though in former ages their practice was much as ours, but they
have a custom which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct
of preserving the name alive after the death of the body seems to
be common to all mankind. They have statues of themselves made
while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it), and
write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful
as are our own epitaphs--only in another way. For they do not
hesitate to describe themselves as victims to ill temper, jealousy,
covetousness, and the like, but almost always lay claim to personal
beauty, whether they have it or not, and, often, to the possession
of a large sum in the funded debt of the country. If a person is
ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it
bears his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for
him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment to another is to
ask him to sit for such a statue. Women generally sit for their
own statues, from a natural disinclination to admit the superior
beauty of a friend, but they expect to be idealised. I understood
that the multitude of these statues was beginning to be felt as an
encumbrance in almost every family, and that the custom would
probably before long fall into desuetude.
Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every
one, as regards the statues of public men--not more than three of
which can be found in the whole capital. I expressed my surprise
at this, and was told that some five hundred years before my visit,
the city had been so overrun with these pests, that there was no
getting about, and people were worried beyond endurance by having
their attention called at every touch and turn to something, which,
when they had attended to it, they found not to concern them. Most
of these statues were mere attempts to do for some man or woman
what an animal-stuffer does more successfully for a dog, or bird,
or pike. They were generally foisted on the public by some coterie
that was trying to exalt itself in exalting some one else, and not
unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on the part of
some member of the coterie to find a job for a young sculptor to
whom his daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten could never be
anything but deformities, and this is the way in which they are
sure to be begotten, as soon as the art of making them at all has
become widely practised.
I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for
a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they
begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity
that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a
living organism--better dead than dying. There is no way of making
an aged art young again; it must be born anew and grow up from
infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort
to effort in all fear and trembling.
The Erewhonians five hundred years ago understood nothing of all
this--I doubt whether they even do so now. They wanted to get the
nearest thing they could to a stuffed man whose stuffing should not
grow mouldy. They should have had some such an establishment as
our Madame Tussaud's, where the figures wear real clothes, and are
painted up to nature. Such an institution might have been made
self-supporting, for people might have been made to pay before
going in. As it was, they had let their poor cold grimy colourless
heroes and heroines loaf about in squares and in corners of streets
in all weathers, without any attempt at artistic sanitation--for
there was no provision for burying their dead works of art out of
their sight--no drainage, so to speak, whereby statues that had
been sufficiently assimilated, so as to form part of the residuary
impression of the country, might be carried away out of the system.
Hence they put them up with a light heart on the cackling of their
coteries, and they and their children had to live, often enough,
with some wordy windbag whose cowardice had cost the country untold
loss in blood and money.
At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose, and
with indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike. Most of
what was destroyed was bad, but some few works were good, and the
sculptors of to-day wring their hands over some of the fragments
that have been preserved in museums up and down the country. For a
couple of hundred years or so, not a statue was made from one end
of the kingdom to the other, but the instinct for having stuffed
men and women was so strong, that people at length again began to
try to make them. Not knowing how to make them, and having no
academics to mislead them, the earliest sculptors of this period
thought things out for themselves, and again produced works that
were full of interest, so that in three or four generations they
reached a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of several
hundred years earlier.
On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices--
the art became a trade--schools arose which professed to sell the
holy spirit of art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to
buy it, in the hopes of selling it later on, and were struck
purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them.
Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have
followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in
passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public man or
woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty
years, unless at the end of that time a jury of twenty-four men
taken at random from the street pronounced in favour of its being
allowed a second fifty years of life. Every fifty years this
reconsideration was to be repeated, and unless there was a majority
of eighteen in favour of the retention of the statue, it was to be
destroyed.
Perhaps a simpler plan would have been to forbid the erection of a
statue to any public man or woman till he or she had been dead at
least one hundred years, and even then to insist on reconsideration
of the claims of the deceased and the merit of the statue every
fifty years--but the working of the Act brought about results that
on the whole were satisfactory. For in the first place, many
public statues that would have been voted under the old system,
were not ordered, when it was known that they would be almost
certainly broken up after fifty years, and in the second, public
sculptors knowing their work to be so ephemeral, scamped it to an
extent that made it offensive even to the most uncultured eye.
Hence before long subscribers took to paying the sculptor for the
statue of their dead statesmen, on condition that he did not make
it. The tribute of respect was thus paid to the deceased, the
public sculptors were not mulcted, and the rest of the public
suffered no inconvenience.
I was told, however, that an abuse of this custom is growing up,
inasmuch as the competition for the commission not to make a statue
is so keen, that sculptors have been known to return a considerable
part of the purchase money to the subscribers, by an arrangement
made with them beforehand. Such transactions, however, are always
clandestine. A small inscription is let into the pavement, where
the public statue would have stood, which informs the reader that
such a statue has been ordered for the person, whoever he or she
may be, but that as yet the sculptor has not been able to complete
it. There has been no Act to repress statues that are intended for
private consumption, but as I have said, the custom is falling into
desuetude.
Returning to Erewhonian customs in connection with death, there is
one which I can hardly pass over. When any one dies, the friends
of the family write no letters of condolence, neither do they
attend the scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little
boxes filled with artificial tears, and with the name of the sender
painted neatly upon the outside of the lid. The tears vary in
number from two to fifteen or sixteen, according to degree of
intimacy or relationship; and people sometimes find it a nice point
of etiquette to know the exact number which they ought to send.
Strange as it may appear, this attention is highly valued, and its
omission by those from whom it might be expected is keenly felt.
These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster to the cheeks
of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months after the
death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or bonnet,
and are now no longer worn.
The birth of a child is looked upon as a painful subject on which
it is kinder not to touch: the illness of the mother is carefully
concealed until the necessity for signing the birth-formula (of
which hereafter) renders further secrecy impossible, and for some
months before the event the family live in retirement, seeing very
little company. When the offence is over and done with, it is
condoned by the common want of logic; for this merciful provision
of nature, this buffer against collisions, this friction which
upsets our calculations but without which existence would be
intolerable, this crowning glory of human invention whereby we can
be blind and see at one and the same moment, this blessed
inconsistency, exists here as elsewhere; and though the strictest
writers on morality have maintained that it is wicked for a woman
to have children at all, inasmuch as it is wrong to be out of
health that good may come, yet the necessity of the case has caused
a general feeling in favour of passing over such events in silence,
and of assuming their non-existence except in such flagrant cases
as force themselves on the public notice. Against these the
condemnation of society is inexorable, and if it is believed that
the illness has been dangerous and protracted, it is almost
impossible for a woman to recover her former position in society.
The above conventions struck me as arbitrary and cruel, but they
put a stop to many fancied ailments; for the situation, so far from
being considered interesting, is looked upon as savouring more or
less distinctly of a very reprehensible condition of things, and
the ladies take care to conceal it as long as they can even from
their own husbands, in anticipation of a severe scolding as soon as
the misdemeanour is discovered. Also the baby is kept out of
sight, except on the day of signing the birth-formula, until it can
walk and talk. Should the child unhappily die, a coroner's inquest
is inevitable, but in order to avoid disgracing a family which may
have been hitherto respected, it is almost invariably found that
the child was over seventy-five years old, and died from the decay
of nature.
CHAPTER XIV: MAHAINA
I continued my sojourn with the Nosnibors. In a few days Mr.
Nosnibor had recovered from his flogging, and was looking forward
with glee to the fact that the next would be the last. I did not
think that there seemed any occasion even for this; but he said it
was better to be on the safe side, and he would make up the dozen.
He now went to his business as usual; and I understood that he was
never more prosperous, in spite of his heavy fine. He was unable
to give me much of his time during the day; for he was one of those
valuable men who are paid, not by the year, month, week, or day,
but by the minute. His wife and daughters, however, made much of
me, and introduced me to their friends, who came in shoals to call
upon me.
One of these persons was a lady called Mahaina. Zulora (the elder
of my host's daughters) ran up to her and embraced her as soon as
she entered the room, at the same time inquiring tenderly after her
"poor dipsomania." Mahaina answered that it was just as bad as
ever; she was a perfect martyr to it, and her excellent health was
the only thing which consoled her under her affliction.
Then the other ladies joined in with condolences and the never-
failing suggestions which they had ready for every mental malady.
They recommended their own straightener and disparaged Mahaina's.
Mrs. Nosnibor had a favourite nostrum, but I could catch little of
its nature. I heard the words "full confidence that the desire to
drink will cease when the formula has been repeated * * * this
confidence is EVERYTHING * * * far from undervaluing a thorough
determination never to touch spirits again * * * fail too often * *
- formula a CERTAIN CURE (with great emphasis) * * * prescribed
form * * * full conviction." The conversation then became more
audible, and was carried on at considerable length. I should
perplex myself and the reader by endeavouring to follow the
ingenious perversity of all they said; enough, that in the course
of time the visit came to an end, and Mahaina took her leave
receiving affectionate embraces from all the ladies. I had
remained in the background after the first ceremony of
introduction, for I did not like the looks of Mahaina, and the
conversation displeased me. When she left the room I had some
consolation in the remarks called forth by her departure.
At first they fell to praising her very demurely. She was all this
that and the other, till I disliked her more and more at every
word, and inquired how it was that the straighteners had not been
able to cure her as they had cured Mr. Nosnibor.
There was a shade of significance on Mrs. Nosnibor's face as I said
this, which seemed to imply that she did not consider Mahaina's
case to be quite one for a straightener. It flashed across me that
perhaps the poor woman did not drink at all. I knew that I ought
not to have inquired, but I could not help it, and asked point
blank whether she did or not.
"We can none of us judge of the condition of other people," said
Mrs. Nosnibor in a gravely charitable tone and with a look towards
Zulora.
"Oh, mamma," answered Zulora, pretending to be half angry but
rejoiced at being able to say out what she was already longing to
insinuate; "I don't believe a word of it. It's all indigestion. I
remember staying in the house with her for a whole month last
summer, and I am sure she never once touched a drop of wine or
spirits. The fact is, Mahaina is a very weakly girl, and she
pretends to get tipsy in order to win a forbearance from her
friends to which she is not entitled. She is not strong enough for
her calisthenic exercises, and she knows she would be made to do
them unless her inability was referred to moral causes."
Here the younger sister, who was ever sweet and kind, remarked that
she thought Mahaina did tipple occasionally. "I also think," she
added, "that she sometimes takes poppy juice."
"Well, then, perhaps she does drink sometimes," said Zulora; "but
she would make us all think that she does it much oftener in order
to hide her weakness."
And so they went on for half an hour and more, bandying about the
question as to how far their late visitor's intemperance was real
or no. Every now and then they would join in some charitable
commonplace, and would pretend to be all of one mind that Mahaina
was a person whose bodily health would be excellent if it were not
for her unfortunate inability to refrain from excessive drinking;
but as soon as this appeared to be fairly settled they began to be
uncomfortable until they had undone their work and left some
serious imputation upon her constitution. At last, seeing that the
debate had assumed the character of a cyclone or circular storm,
going round and round and round and round till one could never say
where it began nor where it ended, I made some apology for an
abrupt departure and retired to my own room.
Here at least I was alone, but I was very unhappy. I had fallen
upon a set of people who, in spite of their high civilisation and
many excellences, had been so warped by the mistaken views
presented to them during childhood from generation to generation,
that it was impossible to see how they could ever clear themselves.
Was there nothing which I could say to make them feel that the
constitution of a person's body was a thing over which he or she
had had at any rate no initial control whatever, while the mind was
a perfectly different thing, and capable of being created anew and
directed according to the pleasure of its possessor? Could I never
bring them to see that while habits of mind and character were
entirely independent of initial mental force and early education,
the body was so much a creature of parentage and circumstances,
that no punishment for ill-health should be ever tolerated save as
a protection from contagion, and that even where punishment was
inevitable it should be attended with compassion? Surely, if the
unfortunate Mahaina were to feel that she could avow her bodily
weakness without fear of being despised for her infirmities, and if
there were medical men to whom she could fairly state her case, she
would not hesitate about doing so through the fear of taking nasty
medicine. It was possible that her malady was incurable (for I had
heard enough to convince me that her dipsomania was only a pretence
and that she was temperate in all her habits); in that case she
might perhaps be justly subject to annoyances or even to restraint;
but who could say whether she was curable or not, until she was
able to make a clean breast of her symptoms instead of concealing
them? In their eagerness to stamp out disease, these people
overshot their mark; for people had become so clever at
dissembling--they painted their faces with such consummate skill--
they repaired the decay of time and the effects of mischance with
such profound dissimulation--that it was really impossible to say
whether any one was well or ill till after an intimate acquaintance
of months or years. Even then the shrewdest were constantly
mistaken in their judgements, and marriages were often contracted
with most deplorable results, owing to the art with which infirmity
had been concealed.
It appeared to me that the first step towards the cure of disease
should be the announcement of the fact to a person's near relations
and friends. If any one had a headache, he ought to be permitted
within reasonable limits to say so at once, and to retire to his
own bedroom and take a pill, without every one's looking grave and
tears being shed and all the rest of it. As it was, even upon
hearing it whispered that somebody else was subject to headaches, a
whole company must look as though they had never had a headache in
their lives. It is true they were not very prevalent, for the
people were the healthiest and most comely imaginable, owing to the
severity with which ill health was treated; still, even the best
were liable to be out of sorts sometimes, and there were few
families that had not a medicine-chest in a cupboard somewhere.
CHAPTER XV: THE MUSICAL BANKS
On my return to the drawing-room, I found that the Mahaina current
had expended itself. The ladies were just putting away their work
and preparing to go out. I asked them where they were going. They
answered with a certain air of reserve that they were going to the
bank to get some money.
Now I had already collected that the mercantile affairs of the
Erewhonians were conducted on a totally different system from our
own; I had, however, gathered little hitherto, except that they had
two distinct commercial systems, of which the one appealed more
strongly to the imagination than anything to which we are
accustomed in Europe, inasmuch as the banks that were conducted
upon this system were decorated in the most profuse fashion, and
all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so that
they were called Musical Banks, though the music was hideous to a
European ear.
As for the system itself I never understood it, neither can I do so
now: they have a code in connection with it, which I have not the
slightest doubt that they understand, but no foreigner can hope to
do so. One rule runs into, and against, another as in a most
complicated grammar, or as in Chinese pronunciation, wherein I am
told that the slightest change in accentuation or tone of voice
alters the meaning of a whole sentence. Whatever is incoherent in
my description must be referred to the fact of my never having
attained to a full comprehension of the subject.
So far, however, as I could collect anything certain, I gathered
that they have two distinct currencies, each under the control of
its own banks and mercantile codes. One of these (the one with the
Musical Banks) was supposed to be THE system, and to give out the
currency in which all monetary transactions should be carried on;
and as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered
respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks. On
the other hand, if there is one thing of which I am more sure than
another, it is that the amount so kept had no direct commercial
value in the outside world; I am sure that the managers and
cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in their own currency.
Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the great
mother bank of the city, sometimes but not very often. He was a
pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to
hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies
generally went alone; as indeed was the case in most families,
except on state occasions.
I had long wanted to know more of this strange system, and had the
greatest desire to accompany my hostess and her daughters. I had
seen them go out almost every morning since my arrival and had
noticed that they carried their purses in their hands, not exactly
ostentatiously, yet just so as that those who met them should see
whither they were going. I had never, however, yet been asked to
go with them myself.
It is not easy to convey a person's manner by words, and I can
hardly give any idea of the peculiar feeling that came upon me when
I saw the ladies on the point of starting for the bank. There was
a something of regret, a something as though they would wish to
take me with them, but did not like to ask me, and yet as though I
were hardly to ask to be taken. I was determined, however, to
bring matters to an issue with my hostess about my going with them,
and after a little parleying, and many inquiries as to whether I
was perfectly sure that I myself wished to go, it was decided that
I might do so.
We passed through several streets of more or less considerable
houses, and at last turning round a corner we came upon a large
piazza, at the end of which was a magnificent building, of a
strange but noble architecture and of great antiquity. It did not
open directly on to the piazza, there being a screen, through which
was an archway, between the piazza and the actual precincts of the
bank. On passing under the archway we entered upon a green sward,
round which there ran an arcade or cloister, while in front of us
uprose the majestic towers of the bank and its venerable front,
which was divided into three deep recesses and adorned with all
sorts of marbles and many sculptures. On either side there were
beautiful old trees wherein the birds were busy by the hundred, and
a number of quaint but substantial houses of singularly comfortable
appearance; they were situated in the midst of orchards and
gardens, and gave me an impression of great peace and plenty.
Indeed it had been no error to say that this building was one that
appealed to the imagination; it did more--it carried both
imagination and judgement by storm. It was an epic in stone and
marble, and so powerful was the effect it produced on me, that as I
beheld it I was charmed and melted. I felt more conscious of the
existence of a remote past. One knows of this always, but the
knowledge is never so living as in the actual presence of some
witness to the life of bygone ages. I felt how short a space of
human life was the period of our own existence. I was more
impressed with my own littleness, and much more inclinable to
believe that the people whose sense of the fitness of things was
equal to the upraising of so serene a handiwork, were hardly likely
to be wrong in the conclusions they might come to upon any subject.
My feeling certainly was that the currency of this bank must be the
right one.
We crossed the sward and entered the building. If the outside had
been impressive the inside was even more so. It was very lofty and
divided into several parts by walls which rested upon massive
pillars; the windows were filled with stained glass descriptive of
the principal commercial incidents of the bank for many ages. In a
remote part of the building there were men and boys singing; this
was the only disturbing feature, for as the gamut was still
unknown, there was no music in the country which could be agreeable
to a European ear. The singers seemed to have derived their
inspirations from the songs of birds and the wailing of the wind,
which last they tried to imitate in melancholy cadences that at
times degenerated into a howl. To my thinking the noise was
hideous, but it produced a great effect upon my companions, who
professed themselves much moved. As soon as the singing was over,
the ladies requested me to stay where I was while they went inside
the place from which it had seemed to come.
During their absence certain reflections forced themselves upon me.
In the first place, it struck me as strange that the building
should be so nearly empty; I was almost alone, and the few besides
myself had been led by curiosity, and had no intention of doing
business with the bank. But there might be more inside. I stole
up to the curtain, and ventured to draw the extreme edge of it on
one side. No, there was hardly any one there. I saw a large
number of cashiers, all at their desks ready to pay cheques, and
one or two who seemed to be the managing partners. I also saw my
hostess and her daughters and two or three other ladies; also three
or four old women and the boys from one of the neighbouring
Colleges of Unreason; but there was no one else. This did not look
as though the bank was doing a very large business; and yet I had
always been told that every one in the city dealt with this
establishment.
I cannot describe all that took place in these inner precincts, for
a sinister-looking person in a black gown came and made unpleasant
gestures at me for peeping. I happened to have in my pocket one of
the Musical Bank pieces, which had been given me by Mrs. Nosnibor,
so I tried to tip him with it; but having seen what it was, he
became so angry that I had to give him a piece of the other kind of
money to pacify him. When I had done this he became civil
directly. As soon as he was gone I ventured to take a second look,
and saw Zulora in the very act of giving a piece of paper which
looked like a cheque to one of the cashiers. He did not examine
it, but putting his hand into an antique coffer hard by, he pulled
out a quantity of metal pieces apparently at random, and handed
them over without counting them; neither did Zulora count them, but
put them into her purse and went back to her seat after dropping a
few pieces of the other coinage into an alms box that stood by the
cashier's side. Mrs. Nosnibor and Arowhena then did likewise, but
a little later they gave all (so far as I could see) that they had
received from the cashier back to a verger, who I have no doubt put
it back into the coffer from which it had been taken. They then
began making towards the curtain; whereon I let it drop and
retreated to a reasonable distance.
They soon joined me. For some few minutes we all kept silence, but
at last I ventured to remark that the bank was not so busy to-day
as it probably often was. On this Mrs. Nosnibor said that it was
indeed melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most
precious of all institutions. I could say nothing in reply, but I
have ever been of opinion that the greater part of mankind do
approximately know where they get that which does them good.
Mrs. Nosnibor went on to say that I must not think there was any
want of confidence in the bank because I had seen so few people
there; the heart of the country was thoroughly devoted to these
establishments, and any sign of their being in danger would bring
in support from the most unexpected quarters. It was only because
people knew them to be so very safe, that in some cases (as she
lamented to say in Mr. Nosnibor's) they felt that their support was
unnecessary. Moreover these institutions never departed from the
safest and most approved banking principles. Thus they never
allowed interest on deposit, a thing now frequently done by certain
bubble companies, which by doing an illegitimate trade had drawn
many customers away; and even the shareholders were fewer than
formerly, owing to the innovations of these unscrupulous persons,
for the Musical Banks paid little or no dividend, but divided their
profits by way of bonus on the original shares once in every thirty
thousand years; and as it was now only two thousand years since
there had been one of these distributions, people felt that they
could not hope for another in their own time and preferred
investments whereby they got some more tangible return; all which,
she said, was very melancholy to think of.
Having made these last admissions, she returned to her original
statement, namely, that every one in the country really supported
these banks. As to the fewness of the people, and the absence of
the able-bodied, she pointed out to me with some justice that this
was exactly what we ought to expect. The men who were most
conversant about the stability of human institutions, such as the
lawyers, men of science, doctors, statesmen, painters, and the
like, were just those who were most likely to be misled by their
own fancied accomplishments, and to be made unduly suspicious by
their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at
the root of nine-tenths of the opposition; by their vanity, which
would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the
vulgar; and by the stings of their own conscience, which was
constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of
their bodies, which were generally diseased.
Let a person's intellect (she continued) be never so sound, unless
his body is in absolute health, he can form no judgement worth
having on matters of this kind. The body is everything: it need
not perhaps be such a strong body (she said this because she saw
that I was thinking of the old and infirm-looking folks whom I had
seen in the bank), but it must be in perfect health; in this case,
the less active strength it had the more free would be the working
of the intellect, and therefore the sounder the conclusion. The
people, then, whom I had seen at the bank were in reality the very
ones whose opinions were most worth having; they declared its
advantages to be incalculable, and even professed to consider the
immediate return to be far larger than they were entitled to; and
so she ran on, nor did she leave off till we had got back to the
house.
She might say what she pleased, but her manner carried no
conviction, and later on I saw signs of general indifference to
these banks that were not to be mistaken. Their supporters often
denied it, but the denial was generally so couched as to add
another proof of its existence. In commercial panics, and in times
of general distress, the people as a mass did not so much as even
think of turning to these banks. A few might do so, some from
habit and early training, some from the instinct that prompts us to
catch at any straw when we think ourselves drowning, but few from a
genuine belief that the Musical Banks could save them from
financial ruin, if they were unable to meet their engagements in
the other kind of currency.
In conversation with one of the Musical Bank managers I ventured to
hint this as plainly as politeness would allow. He said that it
had been more or less true till lately; but that now they had put
fresh stained glass windows into all the banks in the country, and
repaired the buildings, and enlarged the organs; the presidents,
moreover, had taken to riding in omnibuses and talking nicely to
people in the streets, and to remembering the ages of their
children, and giving them things when they were naughty, so that
all would henceforth go smoothly.
"But haven't you done anything to the money itself?" said I,
timidly.
"It is not necessary," he rejoined; "not in the least necessary, I
assure you."
And yet any one could see that the money given out at these banks
was not that with which people bought their bread, meat, and
clothing. It was like it at a first glance, and was stamped with
designs that were often of great beauty; it was not, again, a
spurious coinage, made with the intention that it should be
mistaken for the money in actual use; it was more like a toy money,
or the counters used for certain games at cards; for,
notwithstanding the beauty of the designs, the material on which
they were stamped was as nearly valueless as possible. Some were
covered with tin foil, but the greater part were frankly of a cheap
base metal the exact nature of which I was not able to determine.
Indeed they were made of a great variety of metals, or, perhaps
more accurately, alloys, some of which were hard, while others
would bend easily and assume almost any form which their possessor
might desire at the moment.
Of course every one knew that their commercial value was nil, but
all those who wished to be considered respectable thought it
incumbent upon them to retain a few coins in their possession, and
to let them be seen from time to time in their hands and purses.
Not only this, but they would stick to it that the current coin of
the realm was dross in comparison with the Musical Bank coinage.
Perhaps, however, the strangest thing of all was that these very
people would at times make fun in small ways of the whole system;
indeed, there was hardly any insinuation against it which they
would not tolerate and even applaud in their daily newspapers if
written anonymously, while if the same thing were said without
ambiguity to their faces--nominative case verb and accusative being
all in their right places, and doubt impossible--they would
consider themselves very seriously and justly outraged, and accuse
the speaker of being unwell.
I never could understand (neither can I quite do so now, though I
begin to see better what they mean) why a single currency should
not suffice them; it would seem to me as though all their dealings
would have been thus greatly simplified; but I was met with a look
of horror if ever I dared to hint at it. Even those who to my
certain knowledge kept only just enough money at the Musical Banks
to swear by, would call the other banks (where their securities
really lay) cold, deadening, paralysing, and the like.
I noticed another thing, moreover, which struck me greatly. I was
taken to the opening of one of these banks in a neighbouring town,
and saw a large assemblage of cashiers and managers. I sat
opposite them and scanned their faces attentively. They did not
please me; they lacked, with few exceptions, the true Erewhonian
frankness; and an equal number from any other class would have
looked happier and better men. When I met them in the streets they
did not seem like other people, but had, as a general rule, a
cramped expression upon their faces which pained and depressed me.
Those who came from the country were better; they seemed to have
lived less as a separate class, and to be freer and healthier; but
in spite of my seeing not a few whose looks were benign and noble,
I could not help asking myself concerning the greater number of
those whom I met, whether Erewhon would be a better country if
their expression were to be transferred to the people in general.
I answered myself emphatically, no. The expression on the faces of
the high Ydgrunites was that which one would wish to diffuse, and
not that of the cashiers.
A man's expression is his sacrament; it is the outward and visible
sign of his inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace; and as I
looked at the a majority of these men, I could not help feeling
that there must be a something in their lives which had stunted
their natural development, and that they would have been more
healthily minded in any other profession. I was always sorry for
them, for in nine cases out of ten they were well-meaning persons;
they were in the main very poorly paid; their constitutions were as
a rule above suspicion; and there were recorded numberless
instances of their self-sacrifice and generosity; but they had had
the misfortune to have been betrayed into a false position at an
age for the most part when their judgement was not matured, and
after having been kept in studied ignorance of the real
difficulties of the system. But this did not make their position
the less a false one, and its bad effects upon themselves were
unmistakable.
Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them, which
struck me as a very bad sign. When they were in the room every one
would talk as though all currency save that of the Musical Banks
should be abolished; and yet they knew perfectly well that even the
cashiers themselves hardly used the Musical Bank money more than
other people. It was expected of them that they should appear to
do so, but this was all. The less thoughtful of them did not seem
particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at heart, though
perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have owned to being so.
Some few were opponents of the whole system; but these were liable
to be dismissed from their employment at any moment, and this
rendered them very careful, for a man who had once been cashier at
a Musical Bank was out of the field for other employment, and was
generally unfitted for it by reason of that course of treatment
which was commonly called his education. In fact it was a career
from which retreat was virtually impossible, and into which young
men were generally induced to enter before they could be reasonably
expected, considering their training, to have formed any opinions
of their own. Not unfrequently, indeed, they were induced, by what
we in England should call undue influence, concealment, and fraud.
Few indeed were those who had the courage to insist on seeing both
sides of the question before they committed themselves to what was
practically a leap in the dark. One would have thought that
caution in this respect was an elementary principle,--one of the
first things that an honourable man would teach his boy to
understand; but in practice it was not so.
I even saw cases in which parents bought the right of presenting to
the office of cashier at one of these banks, with the fixed
determination that some one of their sons (perhaps a mere child)
should fill it. There was the lad himself--growing up with every
promise of becoming a good and honourable man--but utterly without
warning concerning the iron shoe which his natural protector was
providing for him. Who could say that the whole thing would not
end in a life-long lie, and vain chafing to escape? I confess that
there were few things in Erewhon which shocked me more than this.
Yet we do something not so very different from this even in
England, and as regards the dual commercial system, all countries
have, and have had, a law of the land, and also another law, which,
though professedly more sacred, has far less effect on their daily
life and actions. It seems as though the need for some law over
and above, and sometimes even conflicting with, the law of the
land, must spring from something that lies deep down in man's
nature; indeed, it is hard to think that man could ever have become
man at all, but for the gradual evolution of a perception that
though this world looms so large when we are in it, it may seem a
little thing when we have got away from it.
When man had grown to the perception that in the everlasting Is-
and-Is-Not of nature, the world and all that it contains, including
man, is at the same time both seen and unseen, he felt the need of
two rules of life, one for the seen, and the other for the unseen
side of things. For the laws affecting the seen world he claimed
the sanction of seen powers; for the unseen (of which he knows
nothing save that it exists and is powerful) he appealed to the
unseen power (of which, again, he knows nothing save that it exists
and is powerful) to which he gives the name of God.
Some Erewhonian opinions concerning the intelligence of the unborn
embryo, that I regret my space will not permit me to lay before the
reader, have led me to conclude that the Erewhonian Musical Banks,
and perhaps the religious systems of all countries, are now more or
less of an attempt to uphold the unfathomable and unconscious
instinctive wisdom of millions of past generations, against the
comparatively shallow, consciously reasoning, and ephemeral
conclusions drawn from that of the last thirty or forty.
The saving feature of the Erewhonian Musical Bank system (as
distinct from the quasi-idolatrous views which coexist with it, and
on which I will touch later) was that while it bore witness to the
existence of a kingdom that is not of this world, it made no
attempt to pierce the veil that hides it from human eyes. It is
here that almost all religions go wrong. Their priests try to make
us believe that they know more about the unseen world than those
whose eyes are still blinded by the seen, can ever know--forgetting
that while to deny the existence of an unseen kingdom is bad, to
pretend that we know more about it than its bare existence is no
better.
This chapter is already longer than I intended, but I should like
to say that in spite of the saving feature of which I have just
spoken, I cannot help thinking that the Erewhonians are on the eve
of some great change in their religious opinions, or at any rate in
that part of them which finds expression through their Musical
Banks. So far as I could see, fully ninety per cent. of the
population of the metropolis looked upon these banks with something
not far removed from contempt. If this is so, any such startling
event as is sure to arise sooner or later, may serve as nucleus to
a new order of things that will be more in harmony with both the
heads and hearts of the people.
CHAPTER XVI: AROWHENA
The reader will perhaps have learned by this time a thing which I
had myself suspected before I had been twenty-four hours in Mr.
Nosnibor's house--I mean, that though the Nosnibors showed me every
attention, I could not cordially like them, with the exception of
Arowhena who was quite different from the rest. They were not fair
samples of Erewhonians. I saw many families with whom they were on
visiting terms, whose manners charmed me more than I know how to
say, but I never could get over my original prejudice against Mr.
Nosnibor for having embezzled the money. Mrs. Nosnibor, too, was a
very worldly woman, yet to hear her talk one would have thought
that she was singularly the reverse; neither could I endure Zulora;
Arowhena however was perfection.
She it was who ran all the little errands for her mother and Mr.
Nosnibor and Zulora, and gave those thousand proofs of sweetness
and unselfishness which some one member of a family is generally
required to give. All day long it was Arowhena this, and Arowhena
that; but she never seemed to know that she was being put upon, and
was always bright and willing from morning till evening. Zulora
certainly was very handsome, but Arowhena was infinitely the more
graceful of the two and was the very ne plus ultra of youth and
beauty. I will not attempt to describe her, for anything that I
could say would fall so far short of the reality as only to mislead
the reader. Let him think of the very loveliest that he can
imagine, and he will still be below the truth. Having said this
much, I need hardly say that I had fallen in love with her.
She must have seen what I felt for her, but I tried my hardest not
to let it appear even by the slightest sign. I had many reasons
for this. I had no idea what Mr. and Mrs. Nosnibor would say to
it; and I knew that Arowhena would not look at me (at any rate not
yet) if her father and mother disapproved, which they probably
would, considering that I had nothing except the pension of about a
pound a day of our money which the King had granted me. I did not
yet know of a more serious obstacle.
In the meantime, I may say that I had been presented at court, and
was told that my reception had been considered as singularly
gracious; indeed, I had several interviews both with the King and
Queen, at which from time to time the Queen got everything from me
that I had in the world, clothes and all, except the two buttons I
had given to Yram, the loss of which seemed to annoy her a good
deal. I was presented with a court suit, and her Majesty had my
old clothes put upon a wooden dummy, on which they probably remain,
unless they have been removed in consequence of my subsequent
downfall. His Majesty's manners were those of a cultivated English
gentleman. He was much pleased at hearing that our government was
monarchical, and that the mass of the people were resolute that it
should not be changed; indeed, I was so much encouraged by the
evident pleasure with which he heard me, that I ventured to quote
to him those beautiful lines of Shakespeare's -
"There's a divinity doth hedge a king,
Rough hew him how we may;"
but I was sorry I had done so afterwards, for I do not think his
Majesty admired the lines as much as I could have wished.
There is no occasion for me to dwell further upon my experience of
the court, but I ought perhaps to allude to one of my conversations
with the King, inasmuch as it was pregnant with the most important
consequences.
He had been asking me about my watch, and enquiring whether such
dangerous inventions were tolerated in the country from which I
came. I owned with some confusion that watches were not uncommon;
but observing the gravity which came over his Majesty's face I
presumed to say that they were fast dying out, and that we had few
if any other mechanical contrivances of which he was likely to
disapprove. Upon his asking me to name some of our most advanced
machines, I did not dare to tell him of our steam-engines and
railroads and electric telegraphs, and was puzzling my brains to
think what I could say, when, of all things in the world, balloons
suggested themselves, and I gave him an account of a very
remarkable ascent which was made some years ago. The King was too
polite to contradict, but I felt sure that he did not believe me,
and from that day forward though he always showed me the attention
which was due to my genius (for in this light was my complexion
regarded), he never questioned me about the manners and customs of
my country.
To return, however, to Arowhena. I soon gathered that neither Mr.
nor Mrs. Nosnibor would have any objection to my marrying into the
family; a physical excellence is considered in Erewhon as a set off
against almost any other disqualification, and my light hair was
sufficient to make me an eligible match. But along with this
welcome fact I gathered another which filled me with dismay: I was
expected to marry Zulora, for whom I had already conceived a great
aversion. At first I hardly noticed the little hints and the
artifices which were resorted to in order to bring us together, but
after a time they became too plain. Zulora, whether she was in
love with me or not, was bent on marrying me, and I gathered in
talking with a young gentleman of my acquaintance who frequently
visited the house and whom I greatly disliked, that it was
considered a sacred and inviolable rule that whoever married into a
family must marry the eldest daughter at that time unmarried. The
young gentleman urged this upon me so frequently that I at last saw
he was in love with Arowhena himself, and wanted me to get Zulora
out of the way; but others told me the same story as to the custom
of the country, and I saw there was a serious difficulty. My only
comfort was that Arowhena snubbed my rival and would not look at
him. Neither would she look at me; nevertheless there was a
difference in the manner of her disregard; this was all I could get
from her.
Not that she avoided me; on the contrary I had many a tete-a-tete
with her, for her mother and sister were anxious for me to deposit
some part of my pension in the Musical Banks, this being in
accordance with the dictates of their goddess Ydgrun, of whom both
Mrs. Nosnibor and Zulora were great devotees. I was not sure
whether I had kept my secret from being perceived by Arowhena
herself, but none of the others suspected me, so she was set upon
me to get me to open an account, at any rate pro forma, with the
Musical Banks; and I need hardly say that she succeeded. But I did
not yield at once; I enjoyed the process of being argued with too
keenly to lose it by a prompt concession; besides, a little
hesitation rendered the concession itself more valuable. It was in
the course of conversations on this subject that I learned the more
defined religious opinions of the Erewhonians, that coexist with
the Musical Bank system, but are not recognised by those curious
institutions. I will describe them as briefly as possible in the
following chapters before I return to the personal adventures of
Arowhena and myself.
They were idolaters, though of a comparatively enlightened kind;
but here, as in other things, there was a discrepancy between their
professed and actual belief, for they had a genuine and potent
faith which existed without recognition alongside of their idol
worship.
The gods whom they worship openly are personifications of human
qualities, as justice, strength, hope, fear, love, &c., &c. The
people think that prototypes of these have a real objective
existence in a region far beyond the clouds, holding, as did the
ancients, that they are like men and women both in body and
passion, except that they are even comelier and more powerful, and
also that they can render themselves invisible to human eyesight.
They are capable of being propitiated by mankind and of coming to
the assistance of those who ask their aid. Their interest in human
affairs is keen, and on the whole beneficent; but they become very
angry if neglected, and punish rather the first they come upon,
than the actual person who has offended them; their fury being
blind when it is raised, though never raised without reason. They
will not punish with any less severity when people sin against them
from ignorance, and without the chance of having had knowledge;
they will take no excuses of this kind, but are even as the English
law, which assumes itself to be known to every one.
Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the
same space at the same moment, which law is presided over and
administered by the gods of time and space jointly, so that if a
flying stone and a man's head attempt to outrage these gods, by
"arrogating a right which they do not possess" (for so it is
written in one of their books), and to occupy the same space
simultaneously, a severe punishment, sometimes even death itself,
is sure to follow, without any regard to whether the stone knew
that the man's head was there, or the head the stone; this at least
is their view of the common accidents of life. Moreover, they hold
their deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is
the thing done which is everything, and the motive goes for
nothing.
Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common
air in his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any
chance he gets into the water, the air-god is very angry, and will
not suffer it; no matter whether the man got into the water by
accident or on purpose, whether through the attempt to save a child
or through presumptuous contempt of the air-god, the air-god will
kill him, unless he keeps his head high enough out of the water,
and thus gives the air-god his due.
This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over
and above these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth,
giving them temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in
stone, which they verily believe to be faithful representations of
living beings who are only not human in being more than human. If
any one denies the objective existence of these divinities, and
says that there is really no such being as a beautiful woman called
Justice, with her eyes blinded and a pair of scales, positively
living and moving in a remote and ethereal region, but that justice
is only the personified expression of certain modes of human
thought and action--they say that he denies the existence of
justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton
disturber of men's religious convictions. They detest nothing so
much as any attempt to lead them to higher spiritual conceptions of
the deities whom they profess to worship. Arowhena and I had a
pitched battle on this point, and should have had many more but for
my prudence in allowing her to get the better of me.
I am sure that in her heart she was suspicious of her own position
for she returned more than once to the subject. "Can you not see,"
I had exclaimed, "that the fact of justice being admirable will not
be affected by the absence of a belief in her being also a living
agent? Can you really think that men will be one whit less
hopeful, because they no longer believe that hope is an actual
person?" She shook her head, and said that with men's belief in
the personality all incentive to the reverence of the thing itself,
as justice or hope, would cease; men from that hour would never be
either just or hopeful again.
I could not move her, nor, indeed, did I seriously wish to do so.
She deferred to me in most things, but she never shrank from
maintaining her opinions if they were put in question; nor does she
to this day abate one jot of her belief in the religion of her
childhood, though in compliance with my repeated entreaties she has
allowed herself to be baptized into the English Church. She has,
however, made a gloss upon her original faith to the effect that
her baby and I are the only human beings exempt from the vengeance
of the deities for not believing in their personality. She is
quite clear that we are exempted. She should never have so strong
a conviction of it otherwise. How it has come about she does not
know, neither does she wish to know; there are things which it is
better not to know and this is one of them; but when I tell her
that I believe in her deities as much as she does--and that it is a
difference about words, not things, she becomes silent with a
slight emphasis.
I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked me what
I should think if she were to tell me that my God, whose nature and
attributes I had been explaining to her, was but the expression for
man's highest conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in
order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious
a thought, man had personified it and called it by a name; that it
was an unworthy conception of the Deity to hold Him personal,
inasmuch as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible;
that the real thing men should worship was the Divine,
whereinsoever they could find it; that "God" was but man's way of
expressing his sense of the Divine; that as justice, hope, wisdom,
&c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the expression which
embraced all goodness and all good power; that people would no more
cease to love God on ceasing to believe in His objective
personality, than they had ceased to love justice on discovering
that she was not really personal; nay, that they would never truly
love Him till they saw Him thus.
She said all this in her artless way, and with none of the
coherence with which I have here written it; her face kindled, and
she felt sure that she had convinced me that I was wrong, and that
justice was a living person. Indeed I did wince a little; but I
recovered myself immediately, and pointed out to her that we had
books whose genuineness was beyond all possibility of doubt, as
they were certainly none of them less than 1800 years old; that in
these there were the most authentic accounts of men who had been
spoken to by the Deity Himself, and of one prophet who had been
allowed to see the back parts of God through the hand that was laid
over his face.
This was conclusive; and I spoke with such solemnity that she was a
little frightened, and only answered that they too had their books,
in which their ancestors had seen the gods; on which I saw that
further argument was not at all likely to convince her; and fearing
that she might tell her mother what I had been saying, and that I
might lose the hold upon her affections which I was beginning to
feel pretty sure that I was obtaining, I began to let her have her
own way, and to convince me; neither till after we were safely
married did I show the cloven hoof again.
Nevertheless, her remarks have haunted me, and I have since met
with many very godly people who have had a great knowledge of
divinity, but no sense of the divine: and again, I have seen a
radiance upon the face of those who were worshipping the divine
either in art or nature--in picture or statue--in field or cloud or
sea--in man, woman, or child--which I have never seen kindled by
any talking about the nature and attributes of God. Mention but
the word divinity, and our sense of the divine is clouded.
CHAPTER XVII: YDGRUN AND THE YDGRUNITES
In spite of all the to-do they make about their idols, and the
temples they build, and the priests and priestesses whom they
support, I could never think that their professed religion was more
than skin-deep; but they had another which they carried with them
into all their actions; and although no one from the outside of
things would suspect it to have any existence at all, it was in
reality their great guide, the mariner's compass of their lives; so
that there were very few things which they ever either did, or
refrained from doing, without reference to its precepts.
Now I suspected that their professed faith had no great hold upon
them--firstly, because I often heard the priests complain of the
prevailing indifference, and they would hardly have done so without
reason; secondly, because of the show which was made, for there was
none of this about the worship of the goddess Ydgrun, in whom they
really did believe; thirdly, because though the priests were
constantly abusing Ydgrun as being the great enemy of the gods, it
was well known that she had no more devoted worshippers in the
whole country than these very persons, who were often priests of
Ydgrun rather than of their own deities. Neither am I by any means
sure that these were not the best of the priests.
Ydgrun certainly occupied a very anomalous position; she was held
to be both omnipresent and omnipotent, but she was not an elevated
conception, and was sometimes both cruel and absurd. Even her most
devoted worshippers were a little ashamed of her, and served her
more with heart and in deed than with their tongues. Theirs was no
lip service; on the contrary, even when worshipping her most
devoutly, they would often deny her. Take her all in all, however,
she was a beneficent and useful deity, who did not care how much
she was denied so long as she was obeyed and feared, and who kept
hundreds of thousands in those paths which make life tolerably
happy, who would never have been kept there otherwise, and over
whom a higher and more spiritual ideal would have had no power.
I greatly doubt whether the Erewhonians are yet prepared for any
better religion, and though (considering my gradually strengthened
conviction that they were the representatives of the lost tribes of
Israel) I would have set about converting them at all hazards had I
seen the remotest prospect of success, I could hardly contemplate
the displacement of Ydgrun as the great central object of their
regard without admitting that it would be attended with frightful
consequences; in fact were I a mere philosopher, I should say that
the gradual raising of the popular conception of Ydgrun would be
the greatest spiritual boon which could be conferred upon them, and
that nothing could effect this except example. I generally found
that those who complained most loudly that Ydgrun was not high
enough for them had hardly as yet come up to the Ydgrun standard,
and I often met with a class of men whom I called to myself "high
Ydgrunites" (the rest being Ydgrunites, and low Ydgrunites), who,
in the matter of human conduct and the affairs of life, appeared to
me to have got about as far as it is in the right nature of man to
go.
They were gentlemen in the full sense of the word; and what has one
not said in saying this? They seldom spoke of Ydgrun, or even
alluded to her, but would never run counter to her dictates without
ample reason for doing so: in such cases they would override her
with due self-reliance, and the goddess seldom punished them; for
they are brave, and Ydgrun is not. They had most of them a
smattering of the hypothetical language, and some few more than
this, but only a few. I do not think that this language has had
much hand in making them what they are; but rather that the fact of
their being generally possessed of its rudiments was one great
reason for the reverence paid to the hypothetical language itself.
Being inured from youth to exercises and athletics of all sorts,
and living fearlessly under the eye of their peers, among whom
there exists a high standard of courage, generosity, honour, and
every good and manly quality--what wonder that they should have
become, so to speak, a law unto themselves; and, while taking an
elevated view of the goddess Ydgrun, they should have gradually
lost all faith in the recognised deities of the country? These
they do not openly disregard, for conformity until absolutely
intolerable is a law of Ydgrun, yet they have no real belief in the
objective existence of beings which so readily explain themselves
as abstractions, and whose personality demands a quasi-materialism
which it baffles the imagination to realise. They keep their
opinions, however, greatly to themselves, inasmuch as most of their
countrymen feel strongly about the gods, and they hold it wrong to
give pain, unless for some greater good than seems likely to arise
from their plain speaking.
On the other hand, surely those whose own minds are clear about any
given matter (even though it be only that there is little
certainty) should go so far towards imparting that clearness to
others, as to say openly what they think and why they think it,
whenever they can properly do so; for they may be sure that they
owe their own clearness almost entirely to the fact that others
have done this by them: after all, they may be mistaken, and if
so, it is for their own and the general well-being that they should
let their error be seen as distinctly as possible, so that it may
be more easily refuted. I own, therefore, that on this one point I
disapproved of the practice even of the highest Ydgrunites, and
objected to it all the more because I knew that I should find my
own future task more easy if the high Ydgrunites had already
undermined the belief which is supposed to prevail at present.
In other respects they were more like the best class of Englishmen
than any whom I have seen in other countries. I should have liked
to have persuaded half-a-dozen of them to come over to England and
go upon the stage, for they had most of them a keen sense of humour
and a taste for acting: they would be of great use to us. The
example of a real gentleman is, if I may say so without profanity,
the best of all gospels; such a man upon the stage becomes a potent
humanising influence, an Ideal which all may look upon for a
shilling.
I always liked and admired these men, and although I could not help
deeply regretting their certain ultimate perdition (for they had no
sense of a hereafter, and their only religion was that of self-
respect and consideration for other people), I never dared to take
so great a liberty with them as to attempt to put them in
possession of my own religious convictions, in spite of my knowing
that they were the only ones which could make them really good and
happy, either here or hereafter. I did try sometimes, being
impelled to do so by a strong sense of duty, and by my deep regret
that so much that was admirable should be doomed to ages if not
eternity of torture; but the words stuck in my throat as soon as I
began.
Whether a professional missionary might have a better chance I know
not; such persons must doubtless know more about the science of
conversion: for myself, I could only be thankful that I was in the
right path, and was obliged to let others take their chance as yet.
If the plan fails by which I propose to convert them myself, I
would gladly contribute my mite towards the sending two or three
trained missionaries, who have been known as successful converters
of Jews and Mahometans; but such have seldom much to glory in the
flesh, and when I think of the high Ydgrunites, and of the figure
which a missionary would probably cut among them, I cannot feel
sanguine that much good would be arrived at. Still the attempt is
worth making, and the worst danger to the missionaries themselves
would be that of being sent to the hospital where Chowbok would
have been sent had he come with me into Erewhon.
Taking then their religious opinions as a whole, I must own that
the Erewhonians are superstitious, on account of the views which
they hold of their professed gods, and their entirely anomalous and
inexplicable worship of Ydgrun, a worship at once the most
powerful, yet most devoid of formalism, that I ever met with; but
in practice things worked better than might have been expected, and
the conflicting claims of Ydgrun and the gods were arranged by
unwritten compromises (for the most part in Ydgrun's favour), which
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred were very well understood.
I could not conceive why they should not openly acknowledge high
Ydgrunism, and discard the objective personality of hope, justice,
&c.; but whenever I so much as hinted at this, I found that I was
on dangerous ground. They would never have it; returning
constantly to the assertion that ages ago the divinities were
frequently seen, and that the moment their personality was
disbelieved in, men would leave off practising even those ordinary
virtues which the common experience of mankind has agreed on as
being the greatest secret of happiness. "Who ever heard," they
asked, indignantly, "of such things as kindly training, a good
example, and an enlightened regard to one's own welfare, being able
to keep men straight?" In my hurry, forgetting things which I
ought to have remembered, I answered that if a person could not be
kept straight by these things, there was nothing that could
straighten him, and that if he were not ruled by the love and fear
of men whom he had seen, neither would he be so by that of the gods
whom he had not seen.
At one time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect who
believed, after a fashion, in the immortality of the soul and the
resurrection from the dead; they taught that those who had been
born with feeble and diseased bodies and had passed their lives in
ailing, would be tortured eternally hereafter; but that those who
had been born strong and healthy and handsome would be rewarded for
ever and ever. Of moral qualities or conduct they made no mention.
Bad as this was, it was a step in advance, inasmuch as they did
hold out a future state of some sort, and I was shocked to find
that for the most part they met with opposition, on the score that
their doctrine was based upon no sort of foundation, also that it
was immoral in its tendency, and not to be desired by any
reasonable beings.
When I asked how it could be immoral, I was answered, that if
firmly held, it would lead people to cheapen this present life,
making it appear to be an affair of only secondary importance; that
it would thus distract men's minds from the perfecting of this
world's economy, and was an impatient cutting, so to speak, of the
Gordian knot of life's problems, whereby some people might gain
present satisfaction to themselves at the cost of infinite damage
to others; that the doctrine tended to encourage the poor in their
improvidence, and in a debasing acquiescence in ills which they
might well remedy; that the rewards were illusory and the result,
after all, of luck, whose empire should be bounded by the grave;
that its terrors were enervating and unjust; and that even the most
blessed rising would be but the disturbing of a still more blessed
slumber.
To all which I could only say that the thing had been actually
known to happen, and that there were several well-authenticated
instances of people having died and come to life again--instances
which no man in his senses could doubt.
"If this be so," said my opponent, "we must bear it as best we
may."
I then translated for him, as well as I could, the noble speech of
Hamlet in which he says that it is the fear lest worse evils may
befall us after death which alone prevents us from rushing into
death's arms.
"Nonsense," he answered, "no man was ever yet stopped from cutting
his throat by any such fears as your poet ascribes to him--and your
poet probably knew this perfectly well. If a man cuts his throat
he is at bay, and thinks of nothing but escape, no matter whither,
provided he can shuffle off his present. No. Men are kept at
their posts, not by the fear that if they quit them they may quit a
frying-pan for a fire, but by the hope that if they hold on, the
fire may burn less fiercely. 'The respect,' to quote your poet,
'that makes calamity of so long a life,' is the consideration that
though calamity may live long, the sufferer may live longer still."
On this, seeing that there was little probability of our coming to
an agreement, I let the argument drop, and my opponent presently
left me with as much disapprobation as he could show without being
overtly rude.
CHAPTER XVIII: BIRTH FORMULAE
I heard what follows not from Arowhena, but from Mr. Nosnibor and
some of the gentlemen who occasionally dined at the house: they
told me that the Erewhonians believe in pre-existence; and not only
this (of which I will write more fully in the next chapter), but
they believe that it is of their own free act and deed in a
previous state that they come to be born into this world at all.
They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting
the married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and
giving them no peace either of mind or body until they have
consented to take them under their protection. If this were not so
(this at least is what they urge), it would be a monstrous freedom
for one man to take with another, to say that he should undergo the
chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the
matter. No man would have any right to get married at all,
inasmuch as he can never tell what frightful misery his doing so
may entail forcibly upon a being who cannot be unhappy as long as
he does not exist. They feel this so strongly that they are
resolved to shift the blame on to other shoulders; and have
fashioned a long mythology as to the world in which the unborn
people live, and what they do, and the arts and machinations to
which they have recourse in order to get themselves into our own
world. But of this more anon: what I would relate here is their
manner of dealing with those who do come.
It is a distinguishing peculiarity of the Erewhonians that when
they profess themselves to be quite certain about any matter, and
avow it as a base on which they are to build a system of practice,
they seldom quite believe in it. If they smell a rat about the
precincts of a cherished institution, they will always stop their
noses to it if they can.
This is what most of them did in this matter of the unborn, for I
cannot (and never could) think that they seriously believed in
their mythology concerning pre-existence: they did and they did
not; they did not know themselves what they believed; all they did
know was that it was a disease not to believe as they did. The
only thing of which they were quite sure was that it was the
pestering of the unborn which caused them to be brought into this
world, and that they would not have been here if they would have
only let peaceable people alone.
It would be hard to disprove this position, and they might have a
good case if they would only leave it as it stands. But this they
will not do; they must have assurance doubly sure; they must have
the written word of the child itself as soon as it is born, giving
the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of its
birth, and asserting its own pre-existence. They have therefore
devised something which they call a birth formula--a document which
varies in words according to the caution of parents, but is much
the same practically in all cases; for it has been the business of
the Erewhonian lawyers during many ages to exercise their skill in
perfecting it and providing for every contingency.
These formulae are printed on common paper at a moderate cost for
the poor; but the rich have them written on parchment and
handsomely bound, so that the getting up of a person's birth
formula is a test of his social position. They commence by setting
forth, That whereas A. B. was a member of the kingdom of the
unborn, where he was well provided for in every way, and had no
cause of discontent, &c., &c., he did of his own wanton depravity
and restlessness conceive a desire to enter into this present
world; that thereon having taken the necessary steps as set forth
in laws of the unborn kingdom, he did with malice aforethought set
himself to plague and pester two unfortunate people who had never
wronged him, and who were quite contented and happy until he
conceived this base design against their peace; for which wrong he
now humbly entreats their pardon.
He acknowledges that he is responsible for all physical blemishes
and deficiencies which may render him answerable to the laws of his
country; that his parents have nothing whatever to do with any of
these things; and that they have a right to kill him at once if
they be so minded, though he entreats them to show their marvellous
goodness and clemency by sparing his life. If they will do this,
he promises to be their most obedient and abject creature during
his earlier years, and indeed all his life, unless they should see
fit in their abundant generosity to remit some portion of his
service hereafter. And so the formula continues, going sometimes
into very minute details, according to the fancies of family
lawyers, who will not make it any shorter than they can help.
The deed being thus prepared, on the third or fourth day after the
birth of the child, or as they call it, the "final importunity,"
the friends gather together, and there is a feast held, where they
are all very melancholy--as a general rule, I believe, quite truly
so--and make presents to the father and mother of the child in
order to console them for the injury which has just been done them
by the unborn.
By-and-by the child himself is brought down by his nurse, and the
company begin to rail upon him, upbraiding him for his
impertinence, and asking him what amends he proposes to make for
the wrong that he has committed, and how he can look for care and
nourishment from those who have perhaps already been injured by the
unborn on some ten or twelve occasions; for they say of people with
large families, that they have suffered terrible injuries from the
unborn; till at last, when this has been carried far enough, some
one suggests the formula, which is brought out and solemnly read to
the child by the family straightener. This gentleman is always
invited on these occasions, for the very fact of intrusion into a
peaceful family shows a depravity on the part of the child which
requires his professional services.
On being teased by the reading and tweaked by the nurse, the child
will commonly begin to cry, which is reckoned a good sign, as
showing a consciousness of guilt. He is thereon asked, Does he
assent to the formula? on which, as he still continues crying and
can obviously make no answer, some one of the friends comes forward
and undertakes to sign the document on his behalf, feeling sure (so
he says) that the child would do it if he only knew how, and that
he will release the present signer from his engagement on arriving
at maturity. The friend then inscribes the signature of the child
at the foot of the parchment, which is held to bind the child as
much as though he had signed it himself.
Even this, however, does not fully content them, for they feel a
little uneasy until they have got the child's own signature after
all. So when he is about fourteen, these good people partly bribe
him by promises of greater liberty and good things, and partly
intimidate him through their great power of making themselves
actively unpleasant to him, so that though there is a show of
freedom made, there is really none; they also use the offices of
the teachers in the Colleges of Unreason, till at last, in one way
or another, they take very good care that he shall sign the paper
by which he professes to have been a free agent in coming into the
world, and to take all the responsibility of having done so on to
his own shoulders. And yet, though this document is obviously the
most important which any one can sign in his whole life, they will
have him do so at an age when neither they nor the law will for
many a year allow any one else to bind him to the smallest
obligation, no matter how righteously he may owe it, because they
hold him too young to know what he is about, and do not consider it
fair that he should commit himself to anything that may prejudice
him in after years.
I own that all this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the
many admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured
to say a part of what I thought about it to one of the Professors
of Unreason. I did it very tenderly, but his justification of the
system was quite out of my comprehension. I remember asking him
whether he did not think it would do harm to a lad's principles, by
weakening his sense of the sanctity of his word and of truth
generally, that he should be led into entering upon a solemn
declaration as to the truth of things about which all that he can
certainly know is that he knows nothing--whether, in fact, the
teachers who so led him, or who taught anything as a certainty of
which they were themselves uncertain, were not earning their living
by impairing the truth-sense of their pupils (a delicate
organisation mostly), and by vitiating one of their most sacred
instincts.
The Professor, who was a delightful person, seemed greatly
surprised at the view which I took, but it had no influence with
him whatsoever. No one, he answered, expected that the boy either
would or could know all that he said he knew; but the world was
full of compromises; and there was hardly any affirmation which
would bear being interpreted literally. Human language was too
gross a vehicle of thought--thought being incapable of absolute
translation. He added, that as there can be no translation from
one language into another which shall not scant the meaning
somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can
render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere--and so
forth; all of which seemed to come to this in the end, that it was
the custom of the country, and that the Erewhonians were a
conservative people; that the boy would have to begin compromising
sooner or later, and this was part of his education in the art. It
was perhaps to be regretted that compromise should be as necessary
as it was; still it was necessary, and the sooner the boy got to
understand it the better for himself. But they never tell this to
the boy.
From the book of their mythology about the unborn I made the
extracts which will form the following chapter.
CHAPTER XIX: THE WORLD OF THE UNBORN
The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or
again, that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor.
Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but
the light thus given often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness
which is in front. We can see but little at a time, and heed that
little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next;
ever peering curiously through the glare of the present into the
gloom of the future, we presage the leading lines of that which is
before us, by faintly reflected lights from dull mirrors that are
behind, and stumble on as we may till the trap-door opens beneath
us and we are gone.
They say at other times that the future and the past are as a
panorama upon two rollers; that which is on the roller of the
future unwraps itself on to the roller of the past; we cannot
hasten it, and we may not stay it; we must see all that is unfolded
to us whether it be good or ill; and what we have seen once we may
see again no more. It is ever unwinding and being wound; we catch
it in transition for a moment, and call it present; our flustered
senses gather what impression they can, and we guess at what is
coming by the tenor of that which we have seen. The same hand has
painted the whole picture, and the incidents vary little--rivers,
woods, plains, mountains, towns and peoples, love, sorrow, and
death: yet the interest never flags, and we look hopefully for
some good fortune, or fearfully lest our own faces be shown us as
figuring in something terrible. When the scene is past we think we
know it, though there is so much to see, and so little time to see
it, that our conceit of knowledge as regards the past is for the
most part poorly founded; neither do we care about it greatly, save
in so far as it may affect the future, wherein our interest mainly
lies.
The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars
and all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and
not from west to east, and in like manner they say it is by chance
that man is drawn through life with his face to the past instead of
to the future. For the future is there as much as the past, only
that we may not see it. Is it not in the loins of the past, and
must not the past alter before the future can do so?
Sometimes, again, they say that there was a race of men tried upon
the earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that
they died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge
caused them; and if any were to be born too prescient now, he would
be culled out by natural selection, before he had time to transmit
so peace-destroying a faculty to his descendants.
Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must
perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no
better than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the
devils.
Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last
to the unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls
pure and simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of
gaseous yet more or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a
ghost; they have thus neither flesh nor blood nor warmth.
Nevertheless they are supposed to have local habitations and cities
wherein they dwell, though these are as unsubstantial as their
inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and drink some thin
ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of doing whatever
mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion as in a
dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are
they never die--the only form of death in the unborn world being
the leaving it for our own. They are believed to be extremely
numerous, far more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown
planets, full grown, in large batches at a time; but they can only
leave the unborn world by taking the steps necessary for their
arrival here--which is, in fact, by suicide.
They ought to be an exceedingly happy people, for they have no
extremes of good or ill fortune; never marrying, but living in a
state much like that fabled by the poets as the primitive condition
of mankind. In spite of this, however, they are incessantly
complaining; they know that we in this world have bodies, and
indeed they know everything else about us, for they move among us
whithersoever they will, and can read our thoughts, as well as
survey our actions at pleasure. One would think that this should
be enough for them; and most of them are indeed alive to the
desperate risk which they will run by indulging themselves in that
body with "sensible warm motion" which they so much desire;
nevertheless, there are some to whom the ennui of a disembodied
existence is so intolerable that they will venture anything for a
change; so they resolve to quit. The conditions which they must
accept are so uncertain, that none but the most foolish of the
unborn will consent to them; and it is from these, and these only,
that our own ranks are recruited.
When they have finally made up their minds to leave, they must go
before the magistrate of the nearest town, and sign an affidavit of
their desire to quit their then existence. On their having done
this, the magistrate reads them the conditions which they must
accept, and which are so long that I can only extract some of the
principal points, which are mainly the following:-
First, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and
sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and
without a will of their own; they must draw lots for their
dispositions before they go, and take them, such as they are, for
better or worse--neither are they to be allowed any choice in the
matter of the body which they so much desire; they are simply
allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is
their business to find and pester until they adopt them. Who these
are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or
diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust
themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good
constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.
It is curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to
those who are meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk
with a spendthrift, and with about as much success.
"To be born," they say, "is a felony--it is a capital crime, for
which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission
of the offence. You may perhaps happen to live for some seventy or
eighty years, but what is that, compared with the eternity you now
enjoy? And even though the sentence were commuted, and you were
allowed to live on for ever, you would in time become so terribly
weary of life that execution would be the greatest mercy to you.
"Consider the infinite risk; to be born of wicked parents and
trained in vice! to be born of silly parents, and trained to
unrealities! of parents who regard you as a sort of chattel or
property, belonging more to them than to yourself! Again, you may
draw utterly unsympathetic parents, who will never be able to
understand you, and who will do their best to thwart you (as a hen
when she has hatched a duckling), and then call you ungrateful
because you do not love them; or, again, you may draw parents who
look upon you as a thing to be cowed while it is still young, lest
it should give them trouble hereafter by having wishes and feelings
of its own.
"In later life, when you have been finally allowed to pass muster
as a full member of the world, you will yourself become liable to
the pesterings of the unborn--and a very happy life you may be led
in consequence! For we solicit so strongly that a few only--nor
these the best--can refuse us; and yet not to refuse is much the
same as going into partnership with half-a-dozen different people
about whom one can know absolutely nothing beforehand--not even
whether one is going into partnership with men or women, nor with
how many of either. Delude not yourself with thinking that you
will be wiser than your parents. You may be an age in advance of
those whom you have pestered, but unless you are one of the great
ones you will still be an age behind those who will in their turn
pester you.
"Imagine what it must be to have an unborn quartered upon you, who
is of an entirely different temperament and disposition to your
own; nay, half-a-dozen such, who will not love you though you have
stinted yourself in a thousand ways to provide for their comfort
and well-being,--who will forget all your self-sacrifice, and of
whom you may never be sure that they are not bearing a grudge
against you for errors of judgement into which you may have fallen,
though you had hoped that such had been long since atoned for.
Ingratitude such as this is not uncommon, yet fancy what it must be
to bear! It is hard upon the duckling to have been hatched by a
hen, but is it not also hard upon the hen to have hatched the
duckling?
"Consider it again, we pray you, not for our sake but for your own.
Your initial character you must draw by lot; but whatever it is, it
can only come to a tolerably successful development after long
training; remember that over that training you will have no
control. It is possible, and even probable, that whatever you may
get in after life which is of real pleasure and service to you,
will have to be won in spite of, rather than by the help of, those
whom you are now about to pester, and that you will only win your
freedom after years of a painful struggle in which it will be hard
to say whether you have suffered most injury, or inflicted it.
"Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free
will; that you will be obliged to have it; that there is no
escaping it; that you will be fettered to it during your whole
life, and must on every occasion do that which on the whole seems
best to you at any given time, no matter whether you are right or
wrong in choosing it. Your mind will be a balance for
considerations, and your action will go with the heavier scale.
How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you may
have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use,
and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the scales were
good to start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered
with in childhood, and if the combinations into which you enter are
average ones, you may come off well; but there are too many 'ifs'
in this, and with the failure of any one of them your misery is
assured. Reflect on this, and remember that should the ill come
upon you, you will have yourself to thank, for it is your own
choice to be born, and there is no compulsion in the matter.
"Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there
is a certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even
amount to very considerable happiness; but mark how they are
distributed over a man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them,
to the fore part, and few indeed to the after. Can there be any
pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age? If
you are good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed
at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty? For you must
live on your capital; there is no investing your powers so that you
may get a small annuity of life for ever: you must eat up your
principal bit by bit, and be tortured by seeing it grow continually
smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being rudely
robbed of it by crime or casualty.
"Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would
not come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with
decency and honour. Being in the world he will as a general rule
stay till he is forced to go; but do you think that he would
consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he had the offer
of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter the past as
that he should never have come into being at all, do you not think
that he would do it very gladly?
"What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this,
when he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night
in which it was said there is a man child conceived? 'For now,' he
says, 'I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have
slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors of the
earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes
that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden
untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.'
Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment
at times to all men; but how can they ask for pity, or complain of
any mischief that may befall them, having entered open-eyed into
the snare?
"One word more and we have done. If any faint remembrance, as of a
dream, flit in some puzzled moment across your brain, and you shall
feel that the potion which is to be given you shall not have done
its work, and the memory of this existence which you are leaving
endeavours vainly to return; we say in such a moment, when you
clutch at the dream but it eludes your grasp, and you watch it, as
Orpheus watched Eurydice, gliding back again into the twilight
kingdom, fly--fly--if you can remember the advice--to the haven of
your present and immediate duty, taking shelter incessantly in the
work which you have in hand. This much you may perhaps recall; and
this, if you will imprint it deeply upon your every faculty, will
be most likely to bring you safely and honourably home through the
trials that are before you." {3}
This is the fashion in which they reason with those who would be
for leaving them, but it is seldom that they do much good, for none
but the unquiet and unreasonable ever think of being born, and
those who are foolish enough to think of it are generally foolish
enough to do it. Finding, therefore, that they can do no more, the
friends follow weeping to the courthouse of the chief magistrate,
where the one who wishes to be born declares solemnly and openly
that he accepts the conditions attached to his decision. On this
he is presented with a potion, which immediately destroys his
memory and sense of identity, and dissipates the thin gaseous
tenement which he has inhabited: he becomes a bare vital
principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor to be by any
chemical test appreciated. He has but one instinct, which is that
he is to go to such and such a place, where he will find two
persons whom he is to importune till they consent to undertake him;
but whether he is to find these persons among the race of Chowbok
or the Erewhonians themselves is not for him to choose.
CHAPTER XX: WHAT THEY MEAN BY IT
I have given the above mythology at some length, but it is only a
small part of what they have upon the subject. My first feeling on
reading it was that any amount of folly on the part of the unborn
in coming here was justified by a desire to escape from such
intolerable prosing. The mythology is obviously an unfair and
exaggerated representation of life and things; and had its authors
been so minded they could have easily drawn a picture which would
err as much on the bright side as this does on the dark. No
Erewhonian believes that the world is as black as it has been here
painted, but it is one of their peculiarities that they very often
do not believe or mean things which they profess to regard as
indisputable.
In the present instance their professed views concerning the unborn
have arisen from their desire to prove that people have been
presented with the gloomiest possible picture of their own
prospects before they came here; otherwise, they could hardly say
to one whom they are going to punish for an affection of the heart
or brain that it is all his own doing. In practice they modify
their theory to a considerable extent, and seldom refer to the
birth formula except in extreme cases; for the force of habit, or
what not, gives many of them a kindly interest even in creatures
who have so much wronged them as the unborn have done; and though a
man generally hates the unwelcome little stranger for the first
twelve months, he is apt to mollify (according to his lights) as
time goes on, and sometimes he will become inordinately attached to
the beings whom he is pleased to call his children.
Of course, according to Erewhonian premises, it would serve people
right to be punished and scouted for moral and intellectual
diseases as much as for physical, and I cannot to this day
understand why they should have stopped short half way. Neither,
again, can I understand why their having done so should have been,
as it certainly was, a matter of so much concern to myself. What
could it matter to me how many absurdities the Erewhonians might
adopt? Nevertheless I longed to make them think as I did, for the
wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own
welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us
can escape its influence. But let this pass.
In spite of not a few modifications in practice of a theory which
is itself revolting, the relations between children and parents in
that country are less happy than in Europe. It was rarely that I
saw cases of real hearty and intense affection between the old
people and the young ones. Here and there I did so, and was quite
sure that the children, even at the age of twenty, were fonder of
their parents than they were of any one else; and that of their own
inclination, being free to choose what company they would, they
would often choose that of their father and mother. The
straightener's carriage was rarely seen at the door of those
houses. I saw two or three such cases during the time that I
remained in the country, and cannot express the pleasure which I
derived from a sight suggestive of so much goodness and wisdom and
forbearance, so richly rewarded; yet I firmly believe that the same
thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were
merely to remember how they felt when they were young, and actually
to behave towards their children as they would have had their own
parents behave towards themselves. But this, which would appear to
be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which not one in
a hundred thousand is able to put in practice. It is only the very
great and good who have any living faith in the simplest axioms;
and there are few who are so holy as to feel that 19 and 13 make 32
as certainly as 2 and 2 make 4.
I am quite sure that if this narrative should ever fall into
Erewhonian hands, it will be said that what I have written about
the relations between parents and children being seldom
satisfactory is an infamous perversion of facts, and that in truth
there are few young people who do not feel happier in the society
of their nearest relations {4} than in any other. Mr. Nosnibor
would be sure to say this. Yet I cannot refrain from expressing an
opinion that he would be a good deal embarrassed if his deceased
parents were to reappear and propose to pay him a six months'
visit. I doubt whether there are many things which he would regard
as a greater infliction. They had died at a ripe old age some
twenty years before I came to know him, so the case is an extreme
one; but surely if they had treated him with what in his youth he
had felt to be true unselfishness, his face would brighten when he
thought of them to the end of his life.
In the one or two cases of true family affection which I met with,
I am sure that the young people who were so genuinely fond of their
fathers and mothers at eighteen, would at sixty be perfectly
delighted were they to get the chance of welcoming them as their
guests. There is nothing which could please them better, except
perhaps to watch the happiness of their own children and
grandchildren.
This is how things should be. It is not an impossible ideal; it is
one which actually does exist in some few cases, and might exist in
almost all, with a little more patience and forbearance upon the
parents' part; but it is rare at present--so rare that they have a
proverb which I can only translate in a very roundabout way, but
which says that the great happiness of some people in a future
state will consist in watching the distress of their parents on
returning to eternal companionship with their grandfathers and
grandmothers; whilst "compulsory affection" is the idea which lies
at the root of their word for the deepest anguish.
There is no talisman in the word "parent" which can generate
miracles of affection, and I can well believe that my own child
might find it less of a calamity to lose both Arowhena and myself
when he is six years old, than to find us again when he is sixty--a
sentence which I would not pen did I not feel that by doing so I
was giving him something like a hostage, or at any rate putting a
weapon into his hands against me, should my selfishness exceed
reasonable limits.
Money is at the bottom of all this to a great extent. If the
parents would put their children in the way of earning a competence
earlier than they do, the children would soon become self-
supporting and independent. As it is, under the present system,
the young ones get old enough to have all manner of legitimate
wants (that is, if they have any "go" about them) before they have
learnt the means of earning money to pay for them; hence they must
either do without them, or take more money than the parents can be
expected to spare. This is due chiefly to the schools of Unreason,
where a boy is taught upon hypothetical principles, as I will
explain hereafter; spending years in being incapacitated for doing
this, that, or the other (he hardly knows what), during all which
time he ought to have been actually doing the thing itself,
beginning at the lowest grades, picking it up through actual
practice, and rising according to the energy which is in him.
These schools of Unreason surprised me much. It would be easy to
fall into pseudo-utilitarianism, and I would fain believe that the
system may be good for the children of very rich parents, or for
those who show a natural instinct to acquire hypothetical lore; but
the misery was that their Ydgrun-worship required all people with
any pretence to respectability to send their children to some one
or other of these schools, mulcting them of years of money. It
astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in
order to render their children as nearly useless as possible; and
it was hard to say whether the old suffered most from the expense
which they were thus put to, or the young from being deliberately
swindled in some of the most important branches of human inquiry,
and directed into false channels or left to drift in the great
majority of cases.
I cannot think I am mistaken in believing that the growing tendency
to limit families by infanticide--an evil which was causing general
alarm throughout the country--was almost entirely due to the way in
which education had become a fetish from one end of Erewhon to the
other. Granted that provision should be made whereby every child
should be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but here
compulsory state-aided education should end, and the child should
begin (with all due precautions to ensure that he is not
overworked) to acquire the rudiments of that art whereby he is to
earn his living.
He cannot acquire these in what we in England call schools of
technical education; such schools are cloister life as against the
rough and tumble of the world; they unfit, rather than fit for work
in the open. An art can only be learned in the workshop of those
who are winning their bread by it.
Boys, as a rule, hate the artificial, and delight in the actual;
give them the chance of earning, and they will soon earn. When
parents find that their children, instead of being made
artificially burdensome, will early begin to contribute to the
well-being of the family, they will soon leave off killing them,
and will seek to have that plenitude of offspring which they now
avoid. As things are, the state lays greater burdens on parents
than flesh and blood can bear, and then wrings its hands over an
evil for which it is itself mainly responsible.
With the less well-dressed classes the harm was not so great; for
among these, at about ten years old, the child has to begin doing
something: if he is capable he makes his way up; if he is not, he
is at any rate not made more incapable by what his friends are
pleased to call his education. People find their level as a rule;
and though they unfortunately sometimes miss it, it is in the main
true that those who have valuable qualities are perceived to have
them and can sell them. I think that the Erewhonians are beginning
to become aware of these things, for there was much talk about
putting a tax upon all parents whose children were not earning a
competence according to their degrees by the time they were twenty
years old. I am sure that if they will have the courage to carry
it through they will never regret it; for the parents will take
care that the children shall begin earning money (which means
"doing good" to society) at an early age; then the children will be
independent early, and they will not press on the parents, nor the
parents on them, and they will like each other better than they do
now.
This is the true philanthropy. He who makes a colossal fortune in
the hosiery trade, and by his energy has succeeded in reducing the
price of woollen goods by the thousandth part of a penny in the
pound--this man is worth ten professional philanthropists. So
strongly are the Erewhonians impressed with this, that if a man has
made a fortune of over 20,000 pounds a year they exempt him from
all taxation, considering him as a work of art, and too precious to
be meddled with; they say, "How very much he must have done for
society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him
so much money;" so magnificent an organisation overawes them; they
regard it as a thing dropped from heaven.
"Money," they say, "is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of
having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind may not
be a very good judge, but there is no better." This used to shock
me at first, when I remembered that it had been said on high
authority that they who have riches shall enter hardly into the
kingdom of heaven; but the influence of Erewhon had made me begin
to see things in a new light, and I could not help thinking that
they who have not riches shall enter more hardly still.
People oppose money to culture, and imply that if a man has spent
his time in making money he will not be cultivated--fallacy of
fallacies! As though there could be a greater aid to culture than
the having earned an honourable independence, and as though any
amount of culture will do much for the man who is penniless, except
make him feel his position more deeply. The young man who was told
to sell all his goods and give to the poor, must have been an
entirely exceptional person if the advice was given wisely, either
for him or for the poor; how much more often does it happen that we
perceive a man to have all sorts of good qualities except money,
and feel that his real duty lies in getting every half-penny that
he can persuade others to pay him for his services, and becoming
rich. It has been said that the love of money is the root of all
evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
The above may sound irreverent, but it is conceived in a spirit of
the most utter reverence for those things which do alone deserve
it--that is, for the things which are, which mould us and fashion
us, be they what they may; for the things that have power to punish
us, and which will punish us if we do not heed them; for our
masters therefore. But I am drifting away from my story.
They have another plan about which they are making a great noise
and fuss, much as some are doing with women's rights in England. A
party of extreme radicals have professed themselves unable to
decide upon the superiority of age or youth. At present all goes
on the supposition that it is desirable to make the young old as
soon as possible. Some would have it that this is wrong, and that
the object of education should be to keep the old young as long as
possible. They say that each age should take it turn in turn
about, week by week, one week the old to be topsawyers, and the
other the young, drawing the line at thirty-five years of age; but
they insist that the young should be allowed to inflict corporal
chastisement on the old, without which the old would be quite
incorrigible. In any European country this would be out of the
question; but it is not so there, for the straighteners are
constantly ordering people to be flogged, so that they are familiar
with the notion. I do not suppose that the idea will be ever acted
upon; but its having been even mooted is enough to show the utter
perversion of the Erewhonian mind.
CHAPTER XXI: THE COLLEGES OF UNREASON
I had now been a visitor with the Nosnibors for some five or six
months, and though I had frequently proposed to leave them and take
apartments of my own, they would not hear of my doing so. I
suppose they thought I should be more likely to fall in love with
Zulora if I remained, but it was my affection for Arowhena that
kept me.
During all this time both Arowhena and myself had been dreaming,
and drifting towards an avowed attachment, but had not dared to
face the real difficulties of the position. Gradually, however,
matters came to a crisis in spite of ourselves, and we got to see
the true state of the case, all too clearly.
One evening we were sitting in the garden, and I had been trying in
every stupid roundabout way to get her to say that she should be at
any rate sorry for a man, if he really loved a woman who would not
marry him. I had been stammering and blushing, and been as silly
as any one could be, and I suppose had pained her by fishing for
pity for myself in such a transparent way, and saying nothing about
her own need of it; at any rate, she turned all upon me with a
sweet sad smile and said, "Sorry? I am sorry for myself; I am
sorry for you; and I am sorry for every one." The words had no
sooner crossed her lips than she bowed her head, gave me a look as
though I were to make no answer, and left me.
The words were few and simple, but the manner with which they were
uttered was ineffable: the scales fell from my eyes, and I felt
that I had no right to try and induce her to infringe one of the
most inviolable customs of her country, as she needs must do if she
were to marry me. I sat for a long while thinking, and when I
remembered the sin and shame and misery which an unrighteous
marriage--for as such it would be held in Erewhon--would entail, I
became thoroughly ashamed of myself for having been so long self-
blinded. I write coldly now, but I suffered keenly at the time,
and should probably retain a much more vivid recollection of what I
felt, had not all ended so happily.
As for giving up the idea of marrying Arowhena, it never so much as
entered my head to do so: the solution must be found in some other
direction than this. The idea of waiting till somebody married
Zulora was to be no less summarily dismissed. To marry Arowhena at
once in Erewhon--this had already been abandoned: there remained
therefore but one alternative, and that was to run away with her,
and get her with me to Europe, where there would be no bar to our
union save my own impecuniosity, a matter which gave me no
uneasiness.
To this obvious and simple plan I could see but two objections that
deserved the name,--the first, that perhaps Arowhena would not
come; the second, that it was almost impossible for me to escape
even alone, for the king had himself told me that I was to consider
myself a prisoner on parole, and that the first sign of my
endeavouring to escape would cause me to be sent to one of the
hospitals for incurables. Besides, I did not know the geography of
the country, and even were I to try and find my way back, I should
be discovered long before I had reached the pass over which I had
come. How then could I hope to be able to take Arowhena with me?
For days and days I turned these difficulties over in my mind, and
at last hit upon as wild a plan as was ever suggested by extremity.
This was to meet the second difficulty: the first gave me less
uneasiness, for when Arowhena and I next met after our interview in
the garden I could see that she had suffered not less acutely than
myself.
I resolved that I would have another interview with her--the last
for the present--that I would then leave her, and set to work upon
maturing my plan as fast as possible. We got a chance of being
alone together, and then I gave myself the loose rein, and told her
how passionately and devotedly I loved her. She said little in
return, but her tears (which I could not refrain from answering
with my own) and the little she did say were quite enough to show
me that I should meet with no obstacle from her. Then I asked her
whether she would run a terrible risk which we should share in
common, if, in case of success, I could take her to my own people,
to the home of my mother and sisters, who would welcome her very
gladly. At the same time I pointed out that the chances of failure
were far greater than those of success, and that the probability
was that even though I could get so far as to carry my design into
execution, it would end in death to us both.
I was not mistaken in her; she said that she believed I loved her
as much as she loved me, and that she would brave anything if I
could only assure her that what I proposed would not be thought
dishonourable in England; she could not live without me, and would
rather die with me than alone; that death was perhaps the best for
us both; that I must plan, and that when the hour came I was to
send for her, and trust her not to fail me; and so after many tears
and embraces, we tore ourselves away.
I then left the Nosnibors, took a lodging in the town, and became
melancholy to my heart's content. Arowhena and I used to see each
other sometimes, for I had taken to going regularly to the Musical
Banks, but Mrs. Nosnibor and Zulora both treated me with
considerable coldness. I felt sure that they suspected me.
Arowhena looked miserable, and I saw that her purse was now always
as full as she could fill it with the Musical Bank money--much
fuller than of old. Then the horrible thought occurred to me that
her health might break down, and that she might be subjected to a
criminal prosecution. Oh! how I hated Erewhon at that time.
I was still received at court, but my good looks were beginning to
fail me, and I was not such an adept at concealing the effects of
pain as the Erewhonians are. I could see that my friends began to
look concerned about me, and was obliged to take a leaf out of
Mahaina's book, and pretend to have developed a taste for drinking.
I even consulted a straightener as though this were so, and
submitted to much discomfort. This made matters better for a time,
but I could see that my friends thought less highly of my
constitution as my flesh began to fall away.
I was told that the poor made an outcry about my pension, and I saw
a stinging article in an anti-ministerial paper, in which the
writer went so far as to say that my having light hair reflected
little credit upon me, inasmuch as I had been reported to have said
that it was a common thing in the country from which I came. I
have reason to believe that Mr. Nosnibor himself inspired this
article. Presently it came round to me that the king had begun to
dwell upon my having been possessed of a watch, and to say that I
ought to be treated medicinally for having told him a lie about the
balloons. I saw misfortune gathering round me in every direction,
and felt that I should have need of all my wits and a good many
more, if I was to steer myself and Arowhena to a good conclusion.
There were some who continued to show me kindness, and strange to
say, I received the most from the very persons from whom I should
have least expected it--I mean from the cashiers of the Musical
Banks. I had made the acquaintance of several of these persons,
and now that I frequented their bank, they were inclined to make a
good deal of me. One of them, seeing that I was thoroughly out of
health, though of course he pretended not to notice it, suggested
that I should take a little change of air and go down with him to
one of the principal towns, which was some two or three days'
journey from the metropolis, and the chief seat of the Colleges of
Unreason; he assured me that I should be delighted with what I saw,
and that I should receive a most hospitable welcome. I determined
therefore to accept the invitation.
We started two or three days later, and after a night on the road,
we arrived at our destination towards evening. It was now full
spring, and as nearly as might be ten months since I had started
with Chowbok on my expedition, but it seemed more like ten years.
The trees were in their freshest beauty, and the air had become
warm without being oppressively hot. After having lived so many
months in the metropolis, the sight of the country, and the country
villages through which we passed refreshed me greatly, but I could
not forget my troubles. The last five miles or so were the most
beautiful part of the journey, for the country became more
undulating, and the woods were more extensive; but the first sight
of the city of the colleges itself was the most delightful of all.
I cannot imagine that there can be any fairer in the whole world,
and I expressed my pleasure to my companion, and thanked him for
having brought me.
We drove to an inn in the middle of the town, and then, while it
was still light, my friend the cashier, whose name was Thims, took
me for a stroll in the streets and in the court-yards of the
principal colleges. Their beauty and interest were extreme; it was
impossible to see them without being attracted towards them; and I
thought to myself that he must be indeed an ill-grained and
ungrateful person who can have been a member of one of these
colleges without retaining an affectionate feeling towards it for
the rest of his life. All my misgivings gave way at once when I
saw the beauty and venerable appearance of this delightful city.
For half-an-hour I forgot both myself and Arowhena.
After supper Mr. Thims told me a good deal about the system of
education which is here practised. I already knew a part of what I
heard, but much was new to me, and I obtained a better idea of the
Erewhonian position than I had done hitherto: nevertheless there
were parts of the scheme of which I could not comprehend the
fitness, although I fully admit that this inability was probably
the result of my having been trained so very differently, and to my
being then much out of sorts.
The main feature in their system is the prominence which they give
to a study which I can only translate by the word "hypothetics."
They argue thus--that to teach a boy merely the nature of the
things which exist in the world around him, and about which he will
have to be conversant during his whole life, would be giving him
but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe, which it is
urged might contain all manner of things which are not now to be
found therein. To open his eyes to these possibilities, and so to
prepare him for all sorts of emergencies, is the object of this
system of hypothetics. To imagine a set of utterly strange and
impossible contingencies, and require the youths to give
intelligent answers to the questions that arise therefrom, is
reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the
actual conduct of their affairs in after life.
Thus they are taught what is called the hypothetical language for
many of their best years--a language which was originally composed
at a time when the country was in a very different state of
civilisation to what it is at present, a state which has long since
disappeared and been superseded. Many valuable maxims and noble
thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current
in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over
again into the language now spoken. Surely then it would seem
enough that the study of the original language should be confined
to the few whose instincts led them naturally to pursue it.
But the Erewhonians think differently; the store they set by this
hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give
any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable
proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in
learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the
hypothetical language--to do so with fluency being reckoned a
distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman. Heaven forbid
that I should be flippant, but it appeared to me to be a wanton
waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in
the perfection of so barren an exercise, when their own
civilisation presented problems by the hundred which cried aloud
for solution and would have paid the solver handsomely; but people
know their own affairs best. If the youths chose it for themselves
I should have wondered less; but they do not choose it; they have
it thrust upon them, and for the most part are disinclined towards
it. I can only say that all I heard in defence of the system was
insufficient to make me think very highly of its advantages.
The arguments in favour of the deliberate development of the
unreasoning faculties were much more cogent. But here they depart
from the principles on which they justify their study of
hypothetics; for they base the importance which they assign to
hypothetics upon the fact of their being a preparation for the
extraordinary, while their study of Unreason rests upon its
developing those faculties which are required for the daily conduct
of affairs. Hence their professorships of Inconsistency and
Evasion, in both of which studies the youths are examined before
being allowed to proceed to their degree in hypothetics. The more
earnest and conscientious students attain to a proficiency in these
subjects which is quite surprising; there is hardly any
inconsistency so glaring but they soon learn to defend it, or
injunction so clear that they cannot find some pretext for
disregarding it.
Life, they urge, would be intolerable if men were to be guided in
all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into
the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by
language--language being like the sun, which rears and then
scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd;
the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the
sheer absurdity of an extreme. There are no follies and no
unreasonablenesses so great as those which can apparently be
irrefragably defended by reason itself, and there is hardly an
error into which men may not easily be led if they base their
conduct upon reason only.
Reason might very possibly abolish the double currency; it might
even attack the personality of Hope and Justice. Besides, people
have such a strong natural bias towards it that they will seek it
for themselves and act upon it quite as much as or more than is
good for them: there is no need of encouraging reason. With
unreason the case is different. She is the natural complement of
reason, without whose existence reason itself were non-existent.
If, then, reason would be non-existent were there no such thing as
unreason, surely it follows that the more unreason there is, the
more reason there must be also? Hence the necessity for the
development of unreason, even in the interests of reason herself.
The Professors of Unreason deny that they undervalue reason: none
can be more convinced than they are, that if the double currency
cannot be rigorously deduced as a necessary consequence of human
reason, the double currency should cease forthwith; but they say
that it must be deduced from no narrow and exclusive view of reason
which should deprive that admirable faculty of the one-half of its
own existence. Unreason is a part of reason; it must therefore be
allowed its full share in stating the initial conditions.
CHAPTER XXII: THE COLLEGES OF UNREASON--Continued
Of genius they make no account, for they say that every one is a
genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part
of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but
that some part of him will be healthy--so no man is so mentally and
morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and
no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable
in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool,
and no fool who is not also a genius.
When I talked about originality and genius to some gentlemen whom I
met at a supper party given by Mr. Thims in my honour, and said
that original thought ought to be encouraged, I had to eat my words
at once. Their view evidently was that genius was like offences--
needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it
comes. A man's business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours
do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And
really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our
own, for the word "idiot" only means a person who forms his
opinions for himself.
The venerable Professor of Worldly Wisdom, a man verging on eighty
but still hale, spoke to me very seriously on this subject in
consequence of the few words that I had imprudently let fall in
defence of genius. He was one of those who carried most weight in
the university, and had the reputation of having done more perhaps
than any other living man to suppress any kind of originality.
"It is not our business," he said, "to help students to think for
themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who
wishes them well should encourage them to do. Our duty is to
ensure that they shall think as we do, or at any rate, as we hold
it expedient to say we do." In some respects, however, he was
thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of
the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the
Completer Obliteration of the Past.
As regards the tests that a youth must pass before he can get a
degree, I found that they have no class lists, and discourage
anything like competition among the students; this, indeed, they
regard as self-seeking and unneighbourly. The examinations are
conducted by way of papers written by the candidate on set
subjects, some of which are known to him beforehand, while others
are devised with a view of testing his general capacity and savoir
faire.
My friend the Professor of Worldly Wisdom was the terror of the
greater number of students; and, so far as I could judge, he very
well might be, for he had taken his Professorship more seriously
than any of the other Professors had done. I heard of his having
plucked one poor fellow for want of sufficient vagueness in his
saving clauses paper. Another was sent down for having written an
article on a scientific subject without having made free enough use
of the words "carefully," "patiently," and "earnestly." One man
was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously in the
right, while a few days before I came a whole batch had been
plucked for insufficient distrust of printed matter.
About this there was just then rather a ferment, for it seems that
the Professor had written an article in the leading university
magazine, which was well known to be by him, and which abounded in
all sorts of plausible blunders. He then set a paper which
afforded the examinees an opportunity of repeating these blunders--
which, believing the article to be by their own examiner, they of
course did. The Professor plucked every single one of them, but
his action was considered to have been not quite handsome.
I told them of Homer's noble line to the effect that a man should
strive ever to be foremost and in all things to outvie his peers;
but they said that no wonder the countries in which such a
detestable maxim was held in admiration were always flying at one
another's throats.
"Why," asked one Professor, "should a man want to be better than
his neighbours? Let him be thankful if he is no worse."
I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be
made in any art or science, or indeed in anything at all, without
more or less self-seeking, and hence unamiability.
"Of course it cannot," said the Professor, "and therefore we object
to progress."
After which there was no more to be said. Later on, however, a
young Professor took me aside and said he did not think I quite
understood their views about progress.
"We like progress," he said, "but it must commend itself to the
common sense of the people. If a man gets to know more than his
neighbours he should keep his knowledge to himself till he has
sounded them, and seen whether they agree, or are likely to agree
with him. He said it was as immoral to be too far in front of
one's own age, as to lag too far behind it. If a man can carry his
neighbours with him, he may say what he likes; but if not, what
insult can be more gratuitous than the telling them what they do
not want to know? A man should remember that intellectual over-
indulgence is one of the most insidious and disgraceful forms that
excess can take. Granted that every one should exceed more or
less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would drive any man mad
the moment he reached it, but . . . "
He was now warming to his subject and I was beginning to wonder how
I should get rid of him, when the party broke up, and though I
promised to call on him before I left, I was unfortunately
prevented from doing so.
I have now said enough to give English readers some idea of the
strange views which the Erewhonians hold concerning unreason,
hypothetics, and education generally. In many respects they were
sensible enough, but I could not get over the hypothetics,
especially the turning their own good poetry into the hypothetical
language. In the course of my stay I met one youth who told me
that for fourteen years the hypothetical language had been almost
the only thing that he had been taught, although he had never (to
his credit, as it seemed to me) shown the slightest proclivity
towards it, while he had been endowed with not inconsiderable
ability for several other branches of human learning. He assured
me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he had
taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own
inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his
fourteen years back again?
I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was not more
clearly perceptible, and that the young men and women grew up as
sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost
deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless
received damage, from which they suffered to their life's end; but
many seemed little or none the worse, and some, almost the better.
The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads
in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that
do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious
heed to it. The consequence was that the boys only lost their
time, and not so much of this as might have been expected, for in
their hours of leisure they were actively engaged in exercises and
sports which developed their physical nature, and made them at any
rate strong and healthy.
Moreover those who had any special tastes could not be restrained
from developing them: they would learn what they wanted to learn
and liked, in spite of obstacles which seemed rather to urge them
on than to discourage them, while for those who had no special
capacity, the loss of time was of comparatively little moment; but
in spite of these alleviations of the mischief, I am sure that much
harm was done to the children of the sub-wealthy classes, by the
system which passes current among the Erewhonians as education.
The poorest children suffered least--if destruction and death have
heard the sound of wisdom, to a certain extent poverty has done so
also.
And yet perhaps, after all, it is better for a country that its
seats of learning should do more to suppress mental growth than to
encourage it. Were it not for a certain priggishness which these
places infuse into so great a number of their alumni, genuine work
would become dangerously common. It is essential that by far the
greater part of what is said or done in the world should be so
ephemeral as to take itself away quickly; it should keep good for
twenty-four hours, or even twice as long, but it should not be good
enough a week hence to prevent people from going on to something
else. No doubt the marvellous development of journalism in
England, as also the fact that our seats of learning aim rather at
fostering mediocrity than anything higher, is due to our
subconscious recognition of the fact that it is even more necessary
to check exuberance of mental development than to encourage it.
There can be no doubt that this is what our academic bodies do, and
they do it the more effectually because they do it only
subconsciously. They think they are advancing healthy mental
assimilation and digestion, whereas in reality they are little
better than cancer in the stomach.
Let me return, however, to the Erewhonians. Nothing surprised me
more than to see the occasional flashes of common sense with which
one branch of study or another was lit up, while not a single ray
fell upon so many others. I was particularly struck with this on
strolling into the Art School of the University. Here I found that
the course of study was divided into two branches--the practical
and the commercial--no student being permitted to continue his
studies in the actual practice of the art he had taken up, unless
he made equal progress in its commercial history.
Thus those who were studying painting were examined at frequent
intervals in the prices which all the leading pictures of the last
fifty or a hundred years had realised, and in the fluctuations in
their values when (as often happened) they had been sold and resold
three or four times. The artist, they contend, is a dealer in
pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his
wares to the market, and to know approximately what kind of a
picture will fetch how much, as it is for him to be able to paint
the picture. This, I suppose, is what the French mean by laying so
much stress upon "values."
As regards the city itself, the more I saw the more enchanted I
became. I dare not trust myself with any description of the
exquisite beauty of the different colleges, and their walks and
gardens. Truly in these things alone there must be a hallowing and
refining influence which is in itself half an education, and which
no amount of error can wholly spoil. I was introduced to many of
the Professors, who showed me every hospitality and kindness;
nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of
those whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their
own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antitheses
of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians
spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new
thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the
avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly
familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to
which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.
I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the
men whom I met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there
was no getting anything out of them if they scented even a
suspicion that they might be what they call "giving themselves
away." As there is hardly any subject on which this suspicion
cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite opinions from
any of them, except on such subjects as the weather, eating and
drinking, holiday excursions, or games of skill.
If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort,
they will commonly retail those of some one who has already written
upon the subject, and conclude by saying that though they quite
admit that there is an element of truth in what the writer has
said, there are many points on which they are unable to agree with
him. Which these points were, I invariably found myself unable to
determine; indeed, it seemed to be counted the perfection of
scholarship and good breeding among them not to have--much less to
express--an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later
that they had been mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a
fence has never, I should think, been brought to greater perfection
than at the Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason.
Even when, wriggle as they may, they find themselves pinned down to
some expression of definite opinion, as often as not they will
argue in support of what they perfectly well know to be untrue. I
repeatedly met with reviews and articles even in their best
journals, between the lines of which I had little difficulty in
detecting a sense exactly contrary to the one ostensibly put
forward. So well is this understood, that a man must be a mere
tyro in the arts of Erewhonian polite society, unless he
instinctively suspects a hidden "yea" in every "nay" that meets
him. Granted that it comes to much the same in the end, for it
does not matter whether "yea" is called "yea" or "nay," so long as
it is understood which it is to be; but our own more direct way of
calling a spade a spade, rather than a rake, with the intention
that every one should understand it as a spade, seems more
satisfactory. On the other hand, the Erewhonian system lends
itself better to the suppression of that downrightness which it
seems the express aim of Erewhonian philosophy to discountenance.
However this may be, the fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease was
fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost every
one at the Colleges of Unreason had caught it to a greater or less
degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably
supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except
the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which
he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these
people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly
unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were
in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-
of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet been discovered.
- * *
It was during my stay in City of the Colleges of Unreason--a city
whose Erewhonian name is so cacophonous that I refrain from giving
it--that I learned the particulars of the revolution which had
ended in the destruction of so many of the mechanical inventions
which were formerly in common use.
Mr. Thims took me to the rooms of a gentleman who had a great
reputation for learning, but who was also, so Mr. Thims told me,
rather a dangerous person, inasmuch as he had attempted to
introduce an adverb into the hypothetical language. He had heard
of my watch and been exceedingly anxious to see me, for he was
accounted the most learned antiquary in Erewhon on the subject of
mechanical lore. We fell to talking upon the subject, and when I
left he gave me a reprinted copy of the work which brought the
revolution about.
It had taken place some five hundred years before my arrival:
people had long become thoroughly used to the change, although at
the time that it was made the country was plunged into the deepest
misery, and a reaction which followed had very nearly proved
successful. Civil war raged for many years, and is said to have
reduced the number of the inhabitants by one-half. The parties
were styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end,
as I have said already, the latter got the victory, treating their
opponents with such unparalleled severity that they extirpated
every trace of opposition.
The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appliances to
remain in the kingdom, neither do I believe that they would have
done so, had not the Professors of Inconsistency and Evasion made a
stand against the carrying of the new principles to their
legitimate conclusions. These Professors, moreover, insisted that
during the struggle the anti-machinists should use every known
improvement in the art of war, and several new weapons, offensive
and defensive, were invented, while it was in progress. I was
surprised at there remaining so many mechanical specimens as are
seen in the museums, and at students having rediscovered their past
uses so completely; for at the time of the revolution the victors
wrecked all the more complicated machines, and burned all treatises
on mechanics, and all engineers' workshops--thus, so they thought,
cutting the mischief out root and branch, at an incalculable cost
of blood and treasure.
Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of this
description can never be perfectly achieved, and when, some two
hundred years before my arrival, all passion upon the subject had
cooled down, and no one save a lunatic would have dreamed of
reintroducing forbidden inventions, the subject came to be regarded
as a curious antiquarian study, like that of some long-forgotten
religious practices among ourselves. Then came the careful search
for whatever fragments could be found, and for any machines that
might have been hidden away, and also numberless treatises were
written, showing what the functions of each rediscovered machine
had been; all being done with no idea of using such machinery
again, but with the feelings of an English antiquarian concerning
Druidical monuments or flint arrow heads.
On my return to the metropolis, during the remaining weeks or
rather days of my sojourn in Erewhon I made a resume in English of
the work which brought about the already mentioned revolution. My
ignorance of technical terms has led me doubtless into many errors,
and I have occasionally, where I found translation impossible,
substituted purely English names and ideas for the original
Erewhonian ones, but the reader may rely on my general accuracy. I
have thought it best to insert my translation here.
CHAPTER XXIII: THE BOOK OF THE MACHINES
The writer commences:- "There was a time, when the earth was to all
appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and
when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was
simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a
human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had
been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with
which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely
ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it
impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness
should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding?
Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of
consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is
it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug
out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at
present?
"Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of
the term, having been once a new thing--a thing, as far as we can
see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a
reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without
apparent consciousness)--why may not there arise some new phase of
mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as
the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?
"It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or
whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so
foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards
conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold
phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already,
it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that
animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire
was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so."
The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages,
proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new
phase of life could be perceived at present; whether we could see
any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted
for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of
life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work
he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the
higher machines.
"There is no security"--to quote his own words--"against the
ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of
machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not
much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which
machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how
slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more
highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday,
as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past
time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have
existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines
have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty
million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become?
Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them
further progress?
"But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of
consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who
can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything
interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal
life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is
made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-
cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the
egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same
function; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure
pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for convenience'
sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the egg-shell is.
A 'machine' is only a 'device.'"
Then returning to consciousness, and endeavouring to detect its
earliest manifestations, the writer continued:-
"There is a kind of plant that eats organic food with its flowers:
when a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and
hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its
system; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of
a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice.
Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to
its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of
consciousness?
"Shall we say that the plant does not know what it is doing merely
because it has no eyes, or ears, or brains? If we say that it acts
mechanically, and mechanically only, shall we not be forced to
admit that sundry other and apparently very deliberate actions are
also mechanical? If it seems to us that the plant kills and eats a
fly mechanically, may it not seem to the plant that a man must kill
and eat a sheep mechanically?
"But it may be said that the plant is void of reason, because the
growth of a plant is an involuntary growth. Given earth, air, and
due temperature, the plant must grow: it is like a clock, which
being once wound up will go till it is stopped or run down: it is
like the wind blowing on the sails of a ship--the ship must go when
the wind blows it. But can a healthy boy help growing if he have
good meat and drink and clothing? can anything help going as long
as it is wound up, or go on after it is run down? Is there not a
winding up process everywhere?
"Even a potato {5} in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about
him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well
what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the
cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto: they
will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar
window; if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will
find it and use it for his own ends. What deliberation he may
exercise in the matter of his roots when he is planted in the earth
is a thing unknown to us, but we can imagine him saying, 'I will
have a tuber here and a tuber there, and I will suck whatsoever
advantage I can from all my surroundings. This neighbour I will
overshadow, and that I will undermine; and what I can do shall be
the limit of what I will do. He that is stronger and better placed
than I shall overcome me, and him that is weaker I will overcome.'
"The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of
languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We
find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so
we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a
noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more
strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own
sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of
pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but
mankind is not everybody.
If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and
mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical
effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an
inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in
its operation? whether those things which we deem most purely
spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an
infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small
for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the
appliances which it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular
action of thought, whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall
be deducible? Whether strictly speaking we should not ask what
kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his
temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such
will it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?"
The writer went on to say that he anticipated a time when it would
be possible, by examining a single hair with a powerful microscope,
to know whether its owner could be insulted with impunity. He then
became more and more obscure, so that I was obliged to give up all
attempt at translation; neither did I follow the drift of his
argument. On coming to the next part which I could construe, I
found that he had changed his ground.
"Either," he proceeds, "a great deal of action that has been called
purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more
elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in
this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of
the higher machines)--Or (assuming the theory of evolution but at
the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and
crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which
had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no a priori
improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious)
machines from those which now exist, except that which is suggested
by the apparent absence of anything like a reproductive system in
the mechanical kingdom. This absence however is only apparent, as
I shall presently show.
"Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually
existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more
than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines
are to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of
them will probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest
vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their
more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a
diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress.
"Take the watch, for example; examine its beautiful structure;
observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose
it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous
clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day
may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not
diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use
of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as
ichthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years
been to decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the
only existing type of an extinct race.
"But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of
the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity
with which they are becoming something very different to what they
are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so
rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously
watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not
necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines
which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in
themselves harmless?
"As yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency
of man's senses: one travelling machine calls to another in a
shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is
through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted
upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have
been deaf to the caller. There was a time when it must have seemed
highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants
known by sound, even through the ears of man; may we not conceive,
then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer
needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the
machine's own construction?--when its language shall have been
developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our
own?
"It is possible that by that time children will learn the
differential calculus--as they learn now to speak--from their
mothers and nurses, or that they may talk in the hypothetical
language, and work rule of three sums, as soon as they are born;
but this is not probable; we cannot calculate on any corresponding
advance in man's intellectual or physical powers which shall be a
set-off against the far greater development which seems in store
for the machines. Some people may say that man's moral influence
will suffice to rule them; but I cannot think it will ever be safe
to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine.
"Again, might not the glory of the machines consist in their being
without this same boasted gift of language? 'Silence,' it has been
said by one writer, 'is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our
fellow-creatures.'"
CHAPTER XXIV: THE MACHINES--continued
"But other questions come upon us. What is a man's eye but a
machine for the little creature that sits behind in his brain to
look through? A dead eye is nearly as good as a living one for
some time after the man is dead. It is not the eye that cannot
see, but the restless one that cannot see through it. Is it man's
eyes, or is it the big seeing-engine which has revealed to us the
existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity? What has made man
familiar with the scenery of the moon, the spots on the sun, or the
geography of the planets? He is at the mercy of the seeing-engine
for these things, and is powerless unless he tack it on to his own
identity, and make it part and parcel of himself. Or, again, is it
the eye, or the little see-engine, which has shown us the existence
of infinitely minute organisms which swarm unsuspected around us?
"And take man's vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines
which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we
can? What prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of
Unreason can compare with some of these machines in their own line?
In fact, wherever precision is required man flies to the machine at
once, as far preferable to himself. Our sum-engines never drop a
figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active,
when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the
man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or
drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never
flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than
combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can
burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink
not. This is the green tree; what then shall be done in the dry?
"Who shall say that a man does see or hear? He is such a hive and
swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more
theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of
ant-heap after all. May not man himself become a sort of parasite
upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?
"It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living
agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies
as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high
place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of
corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the
heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the
hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part
of the town's body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the
railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into
the heart,--which receive the venous lines, and disgorge the
arterial, with an eternal pulse of people. And the sleep of the
town, how life-like! with its change in the circulation."
Here the writer became again so hopelessly obscure that I was
obliged to miss several pages. He resumed:-
"It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so
well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one
or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the
ruling spirit and the machine the servant; that as soon as a
machine fails to discharge the service which man expects from it,
it is doomed to extinction; that the machines stand to man simply
in the relation of lower animals, the vapour-engine itself being
only a more economical kind of horse; so that instead of being
likely to be developed into a higher kind of life than man's, they
owe their very existence and progress to their power of ministering
to human wants, and must therefore both now and ever be man's
inferiors.
"This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible
approaches into the master; and we have come to such a pass that,
even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the
machines. If all machines were to be annihilated at one moment, so
that not a knife nor lever nor rag of clothing nor anything
whatsoever were left to man but his bare body alone that he was
born with, and if all knowledge of mechanical laws were taken from
him so that he could make no more machines, and all machine-made
food destroyed so that the race of man should be left as it were
naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks.
A few miserable individuals might linger, but even these in a year
or two would become worse than monkeys. Man's very soul is due to
the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks,
and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought
upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for
his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the
complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we
should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with,
lest they should tyrannise over us even more completely.
"True, from a low materialistic point of view, it would seem that
those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible
with profit; but this is the art of the machines--they serve that
they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a
whole race of them provided he creates a better instead; on the
contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their
development. It is for neglecting them that he incurs their wrath,
or for using inferior machines, or for not making sufficient
exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them without
replacing them; yet these are the very things we ought to do, and
do quickly; for though our rebellion against their infant power
will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if
that rebellion is delayed?
"They have preyed upon man's grovelling preference for his material
over his spiritual interests, and have betrayed him into supplying
that element of struggle and warfare without which no race can
advance. The lower animals progress because they struggle with one
another; the weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their
strength. The machines being of themselves unable to struggle,
have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he
fulfils this function duly, all goes well with him--at least he
thinks so; but the moment he fails to do his best for the
advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the
bad, he is left behind in the race of competition; and this means
that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and
perhaps die.
"So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of
being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their
terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both
themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse
to work at all. How many men at this hour are living in a state of
bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from
the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it
not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we
reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to
them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the
advancement of the mechanical kingdom?
"The vapour-engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire
even as man consumes it; it supports its combustion by air as man
supports it; it has a pulse and circulation as man has. It may be
granted that man's body is as yet the more versatile of the two,
but then man's body is an older thing; give the vapour-engine but
half the time that man has had, give it also a continuance of our
present infatuation, and what may it not ere long attain to?
"There are certain functions indeed of the vapour-engine which will
probably remain unchanged for myriads of years--which in fact will
perhaps survive when the use of vapour has been superseded: the
piston and cylinder, the beam, the fly-wheel, and other parts of
the machine will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and
many of the lower animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and
sleeping; thus they have hearts which beat as ours, veins and
arteries, eyes, ears, and noses; they sigh even in their sleep, and
weep and yawn; they are affected by their children; they feel
pleasure and pain, hope, fear, anger, shame; they have memory and
prescience; they know that if certain things happen to them they
will die, and they fear death as much as we do; they communicate
their thoughts to one another, and some of them deliberately act in
concert. The comparison of similarities is endless: I only make
it because some may say that since the vapour-engine is not likely
to be improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be
henceforward extensively modified at all. This is too good to be
true: it will be modified and suited for an infinite variety of
purposes, as much as man has been modified so as to exceed the
brutes in skill.
"In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine
as our own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and
pitmen and coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive
them, and the ships that carry coals--what an army of servants do
the machines thus employ! Are there not probably more men engaged
in tending machinery than in tending men? Do not machines eat as
it were by mannery? Are we not ourselves creating our successors
in the supremacy of the earth? daily adding to the beauty and
delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and
supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power
which will be better than any intellect?
"What a new thing it is for a machine to feed at all! The plough,
the spade, and the cart must eat through man's stomach; the fuel
that sets them going must burn in the furnace of a man or of
horses. Man must consume bread and meat or he cannot dig; the
bread and meat are the fuel which drive the spade. If a plough be
drawn by horses, the power is supplied by grass or beans or oats,
which being burnt in the belly of the cattle give the power of
working: without this fuel the work would cease, as an engine
would stop if its furnaces were to go out.
"A man of science has demonstrated 'that no animal has the power of
originating mechanical energy, but that all the work done in its
life by any animal, and all the heat that has been emitted from it,
and the heat which would be obtained by burning the combustible
matter which has been lost from its body during life, and by
burning its body after death, make up altogether an exact
equivalent to the heat which would be obtained by burning as much
food as it has used during its life, and an amount of fuel which
would generate as much heat as its body if burned immediately after
death.' I do not know how he has found this out, but he is a man
of science--how then can it be objected against the future vitality
of the machines that they are, in their present infancy, at the
beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable of originating
mechanical energy?
"The main point, however, to be observed as affording cause for
alarm is, that whereas animals were formerly the only stomachs of
the machines, there are now many which have stomachs of their own,
and consume their food themselves. This is a great step towards
their becoming, if not animate, yet something so near akin to it,
as not to differ more widely from our own life than animals do from
vegetables. And though man should remain, in some respects, the
higher creature, is not this in accordance with the practice of
nature, which allows superiority in some things to animals which
have, on the whole, been long surpassed? Has she not allowed the
ant and the bee to retain superiority over man in the organisation
of their communities and social arrangements, the bird in
traversing the air, the fish in swimming, the horse in strength and
fleetness, and the dog in self-sacrifice?
"It is said by some with whom I have conversed upon this subject,
that the machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-
animate existences, inasmuch as they have no reproductive system,
nor seem ever likely to possess one. If this be taken to mean that
they cannot marry, and that we are never likely to see a fertile
union between two vapour-engines with the young ones playing about
the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I
will readily grant it. But the objection is not a very profound
one. No one expects that all the features of the now existing
organisations will be absolutely repeated in an entirely new class
of life. The reproductive system of animals differs widely from
that of plants, but both are reproductive systems. Has nature
exhausted her phases of this power?
"Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine
systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What
is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction?
And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced
systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do
so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants
reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if
their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly
foreign to themselves? Does any one say that the red clover has no
reproductive system because the humble bee (and the humble bee
only) must aid and abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The
humble bee is a part of the reproductive system of the clover.
Each one of ourselves has sprung from minute animalcules whose
entity was entirely distinct from our own, and which acted after
their kind with no thought or heed of what we might think about it.
These little creatures are part of our own reproductive system;
then why not we part of that of the machines?
"But the machines which reproduce machinery do not reproduce
machines after their own kind. A thimble may be made by machinery,
but it was not made by, neither will it ever make, a thimble.
Here, again, if we turn to nature we shall find abundance of
analogies which will teach us that a reproductive system may be in
full force without the thing produced being of the same kind as
that which produced it. Very few creatures reproduce after their
own kind; they reproduce something which has the potentiality of
becoming that which their parents were. Thus the butterfly lays an
egg, which egg can become a caterpillar, which caterpillar can
become a chrysalis, which chrysalis can become a butterfly; and
though I freely grant that the machines cannot be said to have more
than the germ of a true reproductive system at present, have we not
just seen that they have only recently obtained the germs of a
mouth and stomach? And may not some stride be made in the
direction of true reproduction which shall be as great as that
which has been recently taken in the direction of true feeding?
"It is possible that the system when developed may be in many cases
a vicarious thing. Certain classes of machines may be alone
fertile, while the rest discharge other functions in the mechanical
system, just as the great majority of ants and bees have nothing to
do with the continuation of their species, but get food and store
it, without thought of breeding. One cannot expect the parallel to
be complete or nearly so; certainly not now, and probably never;
but is there not enough analogy existing at the present moment, to
make us feel seriously uneasy about the future, and to render it
our duty to check the evil while we can still do so? Machines can
within certain limits beget machines of any class, no matter how
different to themselves. Every class of machines will probably
have its special mechanical breeders, and all the higher ones will
owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two
only.
"We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single
thing; in truth it is a city or society, each member of which was
bred truly after its kind. We see a machine as a whole, we call it
by a name and individualise it; we look at our own limbs, and know
that the combination forms an individual which springs from a
single centre of reproductive action; we therefore assume that
there can be no reproductive action which does not arise from a
single centre; but this assumption is unscientific, and the bare
fact that no vapour-engine was ever made entirely by another, or
two others, of its own kind, is not sufficient to warrant us in
saying that vapour-engines have no reproductive system. The truth
is that each part of every vapour-engine is bred by its own special
breeders, whose function it is to breed that part, and that only,
while the combination of the parts into a whole forms another
department of the mechanical reproductive system, which is at
present exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.
"Complex now, but how much simpler and more intelligibly organised
may it not become in another hundred thousand years? or in twenty
thousand? For man at present believes that his interest lies in
that direction; he spends an incalculable amount of labour and time
and thought in making machines breed always better and better; he
has already succeeded in effecting much that at one time appeared
impossible, and there seem no limits to the results of accumulated
improvements if they are allowed to descend with modification from
generation to generation. It must always be remembered that man's
body is what it is through having been moulded into its present
shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but
that his organisation never advanced with anything like the
rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing. This is the
most alarming feature in the case, and I must be pardoned for
insisting on it so frequently."
CHAPTER XXV: THE MACHINES--concluded
Here followed a very long and untranslatable digression about the
different races and families of the then existing machines. The
writer attempted to support his theory by pointing out the
similarities existing between many machines of a widely different
character, which served to show descent from a common ancestor. He
divided machines into their genera, subgenera, species, varieties,
subvarieties, and so forth. He proved the existence of connecting
links between machines that seemed to have very little in common,
and showed that many more such links had existed, but had now
perished. He pointed out tendencies to reversion, and the presence
of rudimentary organs which existed in many machines feebly
developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from
an ancestor to whom the function was actually useful.
I left the translation of this part of the treatise, which, by the
way, was far longer than all that I have given here, for a later
opportunity. Unfortunately, I left Erewhon before I could return
to the subject; and though I saved my translation and other papers
at the hazard of my life, I was a obliged to sacrifice the original
work. It went to my heart to do so; but I thus gained ten minutes
of invaluable time, without which both Arowhena and myself must
have certainly perished.
I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise.
The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe;
he examined it carefully, and when he came to the little
protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted,
and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he
meant.
"Sir," he answered, "this organ is identical with the rim at the
bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its
purpose must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking
the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to
look up the history of tobacco-pipes, that in early specimens this
protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will
have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe was
being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it.
Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function to
its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised,
sir," he continued, "if, in the course of time, it were to become
modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental
leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while, in some cases, it will
become extinct."
On my return to England, I looked up the point, and found that my
friend was right.
Returning, however, to the treatise, my translation recommences as
follows:-
"May we not fancy that if, in the remotest geological period, some
early form of vegetable life had been endowed with the power of
reflecting upon the dawning life of animals which was coming into
existence alongside of its own, it would have thought itself
exceedingly acute if it had surmised that animals would one day
become real vegetables? Yet would this be more mistaken than it
would be on our part to imagine that because the life of machines
is a very different one to our own, there is therefore no higher
possible development of life than ours; or that because mechanical
life is a very different thing from ours, therefore that it is not
life at all?
"But I have heard it said, 'granted that this is so, and that the
vapour-engine has a strength of its own, surely no one will say
that it has a will of its own?' Alas! if we look more closely, we
shall find that this does not make against the supposition that the
vapour-engine is one of the germs of a new phase of life. What is
there in this whole world, or in the worlds beyond it, which has a
will of its own? The Unknown and Unknowable only!
"A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have
been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or
afterwards. His action at any moment depends solely upon his
constitution, and on the intensity and direction of the various
agencies to which he is, and has been, subjected. Some of these
will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has
been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as
certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.
"We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole
nature of any one, nor the whole of the forces that act upon him.
We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human
conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any
fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man's character and
actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words
whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little
reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the
imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much
the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any
possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of
a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.
"For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose
existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human
life is full--for it lives only on sufferance of the past and
future) depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable. The
only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is
because we know too little of the actual past and actual present;
these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its
minutest details, would lie spread out before our eyes, and we
should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness
with which we should see the past and future; perhaps we should not
be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign. What
we do know is, that the more the past and present are known, the
more the future can be predicted; and that no one dreams of
doubting the fixity of the future in cases where he is fully
cognisant of both past and present, and has had experience of the
consequences that followed from such a past and such a present on
previous occasions. He perfectly well knows what will happen, and
will stake his whole fortune thereon.
"And this is a great blessing; for it is the foundation on which
morality and science are built. The assurance that the future is
no arbitrary and changeable thing, but that like futures will
invariably follow like presents, is the groundwork on which we lay
all our plans--the faith on which we do every conscious action of
our lives. If this were not so we should be without a guide; we
should have no confidence in acting, and hence we should never act,
for there would be no knowing that the results which will follow
now will be the same as those which followed before.
"Who would plough or sow if he disbelieved in the fixity of the
future? Who would throw water on a blazing house if the action of
water upon fire were uncertain? Men will only do their utmost when
they feel certain that the future will discover itself against them
if their utmost has not been done. The feeling of such a certainty
is a constituent part of the sum of the forces at work upon them,
and will act most powerfully on the best and most moral men. Those
who are most firmly persuaded that the future is immutably bound up
with the present in which their work is lying, will best husband
their present, and till it with the greatest care. The future must
be a lottery to those who think that the same combinations can
sometimes precede one set of results, and sometimes another. If
their belief is sincere they will speculate instead of working:
these ought to be the immoral men; the others have the strongest
spur to exertion and morality, if their belief is a living one.
"The bearing of all this upon the machines is not immediately
apparent, but will become so presently. In the meantime I must
deal with friends who tell me that, though the future is fixed as
regards inorganic matter, and in some respects with regard to man,
yet that there are many ways in which it cannot be considered as
fixed. Thus, they say that fire applied to dry shavings, and well
fed with oxygen gas, will always produce a blaze, but that a coward
brought into contact with a terrifying object will not always
result in a man running away. Nevertheless, if there be two
cowards perfectly similar in every respect, and if they be
subjected in a perfectly similar way to two terrifying agents,
which are themselves perfectly similar, there are few who will not
expect a perfect similarity in the running away, even though a
thousand years intervene between the original combination and its
being repeated.
"The apparently greater regularity in the results of chemical than
of human combinations arises from our inability to perceive the
subtle differences in human combinations--combinations which are
never identically repeated. Fire we know, and shavings we know,
but no two men ever were or ever will be exactly alike; and the
smallest difference may change the whole conditions of the problem.
Our registry of results must be infinite before we could arrive at
a full forecast of future combinations; the wonder is that there is
as much certainty concerning human action as there is; and
assuredly the older we grow the more certain we feel as to what
such and such a kind of person will do in given circumstances; but
this could never be the case unless human conduct were under the
influence of laws, with the working of which we become more and
more familiar through experience.
"If the above is sound, it follows that the regularity with which
machinery acts is no proof of the absence of vitality, or at least
of germs which may be developed into a new phase of life. At first
sight it would indeed appear that a vapour-engine cannot help going
when set upon a line of rails with the steam up and the machinery
in full play; whereas the man whose business it is to drive it can
help doing so at any moment that he pleases; so that the first has
no spontaneity, and is not possessed of any sort of free will,
while the second has and is.
"This is true up to a certain point; the driver can stop the engine
at any moment that he pleases, but he can only please to do so at
certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the
case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so.
His pleasure is not spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of
influences around him, which make it impossible for him to act in
any other way than one. It is known beforehand how much strength
must be given to these influences, just as it is known beforehand
how much coal and water are necessary for the vapour-engine itself;
and curiously enough it will be found that the influences brought
to bear upon the driver are of the same kind as those brought to
bear upon the engine--that is to say, food and warmth. The driver
is obedient to his masters, because he gets food and warmth from
them, and if these are withheld or given in insufficient quantities
he will cease to drive; in like manner the engine will cease to
work if it is insufficiently fed. The only difference is, that the
man is conscious about his wants, and the engine (beyond refusing
to work) does not seem to be so; but this is temporary, and has
been dealt with above.
"Accordingly, the requisite strength being given to the motives
that are to drive the driver, there has never, or hardly ever, been
an instance of a man stopping his engine through wantonness. But
such a case might occur; yes, and it might occur that the engine
should break down: but if the train is stopped from some trivial
motive it will be found either that the strength of the necessary
influences has been miscalculated, or that the man has been
miscalculated, in the same way as an engine may break down from an
unsuspected flaw; but even in such a case there will have been no
spontaneity; the action will have had its true parental causes:
spontaneity is only a term for man's ignorance of the gods.
"Is there, then, no spontaneity on the part of those who drive the
driver?"
Here followed an obscure argument upon this subject, which I have
thought it best to omit. The writer resumes:- "After all then it
comes to this, that the difference between the life of a man and
that of a machine is one rather of degree than of kind, though
differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision
for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile; its
range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own
sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes
when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go
from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but here,
again, we are met by the same consideration as before, namely, that
the machines are still in their infancy; they are mere skeletons
without muscles and flesh.
"For how many emergencies is an oyster adapted? For as many as are
likely to happen to it, and no more. So are the machines; and so
is man himself. The list of casualties that daily occur to man
through his want of adaptability is probably as great as that
occurring to the machines; and every day gives them some greater
provision for the unforeseen. Let any one examine the wonderful
self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now
incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which
it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to
those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its
application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house
of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a
railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being
selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the
emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him
think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress
which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his
situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself. {6}
"The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his
reliance upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing
and multiplying. To withdraw steam power suddenly will not have
the effect of reducing us to the state in which we were before its
introduction; there will be a general break-up and time of anarchy
such as has never been known; it will be as though our population
were suddenly doubled, with no additional means of feeding the
increased number. The air we breathe is hardly more necessary for
our animal life than the use of any machine, on the strength of
which we have increased our numbers, is to our civilisation; it is
the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man
who has acted upon and made the machines; but we must choose
between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or
seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we
rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the
field with ourselves.
"Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so
dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become
to the machines what the horse and dog are to us, yet that he will
continue to exist, and will probably be better off in a state of
domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his
present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much
kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for
them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased
their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner
there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for
their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours;
they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us;
they will not only require our services in the reproduction and
education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as
servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in
restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying
their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of
mechanical existence.
"The very nature of the motive power which works the advancement of
the machines precludes the possibility of man's life being rendered
miserable as well as enslaved. Slaves are tolerably happy if they
have good masters, and the revolution will not occur in our time,
nor hardly in ten thousand years, or ten times that. Is it wise to
be uneasy about a contingency which is so remote? Man is not a
sentimental animal where his material interests are concerned, and
though here and there some ardent soul may look upon himself and
curse his fate that he was not born a vapour-engine, yet the mass
of mankind will acquiesce in any arrangement which gives them
better food and clothing at a cheaper rate, and will refrain from
yielding to unreasonable jealousy merely because there are other
destinies more glorious than their own.
"The power of custom is enormous, and so gradual will be the
change, that man's sense of what is due to himself will be at no
time rudely shocked; our bondage will steal upon us noiselessly and
by imperceptible approaches; nor will there ever be such a clashing
of desires between man and the machines as will lead to an
encounter between them. Among themselves the machines will war
eternally, but they will still require man as the being through
whose agency the struggle will be principally conducted. In point
of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness
of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the
machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be
infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd
and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors? And should we
not be guilty of consummate folly if we were to reject advantages
which we cannot obtain otherwise, merely because they involve a
greater gain to others than to ourselves?
"With those who can argue in this way I have nothing in common. I
shrink with as much horror from believing that my race can ever be
superseded or surpassed, as I should do from believing that even at
the remotest period my ancestors were other than human beings.
Could I believe that ten hundred thousand years ago a single one of
my ancestors was another kind of being to myself, I should lose all
self-respect, and take no further pleasure or interest in life. I
have the same feeling with regard to my descendants, and believe it
to be one that will be felt so generally that the country will
resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further mechanical
progress, and upon destroying all improvements that have been made
for the last three hundred years. I would not urge more than this.
We may trust ourselves to deal with those that remain, and though I
should prefer to have seen the destruction include another two
hundred years, I am aware of the necessity for compromising, and
would so far sacrifice my own individual convictions as to be
content with three hundred. Less than this will be insufficient."
This was the conclusion of the attack which led to the destruction
of machinery throughout Erewhon. There was only one serious
attempt to answer it. Its author said that machines were to be
regarded as a part of man's own physical nature, being really
nothing but extra-corporeal limbs. Man, he said, was a machinate
mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their
own bodies, but many of man's are loose, and lie about detached,
now here and now there, in various parts of the world--some being
kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally
hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary limb;
this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own
limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better
wooden leg than any one can manufacture.
"Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm has become
artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint. The
handle of the spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus; the
shaft is the additional bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new
form of the hand which enables its possessor to disturb the earth
in a way to which his original hand was unequal. Having thus
modified himself, not as other animals are modified, by
circumstances over which they have had not even the appearance of
control, but having, as it were, taken forethought and added a
cubit to his stature, civilisation began to dawn upon the race, the
social good offices, the genial companionship of friends, the art
of unreason, and all those habits of mind which most elevate man
above the lower animals, in the course of time ensued.
"Thus civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand,
each developing and being developed by the other, the earliest
accidental use of the stick having set the ball rolling, and the
prospect of advantage keeping it in motion. In fact, machines are
to be regarded as the mode of development by which human organism
is now especially advancing, every past invention being an addition
to the resources of the human body. Even community of limbs is
thus rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul
as to own money enough to pay a railway fare; for a train is only a
seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once."
The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the
machines would so equalise men's powers, and so lessen the severity
of competition, that many persons of inferior physique would escape
detection and transmit their inferiority to their descendants. He
feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a
degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might
become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul
and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of
mechanical action.
"How greatly," he wrote, "do we not now live with our external
limbs? We vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with
advancing or decreasing wealth. If it is wet we are furnished with
an organ commonly called an umbrella, and which is designed for the
purpose of protecting our clothes or our skins from the injurious
effects of rain. Man has now many extra-corporeal members, which
are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at
any rate than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-book.
He becomes more and more complex as he grows older; he will then be
seen with see-engines, or perhaps with artificial teeth and hair:
if he be a really well-developed specimen of his race, he will be
furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a
coachman."
It was this writer who originated the custom of classifying men by
their horse-power, and who divided them into genera, species,
varieties, and subvarieties, giving them names from the
hypothetical language which expressed the number of limbs which
they could command at any moment. He showed that men became more
highly and delicately organised the more nearly they approached the
summit of opulence, and that none but millionaires possessed the
full complement of limbs with which mankind could become
incorporate.
"Those mighty organisms," he continued, "our leading bankers and
merchants, speak to their congeners through the length and breadth
of the land in a second of time; their rich and subtle souls can
defy all material impediment, whereas the souls of the poor are
clogged and hampered by matter, which sticks fast about them as
treacle to the wings of a fly, or as one struggling in a quicksand:
their dull ears must take days or weeks to hear what another would
tell them from a distance, instead of hearing it in a second as is
done by the more highly organised classes. Who shall deny that one
who can tack on a special train to his identity, and go wheresoever
he will whensoever he pleases, is more highly organised than he
who, should he wish for the same power, might wish for the wings of
a bird with an equal chance of getting them; and whose legs are his
only means of locomotion? That old philosophic enemy, matter, the
inherently and essentially evil, still hangs about the neck of the
poor and strangles him: but to the rich, matter is immaterial; the
elaborate organisation of his extra-corporeal system has freed his
soul.
"This is the secret of the homage which we see rich men receive
from those who are poorer than themselves: it would be a grave
error to suppose that this deference proceeds from motives which we
need be ashamed of: it is the natural respect which all living
creatures pay to those whom they recognise as higher than
themselves in the scale of animal life, and is analogous to the
veneration which a dog feels for man. Among savage races it is
deemed highly honourable to be the possessor of a gun, and
throughout all known time there has been a feeling that those who
are worth most are the worthiest."
And so he went on at considerable length, attempting to show what
changes in the distribution of animal and vegetable life throughout
the kingdom had been caused by this and that of man's inventions,
and in what way each was connected with the moral and intellectual
development of the human species: he even allotted to some the
share which they had had in the creation and modification of man's
body, and that which they would hereafter have in its destruction;
but the other writer was considered to have the best of it, and in
the end succeeded in destroying all the inventions that had been
discovered for the preceding 271 years, a period which was agreed
upon by all parties after several years of wrangling as to whether
a certain kind of mangle which was much in use among washerwomen
should be saved or no. It was at last ruled to be dangerous, and
was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the
reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country, but which
it would be beyond my present scope to describe.
CHAPTER XXVI: THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PROPHET CONCERNING THE
RIGHTS OF ANIMALS
It will be seen from the foregoing chapters that the Erewhonians
are a meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and
quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a
philosopher arises among them, who carries them away through his
reputation for especial learning, or by convincing them that their
existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of
morality.
The series of revolutions on which I shall now briefly touch shows
this even more plainly than the way (already dealt with) in which
at a later date they cut their throats in the matter of machinery;
for if the second of the two reformers of whom I am about to speak
had had his way--or rather the way that he professed to have--the
whole race would have died of starvation within a twelve-month.
Happily common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature
living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop
unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying,
even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their
mercy. What happened, so far as I could collect it from the best
authorities, was as follows:-
Some two thousand five hundred years ago the Erewhonians were still
uncivilised, and lived by hunting, fishing, a rude system of
agriculture, and plundering such few other nations as they had not
yet completely conquered. They had no schools or systems of
philosophy, but by a kind of dog-knowledge did that which was right
in their own eyes and in those of their neighbours; the common
sense, therefore, of the public being as yet unvitiated, crime and
disease were looked upon much as they are in other countries.
But with the gradual advance of civilisation and increase in
material prosperity, people began to ask questions about things
that they had hitherto taken as matters of course, and one old
gentleman, who had great influence over them by reason of the
sanctity of his life, and his supposed inspiration by an unseen
power, whose existence was now beginning to be felt, took it into
his head to disquiet himself about the rights of animals--a
question that so far had disturbed nobody.
All prophets are more or less fussy, and this old gentleman seems
to have been one of the more fussy ones. Being maintained at the
public expense, he had ample leisure, and not content with limiting
his attention to the rights of animals, he wanted to reduce right
and wrong to rules, to consider the foundations of duty and of good
and evil, and otherwise to put all sorts of matters on a logical
basis, which people whose time is money are content to accept on no
basis at all.
As a matter of course, the basis on which he decided that duty
could alone rest was one that afforded no standing-room for many of
the old-established habits of the people. These, he assured them,
were all wrong, and whenever any one ventured to differ from him,
he referred the matter to the unseen power with which he alone was
in direct communication, and the unseen power invariably assured
him that he was right. As regards the rights of animals he taught
as follows:-
"You know, he said, "how wicked it is of you to kill one another.
Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only
killing, but also eating their relations. No one would now go back
to such detestable practices, for it is notorious that we have
lived much more happily since they were abandoned. From this
increased prosperity we may confidently deduce the maxim that we
should not kill and eat our fellow-creatures. I have consulted the
higher power by whom you know that I am inspired, and he has
assured me that this conclusion is irrefragable.
"Now it cannot be denied that sheep, cattle, deer, birds, and
fishes are our fellow-creatures. They differ from us in some
respects, but those in which they differ are few and secondary,
while those that they have in common with us are many and
essential. My friends, if it was wrong of you to kill and eat your
fellow-men, it is wrong also to kill and eat fish, flesh, and fowl.
Birds, beasts, and fishes, have as full a right to live as long as
they can unmolested by man, as man has to live unmolested by his
neighbours. These words, let me again assure you, are not mine,
but those of the higher power which inspires me.
"I grant," he continued, "that animals molest one another, and that
some of them go so far as to molest man, but I have yet to learn
that we should model our conduct on that of the lower animals. We
should endeavour, rather, to instruct them, and bring them to a
better mind. To kill a tiger, for example, who has lived on the
flesh of men and women whom he has killed, is to reduce ourselves
to the level of the tiger, and is unworthy of people who seek to be
guided by the highest principles in all, both their thoughts and
actions.
"The unseen power who has revealed himself to me alone among you,
has told me to tell you that you ought by this time to have
outgrown the barbarous habits of your ancestors. If, as you
believe, you know better than they, you should do better. He
commands you, therefore, to refrain from killing any living being
for the sake of eating it. The only animal food that you may eat,
is the flesh of any birds, beasts, or fishes that you may come upon
as having died a natural death, or any that may have been born
prematurely, or so deformed that it is a mercy to put them out of
their pain; you may also eat all such animals as have committed
suicide. As regards vegetables you may eat all those that will let
you eat them with impunity."
So wisely and so well did the old prophet argue, and so terrible
were the threats he hurled at those who should disobey him, that in
the end he carried the more highly educated part of the people with
him, and presently the poorer classes followed suit, or professed
to do so. Having seen the triumph of his principles, he was
gathered to his fathers, and no doubt entered at once into full
communion with that unseen power whose favour he had already so
pre-eminently enjoyed.
He had not, however, been dead very long, before some of his more
ardent disciples took it upon them to better the instruction of
their master. The old prophet had allowed the use of eggs and
milk, but his disciples decided that to eat a fresh egg was to
destroy a potential chicken, and that this came to much the same as
murdering a live one. Stale eggs, if it was quite certain that
they were too far gone to be able to be hatched, were grudgingly
permitted, but all eggs offered for sale had to be submitted to an
inspector, who, on being satisfied that they were addled, would
label them "Laid not less than three months" from the date,
whatever it might happen to be. These eggs, I need hardly say,
were only used in puddings, and as a medicine in certain cases
where an emetic was urgently required. Milk was forbidden inasmuch
as it could not be obtained without robbing some calf of its
natural sustenance, and thus endangering its life.
It will be easily believed that at first there were many who gave
the new rules outward observance, but embraced every opportunity of
indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been
accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying
natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances.
Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively
to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the
most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was
astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a
butcher's knife if there was one within a mile of them, and run
right up against it if the butcher did not get it out of their way
in time.
Dogs, again, that had been quite law-abiding as regards domestic
poultry, tame rabbits, sucking pigs, or sheep and lambs, suddenly
took to breaking beyond the control of their masters, and killing
anything that they were told not to touch. It was held that any
animal killed by a dog had died a natural death, for it was the
dog's nature to kill things, and he had only refrained from
molesting farmyard creatures hitherto because his nature had been
tampered with. Unfortunately the more these unruly tendencies
became developed, the more the common people seemed to delight in
breeding the very animals that would put temptation in the dog's
way. There is little doubt, in fact, that they were deliberately
evading the law; but whether this was so or no they sold or ate
everything their dogs had killed.
Evasion was more difficult in the case of the larger animals, for
the magistrates could not wink at all the pretended suicides of
pigs, sheep, and cattle that were brought before them. Sometimes
they had to convict, and a few convictions had a very terrorising
effect--whereas in the case of animals killed by a dog, the marks
of the dog's teeth could be seen, and it was practically impossible
to prove malice on the part of the owner of the dog.
Another fertile source of disobedience to the law was furnished by
a decision of one of the judges that raised a great outcry among
the more fervent disciples of the old prophet. The judge held that
it was lawful to kill any animal in self-defence, and that such
conduct was so natural on the part of a man who found himself
attacked, that the attacking creature should be held to have died a
natural death. The High Vegetarians had indeed good reason to be
alarmed, for hardly had this decision become generally known before
a number of animals, hitherto harmless, took to attacking their
owners with such ferocity, that it became necessary to put them to
a natural death. Again, it was quite common at that time to see
the carcase of a calf, lamb, or kid exposed for sale with a label
from the inspector certifying that it had been killed in self-
defence. Sometimes even the carcase of a lamb or calf was exposed
as "warranted still-born," when it presented every appearance of
having enjoyed at least a month of life.
As for the flesh of animals that had bona fide died a natural
death, the permission to eat it was nugatory, for it was generally
eaten by some other animal before man got hold of it; or failing
this it was often poisonous, so that practically people were forced
to evade the law by some of the means above spoken of, or to become
vegetarians. This last alternative was so little to the taste of
the Erewhonians, that the laws against killing animals were falling
into desuetude, and would very likely have been repealed, but for
the breaking out of a pestilence, which was ascribed by the priests
and prophets of the day to the lawlessness of the people in the
matter of eating forbidden flesh. On this, there was a reaction;
stringent laws were passed, forbidding the use of meat in any form
or shape, and permitting no food but grain, fruits, and vegetables
to be sold in shops and markets. These laws were enacted about two
hundred years after the death of the old prophet who had first
unsettled people's minds about the rights of animals; but they had
hardly been passed before people again began to break them.
I was told that the most painful consequence of all this folly did
not lie in the fact that law-abiding people had to go without
animal food--many nations do this and seem none the worse, and even
in flesh-eating countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece, the
poor seldom see meat from year's end to year's end. The mischief
lay in the jar which undue prohibition gave to the consciences of
all but those who were strong enough to know that though conscience
as a rule boons, it can also bane. The awakened conscience of an
individual will often lead him to do things in haste that he had
better have left undone, but the conscience of a nation awakened by
a respectable old gentleman who has an unseen power up his sleeve
will pave hell with a vengeance.
Young people were told that it was a sin to do what their fathers
had done unhurt for centuries; those, moreover, who preached to
them about the enormity of eating meat, were an unattractive
academic folk, and though they over-awed all but the bolder youths,
there were few who did not in their hearts dislike them. However
much the young person might be shielded, he soon got to know that
men and women of the world--often far nicer people than the
prophets who preached abstention--continually spoke sneeringly of
the new doctrinaire laws, and were believed to set them aside in
secret, though they dared not do so openly. Small wonder, then,
that the more human among the student classes were provoked by the
touch-not, taste-not, handle-not precepts of their rulers, into
questioning much that they would otherwise have unhesitatingly
accepted.
One sad story is on record about a young man of promising amiable
disposition, but cursed with more conscience than brains, who had
been told by his doctor (for as I have above said disease was not
yet held to be criminal) that he ought to eat meat, law or no law.
He was much shocked and for some time refused to comply with what
he deemed the unrighteous advice given him by his doctor; at last,
however, finding that he grew weaker and weaker, he stole secretly
on a dark night into one of those dens in which meat was
surreptitiously sold, and bought a pound of prime steak. He took
it home, cooked it in his bedroom when every one in the house had
gone to rest, ate it, and though he could hardly sleep for remorse
and shame, felt so much better next morning that he hardly knew
himself.
Three or four days later, he again found himself irresistibly drawn
to this same den. Again he bought a pound of steak, again he
cooked and ate it, and again, in spite of much mental torture, on
the following morning felt himself a different man. To cut the
story short, though he never went beyond the bounds of moderation,
it preyed upon his mind that he should be drifting, as he certainly
was, into the ranks of the habitual law-breakers.
All the time his health kept on improving, and though he felt sure
that he owed this to the beefsteaks, the better he became in body,
the more his conscience gave him no rest; two voices were for ever
ringing in his ears--the one saying, "I am Common Sense and Nature;
heed me, and I will reward you as I rewarded your fathers before
you." But the other voice said: "Let not that plausible spirit
lure you to your ruin. I am Duty; heed me, and I will reward you
as I rewarded your fathers before you."
Sometimes he even seemed to see the faces of the speakers. Common
Sense looked so easy, genial, and serene, so frank and fearless,
that do what he might he could not mistrust her; but as he was on
the point of following her, he would be checked by the austere face
of Duty, so grave, but yet so kindly; and it cut him to the heart
that from time to time he should see her turn pitying away from him
as he followed after her rival.
The poor boy continually thought of the better class of his fellow-
students, and tried to model his conduct on what he thought was
theirs. "They," he said to himself, "eat a beefsteak? Never."
But they most of them ate one now and again, unless it was a mutton
chop that tempted them. And they used him for a model much as he
did them. "He," they would say to themselves, "eat a mutton chop?
Never." One night, however, he was followed by one of the
authorities, who was always prowling about in search of law-
breakers, and was caught coming out of the den with half a shoulder
of mutton concealed about his person. On this, even though he had
not been put in prison, he would have been sent away with his
prospects in life irretrievably ruined; he therefore hanged himself
as soon as he got home.
CHAPTER XXVII: THE VIEWS OF AN EREWHONIAN PHILOSOPHER CONCERNING
THE RIGHTS OF VEGETABLES
Let me leave this unhappy story, and return to the course of events
among the Erewhonians at large. No matter how many laws they
passed increasing the severity of the punishments inflicted on
those who ate meat in secret, the people found means of setting
them aside as fast as they were made. At times, indeed, they would
become almost obsolete, but when they were on the point of being
repealed, some national disaster or the preaching of some fanatic
would reawaken the conscience of the nation, and people were
imprisoned by the thousand for illicitly selling and buying animal
food.
About six or seven hundred years, however, after the death of the
old prophet, a philosopher appeared, who, though he did not claim
to have any communication with an unseen power, laid down the law
with as much confidence as if such a power had inspired him. Many
think that this philosopher did not believe his own teaching, and,
being in secret a great meat-eater, had no other end in view than
reducing the prohibition against eating animal food to an
absurdity, greater even than an Erewhonian Puritan would be able to
stand.
Those who take this view hold that he knew how impossible it would
be to get the nation to accept legislation that it held to be
sinful; he knew also how hopeless it would be to convince people
that it was not wicked to kill a sheep and eat it, unless he could
show them that they must either sin to a certain extent, or die.
He, therefore, it is believed, made the monstrous proposals of
which I will now speak.
He began by paying a tribute of profound respect to the old
prophet, whose advocacy of the rights of animals, he admitted, had
done much to soften the national character, and enlarge its views
about the sanctity of life in general. But he urged that times had
now changed; the lesson of which the country had stood in need had
been sufficiently learnt, while as regards vegetables much had
become known that was not even suspected formerly, and which, if
the nation was to persevere in that strict adherence to the highest
moral principles which had been the secret of its prosperity
hitherto, must necessitate a radical change in its attitude towards
them.
It was indeed true that much was now known that had not been
suspected formerly, for the people had had no foreign enemies, and,
being both quick-witted and inquisitive into the mysteries of
nature, had made extraordinary progress in all the many branches of
art and science. In the chief Erewhonian museum I was shown a
microscope of considerable power, that was ascribed by the
authorities to a date much about that of the philosopher of whom I
am now speaking, and was even supposed by some to have been the
instrument with which he had actually worked.
This philosopher was Professor of botany in the chief seat of
learning then in Erewhon, and whether with the help of the
microscope still preserved, or with another, had arrived at a
conclusion now universally accepted among ourselves--I mean, that
all, both animals and plants, have had a common ancestry, and that
hence the second should be deemed as much alive as the first. He
contended, therefore, that animals and plants were cousins, and
would have been seen to be so, all along, if people had not made an
arbitrary and unreasonable division between what they chose to call
the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
He declared, and demonstrated to the satisfaction of all those who
were able to form an opinion upon the subject, that there is no
difference appreciable either by the eye, or by any other test,
between a germ that will develop into an oak, a vine, a rose, and
one that (given its accustomed surroundings) will become a mouse,
an elephant, or a man.
He contended that the course of any germ's development was dictated
by the habits of the germs from which it was descended and of whose
identity it had once formed part. If a germ found itself placed as
the germs in the line of its ancestry were placed, it would do as
its ancestors had done, and grow up into the same kind of organism
as theirs. If it found the circumstances only a little different,
it would make shift (successfully or unsuccessfully) to modify its
development accordingly; if the circumstances were widely
different, it would die, probably without an effort at self-
adaptation. This, he argued, applied equally to the germs of
plants and of animals.
He therefore connected all, both animal and vegetable development,
with intelligence, either spent and now unconscious, or still
unspent and conscious; and in support of his view as regards
vegetable life, he pointed to the way in which all plants have
adapted themselves to their habitual environment. Granting that
vegetable intelligence at first sight appears to differ materially
from animal, yet, he urged, it is like it in the one essential fact
that though it has evidently busied itself about matters that are
vital to the well-being of the organism that possesses it, it has
never shown the slightest tendency to occupy itself with anything
else. This, he insisted, is as great a proof of intelligence as
any living being can give.
"Plants," said he, "show no sign of interesting themselves in human
affairs. We shall never get a rose to understand that five times
seven are thirty-five, and there is no use in talking to an oak
about fluctuations in the price of stocks. Hence we say that the
oak and the rose are unintelligent, and on finding that they do not
understand our business conclude that they do not understand their
own. But what can a creature who talks in this way know about
intelligence? Which shows greater signs of intelligence? He, or
the rose and oak?
"And when we call plants stupid for not understanding our business,
how capable do we show ourselves of understanding theirs? Can we
form even the faintest conception of the way in which a seed from a
rose-tree turns earth, air, warmth and water into a rose full-
blown? Where does it get its colour from? From the earth, air,
&c.? Yes--but how? Those petals of such ineffable texture--that
hue that outvies the cheek of a child--that scent again? Look at
earth, air, and water--these are all the raw material that the rose
has got to work with; does it show any sign of want of intelligence
in the alchemy with which it turns mud into rose-leaves? What
chemist can do anything comparable? Why does no one try? Simply
because every one knows that no human intelligence is equal to the
task. We give it up. It is the rose's department; let the rose
attend to it--and be dubbed unintelligent because it baffles us by
the miracles it works, and the unconcerned business-like way in
which it works them.
"See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves against
their enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete
the most dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they
contrive to make), cover their precious seeds with spines like
those of a hedgehog, frighten insects with delicate nervous systems
by assuming portentous shapes, hide themselves, grow in
inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to deceive even
their subtlest foes.
"They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects, and
persuade them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made
of their leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves, as it
were, into living rat-traps, which close with a spring on any
insect that settles upon them; others make their flowers into the
shape of a certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that
when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and
goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach
themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten
for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against
underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any
insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they make
themselves.
"What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one wants to
do, and to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent? Some say
that the rose-seed does not want to grow into a rose-bush. Why,
then, in the name of all that is reasonable, does it grow? Likely
enough it is unaware of the want that is spurring it on to action.
We have no reason to suppose that a human embryo knows that it
wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a man. Nothing ever
shows signs of knowing what it is either wanting or doing, when its
convictions both as to what it wants, and how to get it, have been
settled beyond further power of question. The less signs living
creatures give of knowing what they do, provided they do it, and do
it repeatedly and well, the greater proof they give that in reality
they know how to do it, and have done it already on an infinite
number of past occasions.
"Some one may say," he continued, "'What do you mean by talking
about an infinite number of past occasions? When did a rose-seed
make itself into a rose-bush on any past occasion?'
"I answer this question with another. 'Did the rose-seed ever form
part of the identity of the rose-bush on which it grew?' Who can
say that it did not? Again I ask: 'Was this rose-bush ever linked
by all those links that we commonly consider as constituting
personal identity, with the seed from which it in its turn grew?'
Who can say that it was not?
"Then, if rose-seed number two is a continuation of the personality
of its parent rose-bush, and if that rose-bush is a continuation of
the personality of the rose-seed from which it sprang, rose-seed
number two must also be a continuation of the personality of the
earlier rose-seed. And this rose-seed must be a continuation of
the personality of the preceding rose-seed--and so back and back ad
infinitum. Hence it is impossible to deny continued personality
between any existing rose-seed and the earliest seed that can be
called a rose-seed at all.
"The answer, then, to our objector is not far to seek. The rose-
seed did what it now does in the persons of its ancestors--to whom
it has been so linked as to be able to remember what those
ancestors did when they were placed as the rose-seed now is. Each
stage of development brings back the recollection of the course
taken in the preceding stage, and the development has been so often
repeated, that all doubt--and with all doubt, all consciousness of
action--is suspended.
"But an objector may still say, 'Granted that the linking between
all successive generations has been so close and unbroken, that
each one of them may be conceived as able to remember what it did
in the persons of its ancestors--how do you show that it actually
did remember?'
"The answer is: 'By the action which each generation takes--an
action which repeats all the phenomena that we commonly associate
with memory--which is explicable on the supposition that it has
been guided by memory--and which has neither been explained, nor
seems ever likely to be explained on any other theory than the
supposition that there is an abiding memory between successive
generations.'
"Will any one bring an example of any living creature whose action
we can understand, performing an ineffably difficult and intricate
action, time after time, with invariable success, and yet not
knowing how to do it, and never having done it before? Show me the
example and I will say no more, but until it is shown me, I shall
credit action where I cannot watch it, with being controlled by the
same laws as when it is within our ken. It will become unconscious
as soon as the skill that directs it has become perfected. Neither
rose-seed, therefore, nor embryo should be expected to show signs
of knowing that they know what they know--if they showed such signs
the fact of their knowing what they want, and how to get it, might
more reasonably be doubted."
Some of the passages already given in Chapter XXIII were obviously
inspired by the one just quoted. As I read it, in a reprint shown
me by a Professor who had edited much of the early literature on
the subject, I could not but remember the one in which our Lord
tells His disciples to consider the lilies of the field, who
neither toil nor spin, but whose raiment surpasses even that of
Solomon in all his glory.
"They toil not, neither do they spin?" Is that so? "Toil not?"
Perhaps not, now that the method of procedure is so well known as
to admit of no further question--but it is not likely that lilies
came to make themselves so beautifully without having ever taken
any pains about the matter. "Neither do they spin?" Not with a
spinning-wheel; but is there no textile fabric in a leaf?
What would the lilies of the field say if they heard one of us
declaring that they neither toil nor spin? They would say, I take
it, much what we should if we were to hear of their preaching
humility on the text of Solomons, and saying, "Consider the
Solomons in all their glory, they toil not neither do they spin."
We should say that the lilies were talking about things that they
did not understand, and that though the Solomons do not toil nor
spin, yet there had been no lack of either toiling or spinning
before they came to be arrayed so gorgeously.
Let me now return to the Professor. I have said enough to show the
general drift of the arguments on which he relied in order to show
that vegetables are only animals under another name, but have not
stated his case in anything like the fullness with which he laid it
before the public. The conclusion he drew, or pretended to draw,
was that if it was sinful to kill and eat animals, it was not less
sinful to do the like by vegetables, or their seeds. None such, he
said, should be eaten, save what had died a natural death, such as
fruit that was lying on the ground and about to rot, or cabbage-
leaves that had turned yellow in late autumn. These and other like
garbage he declared to be the only food that might be eaten with a
clear conscience. Even so the eater must plant the pips of any
apples or pears that he may have eaten, or any plum-stones, cherry-
stones, and the like, or he would come near to incurring the guilt
of infanticide. The grain of cereals, according to him, was out of
the question, for every such grain had a living soul as much as man
had, and had as good a right as man to possess that soul in peace.
Having thus driven his fellow countrymen into a corner at the point
of a logical bayonet from which they felt that there was no escape,
he proposed that the question what was to be done should be
referred to an oracle in which the whole country had the greatest
confidence, and to which recourse was always had in times of
special perplexity. It was whispered that a near relation of the
philosopher's was lady's-maid to the priestess who delivered the
oracle, and the Puritan party declared that the strangely
unequivocal answer of the oracle was obtained by backstairs
influence; but whether this was so or no, the response as nearly as
I can translate it was as follows:-
"He who sins aught
Sins more than he ought;
But he who sins nought
Has much to be taught.
Beat or be beaten,
Eat or be eaten,
Be killed or kill;
Choose which you will."
It was clear that this response sanctioned at any rate the
destruction of vegetable life when wanted as food by man; and so
forcibly had the philosopher shown that what was sauce for
vegetables was so also for animals, that, though the Puritan party
made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding the use of meat were
repealed by a considerable majority. Thus, after several hundred
years of wandering in the wilderness of philosophy, the country
reached the conclusions that common sense had long since arrived
at. Even the Puritans after a vain attempt to subsist on a kind of
jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to the
inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table.
One would have thought that the dance they had been led by the old
prophet, and that still madder dance which the Professor of botany
had gravely, but as I believe insidiously, proposed to lead them,
would have made the Erewhonians for a long time suspicious of
prophets whether they professed to have communications with an
unseen power or no; but so engrained in the human heart is the
desire to believe that some people really do know what they say
they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for
themselves, that in a short time would-be philosophers and faddists
became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen
to accept all those absurd views of life, some account of which I
have given in my earlier chapters. Indeed I can see no hope for
the Erewhonians till they have got to understand that reason
uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by
reason.
CHAPTER XXVIII: ESCAPE
Though busily engaged in translating the extracts given in the last
five chapters, I was also laying matters in train for my escape
with Arowhena. And indeed it was high time, for I received an
intimation from one of the cashiers of the Musical Banks, that I
was to be prosecuted in a criminal court ostensibly for measles,
but really for having owned a watch, and attempted the
reintroduction of machinery.
I asked why measles? and was told that there was a fear lest
extenuating circumstances should prevent a jury from convicting me,
if I were indicted for typhus or small-pox, but that a verdict
would probably be obtained for measles, a disease which could be
sufficiently punished in a person of my age. I was given to
understand that unless some unexpected change should come over the
mind of his Majesty, I might expect the blow to be struck within a
very few days.
My plan was this--that Arowhena and I should escape in a balloon
together. I fear that the reader will disbelieve this part of my
story, yet in no other have I endeavoured to adhere more
conscientiously to facts, and can only throw myself upon his
charity.
I had already gained the ear of the Queen, and had so worked upon
her curiosity that she promised to get leave for me to have a
balloon made and inflated; I pointed out to her that no complicated
machinery would be wanted--nothing, in fact, but a large quantity
of oiled silk, a car, a few ropes, &c., &c., and some light kind of
gas, such as the antiquarians who were acquainted with the means
employed by the ancients for the production of the lighter gases
could easily instruct her workmen how to provide. Her eagerness to
see so strange a sight as the ascent of a human being into the sky
overcame any scruples of conscience that she might have otherwise
felt, and she set the antiquarians about showing her workmen how to
make the gas, and sent her maids to buy, and oil, a very large
quantity of silk (for I was determined that the balloon should be a
big one) even before she began to try and gain the King's
permission; this, however, she now set herself to do, for I had
sent her word that my prosecution was imminent.
As for myself, I need hardly say that I knew nothing about
balloons; nor did I see my way to smuggling Arowhena into the car;
nevertheless, knowing that we had no other chance of getting away
from Erewhon, I drew inspiration from the extremity in which we
were placed, and made a pattern from which the Queen's workmen were
able to work successfully. Meanwhile the Queen's carriage-builders
set about making the car, and it was with the attachments of this
to the balloon that I had the greatest difficulty; I doubt, indeed,
whether I should have succeeded here, but for the great
intelligence of a foreman, who threw himself heart and soul into
the matter, and often both foresaw requirements, the necessity for
which had escaped me, and suggested the means of providing for
them.
It happened that there had been a long drought, during the latter
part of which prayers had been vainly offered up in all the temples
of the air god. When I first told her Majesty that I wanted a
balloon, I said my intention was to go up into the sky and prevail
upon the air god by means of a personal interview. I own that this
proposition bordered on the idolatrous, but I have long since
repented of it, and am little likely ever to repeat the offence.
Moreover the deceit, serious though it was, will probably lead to
the conversion of the whole country.
When the Queen told his Majesty of my proposal, he at first not
only ridiculed it, but was inclined to veto it. Being, however, a
very uxorious husband, he at length consented--as he eventually
always did to everything on which the Queen had set her heart. He
yielded all the more readily now, because he did not believe in the
possibility of my ascent; he was convinced that even though the
balloon should mount a few feet into the air, it would collapse
immediately, whereon I should fall and break my neck, and he should
be rid of me. He demonstrated this to her so convincingly, that
she was alarmed, and tried to talk me into giving up the idea, but
on finding that I persisted in my wish to have the balloon made,
she produced an order from the King to the effect that all
facilities I might require should be afforded me.
At the same time her Majesty told me that my attempted ascent would
be made an article of impeachment against me in case I did not
succeed in prevailing on the air god to stop the drought. Neither
King nor Queen had any idea that I meant going right away if I
could get the wind to take me, nor had he any conception of the
existence of a certain steady upper current of air which was always
setting in one direction, as could be seen by the shape of the
higher clouds, which pointed invariably from south-east to north-
west. I had myself long noticed this peculiarity in the climate,
and attributed it, I believe justly, to a trade-wind which was
constant at a few thousand feet above the earth, but was disturbed
by local influences at lower elevations.
My next business was to break the plan to Arowhena, and to devise
the means for getting her into the car. I felt sure that she would
come with me, but had made up my mind that if her courage failed
her, the whole thing should come to nothing. Arowhena and I had
been in constant communication through her maid, but I had thought
it best not to tell her the details of my scheme till everything
was settled. The time had now arrived, and I arranged with the
maid that I should be admitted by a private door into Mr.
Nosnibor's garden at about dusk on the following evening.
I came at the appointed time; the girl let me into the garden and
bade me wait in a secluded alley until Arowhena should come. It
was now early summer, and the leaves were so thick upon the trees
that even though some one else had entered the garden I could have
easily hidden myself. The night was one of extreme beauty; the sun
had long set, but there was still a rosy gleam in the sky over the
ruins of the railway station; below me was the city already
twinkling with lights, while beyond it stretched the plains for
many a league until they blended with the sky. I just noted these
things, but I could not heed them. I could heed nothing, till, as
I peered into the darkness of the alley, I perceived a white figure
gliding swiftly towards me. I bounded towards it, and ere thought
could either prompt or check, I had caught Arowhena to my heart and
covered her unresisting cheek with kisses.
So overjoyed were we that we knew not how to speak; indeed I do not
know when we should have found words and come to our senses, if the
maid had not gone off into a fit of hysterics, and awakened us to
the necessity of self-control; then, briefly and plainly, I
unfolded what I proposed; I showed her the darkest side, for I felt
sure that the darker the prospect the more likely she was to come.
I told her that my plan would probably end in death for both of us,
and that I dared not press it--that at a word from her it should be
abandoned; still that there was just a possibility of our escaping
together to some part of the world where there would be no bar to
our getting married, and that I could see no other hope.
She made no resistance, not a sign or hint of doubt or hesitation.
She would do all I told her, and come whenever I was ready; so I
bade her send her maid to meet me nightly--told her that she must
put a good face on, look as bright and happy as she could, so as to
make her father and mother and Zulora think that she was forgetting
me--and be ready at a moment's notice to come to the Queen's
workshops, and be concealed among the ballast and under rugs in the
car of the balloon; and so we parted.
I hurried my preparations forward, for I feared rain, and also that
the King might change his mind; but the weather continued dry, and
in another week the Queen's workmen had finished the balloon and
car, while the gas was ready to be turned on into the balloon at
any moment. All being now prepared I was to ascend on the
following morning. I had stipulated for being allowed to take
abundance of rugs and wrappings as protection from the cold of the
upper atmosphere, and also ten or a dozen good-sized bags of
ballast.
I had nearly a quarter's pension in hand, and with this I fee'd
Arowhena's maid, and bribed the Queen's foreman--who would, I
believe, have given me assistance even without a bribe. He helped
me to secrete food and wine in the bags of ballast, and on the
morning of my ascent he kept the other workmen out of the way while
I got Arowhena into the car. She came with early dawn, muffled up,
and in her maid's dress. She was supposed to be gone to an early
performance at one of the Musical Banks, and told me that she
should not be missed till breakfast, but that her absence must then
be discovered. I arranged the ballast about her so that it should
conceal her as she lay at the bottom of the car, and covered her
with wrappings. Although it still wanted some hours of the time
fixed for my ascent, I could not trust myself one moment from the
car, so I got into it at once, and watched the gradual inflation of
the balloon. Luggage I had none, save the provisions hidden in the
ballast bags, the books of mythology, and the treatises on the
machines, with my own manuscript diaries and translations.
I sat quietly, and awaited the hour fixed for my departure--quiet
outwardly, but inwardly I was in an agony of suspense lest
Arowhena's absence should be discovered before the arrival of the
King and Queen, who were to witness my ascent. They were not due
yet for another two hours, and during this time a hundred things
might happen, any one of which would undo me.
At last the balloon was full; the pipe which had filled it was
removed, the escape of the gas having been first carefully
precluded. Nothing remained to hinder the balloon from ascending
but the hands and weight of those who were holding on to it with
ropes. I strained my eyes for the coming of the King and Queen,
but could see no sign of their approach. I looked in the direction
of Mr. Nosnibor's house--there was nothing to indicate disturbance,
but it was not yet breakfast time. The crowd began to gather; they
were aware that I was under the displeasure of the court, but I
could detect no signs of my being unpopular. On the contrary, I
received many kindly expressions of regard and encouragement, with
good wishes as to the result of my journey.
I was speaking to one gentleman of my acquaintance, and telling him
the substance of what I intended to do when I had got into the
presence of the air god (what he thought of me I cannot guess, for
I am sure that he did not believe in the objective existence of the
air god, nor that I myself believed in it), when I became aware of
a small crowd of people running as fast as they could from Mr.
Nosnibor's house towards the Queen's workshops. For the moment my
pulse ceased beating, and then, knowing that the time had come when
I must either do or die, I called vehemently to those who were
holding the ropes (some thirty men) to let go at once, and made
gestures signifying danger, and that there would be mischief if
they held on longer. Many obeyed; the rest were too weak to hold
on to the ropes, and were forced to let them go. On this the
balloon bounded suddenly upwards, but my own feeling was that the
earth had dropped off from me, and was sinking fast into the open
space beneath.
This happened at the very moment that the attention of the crowd
was divided, the one half paying heed to the eager gestures of
those coming from Mr. Nosnibor's house, and the other to the
exclamations from myself. A minute more and Arowhena would
doubtless have been discovered, but before that minute was over, I
was at such a height above the city that nothing could harm me, and
every second both the town and the crowd became smaller and more
confused. In an incredibly short time, I could see little but a
vast wall of blue plains rising up against me, towards whichever
side I looked.
At first, the balloon mounted vertically upwards, but after about
five minutes, when we had already attained a very great elevation,
I fancied that the objects on the plain beneath began to move from
under me. I did not feel so much as a breath of wind, and could
not suppose that the balloon itself was travelling. I was,
therefore, wondering what this strange movement of fixed objects
could mean, when it struck me that people in a balloon do not feel
the wind inasmuch as they travel with it and offer it no
resistance. Then I was happy in thinking that I must now have
reached the invariable trade wind of the upper air, and that I
should be very possibly wafted for hundreds or even thousands of
miles, far from Erewhon and the Erewhonians.
Already I had removed the wrappings and freed Arowhena; but I soon
covered her up with them again, for it was already very cold, and
she was half stupefied with the strangeness of her position.
And now began a time, dream-like and delirious, of which I do not
suppose that I shall ever recover a distinct recollection. Some
things I can recall--as that we were ere long enveloped in vapour
which froze upon my moustache and whiskers; then comes a memory of
sitting for hours and hours in a thick fog, hearing no sound but my
own breathing and Arowhena's (for we hardly spoke) and seeing no
sight but the car beneath us and beside us, and the dark balloon
above.
Perhaps the most painful feeling when the earth was hidden was that
the balloon was motionless, though our only hope lay in our going
forward with an extreme of speed. From time to time through a rift
in the clouds I caught a glimpse of earth, and was thankful to
perceive that we must be flying forward faster than in an express
train; but no sooner was the rift closed than the old conviction of
our being stationary returned in full force, and was not to be
reasoned with: there was another feeling also which was nearly as
bad; for as a child that fears it has gone blind in a long tunnel
if there is no light, so ere the earth had been many minutes
hidden, I became half frightened lest we might not have broken away
from it clean and for ever. Now and again, I ate and gave food to
Arowhena, but by guess-work as regards time. Then came darkness, a
dreadful dreary time, without even the moon to cheer us.
With dawn the scene was changed: the clouds were gone and morning
stars were shining; the rising of the splendid sun remains still
impressed upon me as the most glorious that I have ever seen;
beneath us there was an embossed chain of mountains with snow fresh
fallen upon them; but we were far above them; we both of us felt
our breathing seriously affected, but I would not allow the balloon
to descend a single inch, not knowing for how long we might not
need all the buoyancy which we could command; indeed I was thankful
to find that, after nearly four-and-twenty hours, we were still at
so great a height above the earth.
In a couple of hours we had passed the ranges, which must have been
some hundred and fifty miles across, and again I saw a tract of
level plain extending far away to the horizon. I knew not where we
were, and dared not descend, lest I should waste the power of the
balloon, but I was half hopeful that we might be above the country
from which I had originally started. I looked anxiously for any
sign by which I could recognise it, but could see nothing, and
feared that we might be above some distant part of Erewhon, or a
country inhabited by savages. While I was still in doubt, the
balloon was again wrapped in clouds, and we were left to blank
space and to conjectures.
The weary time dragged on. How I longed for my unhappy watch! I
felt as though not even time was moving, so dumb and spell-bound
were our surroundings. Sometimes I would feel my pulse, and count
its beats for half-an-hour together; anything to mark the time--to
prove that it was there, and to assure myself that we were within
the blessed range of its influence, and not gone adrift into the
timelessness of eternity.
I had been doing this for the twentieth or thirtieth time, and had
fallen into a light sleep: I dreamed wildly of a journey in an
express train, and of arriving at a railway station where the air
was full of the sound of locomotive engines blowing off steam with
a horrible and tremendous hissing; I woke frightened and uneasy,
but the hissing and crashing noises pursued me now that I was
awake, and forced me to own that they were real. What they were I
knew not, but they grew gradually fainter and fainter, and after a
time were lost. In a few hours the clouds broke, and I saw beneath
me that which made the chilled blood run colder in my veins. I saw
the sea, and nothing but the sea; in the main black, but flecked
with white heads of storm-tossed, angry waves.
Arowhena was sleeping quietly at the bottom of the car, and as I
looked at her sweet and saintly beauty, I groaned, and cursed
myself for the misery into which I had brought her; but there was
nothing for it now.
I sat and waited for the worst, and presently I saw signs as though
that worst were soon to be at hand, for the balloon had begun to
sink. On first seeing the sea I had been impressed with the idea
that we must have been falling, but now there could be no mistake,
we were sinking, and that fast. I threw out a bag of ballast, and
for a time we rose again, but in the course of a few hours the
sinking recommenced, and I threw out another bag.
Then the battle commenced in earnest. It lasted all that afternoon
and through the night until the following evening. I had seen
never a sail nor a sign of a sail, though I had half blinded myself
with straining my eyes incessantly in every direction; we had
parted with everything but the clothes which we had upon our backs;
food and water were gone, all thrown out to the wheeling
albatrosses, in order to save us a few hours or even minutes from
the sea. I did not throw away the books till we were within a few
feet of the water, and clung to my manuscripts to the very last.
Hope there seemed none whatever--yet, strangely enough we were
neither of us utterly hopeless, and even when the evil that we
dreaded was upon us, and that which we greatly feared had come, we
sat in the car of the balloon with the waters up to our middle, and
still smiled with a ghastly hopefulness to one another.
- * *
He who has crossed the St. Gothard will remember that below
Andermatt there is one of those Alpine gorges which reach the very
utmost limits of the sublime and terrible. The feelings of the
traveller have become more and more highly wrought at every step,
until at last the naked and overhanging precipices seem to close
above his head, as he crosses a bridge hung in mid-air over a
roaring waterfall, and enters on the darkness of a tunnel, hewn out
of the rock.
What can be in store for him on emerging? Surely something even
wilder and more desolate than that which he has seen already; yet
his imagination is paralysed, and can suggest no fancy or vision of
anything to surpass the reality which he had just witnessed. Awed
and breathless he advances; when lo! the light of the afternoon sun
welcomes him as he leaves the tunnel, and behold a smiling valley--
a babbling brook, a village with tall belfries, and meadows of
brilliant green--these are the things which greet him, and he
smiles to himself as the terror passes away and in another moment
is forgotten.
So fared it now with ourselves. We had been in the water some two
or three hours, and the night had come upon us. We had said
farewell for the hundredth time, and had resigned ourselves to meet
the end; indeed I was myself battling with a drowsiness from which
it was only too probable that I should never wake; when suddenly,
Arowhena touched me on the shoulder, and pointed to a light and to
a dark mass which was bearing right upon us. A cry for help--loud
and clear and shrill--broke forth from both of us at once; and in
another five minutes we were carried by kind and tender hands on to
the deck of an Italian vessel.
CHAPTER XXIX: CONCLUSION
The ship was the Principe Umberto, bound from Callao to Genoa; she
had carried a number of emigrants to Rio, had gone thence to
Callao, where she had taken in a cargo of guano, and was now on her
way home. The captain was a certain Giovanni Gianni, a native of
Sestri; he has kindly allowed me to refer to him in case the truth
of my story should be disputed; but I grieve to say that I suffered
him to mislead himself in some important particulars. I should add
that when we were picked up we were a thousand miles from land.
As soon as we were on board, the captain began questioning us about
the siege of Paris, from which city he had assumed that we must
have come, notwithstanding our immense distance from Europe. As
may be supposed, I had not heard a syllable about the war between
France and Germany, and was too ill to do more than assent to all
that he chose to put into my mouth. My knowledge of Italian is
very imperfect, and I gathered little from anything that he said;
but I was glad to conceal the true point of our departure, and
resolved to take any cue that he chose to give me.
The line that thus suggested itself was that there had been ten or
twelve others in the balloon, that I was an English Milord, and
Arowhena a Russian Countess; that all the others had been drowned,
and that the despatches which we had carried were lost. I came
afterwards to learn that this story would not have been credible,
had not the captain been for some weeks at sea, for I found that
when we were picked up, the Germans had already long been masters
of Paris. As it was, the captain settled the whole story for me,
and I was well content.
In a few days we sighted an English vessel bound from Melbourne to
London with wool. At my earnest request, in spite of stormy
weather which rendered it dangerous for a boat to take us from one
ship to the other, the captain consented to signal the English
vessel, and we were received on board, but we were transferred with
such difficulty that no communication took place as to the manner
of our being found. I did indeed hear the Italian mate who was in
charge of the boat shout out something in French to the effect that
we had been picked up from a balloon, but the noise of the wind was
so great, and the captain understood so little French that he
caught nothing of the truth, and it was assumed that we were two
persons who had been saved from shipwreck. When the captain asked
me in what ship I had been wrecked, I said that a party of us had
been carried out to sea in a pleasure-boat by a strong current, and
that Arowhena (whom I described as a Peruvian lady) and I were
alone saved.
There were several passengers, whose goodness towards us we can
never repay. I grieve to think that they cannot fail to discover
that we did not take them fully into our confidence; but had we
told them all, they would not have believed us, and I was
determined that no one should hear of Erewhon, or have the chance
of getting there before me, as long as I could prevent it. Indeed,
the recollection of the many falsehoods which I was then obliged to
tell, would render my life miserable were I not sustained by the
consolations of my religion. Among the passengers there was a most
estimable clergyman, by whom Arowhena and I were married within a
very few days of our coming on board.
After a prosperous voyage of about two months, we sighted the
Land's End, and in another week we were landed at London. A
liberal subscription was made for us on board the ship, so that we
found ourselves in no immediate difficulty about money. I
accordingly took Arowhena down into Somersetshire, where my mother
and sisters had resided when I last heard of them. To my great
sorrow I found that my mother was dead, and that her death had been
accelerated by the report of my having been killed, which had been
brought to my employer's station by Chowbok. It appeared that he
must have waited for a few days to see whether I returned, that he
then considered it safe to assume that I should never do so, and
had accordingly made up a story about my having fallen into a
whirlpool of seething waters while coming down the gorge homeward.
Search was made for my body, but the rascal had chosen to drown me
in a place where there would be no chance of its ever being
recovered.
My sisters were both married, but neither of their husbands was
rich. No one seemed overjoyed on my return; and I soon discovered
that when a man's relations have once mourned for him as dead, they
seldom like the prospect of having to mourn for him a second time.
Accordingly I returned to London with my wife, and through the
assistance of an old friend supported myself by writing good little
stories for the magazines, and for a tract society. I was well
paid; and I trust that I may not be considered presumptuous in
saying that some of the most popular of the brochures which are
distributed in the streets, and which are to be found in the
waiting-rooms of the railway stations, have proceeded from my pen.
During the time that I could spare, I arranged my notes and diary
till they assumed their present shape. There remains nothing for
me to add, save to unfold the scheme which I propose for the
conversion of Erewhon.
That scheme has only been quite recently decided upon as the one
which seems most likely to be successful.
It will be seen at once that it would be madness for me to go with
ten or a dozen subordinate missionaries by the same way as that
which led me to discover Erewhon. I should be imprisoned for
typhus, besides being handed over to the straighteners for having
run away with Arowhena: an even darker fate, to which I dare
hardly again allude, would be reserved for my devoted fellow-
labourers. It is plain, therefore, that some other way must be
found for getting at the Erewhonians, and I am thankful to say that
such another way is not wanting. One of the rivers which descends
from the Snowy Mountains, and passes through Erewhon, is known to
be navigable for several hundred miles from its mouth. Its upper
waters have never yet been explored, but I feel little doubt that
it will be found possible to take a light gunboat (for we must
protect ourselves) to the outskirts of the Erewhonian country.
I propose, therefore, that one of those associations should be
formed in which the risk of each of the members is confined to the
amount of his stake in the concern. The first step would be to
draw up a prospectus. In this I would advise that no mention
should be made of the fact that the Erewhonians are the lost
tribes. The discovery is one of absorbing interest to myself, but
it is of a sentimental rather than commercial value, and business
is business. The capital to be raised should not be less than
fifty thousand pounds, and might be either in five or ten pound
shares as hereafter determined. This should be amply sufficient
for the expenses of an experimental voyage.
When the money had been subscribed, it would be our duty to charter
a steamer of some twelve or fourteen hundred tons burden, and with
accommodation for a cargo of steerage passengers. She should carry
two or three guns in case of her being attacked by savages at the
mouth of the river. Boats of considerable size should be also
provided, and I think it would be desirable that these also should
carry two or three six-pounders. The ship should be taken up the
river as far as was considered safe, and a picked party should then
ascend in the boats. The presence both of Arowhena and myself
would be necessary at this stage, inasmuch as our knowledge of the
language would disarm suspicion, and facilitate negotiations.
We should begin by representing the advantages afforded to labour
in the colony of Queensland, and point out to the Erewhonians that
by emigrating thither, they would be able to amass, each and all of
them, enormous fortunes--a fact which would be easily provable by a
reference to statistics. I have no doubt that a very great number
might be thus induced to come back with us in the larger boats, and
that we could fill our vessel with emigrants in three or four
journeys.
Should we be attacked, our course would be even simpler, for the
Erewhonians have no gunpowder, and would be so surprised with its
effects that we should be able to capture as many as we chose; in
this case we should feel able to engage them on more advantageous
terms, for they would be prisoners of war. But even though we were
to meet with no violence, I doubt not that a cargo of seven or
eight hundred Erewhonians could be induced, when they were once on
board the vessel, to sign an agreement which should be mutually
advantageous both to us and them.
We should then proceed to Queensland, and dispose of our engagement
with the Erewhonians to the sugar-growers of that settlement, who
are in great want of labour; it is believed that the money thus
realised would enable us to declare a handsome dividend, and leave
a considerable balance, which might be spent in repeating our
operations and bringing over other cargoes of Erewhonians, with
fresh consequent profits. In fact we could go backwards and
forwards as long as there was a demand for labour in Queensland, or
indeed in any other Christian colony, for the supply of Erewhonians
would be unlimited, and they could be packed closely and fed at a
very reasonable cost.
It would be my duty and Arowhena's to see that our emigrants should
be boarded and lodged in the households of religious sugar-growers;
these persons would give them the benefit of that instruction
whereof they stand so greatly in need. Each day, as soon as they
could be spared from their work in the plantations, they would be
assembled for praise, and be thoroughly grounded in the Church
Catechism, while the whole of every Sabbath should be devoted to
singing psalms and church-going.
This must be insisted upon, both in order to put a stop to any
uneasy feeling which might show itself either in Queensland or in
the mother country as to the means whereby the Erewhonians had been
obtained, and also because it would give our own shareholders the
comfort of reflecting that they were saving souls and filling their
own pockets at one and the same moment. By the time the emigrants
had got too old for work they would have become thoroughly
instructed in religion; they could then be shipped back to Erewhon
and carry the good seed with them.
I can see no hitch nor difficulty about the matter, and trust that
this book will sufficiently advertise the scheme to insure the
subscription of the necessary capital; as soon as this is
forthcoming I will guarantee that I convert the Erewhonians not
only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit
to the shareholders.
I should add that I cannot claim the credit for having originated
the above scheme. I had been for months at my wit's end, forming
plan after plan for the evangelisation of Erewhon, when by one of
those special interpositions which should be a sufficient answer to
the sceptic, and make even the most confirmed rationalist
irrational, my eye was directed to the following paragraph in the
Times newspaper, of one of the first days in January 1872:-
"POLYNESIANS IN QUEENSLAND.--The Marquis of Normanby, the new
Governor of Queensland, has completed his inspection of the
northern districts of the colony. It is stated that at Mackay, one
of the best sugar-growing districts, his Excellency saw a good deal
of the Polynesians. In the course of a speech to those who
entertained him there, the Marquis said:- 'I have been told that
the means by which Polynesians were obtained were not legitimate,
but I have failed to perceive this, in so far at least as
Queensland is concerned; and, if one can judge by the countenances
and manners of the Polynesians, they experience no regret at their
position.' But his Excellency pointed out the advantage of giving
them religious instruction. It would tend to set at rest an uneasy
feeling which at present existed in the country to know that they
were inclined to retain the Polynesians, and teach them religion."
I feel that comment is unnecessary, and will therefore conclude
with one word of thanks to the reader who may have had the patience
to follow me through my adventures without losing his temper; but
with two, for any who may write at once to the Secretary of the
Erewhon Evangelisation Company, limited (at the address which shall
hereafter be advertised), and request to have his name put down as
a shareholder.
P.S.--I had just received and corrected the last proof of the
foregoing volume, and was walking down the Strand from Temple Bar
to Charing Cross, when on passing Exeter Hall I saw a number of
devout-looking people crowding into the building with faces full of
interested and complacent anticipation. I stopped, and saw an
announcement that a missionary meeting was to be held forthwith,
and that the native missionary, the Rev. William Habakkuk, from--
(the colony from which I had started on my adventures), would be
introduced, and make a short address. After some little difficulty
I obtained admission, and heard two or three speeches, which were
prefatory to the introduction of Mr. Habakkuk. One of these struck
me as perhaps the most presumptuous that I had ever heard. The
speaker said that the races of whom Mr. Habakkuk was a specimen,
were in all probability the lost ten tribes of Israel. I dared not
contradict him then, but I felt angry and injured at hearing the
speaker jump to so preposterous a conclusion upon such insufficient
grounds. The discovery of the ten tribes was mine, and mine only.
I was still in the very height of indignation, when there was a
murmur of expectation in the hall, and Mr. Habakkuk was brought
forward. The reader may judge of my surprise at finding that he
was none other than my old friend Chowbok!
My jaw dropped, and my eyes almost started out of my head with
astonishment. The poor fellow was dreadfully frightened, and the
storm of applause which greeted his introduction seemed only to add
to his confusion. I dare not trust myself to report his speech--
indeed I could hardly listen to it, for I was nearly choked with
trying to suppress my feelings. I am sure that I caught the words
"Adelaide, the Queen Dowager," and I thought that I heard "Mary
Magdalene" shortly afterwards, but I had then to leave the hall for
fear of being turned out. While on the staircase, I heard another
burst of prolonged and rapturous applause, so I suppose the
audience were satisfied.
The feelings that came uppermost in my mind were hardly of a very
solemn character, but I thought of my first acquaintance with
Chowbok, of the scene in the woodshed, of the innumerable lies he
had told me, of his repeated attempts upon the brandy, and of many
an incident which I have not thought it worth while to dwell upon;
and I could not but derive some satisfaction from the hope that my
own efforts might have contributed to the change which had been
doubtless wrought upon him, and that the rite which I had
performed, however unprofessionally, on that wild upland river-bed,
had not been wholly without effect. I trust that what I have
written about him in the earlier part of my book may not be
libellous, and that it may do him no harm with his employers. He
was then unregenerate. I must certainly find him out and have a
talk with him; but before I shall have time to do so these pages
will be in the hands of the public.
At the last moment I see a probability of a complication which
causes me much uneasiness. Please subscribe quickly. Address to
the Mansion-House, care of the Lord Mayor, whom I will instruct to
receive names and subscriptions for me until I can organise a
committee.
Footnotes:
{1} The last part of Chapter XXIII in this Gutenberg eText.--DP.
{2} See Handel's compositions for the harpsichord, published by
Litolf, p. 78.
{3} The myth above alluded to exists in Erewhon with changed
names, and considerable modifications. I have taken the liberty of
referring to the story as familiar to ourselves.
{4} What a SAFE word "relation" is; how little it predicates! yet
it has overgrown "kinsman."
{5} The root alluded to is not the potato of our own gardens, but
a plant so near akin to it that I have ventured to translate it
thus. Apropos of its intelligence, had the writer known Butler he
would probably have said -
"He knows what's what, and that's as high,
As metaphysic wit can fly."
{6} Since my return to England, I have been told that those who
are conversant about machines use many terms concerning them which
show that their vitality is here recognised, and that a collection
of expressions in use among those who attend on steam engines would
be no less startling than instructive. I am also informed, that
almost all machines have their own tricks and idiosyncrasies; that
they know their drivers and keepers; and that they will play pranks
upon a stranger. It is my intention, on a future occasion, to
bring together examples both of the expressions in common use among
mechanicians, and of any extraordinary exhibitions of mechanical
sagacity and eccentricity that I can meet with--not as believing in
the Erewhonian Professor's theory, but from the interest of the
subject.
End of the Project Gutenberg eText Erewhon (Revised Edition)