Or again, let a man, if he knows nothing of botany, not trouble himself with collecting and drying specimens; let him simply photograph every strange and new tree or plant he sees, to give a general notion of its species, its look; let him append, where he can, a photograph of its leafage, flower, fruit; and send them to Dr. Hooker, or any distinguished botanist: and he will find that, though he may know nothing of botany, he will have pretty certainly increased the knowledge of those who do know.
The sportsman, again—I mean the sportsman of that type which seems peculiar to these islands, who loves toil and danger for their own sakes; he surely is a naturalist, ipso facto, though he knows it not. He has those very habits of keen observation on which all sound knowledge of nature is based; and he, if he will—as he may do without interfering with his sport—can study the habits of the animals among whom he spends wholesome and exciting days. You have only to look over such good old books as Williams’s ‘Wild Sports of the East,’ Campbell’s ‘Old Forest Ranger,’ Lloyd’s ‘Scandinavian Adventures,’ and last, but not least, Waterton’s ‘Wanderings,’ to see what valuable additions to true zoology—the knowledge of live creatures, not merely dead ones—British sportsmen have made, and still can make. And as for the employment of time, which often hangs so heavily on a soldier’s hands, really I am ready to say, if you are neither men of science, nor draughtsmen, nor sportsmen, why go and collect beetles. It is not very dignified, I know, nor exciting: but it will be something to do. It cannot harm you, if you take, as beetle-hunters do, an india-rubber sheet to lie on; and it will certainly benefit science. Moreover, there will be a noble humility in the act. You will confess to the public that you consider yourself only fit to catch beetles; by which very confession you will prove yourself fit for much finer things than catching beetles: and meanwhile, as I said before, you will be at least out of harm’s way. At a foreign barrack once, the happiest officer I met, because the most regularly employed, was one who spent his time in collecting butterflies. He knew nothing about them scientifically—not even their names. He took them simply for their wonderful beauty and variety; and in the hope, too—in which he was really scientific—that if he carefully kept every form which he saw, his collection might be of use some day to entomologists at home. A most pleasant gentleman he was; and, I doubt not, none the worse soldier for his butterfly catching. Commendable, also, in my eyes, was another officer—whom I have not the pleasure of knowing—who, on a remote foreign station, used wisely to escape from the temptations of the world into an entirely original and most pleasant hermitage. For finding—so the story went—that many of the finest insects kept to the tree-tops, and never came to ground at all, he used to settle himself among the boughs of some tree in the tropic forests, with a long-handled net and plenty of cigars, and pass his hours in that airy flower garden, making dashes every now and then at some splendid monster as it fluttered round his head. His example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be allowed that—at least as long as he was in his tree—he was neither dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and perhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment.
One word more, and I have done. If I was allowed to give one special piece of advice to a young officer, whether of the army or navy, I would say—Respect scientific men; associate with them; learn from them; find them to be, as you will usually, the most pleasant and instructive of companions: but always respect them. Allow them chivalrously, you who have an acknowledged rank, their yet unacknowledged rank; and treat them as all the world will treat them, in a higher and truer state of civilisation. They do not yet wear the Queen’s uniform; they are not yet accepted servants of the State; as they will be in some more perfectly organised and civilised land: but they are soldiers nevertheless, and good soldiers and chivalrous, fighting their nation’s battle, often on even less pay than you,—and with still less chance of promotion and of fame, against most real and fatal enemies—against ignorance of the laws of this planet, and all the miseries which that ignorance begets. Honour them for their work; sympathise in it; give them a helping hand in it whenever you have an opportunity—and what opportunities you have, I have been trying to sketch for you to-night; and more, work at it yourselves whenever and wherever you can. Show them that the spirit which animates them—the hatred of ignorance and disorder, and of their bestial consequences—animates you likewise; show them that the habit of mind which they value in themselves—the habit of accurate observation and careful judgment—is your habit likewise; show them that you value science, not merely because it gives better weapons of destruction and of defence, but because it helps you to become clear-headed, large-minded, able to take a just and accurate view of any subject which comes before you, and to cast away every old prejudice and every hasty judgment in the face of truth and of duty: and it will be better for you and for them.
But why? What need for the soldier and the man of science to fraternise just now? This need:—The two classes which will have an increasing, it may be a preponderating, influence on the fate of the human race for some time, will be the pupils of Aristotle and those of Alexander—the men of science and the soldiers. In spite of all appearances, and all declamations to the contrary, that is my firm conviction. They, and they alone, will be left to rule; because they alone, each in his own sphere, have learnt to obey. It is therefore most needful for the welfare of society that they should pull with, and not against each other; that they should understand each other, respect each other, take counsel with each other, supplement each other’s defects, bring out each other’s higher tendencies, counteract each other’s lower ones. The scientific man has something to learn of you, gentlemen, which I doubt not that he will learn in good time. You, again, have—as I have been hinting to you to-night—something to learn of him, which you, I doubt not, will learn in good time likewise. Repeat, each of you according to his powers, the old friendship between Aristotle and Alexander; and so, from the sympathy and co-operation of you two, a class of thinkers and actors may yet arise which can save this nation, and the other civilised nations of the world, from that of which I had rather not speak; and wish that I did not think, too often and too earnestly.
I may be a dreamer: and I may consider, in my turn, as wilder dreamers than myself, certain persons who fancy that their only business in life is to make money, the scientific man’s only business is to show them how to make money, and the soldier’s only business to guard their money for them. Be that as it may, the finest type of civilised man which we are likely to see for some generations to come, will be produced by a combination of the truly military with the truly scientific man. I say—I may be a dreamer: but you at least, as well as my scientific friends, will bear with me; for my dream is to your honour.
ON BIO-GEOLOGY.
AN ADDRESS GIVEN TO THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY OF WINCHESTER.
I am not sure that the subject of my address is rightly chosen. I am not sure that I ought not to have postponed a question of mere natural history, to speak to you, as scientific men, on the questions of life and death, which have been forced upon us by the awful warning of an illustrious personage’s illness; of preventible disease, its frightful prevalency; of the 200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever alone since the Prince Consort’s death, ten years ago; of the remedies; of drainage; of sewage disinfection and utilisation; and of the assistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any effort towards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from those unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, ready to spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless. Of all this I longed to speak: but I thought it best only to hint at it, and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity; taking for granted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen, have been of late painfully awakened to its importance. It seemed to me almost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstances I know little or nothing. As an old sanitary reformer, practical, as well as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties which beset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like this; where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors’ ignorance; and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries of accumulated dirt.
And, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellect enough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go on to ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more and more important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do much towards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector of specimens—as he was twenty years ago—to a philosopher elucidating some of the grandest problems. I mean the infant science of Bio-geology—the science which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over the globe, and the causes of that distribution.
I doubt not that there are many here who know far more about the subject than I; who are far better read than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin, Wallace, Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men who have written on it. But I may, perhaps, give a few hints which will be of use to the younger members of this Society, and will point out to them how to get a new relish for the pursuit of field science.
Bio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant or animal you meet, large or small, not merely—What is your name? That is the collector and classifier’s duty; and a most necessary duty it is, and one to be performed with the most conscientious patience and accuracy, so that a sound foundation may be built for future speculations. But young naturalists should act not merely as Nature’s registrars and census-takers, but as her policemen and gamekeepers; and ask everything they meet—How did you get here? By what road did you come? What was your last place of abode? And now you are here, how do you get your living? Are you and your children thriving, like decent people who can take care of themselves, or growing pauperised and degraded, and dying out? Not that we have a fear of your becoming a dangerous class. Madam Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. She has, doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards each organism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear. So, you plant or you animal, are you among the strong, the successful, the multiplying, the colonising? Or are you among the weak, the failing, the dwindling, the doomed?
These questions may seem somewhat rude: but you may comfort yourself by the thought that plants and animals, though they deserve all kindness, all admiration, deserve no courtesy—at least in this respect. For they are, one and all, wherever you find them, vagrants and landloupers, intruders and conquerors, who have got where they happen to be simply by the law of the strongest—generally not without a little robbery and murder. They have no right save that of possession; the same by which the puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then lays her eggs in the rabbit burrow—simply because she can.
Now, you will see at once that such a course of questioning will call out a great many curious and interesting answers, if you can only get the things to tell you their story; as you always may, if you will cross-examine them long enough; and will lead you into many subjects beside mere botany or entomology. So various, indeed, are the subjects which you will thus start, that I can only hint at them now in the most cursory fashion.
At the outset you will soon find yourself involved in chemical and meteorological questions: as, for instance, when you ask—How is it that I find one flora on the sea-shore, another on the sandstone, another on the chalk, and another on the peat-making gravelly strata? The usual answer would be, I presume—if we could work it out by twenty years’ experiment, such as Mr. Lawes, of Rothampsted, has been making on the growth of grasses and leguminous plants in different soils and under different manures—the usual answer, I say, would be—Because we plants want such and such mineral constituents in our woody fibre; again, because we want a certain amount of moisture at a certain period of the year: or, perhaps, simply because the mechanical arrangement of the particles of a certain soil happens to suit the shape of our roots and of their stomata. Sometimes you will get an answer quickly enough; sometimes not. If you ask, for instance, Asplenium viride how it contrives to grow plentifully in the Craven of Yorkshire down to 600 or 800 feet above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing lower than 2000 feet, and is not plentiful even there?—it will reply—Because in the Craven I can get as much carbonic acid as I want from the decomposing limestone: while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very little; and I have to make it up by clinging to the mountain tops, for the sake of the greater rainfall. But if you ask Polopodium calcareum—How is it you choose only to grow on limestone, while Polypodium Dryopteris, of which, I suspect, you are only a variety, is ready to grow anywhere?—Polypodium calcareum will refuse, as yet, to answer a word.
Again—I can only give you the merest string of hints—you will find in your questionings that many plants and animals have no reason at all to show why they should be in one place and not in another, save the very sound reason for the latter which was suggested to me once by a great naturalist. I was asking—Why don’t I find such and such a species in my parish, while it is plentiful a few miles off in exactly the same soil?—and he answered—For the same reason that you are not in America. Because you have not got there. Which answer threw to me a flood of light on this whole science. Things are often where they are, simply because they happen to have got there, and not elsewhere. But they must have got there by some means: and those means I want young naturalists to discover; at least to guess at.
A species, for instance—and I suspect it is a common case with insects—may abound in a single spot, simply because, long years ago, a single brood of eggs happened to hatch at a time when eggs of other species, who would have competed against them for food, did not hatch; and they may remain confined to that spot, though there is plenty of good food for them outside it, simply because they do not increase fast enough to require to spread out in search of more food. Thus I should explain a case which I heard of lately of Anthocera trifolii, abundant for years in one corner of a certain field, and only there; while there was just as much trefoil all round for its larvæ as there was in the selected spot. I can, I say, only give hints: but they will suffice, I hope, to show the path of thought into which I want young naturalists to turn their minds.
Or, again, you will have to inquire whether the species has not been prevented from spreading by some natural barrier. Mr. Wallace, whom you all of course know, has shown in his ‘Malay Archipelago’ that a strait of deep sea can act as such a barrier between species. Moritz Wagner has shown that, in the case of insects, a moderately broad river may divide two closely allied species of beetles, or a very narrow snow-range two closely allied species of moths.
Again, another cause, and a most common one is: that the plants cannot spread because they find the ground beyond them already occupied by other plants, who will not tolerate a fresh mouth, having only just enough to feed themselves. Take the case of Saxifraga hypnoides and S. umbrosa, “London pride.” They are two especially strong species. They show that, S. hypnoides especially, by their power of sporting, of diverging into varieties; they show it equally by their power of thriving anywhere, if they can only get there. They will both grow in my sandy garden, under a rainfall of only 23 inches, more luxuriantly than in their native mountains under a rainfall of 50 or 60 inches. Then how is it that S. hypnoides cannot get down off the mountains; and that S. umbrosa, though in Kerry it has got off the mountains and down to the sea level, exterminating, I suspect, many species in its progress, yet cannot get across county Cork? The only answer is, I believe: that both species are continually trying to go ahead; but that the other plants already in front of them are too strong for them, and massacre their infants as soon as born.
And this brings us to another curious question: the sudden and abundant appearance of plants, like the foxglove and Epilobium angustifolium, in spots where they have never been seen before. Are their seeds, as some think, dormant in the ground; or are the seeds which have germinated fresh ones wafted thither by wind or otherwise, and only able to germinate in that one spot, because there the soil is clear? General Monro, now famous for his unequalled memoir on the bamboos, holds to the latter theory. He pointed out to me that the Epilobium seeds, being feathered, could travel with the wind; that the plant always made its appearance first on new banks, landslips, clearings, where it had nothing to compete against; and that the foxglove did the same. True, and most painfully true, in the case of thistles and groundsels: but foxglove seeds, though minute, would hardly be carried by the wind any more than those of the white clover, which comes up so abundantly in drained fens. Adhuc sub judice lis est, and I wish some young naturalists would work carefully at the solution; by experiment, which is the most sure way to find out anything.
But in researches in this direction they will find puzzles enough. I will give them one which I shall be most thankful to hear they have solved within the next seven years—How is it that we find certain plants, namely, the thrift and the scurvy grass, abundant on the sea-shore and common on certain mountain-tops, but nowhere between the two? Answer me that. For I have looked at the fact for years—before, behind, sideways, upside down, and inside out—and I cannot understand it.
But all these questions, and specially, I suspect, that last one, ought to lead the young student up to the great and complex question—How were these islands re-peopled with plants and animals, after the long and wholesale catastrophe of the glacial epoch?
I presume you all know, and will agree, that the whole of these islands, north of the Thames, save certain ice-clad mountain-tops, were buried for long ages under an icy sea. From whence did vegetable and animal life crawl back to the land, as it rose again; and cover its mantle of glacial drift with fresh life and verdure?
Now let me give you a few prolegomena on this matter. You must study the plants of course, species by species. Take Watson’s ‘Cybele Britannica,’ and Moore’s ‘Cybele Hibernica;’ and let—as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say—“your thought play freely about them.” Look carefully, too, in the case of each species, at the note on its distribution, which you will find appended in Bentham’s ‘Handbook,’ and in Hooker’s ‘Student’s Flora.’ Get all the help you can, if you wish to work the subject out, from foreign botanists, both European and American; and I think that, on the whole, you will come to some such theory as this for a general starting platform. We do not owe our flora—I must keep to the flora just now—to so many different regions, or types, as Mr. Watson conceives, but to three, namely: an European or Germanic flora, from the south-east; an Atlantic flora, from the south-west; a Northern flora from the north. These three invaded us after the glacial epoch; and our general flora is their result.
But this will cause you much trouble. Before you go a step further you will have to eliminate from all your calculations most of the plants which Watson calls glareal, i.e. found in cultivated ground about habitations. And what their limit may be I think we never shall know. But of this we may be sure; that just as invading armies always bring with them, in forage or otherwise, some plants from their own country—just as the Cossacks, in 1815, brought more than one Russian plant through Germany into France—just as you have already a crop of North German plants upon the battle-fields of France—thus do conquering races bring new plants. The Romans, during their 300 or 400 years of occupation and civilisation, must have brought more species, I believe, than I dare mention. I suspect them of having brought, not merely the common hedge elm of the south, not merely the three species of nettle, but all our red poppies, and a great number of the weeds which are common in our cornfields; and when we add to them the plants which may have been brought by returning crusaders and pilgrims; by monks from every part of Europe, by Flemings or other dealers in foreign wool; we have to cut a huge cantle out of our indigenous flora: only, having no records, we hardly know where and what to cut out; and can only, we elder ones, recommend the subject to the notice of the younger botanists, that they may work it out after our work is done.
Of course these plants introduced by man, if they are cut out, must be cut out of only one of the floras, namely, the European; for they, probably, came from the south-east, by whatever means they came.
That European flora invaded us, I presume, immediately after the glacial epoch, at a time when France and England were united, and the German Ocean a mere network of rivers, which emptied into the deep sea between Scotland and Scandinavia. And here I must add, that endless questions of interest will arise to those who will study, not merely the invasion of that truly European flora, but the invasion of reptiles, insects, and birds, especially birds of passage, which must have followed it as soon as the land was sufficiently covered with vegetation to support life. Whole volumes remain to be written on this subject. I trust that some of your younger members may live to write one of them. The way to begin will be: to compare the flora and fauna of this part of England very carefully with that of the southern and eastern counties; and then to compare them again with the fauna and flora of France, Belgium, and Holland.
As for the Atlantic flora, you will have to decide for yourselves whether you accept or not the theory of a sunken Atlantic continent. I confess that all objections to that theory, however astounding it may seem, are outweighed in my mind by a host of facts which I can explain by no other theory. But you must judge for yourselves; and to do so you must study carefully the distribution of heaths, both in Europe and at the Cape; and their non-appearance beyond the Ural Mountains, and in America, save in Labrador, where the common ling, an older and less specialised form, exists. You must consider, too, the plants common to the Azores, Portugal, the West of England, Ireland, and the Western Hebrides. In so doing young naturalists will at least find proofs of a change in the distribution of land and water, which will utterly astound them when they face it for the first time.
As for the Northern flora, the question whence it came is puzzling enough. It seems difficult to conceive how any plants could have survived when Scotland was an archipelago in the same ice-covered condition as Greenland is now; and we have no proof that there existed after the glacial epoch any northern continent from which the plants and animals could have come back to us. The species of plants and animals common to Britain, Scandinavia, and North America, must have spread in pre-glacial times, when a continent joining them did exist.
But some light has been thrown on this question by an article, as charming as it is able, on “The Physics of the Arctic Ice,” by Dr. Brown, of Campster. You will find it in the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society’ for February 1870. He shows there that even in Greenland peaks and crags are left free enough from ice to support a vegetation of between 300 or 400 species of flowering plants; and, therefore, he well says, we must be careful to avoid concluding that the plant and animal life on the dreary shores or mountain-tops of the old glacial Scotland was poor. The same would hold good of our mountains; and, if so, we may look with respect, even with awe, on the Alpine plants of Wales, Scotland, and the Lake mountains, as organisms stunted, it may be, and even degraded, by their long battle with the elements; but venerable from their age, historic from their endurance. Relics of an older temperate world, they have lived through thousands of centuries of frost and fog, to sun themselves in a temperate climate once more. I can never pick one of them without a tinge of shame; and to exterminate one of them is to destroy for the mere pleasure of collecting the last of a family which God has taken the trouble to preserve for thousands of centuries.
I trust that these hints—for I can call them nothing more—will at least awaken any young naturalist who has hitherto only collected natural objects, to study the really important and interesting question—How did these things get here?
Now hence arise questions which may puzzle the mind of a Hampshire naturalist. You have in this neighbourhood, as you well know, two, or rather three, soils, each carrying its peculiar vegetation. First, you have the clay lying on the chalk, and carrying vast woodlands, seemingly primeval. Next, you have the chalk, with its peculiar, delicate, and often fragrant crop of lime-loving plants; and next you have the poor sands and clays of the New Forest basin, saturated with iron, and therefore carrying a moorland or peat-loving vegetation, in many respects quite different from the others. And this moorland soil, and this vegetation, with a few singular exceptions, repeats itself, as I daresay you know, in the north of the county, in the Bagshot basin, as it is called—the moors of Aldershot, Hartford Bridge, and Windsor Forest.
Now what a variety of interesting questions are opened up by these simple facts. How did these three floras get each to its present place? Where did each come from? How did it get past or through the other, till each set of plants, after long internecine competition, settled itself down in the sheet of land most congenial to it? And when did each come hither? Which is the oldest? Will any one tell me whether the heathy flora of the moors, or the thymy flora of the chalk downs, were the earlier inhabitants of these isles? To these questions I cannot get any answer; and they cannot be answered without first—a very careful study of the range of each species of plant on the continent of Europe; and next, without careful study of those stupendous changes in the shape of this island which have taken place at a very late geological epoch. The composition of the flora of our moorlands is as yet to me an utter puzzle. We have Lycopodiums—three species—enormously ancient forms which have survived the age of ice: but did they crawl downward hither from the northern mountains, or upward hither from the Pyrenees? We have the beautiful bog asphodel again—an enormously ancient form; for it is, strange to say, common to North America and to Northern Europe, but does not enter Asia—almost an unique instance. It must, surely, have come from the north; and points—as do many species of plants and animals—to the time when North Europe and North America were joined. We have, sparingly, in North Hampshire, though, strangely, not on the Bagshot moors, the Common or Northern Butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris); and also, in the south, the New Forest part of the county, the delicate little Pinguicula lusitanica, the only species now found in Devon and Cornwall, marking the New Forest as the extreme eastern limit of the Atlantic flora. We have again the heaths, which, as I have just said, are found neither in America nor in Asia, and must, I believe, have come from some south-western land long since submerged beneath the sea. But more, we have in the New Forest two plants which are members of the South Europe, or properly, the Atlantic flora; which must have come from the south and south-east; and which are found in no other spots in these islands. I mean the lovely Gladiolus, which grows abundantly under the ferns near Lyndhurst, certainly wild but it does not approach England elsewhere nearer than the Loire and the Rhine; and next, that delicate orchid, the Spiranthes æstivalis, which is known only in a bog near Lyndhurst and in the Channel Islands, while on the Continent it extends from southern Europe all through France. Now, what do these two plants mark? They give us a point in botany, though not in time, to determine when the south of England was parted from the opposite shores of France; and whenever that was, it was just after the Gladiolus and Spiranthes got hither. Two little colonies of these lovely flowers arrived just before their retreat was cut off. They found the country already occupied with other plants; and, not being reinforced by fresh colonists from the south, have not been able to spread farther north than Lyndhurst. Thus, in the New Forest, and, I may say, in the Bagshot moors, you find plants which you do not expect, and do not find plants which you do expect; and you are, or ought to be, puzzled, and I hope also interested, and stirred up to find out more.
I spoke just now of the time when England was joined to France, as bearing on Hampshire botany. It bears no less on Hampshire zoology. In insects, for instance, the presence of the purple emperor and the white admiral in our Hampshire woods, as well as the abundance of the great stag-beetle, point to a time when the two countries were joined, at least, as far west as Hampshire; while the absence of these insects farther to the westward shows that the countries, if ever joined, were already parted; and that those insects have not yet had time to spread westward. The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of the stag-beetle, along the south-east coast of England as far as the primeval forests of South Lincolnshire, points—as do a hundred other facts—to a time when the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the bed of a river running from the west; and when, as I told you just now, all the rivers which now run into the German Ocean, from the Humber on the west to the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the sea between Scotland and Norway, after wandering through a vast lowland, covered with countless herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other mammals now extinct; while the birds, as far as we know; the insects; the fresh-water fish; and even, as my friend Mr. Brady has proved, the Entomostraca of the rivers, were the same in what is now Holland as in what is now our Eastern counties. I could dwell long on this matter. I could talk long about how certain species of Lepidoptera—moths and butterflies—like Papilio Machaon and P. Podalirius, swarm through France, reach up to the British Channel, and have not crossed it; with the exception of one colony of Machaon in the Cambridgeshire fens. I could talk long about a similar phenomenon in the case of our migratory and singing birds: how many exquisite species—notably those two glorious songsters, the Orphean Warbler and Hippolais, which delight our ears everywhere on the other side of the Channel—follow our nightingales, blackcaps, and warblers northward every spring almost to the Straits of Dover: but dare not cross, simply because they have been, as it were, created since the gulf was opened, and have never learnt from their parents how to fly over it.
In the case of fishes, again, I might say much on the curious fact that the Cyprinidæ, or white fish—carp, &c.—and their natural enemy, the pike, are indigenous, I believe, only to the rivers, English or continental, on the eastern side of the Straits of Dover; while the rivers on the western side were originally tenanted, like our Hampshire streams, as now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid being the minnow—if it, too, be not an interloper; and I might ask you to consider the bearing of this curious fact on the former junction of England and France.
But I have only time to point out to you a few curious facts with regard to reptiles, which should be specially interesting to a Hampshire bio-geologist. You know, of course, that in Ireland there are no reptiles, save the little common lizard, Lacerta agilis, and a few frogs on the mountain-tops—how they got there I cannot conceive. And you will, of course, guess, and rightly, that the reason of the absence of reptiles is: that Ireland was parted off from England before the creatures, which certainly spread from southern and warmer climates, had time to get there. You know, of course, that we have a few reptiles in England. But you may not be aware that, as soon as you cross the Channel, you find many more species of reptiles than here, as well as those which you find here. The magnificent green lizard which rattles about like a rabbit in a French forest, is never found here; simply because it had not worked northward till after the Channel was formed. But there are three reptiles peculiar to this part of England which should be most interesting to a Hampshire zoologist. The one is the sand lizard (L. stirpium), found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South Hampshire moors likewise—a North European and French species. Another, the Coronella lævis, a harmless French and Austrian snake, which has been found about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about fifteen or twenty times. I have had three specimens from my own parish. I believe it not to be uncommon; and most probably to be found, by those who will look, both in the New Forest and Woolmer. The third is the Natterjack, or running toad (Bufo Rubeta), a most beautifully spotted animal, with a yellow stripe down his back, which is common with me at Eversley, and common also in many moorlands of Hants and Surrey; and, according to Fleming, on heaths near London, and as far north-east as Lincolnshire; in which case it will belong to the Germanic fauna. Now, here again we have cases of animals which have just been able to get hither before the severance of England and France; and which, not being reinforced from the rear, have been forced to stop, in small and probably decreasing colonies, on the spots nearest the coast which were fit for them.
I trust that I have not kept you too long over these details. What I wish to impress upon you is that Hampshire is a county specially fitted for the study of important bio-geological questions.
To work them out, you must trace the geology of Hampshire, and, indeed, of East Dorset. You must try to form a conception of how the land was shaped in miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which reared the chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting the tertiary beds upon their northern slopes. You must ask—Was there not land to the south of the Isle of Wight in those ages, and for ages after; and what was its extent and shape? You must ask—When was the gap between the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Purbeck sawn through, leaving the Needles as remnants on one side, and Old Harry on the opposite? And was it sawn asunder merely by the age-long gnawing of the waves? You must ask—Where did the great river which ran from the west, where Poole Harbour is now, and probably through what is now the Solent, depositing brackish water-beds right and left—where, I say, did it run into the sea? Where the Straits of Dover are now? Or, if not there, where? What, too, is become of the land to the Westward, composed of ancient metamorphic rocks, out of which it ran, and deposited on what are now the Haggerstone Moors of Poole, vast beds of grit? What was the climate on its banks when it washed down the delicate leaves of broad-leaved trees, akin to our modern English ones, which are found in the fine mud-sand strata of Bournemouth? When, finally, did it dwindle down to the brook which now runs through Wareham town? Was its bed sea, or dry land, or under an ice sheet, during the long ages of the glacial epoch? And if you say—Who is sufficient for these things?—Who can answer these questions? I answer—Who but you, or your pupils after you, if you will but try?
And if any shall reply—And what use if I do try? What use, if I do try? What use if I succeed in answering every question which you have propounded to-night? Shall I be the happier for it? Shall I be the wiser?
My friends, whether you will be the happier for it, or for any knowledge of physical science, or for any other knowledge whatsoever, I cannot tell: that lies in the decision of a Higher Power than I; and, indeed, to speak honestly, I do not think that bio-geology or any other branch of physical science is likely, at first at least, to make you happy. Neither is the study of your fellow-men. Neither is religion itself. We were not sent into the world to be happy, but to be right; at least, poor creatures that we are, as right as we can be; and we must be content with being right, and not happy. For I fear, or rather I hope, that most of us are not capable of carrying out Talleyrand’s recipe for perfect happiness on earth—namely, a hard heart and a good digestion. Therefore, as our hearts are, happily, not always hard, and our digestions, unhappily, not always good, we will be content to be made wise by physical science, even though we be not made happy.
And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but, content with what we do not understand—the habit of mind which theologians call—and rightly—faith in God; the true and solid faith, which comes often out of sadness, and out of doubt, such as bio-geology may well stir in us at first sight. For our first feeling will be—I know mine was when I began to look into these matters—one somewhat of dread and of horror.
Here were all these creatures, animal and vegetable, competing against each other. And their competition was so earnest and complete, that it did not mean—as it does among honest shopkeepers in a civilised country—I will make a little more money than you; but—I will crush you, enslave you, exterminate you, eat you up. “Woe to the weak,” seems to be Nature’s watchword. The Psalmist says, “The righteous shall inherit the land.” If you go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you observe carefully a square acre of any English land, cultivated or uncultivated, you will find that Nature’s text at first sight looks a very different one. She seems to say—Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inherit the land. Plant, insect, bird, what not—Find a weaker plant, insect, bird, than yourself, and kill it, and take possession of its little vineyard, and no Naboth’s curse shall follow you: but you shall inherit, and thrive therein, you, and your children after you, if they will be only as strong and as cruel as you are. That is Nature’s law: and is it not at first sight a fearful law? Internecine competition, ruthless selfishness, so internecine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered in tropic forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and fiercely, though not in the least more evilly, than in our slow and cold temperate one, I have said—Really these trees and plants are as wicked as so many human beings.
Throughout the great republic of the organic world, the motto of the majority is, and always has been as far back as we can see, what it is, and always has been, with the majority of human beings, “Every one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.” Over-reaching tyranny; the temper which fawns, and clings, and plays the parasite as long as it is down, and when it has risen, fattens on its patron’s blood and life—these, and the other works of the flesh, are the works of average plants and animals, as far as they can practise them. At least, so says at first sight the science of bio-geology; till the naturalist, if he be also human and humane, is glad to escape from the confusion and darkness of the universal battle-field of selfishness into the order and light of Christmas-tide.
For then there comes to him the thought—And are these all the facts? And is this all which the facts mean? That mutual competition is one law of Nature, we see too plainly. But is there not, besides that law, a law of mutual help? True it is, as the wise man has said, that the very hyssop on the wall grows there because all the forces of the universe could not prevent its growing. All honour to the hyssop. A brave plant, it has fought a brave fight, and has its just deserts—as everything in Nature has—and so has won. But did all the powers of the universe combine to prevent it growing? Is not that a one-sided statement of facts? Did not all the powers of the universe also combine to make it grow, if only it had valour and worth wherewith to grow? Did not the rains feed it, the very mortar in the wall give lime to its roots? Were not electricity, gravitation, and I know not what of chemical and mechanical forces, busy about the little plant, and every cell of it, kindly and patiently ready to help it, if it would only help itself? Surely this is true; true of every organic thing, animal and vegetable, and mineral, too, for aught I know: and so we must soften our sadness at the sight of the universal mutual war by the sight of an equally universal mutual help.
But more. It is true—too true if you will—that all things live on each other. But is it not, therefore, equally true that all things live for each other?—that self-sacrifice, and not selfishness, is at the bottom the law of Nature, as it is the law of Grace; and the law of bio-geology, as it is the law of all religion and virtue worthy of the name? Is it not true that everything has to help something else to live, whether it knows it or not?—that not a plant or an animal can turn again to its dust without giving food and existence to other plants, other animals?—that the very tiger, seemingly the most useless tyrant of all tyrants, is still of use, when, after sending out of the world suddenly, and all but painlessly, many an animal which would without him have starved in misery through a diseased old age, he himself dies, and, in dying, gives, by his own carcase, the means of life and of enjoyment to a thousandfold more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed?
And so, the longer one watches the great struggle for existence, the more charitable, the more hopeful, one becomes; as one sees that, consciously or unconsciously, the law of Nature is, after all, self-sacrifice; unconscious in plants and animals, as far as we know; save always those magnificent instances of true self-sacrifice shown by the social insects, by ants, bees, and others, which put to shame by a civilization truly noble—why should I not say divine, for God ordained it?—the selfishness and barbarism of man. But be that as it may, in man the law of self-sacrifice—whether unconscious or not in the animals—rises into consciousness just as far as he is a man; and the crowning lesson of bio-geology may be, when we have worked it out, after all, the lesson of Christmas-tide—of the infinite self-sacrifice of God for man; and Nature as well as religion may say to us—
“Ah, could you crush that ever craving lust
For bliss, which kills all bliss, and lose your life,
Your barren unit life, to find again
A thousand times in those for whom you die—
So were you men and women, and should hold
Your rightful rank in God’s great universe,
Wherein, in heaven or earth, by will or nature,
Naught lives for self. All, all, from crown to base—
The Lamb, before the world’s foundation slain—
The angels, ministers to God’s elect—
The sun, who only shines to light the worlds—
The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers—
The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves
Flee the decay of stagnant self-content—
The oak, ennobled by the shipwright’s axe—
The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower—
The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms
Born only to be prey to every bird—
All spend themselves on others: and shall man,
Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot
Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,
As being both worm and angel, to that service
By which both worms and angels hold their life,
Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,
Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him?
No; let him show himself the creatures’ Lord
By free-will gift of that self-sacrifice
Which they, perforce, by Nature’s laws endure.”
My friends, scientific and others, if the study of bio-geology shall help to teach you this, or anything like this; I think that though it may not make you more happy, it may yet make you more wise; and, therefore, what is better than being more happy, namely, more blessed.
HEROISM
It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralizing us; and that in proportion as he does his duty well; whether the perfection of justice and safety, the complete “preservation of body and goods,” may not reduce the educated and comfortable classes into that lap-dog condition in which not conscience, but comfort, doth make cowards of us all. Our forefathers had, on the whole, to take care of themselves; we find it more convenient to hire people to take care of us. So much the better for us, in some respects: but, it may be, so much the worse in others. So much the better; because, as usually results from the division of labour, these people, having little or nothing to do save to take care of us, do so far better than we could; and so prevent a vast amount of violence and wrong, and therefore of misery, especially to the weak: for which last reason we will acquiesce in the existence of policemen and lawyers, as we do in the results of arbitration, as the lesser of two evils. The odds in war are in favour of the bigger bully; in arbitration, in favour of the bigger rogue; and it is a question whether the lion or the fox be the safer guardian of human interests. But arbitration prevents war: and that, in three cases out of four, is full reason for employing it.
On the other hand, the lap-dog condition, whether in dogs or in men, is certainly unfavourable to the growth of the higher virtues. Safety and comfort are good, indeed, for the good; for the brave, the self-originating, the earnest. They give to such a clear stage and no favour wherein to work unhindered for their fellow-men. But for the majority, who are neither brave, self-originating, nor earnest, but the mere puppets of circumstance, safety and comfort may, and actually do, merely make their lives mean and petty, effeminate and dull. Therefore their hearts must be awakened, as often as possible, to take exercise enough for health; and they must be reminded, perpetually and importunately, of what a certain great philosopher called “whatsoever things are true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report;” “if there be any manhood, and any just praise, to think of such things.”
This pettiness and dulness of our modern life is just what keeps alive our stage, to which people go to see something a little less petty, a little less dull, than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of—I had almost said the excuse for—the modern rage for sensational novels. Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of passion and action, for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of human nature is, after all, that which is nearest to every one and most interesting to every one, therefore they go to fiction, since they cannot go to fact, to see what they themselves might be had they the chance; to see what fantastic tricks before high heaven men and women like themselves can play; and how they play them.
Well: it is not for me to judge, for me to blame. I will only say that there are those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There are those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able, and just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but for an hour, more fair.
If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider with me that one word Hero, and what it means.
Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, the capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful, always ennobling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts are not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence.
But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for working with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the ground of all sound knowledge was—to understand the true meaning of the words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser man than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism is.
Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting at its etymology—that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroism means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the earliest human speech in which we find it.
A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and men, is a threefold division of rational beings, with which we meet more than once or twice. Those grand old Greeks felt deeply the truth of the poet’s saying—
“Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man.”
But more: the Greeks supposed these heroes to be, in some way or other, partakers of a divine nature; akin to the gods; usually, either they, or some ancestor of theirs, descended from a god or goddess. Those who have read Mr. Gladstone’s ‘Juventus Mundi’ will remember the section (cap. ix. § 6) on the modes of the approximation between the divine and the human natures; and whether or not they agree with the author altogether, all will agree, I think, that the first idea of a hero or a heroine was a godlike man or godlike woman.
A godlike man. What varied, what infinite forms of nobleness that word might include, ever increasing, as men’s notions of the gods became purer and loftier, or, alas! decreasing, as their notions became degraded. The old Greeks, with that intense admiration of beauty which made them, in after ages, the master sculptors and draughtsmen of their own, and, indeed, of any age, would, of course, require in their hero, their godlike man, beauty and strength, manners, too, and eloquence, and all outward perfections of humanity, and neglect his moral qualities. Neglect, I say, but not ignore. The hero, by virtue of his kindred with the gods, was always expected to be a better man than common men, as virtue was then understood. And how better? Let us see.
The hero was at least expected to be more reverent than other men to those divine beings of whose nature he partook, whose society he might enjoy even here on earth. He might be unfaithful to his own high lineage; he might misuse his gifts by selfishness and self-will; he might, like Ajax, rage with mere jealousy and wounded pride till his rage ended in shameful madness and suicide. He might rebel against the very gods, and all laws of right and wrong, till he perished in his ατασθαλιη,
“Smitten down, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals.”
But he ought to have, he must have, to be true to his name of Hero, justice, self-restraint, and αιδως—that highest form of modesty, for which we have, alas! no name in the English tongue; that perfect respect for the feelings of others which springs out of perfect self-respect. And he must have, too—if he were to be a hero of the highest type—the instinct of helpfulness; the instinct that, if he were a kinsman of the gods, he must fight on their side, through toil and danger, against all that was unlike them, and therefore hateful to them. Who loves not the old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and all the rest—
“Who dared, in the god-given might of their manhood
Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests
Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated, brood of the giants;
Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired rulers”—
These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though they may have been, ennobled the old Greek heart; they ennobled the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the rediscovery of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian ideal, they harmonised with—I had almost said they supplemented—that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually gave a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had grown up in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister. They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a literature, both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser’s ‘Fairy Queen’—perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by mortal man.
And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What, though they have no body, and, perhaps, never had, has given them an immortal soul, which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?
What but this, that in them—dim it may be and undeveloped, but still there—lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the perfection of heroism; of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the gods?
Let us say, then, that true heroism must involve self-sacrifice. Those stories certainly involve it, whether ancient or modern, which the hearts, not of philosophers merely, or poets, but of the poorest and the most ignorant, have accepted instinctively as the highest form of moral beauty—the highest form, and yet one possible to all.
Grace Darling rowing out into the storm toward the wreck.—The “drunken private of the Buffs,” who, prisoner among the Chinese, and commanded to prostrate himself and kotoo, refused in the name of his country’s honour—“He would not bow to any Chinaman on earth:” and so was knocked on the head, and died surely a hero’s death.—Those soldiers of the ‘Birkenhead,’ keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from limb.—Or, to go across the Atlantic—for there are heroes in the Far West—Mr. Bret Harte’s “Flynn of Virginia,” on the Central Pacific Railway—the place is shown to travellers—who sacrificed his life for his married comrade,—
“There, in the drift,
Back to the wall,
He held the timbers
Ready to fall.
Then in the darkness
I heard him call,—
‘Run for your life, Jake!
Run for your wife’s sake!
Don’t wait for me.’“And that was all
Heard in the din—
Heard of Tom Flynn,
Flynn of Virginia.”
Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till every soul save he got safe on shore,—
“Through the hot black breath of the burning boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard;
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knew he would keep his word.
And sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the ‘Prairie Belle.’“He weren’t no saint—but at judgment
I’d run my chance with Jim
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shake hands with him.
He’d seen his duty—a dead sure thing—
And went for it there and then;
And Christ is not going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.”
To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay’s—and he has written many gallant and beautiful poems—I have but one demurrer: Jim Bludso did not merely do his duty, but more than his duty. He did a voluntary deed, to which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross—as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won—by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral. And it is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man: an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is above though not against duty.
Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not grudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and shrieked till help arrived.
Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same. Well: I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—of all which four I see every day too much. The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy. Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion—and not unwisely—as the three highest types of human capacity. The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master’s death. The animals and monsters of Greek myth—like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable—glide insensibly into speech and reason. Birds—the most wonderful of all animals in the eyes of a man of science or a poet—are sometimes looked on as wiser, and nearer to the gods, than man. The Norseman—the noblest and ablest human being, save the Greek, of whom history can tell us—was not ashamed to say of the bear of his native forests that he had “ten men’s strength and eleven men’s wisdom.” How could Reinecke Fuchs have gained immortality, in the Middle Ages and since, save by the truth of its too solid and humiliating theorem—that the actions of the world of men were, on the whole, guided by passions but too exactly like those of the lower animals? I have said, and say again, with good old Vaughan—
“Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.”
But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted the monkey’s heroism from quite a different point of view; and would have said that the poor little creature had been visited suddenly by some “divine afflatus”—an expression quite as philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic formulas which I read now-a-days—and had been thus raised for the moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a philosophy which is out of date and out of fashion, and which will have to wait a century or two before it comes into fashion again.
And now: if self-sacrifice and heroism be, as I believe, identical, I must protest against a use of the word sacrifice which is growing too common in newspaper-columns, in which we are told of an “enormous sacrifice of life;” an expression which means merely that a great many poor wretches have been killed, quite against their own will, and for no purpose whatsoever: no sacrifice at all, unless it be one to the demons of ignorance, cupidity or mismanagement.
The stout Whig undergraduate understood better the meaning of such words, who, when asked, “In what sense might Charles the First be said to be a martyr?” answered, “In the same sense that a man might be said to be a martyr to the gout.”
And I must protest, in like wise, against a misuse of the words hero, heroism, heroic, which is becoming too common, namely, applying them to mere courage. We have borrowed the misuse, I believe, as we have more than one beside, from the French press. I trust that we shall neither accept it, nor the temper which inspires it. It may be convenient for those who flatter their nation, and especially the military part of it, into a ruinous self-conceit, to frame some such syllogism as this—“Courage is heroism: every Frenchman is naturally courageous: therefore every Frenchman is a hero.” But we, who have been trained at once in a sounder school of morals, and in a greater respect for facts, and for language as the expression of facts, shall be careful, I hope, not to trifle thus with that potent and awful engine—human speech. We shall eschew likewise, I hope, a like abuse of the word moral, which has crept from the French press now and then, not only into our own press, but into the writings of some of our military men, who, as Englishmen, should have known better. We were told again and again, during the late war, that the moral effect of such a success had been great; that the morale of the troops was excellent; or again, that the morale of the troops had suffered, or even that they were somewhat demoralised. But when one came to test what was really meant by these fine words, one discovered that morals had nothing to do with the facts which they expressed; that the troops were in the one case actuated simply by the animal passion of hope, in the other simply by the animal passion of fear. This abuse of the word moral has crossed, I am sorry to say, the Atlantic; and a witty American, whom we must excuse, though we must not imitate, when some one had been blazing away at him with a revolver, he being unarmed, is said to have described his very natural emotions on the occasion, by saying that he felt dreadfully demoralised. We, I hope, shall confine the word demoralisation, as our generals of the last century would have done, when applied to soldiers, to crime, including, of course, the neglect of duty or of discipline; and we shall mean by the word heroism in like manner, whether applied to a soldier or to any human being, not mere courage; not the mere doing of duty: but the doing of something beyond duty; something which is not in the bond; some spontaneous and unexpected act of self-devotion.
I am glad, but not surprised, to see that Miss Yonge has held to this sound distinction in her golden little book of ‘Golden Deeds;’ and said, “Obedience, at all costs and risks, is the very essence of a soldier’s life. It has the solid material, but it has hardly the exceptional brightness, of a golden deed.”
I know that it is very difficult to draw the line between mere obedience to duty and express heroism. I know also that it would be both invidious and impertinent in an utterly unheroic personage like me, to try to draw that line; and to sit at home at ease, analysing and criticising deeds which I could not do myself: but—to give an instance or two of what I mean—
To defend a post as long as it is tenable is not heroic. It is simple duty. To defend it after it has become untenable, and even to die in so doing, is not heroic, but a noble madness, unless an advantage is to be gained thereby for one’s own side. Then, indeed, it rises towards, if not into, the heroism of self-sacrifice.
Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylæ, when they sat “combing their yellow hair for death” on the sea-shore? They devoted themselves to hopeless destruction: but why? They felt—I must believe that, for they behaved as if they felt—that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a mightier and a nobler man than they. And they did their work. They produced, if you will, a “moral” effect, which has lasted even to this very day. They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian empire. They made the event of that war certain, and the victories of Salamis and Platæa comparatively easy. They made Alexander’s conquest of the East, 150 years afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.
They did not, of course, foresee all this. No great or inspired man can foresee all the consequences of his deeds: but these men were, as I hold, inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which they played; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent them thither to help in that great game.
Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalry regiments who, in the battle of Mars La Tour, were bidden to hurl themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken French infantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of their comrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man, and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even at the bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen were killed or wounded? And why?
Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter of an hour. A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps. And how much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knew when, and where, and why to die. Who will refuse the name of heroes to these men? And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined the honour. They had but done that which was in the bond. They were but obeying orders after all. As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons—“‘I have but done that which it was my duty to do,’ is the natural answer of those capable of such actions. They have been constrained to them by duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all.”
These last true words bring us to another element in heroism: its simplicity. Whatsoever is not simple; whatsoever is affected, boastful, wilful, covetous, tarnishes, even destroys, the heroic character of a deed; because all these faults spring out of self. On the other hand, wherever you find a perfectly simple, frank, unconscious character, there you have the possibility, at least, of heroic action. For it is nobler far to do the most commonplace duty in the household, or behind the counter, with a single eye to duty, simply because it must be done—nobler far, I say, than to go out of your way to attempt a brilliant deed, with a double mind, and saying to yourself not only—“This will be a brilliant deed,” but also—“and it will pay me, or raise me, or set me off, into the bargain.” Heroism knows no “into the bargain.” And therefore, again, I must protest against applying the word heroic to any deeds, however charitable, however toilsome, however dangerous, performed for the sake of what certain French ladies, I am told, call “faire son salut”—saving one’s soul in the world to come. I do not mean to judge. Other and quite unselfish motives may be, and doubtless often are, mixed up with that selfish one: womanly pity and tenderness; love for, and desire to imitate, a certain incarnate ideal of self-sacrifice, who is at once human and divine. But that motive of saving the soul, which is too often openly proposed and proffered, is utterly unheroic. The desire to escape pains and penalties hereafter by pains and penalties here; the balance of present loss against future gain—what is this but selfishness extended out of this world into eternity? “Not worldliness,” indeed, as a satirist once said with bitter truth, “but other-worldliness.”
Moreover—and the young and the enthusiastic should also bear this in mind—though heroism means the going beyond the limits of strict duty, it never means the going out of the path of strict duty. If it is your duty to go to London, go thither: you may go as much further as you choose after that. But you must go to London first. Do your duty first; it will be time after that to talk of being heroic.
And therefore one must seriously warn the young, lest they mistake for heroism and self-sacrifice what is merely pride and self-will, discontent with the relations by which God has bound them, and the circumstances which God has appointed for them. I have known girls think they were doing a fine thing by leaving uncongenial parents or disagreeable sisters, and cutting out for themselves, as they fancied, a more useful and elevated line of life than that of mere home duties; while, after all, poor things, they were only saying, with the Pharisees of old, “Corban, it is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;” and in the name of God, neglecting the command of God to honour their father and mother.
There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave their children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spending their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own. It is ill to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to the angels. It is ill, I say, trying to make God presents, before we have tried to pay God our debts. The first duty of every man is to the wife whom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into the world; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceit that a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allow him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man’s invaluable services. Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye; every motive which springs from self; is by its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may.
But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation—the desire for the love and respect of our fellow-men.
That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives. I know that it is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion common to us and the lower animals. And yet no man excludes it less than that true hero, St. Paul. If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of whom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would become watchwords to children in their fatherland: what is that to us, save that it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that thought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy, and death more sweet?
And yet—and yet—is not the highest heroism that which is free even from the approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best and wisest? The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in secret? The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber? The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?—a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and noise of the outer world: more common among women; women of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and entreat to be left alone with God. True, they cannot always hide. They must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden lesson. But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces, woman transcends the man, that it would hide if it could.
And it was a pleasant thought to me, when I glanced lately at the golden deeds of woman in Miss Yonge’s book—it was a pleasant thought to me, that I could say to myself—Ah! yes. These heroines are known, and their fame flies through the mouths of men. But if so, how many thousands of heroines there must have been, how many thousands there may be now, of whom we shall never know. But still they are there. They sow in secret the seed of which we pluck the flower and eat the fruit, and know not that we pass the sower daily in the street; perhaps some humble ill-drest woman, earning painfully her own small sustenance. She who nurses a bedridden mother, instead of sending her to the workhouse. She who spends her heart and her money on a drunken father, a reckless brother, on the orphans of a kinsman or a friend. She who—But why go on with the long list of great little heroisms, with which a clergyman at least comes in contact daily—and it is one of the most ennobling privileges of a clergyman’s high calling that he does come in contact with them—why go on, I say, save to commemorate one more form of great little heroism—the commonest, and yet the least remembered of all—namely, the heroism of an average mother? Ah, when I think of that last broad fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more—because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.