The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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As to omens, aforesaid witness deposes that the sceptre, ball, and cross
were struck by lightning out of King John's hand, in the Schools
quadrangle at Oxford, immediately on the accession of William the
Reformer; and all the world is cognusant that York Minster, the Royal
Exchange, and the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire near about
the commencement of open hostility, among ruling powers, to our church,
commerce, and constitution; and I myself can tell a tale of no less than
eight remarkable warnings happening one day to a poor friend, who died
on the next, which none could be expected to believe unless I delivered
it on oath as having been an eye-witness to the facts. Dreams
also--strange, vague, mysterious word; there is a gloomy look in it, a
dreary intonation that makes the very flesh creep: the records of public
justice will show many a murder revealed by them, as instance the Red
Barn; more than one poor client, in the clutch of a "respectable"
attorney, has been helped to his rights by their influence; from
Agamemnon and Pilate, down to Napoleon, the oppressors of mankind have
in those had kindly warning. Dreams--how many millions false and
foolish, for the one proving to be true!--but that one, how clear,
determinate, and lasting, as ministered by far other agency than
imagination taking its sport while reason slumbers! Who has not tales to
tell of dreams? A warning not to go on board such and such a ship--which
founders; a strange unlikely scene fixed upon the mind, concerning
friends and circumstances miles away, exactly in the manner and at the
time of its occurrence; the fore-shown coming of an unexpected guest;
the pourtrayed visage of a secret enemy: these, and others like these,
many can attest, and I not least. And of other marvels, though here left
unconsidered, yet might much be said: truths so strange, that the pages
of romance would not trench on such extravagance; combinations so
unlikely, that thrice twelve cast successively by proper dice, were but
probability to those. Thus, in authorial fashion, has the marvellous
dwelt upon my mind; and thus would I suggest a hand-book thereof to
catering booksellers and the insatiable public.

* * * * *

Against bears in a stage-coach, pointers in a drawing-room, lap dogs in
a _vis-a-vis_, and monkeys in a lady's boudoir, my love of comfort and
propriety enters strong protest; an emancipated parrot attracts my
sympathy far less than bright-eyed children feeding their testy pet, for
I dread the cannibal temptation of those soft fair fingers, when brought
into collision with Polly's hook and eye; gigantic Newfoundlanders
dragging their perpetual chains, larks and linnets trilling the faint
song of liberty behind their prison bars, cold green snakes stewing in a
school-boy's pocket, and dormice nestling in a lady's glove, summon my
antipathies; a cargo of five hundred pigs, with whom I had once the
honour of sailing from Cork to London, were far from pleasant as
_compagnons de voyage_; neither can I sleep with kittens in the room.
Nevertheless, no one can profess truer compassion, truer friendship (if
you will) for the animal creation: often have I walked on in weariness,
rather than increase the strain upon the Rosinantes of an omnibus; and
my greatest school scrape was occasioned by thrashing the favoured scion
of a noble house for cruelty to a cat. Such and such-like--for we learn
from AEsop (Fable eighty-eight, to wit) that trumpeters deserve to be
unpopular--is my physical zeal in the cause of poor dumb brutes: nor is
my regard for them the less in matters metaphysical. Bishop Butler, we
may all of us remember, in 'THE _Analogy_' argues that the
objector against a man's immortality must show good cause why that
which exists, should ever cease to exist; and, until that good cause be
shown, the weight of probability is in favour of continual being. Now,
for my part, I wish to be informed why this probability should not be
extended to that innocent maltreated class, whom God's mercy made with
equal skill, and sustains with equal care, as in the case of man,
and--dare we add?--of angels. Doth He not feed the ravens? Do the young
lions not gather what He giveth? Doth a sparrow fall to the ground
without Our Father? and is not the unsinning multitude of Nineveh's
young children climaxed with "much cattle?" It is true, there may be
mighty difference between "the spirit of a man that goeth upward, and
the spirit of a beast that goeth downward in the earth:" but mark this,
there _is_ a spirit in the beast; and as man's eternal heaven may lie in
some superior sphere, so that temporarily designed for the lower animals
may be seen in the renovated earth. It is also true, that St. Paul,
arguing for the temporal livelihood of Christian ministers from the type
of "not muzzling the ox that treadeth out the corn," asks, "Doth God
care for oxen?"--or, in effect, doth He legislate (I speak soberly,
though the sublime treads on the ridiculous,) for a stable?--and the
implication is, "To thy dutiful husbandry, O man! such lesser cares are
left." Sorry, righteously sorry, would it make any good man's heart to
think that the Creator had ceased to care for the meanest of his
creatures: in a certain sense

"He sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall;"

and, assured that carelessness in a just Creator of his poor dependent
creatures must be impossible, I submit that, critically speaking, some
laudable variation might be made in that text by the simple
consideration that [Greek: melei] is not so strictly rendered "care for"
as [Greek: kedetai]. Scripture, then, so far from militating against the
possible truth, that animals have souls, would seem, by a side-long
glance, to countenance the doctrine: and now let us for a passing moment
turn and see what aid is given to us by moral philosophy.

No case can be conceived more hard or more unjust than that of a
sentient creature (on the hypothesis of its having no soul, no
conscience, necessarily quite innocent), thrown into a world of cruelty
and tyranny, without the chance of compensation for sufferings
undeserved. Neither can any good government be so partial, as (limiting
the whole existence of animals to an hour, a day, a year,) to allow one
of a litter to be pampered with continual luxuries, and another to be
tortured for all its little life by blows, famine, disease--and in its
lingering death by the scientific scalpels of a critical Majendie or a
cold-blooded Spallanzani. Remember, that in the so-called parallel case
of partialities among men--the this-world's choice of a Jacob, the
this-world's rejection of an Esau--the answer is obvious: there are two
scales to the balance, there is yet another world. Far be it from us to
think that all things are not then to be cleared up; that the innocent
little ones of Kedar and the exterminated Canaanites will not then be
heard one by one, and no longer be mingled up indiscriminately in an
overwhelming national judgment; that the pleas of evil education and
example, of hereditary taint and common usage, will be then thrown aside
as vain excuse; and that eventual justice will not with facility explain
every riddle in the moral government of God. But in the case of soulless
extinguished animals, there is, there can be no compensation, no
explanation; whether in pain or pleasure, they have lived and they have
died forgotten by their Maker, and left to the casual kindness or
cruelty of, towards them at least, irresponsible masters. How different
the view opened to us by the possibility of soul being apportioned in
various measure among the lower animals: there is a clue given "to
justify the ways of God to"--brutes: we need not then consider, with a
certain French abbe, that they are fallen angels, doing penance for
their sins; we need not, with old Pythagoras and latter Brahmins,
account them stationed lodges, homes of transmigration for the spirits
of men in process of being purged from their offences: we need not
regard them as Avatars of Vishnu, or incarnations of Apis, visible
deities craving the idolatries of India and Egypt. The truth commends
itself by mere simplicity: nakedness betrays its Eve-like innocence of
guile or error: those living creatures whom we call brutes and beasts,
have, in their degree, the breath of God within them, as well as His
handiwork upon them. And, candid theologian, tell me why--in that
Millenium so long looked-for, when, after a fiery purgation, this earth
shall have its sabbath, and when those who for a time were "caught up
into the air," descending again with their Lord and his ten thousand
saints, shall bodily dwell with others risen in the flesh for that happy
season on this renovated globe--tell me why there should not be some
tithe of the animal creation made to rise again to minister in pleasure,
as they once ministered in pain? And for the rest, the other nine, what
hinders them from tenanting a thousand happy fields in other of the
large domains of space? What hinders those poor dumb slaves from
enjoying some emancipate existence--we need not perhaps accord them
more of immortality than justice, demands for compensation--for a
definite time, a millennium let us think, in scores of those million
orbs that twinkle in the galaxy?

Space stretches wide enough for every grain
Of the broad sands that curb our swelling seas,
Each separate in its sphere, to stand apart
As far as sun from sun.

Shall I then say what hinders?--the littleness of man's mind, refusing
possibility of room for those countless quadrillions; and the
selfishness of his pride, scorning the more generous savage, whose
doctrine (certainly too lax in liberality) raises the beast to a level
with mankind, and

"Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."

Truly, the Creator's justice, and mercy, and the majesty of his kingdom,
give hope of after-life to all creation: Saint Antony of Padua did waste
time in homilizing birds, beasts, and fishes; but may they not find
blessings, though ignorant of priests?--And now, suffer me, in my
current fashion, to glance at a few other considerations affecting this
topic. It will be admitted, I suppose, that the lower animals possess,
in their degree, similar cerebral or at least nervous mechanism with
ourselves; in their degree, I say; for a zooephyte and a caterpillar have
brains, though not in the head; and to this day Waterton does not know
whether he shot a man or a monkey, so closely is his nondescript linked
with either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orang
outang. Brutes are nerved as we are, and uncivilized man possesses
instincts like them: all we can with any show of reason deny them is
moral sense, and in our arbitrary refusal of this, and our summary
disposal of what we are pleased to term instinct, we take credit to
ourselves for exclusive participation in that immaterial essence which
is called Soul. But is it, in candour, true that brutes have no moral
sense? Obviously, since moral sense is a growing thing, and ascending in
the scale of being, and since man is its chief receptacle on earth, we
ought to be able to take the best instances of animal morals from those
creatures which have come most within the influence of human example; as
pets of every kind, but mainly dogs. Does not a puppy, that has stolen a
sweet morsel from some butcher's stall, fly, though none pursue him? Is
a fox-hound not conscience-stricken for his harry of the sheep-fold? and
who will deny some sense of duty, and no little strength of affection,
in a shepherd's dog? Have not Cowper's now historic hares displayed an
educated and unnatural confidence; and many a gray parrot, though
limited in speech, said many a witty thing?--Again, read some common
collection of canine anecdotes: What essential difference is there
between the affectionate watch kept by man over his brother's bed of
sickness, and that which has been known of more than one poor cur, whose
solicitude has extended even to dying on his master's grave? The
soldier's faithful poodle licks his wounds upon the stormy battle-field;
and Landseer's colley-dog tears up the turf, and howls the shepherd's
requiem. What real distinction can we make between a high sense of duty
in the captain who is the last to leave his sinking ship, and that in
the watchful terrier, whom neither tempting morsels nor menaced blows
can induce to desert the ploughman's smock committed to his care? Once
more: Who does not recognise individuality of character in animals? A
dog, or a horse, or a tame deer, or, in fact, any domesticated creature,
will act throughout life, in a certain course of disposition, at least
as consistently as most masters: it will also have its whims and ways,
likings and dislikings, habits, fears, joys, and sorrows; and, verily,
in patience, courage, gratitude, and obedience, will put its monarch to
the blush.

But upon this theme--meagre as the sketch may be, fanciful,
illogical--my cursory notions have too long detained you. I had intended
barely to have introduced a black-looking Greek composite, serving for
name to an unwritten essay which we will imagine in existence as

PSYCHOTHERION,

AN INCONCLUSIVE ARGUMENT ON THE SOULS OF BRUTES;

And my thoughts have run on thus far so little conclusively (I humbly
admit to you), that we will, to save trouble, leave the riddle as
unsolved as ever, and gain no better advantage than thus having loosely
adverted to another fancy of your author's mind.

* * * * *

Not yet is my mind a simple freeman, a private, unincumbered, individual
self-possessor: its slaves are not yet all manumitted; I lack not
subjects; I am no lord of depopulated regions; albeit my aim is indeed
akin to that of old Rufus, and Goldsmith's tyrannical Squire of Auburn;
I wish to clear my hunting-grounds, to make a solitude, and call it
peace. Slowly, but still surely, am I working out that will. Meanwhile,
however, there is no need to advertise for heroes; they are only too
rife, clinging like bats to the curtains of my chambers of imagery, or
with attendant satellites hanging in bunches, as swarming bees about
their monarch, to the rafters of my brain. Selection is the hardest
difficulty; here is the labour, here the toil; because for just
selection there should be good reasons. Now, amongst other my
multitudinous authorial projects, this perhaps is not the worst; namely,
by a series of dissimilar novels, psychological rather than religious,
and for interest's sake laid in diverse ages and countries, to
illustrate separately the most rampant errors of the Papacy. For
example, say that Lewis's '_Monk_' is a strong delineation of the evils
consequent on constrained and unchosen celibacy; though its colouring be
meretricious, though its details offend the moralities of nature, still
it is a book replete to thoughtful minds with terrible teaching--be not
high-minded, but fear. In like manner, guilty thoughts dropped upon
innocent young hearts in that foul corner,

THE CONFESSIONAL,

might make a stirring tale, or haply a series of them: the cowled
hypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is all innocence; his
schemes of ambition, or avarice, or lust, slowly elaborated by the
fiend-like purposes to which he puts his ill-used knowledge of the human
heart; his sacrilegious violation of the holy grievings made by mistaken
penitence. History should bring its collateral assistance: the Medicean
Queens, Venice, bloody Spain, hard-visaged monks calmly directing the
engines of torture, the poison of anonymous calumny, and dread secrets
more dreadfully betrayed, could furnish much of truthful precedent. The
bad obstructions placed between the sinner and his God by selfish
priestcraft; the souls that would return again, like Noah's weary dove,
enticed by ravens to forsake the ark, mate with them, and feed on their
banquet of corruption; the social, religious, philosophic, and eternal
harms brought out in full detail; the progress of this world's misery in
the lives of the confessing, and of studious crime in the heart of the
absolver: a scene laid among the high Alps, and the sunny plains they
topple over; the time, that of some murderous Simon de Montfort; the
actors, Waldensian saints, and demon inquisitors; the prominent
characters, a plausible intriguing friar, (as of old a monk of Cluni,)
whose ambition is the popedom, and whose conscience has no scruple
about means, bloody, bad, vindictive, atheistic; and then his victims, a
youth that he trains from infancy to the sole end of poisoning, subtly
and slowly, all who stand in his path; a girl who loves this youth, and
who, flying from the foul friar in the day of temptation, betakes her to
the mountains, and ultimately saves her lover from his terrible
destination in guilt, by hiding him in her own haven of refuge, the
persecuted little church; and with these materials to work upon, I need
hardly detail to you an intricate plot and an obvious _denouement_.

This class of theme, it is probable, has exercised the talents of many;
but as the evils of confessing to deceitful man, and of blind trust in
his deleterious advice, have not specifically met my eye, the subject is
new to me, and may be so to others. Still, I stay not now further to
enlarge upon it; I must press on; and will not cruelly encourage the
birth of thoughts brought forth only to be destroyed, like father
Saturn's babes--the anthropophagite.

A good reason for selection at last presents itself. Sundry collateral
ancestors of mine [every body from Cain downwards must have had
ancestors; so no quibbling, please, nor quarrelling about so exploded an
absurdity as family-pride,] were lucky enough in days lang syne to
appropriate to themselves, amongst other matters, a respectable
allowance of forfeited monastic territory; and I know it by this token:
that in yonder venerable chest of archives and muniments, rest in their
own dust of ages, duly and clearly assorted, all those abbey deeds from
the times of Henry Beauclerc. Here's a fine unlooked-for opportunity of
making dull ancestral spots classic ground, famous among men; here's a
chance of immortalizing the crumbling ruins of an obscure, but
interesting, abbey-church; here's a fair field for dragging in all that
one knows or does not know, all that parchments can prove, or fancy can
invent, of redoubtable or reprobate progenitors, and investing the place
of their possessions with a glory beyond heraldry. Much is on my mind of
the desperate evils consequent on the Romish rule of idol-worship: and
why not lay my scene on the wild banks of the Swale, among the bleak,
rough moors that stand round Richmond, and the gullies that run between
the Yorkshire hills? Why not talk about those names of gentle blood,
familiar to the ear as household words, Uvedale and Scrope, Vavasour and
Ratcliffe? Why not press into the service of instructive novelism truths
stranger than fiction, among characters more marked, and names of higher
note, than the whole hot-pressed family of the Fitzes?

All this might be accomplished, were it worth the worry, in

THE PRIOR OF MARRICK.

And now for a story of idolatry. It seems an absurdity, an insanity; it
is one--both. But think it out. Is it quite impossible, quite
incredible? Let me sketch the outline of so strange infatuation. Our
prior was once a good man--an easy, kind, and amiable: he takes the cowl
in early youth, partly because he is the younger son of an unfighting
family, and must, partly because he is melancholy, and will. And
wherefore melancholy? There was brought up with him, from the very
nursery, a fair girl, the weeping orphan of a neighbouring squire, who
had buckled on his harness, and fallen in the wars: they loved, of
course, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: they
were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter;
still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful
to each other, or more united. But--a hacking cough--a hectic cheek--a
wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of
death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower:
henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was--so thought he, as
many do--his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his present
sorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time,
the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy at
Rome--true-healing godliness--alleviates his grief, and makes him less
sad, but not wiser; years pass, the desire of preeminence in his own
small world has hitherto furnished incentives to existence, and he find
himself a prior too soon; for he has nothing more to live for. Yes:
there is an object; the turmoil of small ambition with its petty cares
is past, and the now motiveless man lingers in yearning thought on the
only white spot in his gloomy journey, the green oasis of his desert
life, that dream of early love. He has long loved the fair, quiet image
of our Lady of Marrick, unwittingly, for another Mary's sake;
half-oblivious of the past in scheming for the present, he has knelt at
midnight before that figure of the Virgin-mother, and knew not why he
trembled; he thought it the ecstacy of devotion, the warm-gushing flood
of calmness, which prayer confers upon care confessed. But now, he sees
it, he knows it; there is, indeed, good cause: how miraculously the
white marble face grows into resemblance with _hers!_ the same sainted
look of delicate unearthly beauty, the same white cheek, so still and
unruffled even by a smile, the same turn of heavenly triumph on the lip,
the same wild compassion in the eye! Great God--he loves again!--that
staid, grave, melancholy man, loves with more than youthful fondness;
the image is now dearer than the most sacred; there is a halo round it,
like light from heaven: he adores its placid, eternal, changeless
aspect; if it could move, the charm would half dissolve; he loves it--as
an image! And then how rapturously joins he with the wondering choir of
more stagnant worshippers, while they yield to this substantial form,
this stone-transmigration of his love, this tangible, unpassionate,
abiding, present deity, the holy hymns of praise, due only to the unseen
God! How gladly he sings her titles, ascribing all excellence to her!
How tenderly falls he at her feet, with eyes lighted as in youth! How
earnestly he prays to his fixed image--_to_ it, not _through_ it, for
his heart is _there_! How zealously he longs for her honour, her worship
among men--hers, the presiding idol of that Gothic pile, the hallowed
Lady, the goddess-queen of Marrick! Stop--can he do nothing for her, can
he venture nothing in her service? Other shrines are rich, other images
decked in gold and jewels; there is yet an object for his useless life,
there are yet ends to be attained, ends--that can justify the means. He
longs for wealth, he plots for it, he dares for it: he plans lying
miracles, and thousands flock to the shrine; he waylays dying men, and,
by threatened dread of torments of the damned, extortionizes conscience
into unjust riches for himself; he accuses the innocent, and reaps the
fine; he connives at the guilty, and fingers the bribe. So wealth flows
in, and the altar of his idol is hung with cloth of gold, her diadem is
alight with gems, costly offerings deck her temple, bending crowds kneel
to her divinity. Is he not happy? Is he not content? Oh, no: an
insatiate demon has possessed him; with more than Pygmalion's insanity,
he loves that image; he dreams, he thinks of that one unchanging form.
The marvelling brotherhood, credulous witnesses of such deep devotion,
hold him for a saint; and Rome, at the wish of the world, sends him, as
to a living St. Eustatius, the patent of canonization: they praise him,
honour him, pray to him; but he contemptuously (and they take it for
humility) spurns a gift which speaks of any other heaven than the
presence of that one fair, beautiful, beloved statue. A thought fills
him, and that with joy: he has heard of sacrifices in old time,
immolations, offerings up of self, as the highest act of a devout
worshipper; he cares not for earth nor for heaven; and one night, in his
enthusiastic vigils, the phrensy of idolatry arms that old man's own
weak hand against himself, and he falls at the statue's feet,
self-murdered, _its_ martyr.

Here were scope for psychology; here were subtle unwindings of motive,
trackings of reason, intricate anatomizations of the heart. All ages,
before these last in which we live, have been worshippers, even to
excess, of "unknown gods," "too superstitious:" we, upon whom the ends
of the world are fallen, may be thought to be beyond a danger into which
the wisest of old time were entrapped: we scarcely allow that the
Brahmin may, notwithstanding, be a learned man and a shrewd, when we see
him fall before his monster; we have not wits to understand how the
Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman dynasties could be so besotted.
For this superior illumination of mind, let us thank not ourselves, but
the Light of the world; and, warned by the history of ages, let us
beware how we place created things to mediate between us and the most
High; let us be shy of symbolic emblems--of pictures, images,
observances--lest they grow into forms that engross the mind, and fill
it with a swarm of substantial idols.