MOTHER EARTH'S BIOGRAPHY.* This is a book of which it
is not easy to give a definite and coherent account. We are at a loss to discriminate what in it is meant to be serious from what is intended for wit and humour. In what sense it can be called a romance, except that it has pass- ages of a kind of sentimentality and mock-eloquent love-making, we cannot say. One of these passages occurs at the commence- ment. Here is a sample of it
There is scarcely a more agreeable situation in life than a quiet walk with your sweetheart out under the stars. The subdued wild light and calm tranquillity of evening are favourable for both thought and feeling. Above, there is immensity ; within, there is immensity,—if the true course of love runs smooth; the starry heavens above us, the divine love within us, the height and the depth of our strongest emotions. Delicious hour ! the little hand lays lightly, confidingly in yours; you gaze on the glittering stars, and choose which shall be your dwelling-place when love, &c., &c."
The reader, we fancy, is calling aloud to us to spare him, and as there are nearly four pages of writing, equally fine and equally execrable, we claim from him a recognition of our humanity in inflicting on him no more of it. The use of the word " lay " as a neuter verb, whatever it may be in America, is, in England, a gross vulgarism, for which any school-girl would deserve a scolding. But the book is not so feeble and foolish as, from these opening sentences, English readers would expect. The author does not write thus except with an effort, and the pre- sumption is that there are a sufficient number of readers of a vitiated taste, either on the one side of the Atlantic or on the other, to tempt him to adopt a style of offensive falsetto. Even the scene of which we have given the commencement closes less stupidly than it opens, and we begin to perceive that the author has some notion of the methods and lights of modern science. Having permitted the reader to skip the middle, we must ask him
to glance at the end of the love-scene. The gentleman speaks :-
"'Now nature is one ; all things follow the same law of growth. Listen, then, little woman, who, from tradition of a Golden Ago, have been taught to admire simplicity ; who prefer the daisy to the rose, and fawn-colour to crimson and gold. Weak, vague, incoherent sim- plicity is the beginning of all things. If you admire the confused and chaotic nebula more than the magnificent solar system ; the unorganised and sightless polyp more than the multiplex formation and keen activities of bird or quadruped; the vague, meaningless babble of the infant more than the breathing thoughts and burning words of the mature man : then you may consistently prefer a simple cot to a brown stone front ; the green simple country to tho nervous pulsating metro- polis ; the simple pre-Raphaelites to Reubens [sic] ; those simple, sweet, and homely melodies to the opera. Simplicity, little ono, sim- plicity has had its day. Evolution is from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toe coherent heterogeneity, though progressive—' Tho shrug of two very plump shoulders tells you you have gone too far. A gathering frown is chased by a satirical smile.—' What a capital missionary you would make. Come, Mr. Definite Heterogeneity, I'm tired of star-gazing, let's go in.'"
If the writer intended his book to serve any really important end, he should not have stooped to such maudlin trash as constitutes almost the whole of this first chapter. That the name of perhaps the best known of all great painters should have been vilely misspelt does not argue that nice accuracy is among his gifts, and surely, if a man has no better adjective with which to qualify "tranquillity" than "calm," he might have left it unqualified.
• C'hronos: Mother Earth's Biography. A Romance of the New School. By Wallace Wood, M.D. London: TrUbner and Co. 187& The true and vital idea which, with all his perverse smartness and perpetual effort to be sparkling and epigrammatic, gives value to Dr. Wood's lucubrations, is that nature is not by any means the regular, smooth-going, universally wise, beautiful, and beneficent affair which has been a stock theme for theological dlatitude. Whether, in the bosom of the infinite, there may not be scope and verge enough for every black eddy, and engulfing pool, and sinking sand, and sunken rock, that work woe to the human mariner who trims his little sail and ventures out into the deep, it were bootless to inquire; what modern science tells us, and what this writer has rather vigorously apprehended, is that there is in nature, as it falls within man's observation, that which, by every human criterion, must be pronounced imperfection. It is a fact of which no age has had so clear a vision as the present, that there are lines of retrogression as well as of progress in nature; that degraded races are developed as well as races the reverse of degraded ; that deformity may be linked to strong vitality, that skill and power in the infliction of pain may give predominance to certain races, as capacity to work, and patience, and peaceableness may give predominance to others. Nature turns out her shark and her tiger with what, to the eye of science, is as complete satisfaction, or as complete indifference, as that with which she develops the elephant, the deer, the sheep, the horse. Whatever the measuring-line of the universe may be, it very clearly is not the ell-wand of human intelligence, and the inexorable condition which modern science imposes upon her children is that they shall relinquish conceit.
In various passages, one of the best of which is that in which he treats of the natural history of the serpent, Dr. Wood forcibly illustrates this general fact. Serpents owed their preservation, when their reptile kindred were, for the most part, destroyed by powerful enemies, to their being "so extremely dirty as to be unpalatable." Even their foulness and bad savour did not effectually protect them until all the less foul and more savoury individuals were thinned out, "and the filth of their bodies became a veritable and deadly poison. They were the slender ones, too, and those able to creep into the thicket and into holes, and to seek a hiding- place amid the gnarled roots of trees. And as time wore on and enemies increased, it was only those few of each generation who were a little more nauseous and poisonous than the rest, and a little more agile and slender, that were spared and perpetuated the stock ; and the limbs finally growing useless, atrophied; and being for this skulking and ignoble life rather a nuisance than other- wise, they were gradually lost entirely." The race struggled long, but the more poisonous, the more slim, the more skulking it became, the more did it prevail. " And at last these skulkers, though for a time at the very verge of extermination, began to flourish ; and they became experts, and began to retaliate in the most unexpected fashion, by winding the long slim body round the adversary, and strangling him to death. The snake's condi- tion in life finally became a diabolically envious one. He avoids his enemies by becoming so vile and poisonous that nothing will touch him ; his mode of life is so utterly detestable and degraded, that no creature will ever compete with him ; he is as free from invasion as the Esquiroaux ; he is strictly let alone, and his race is destined to be a long one." The serpent becomes the criminal of creation, "a criminal of the deepest dye, and in this business a thorough expert ":—
" What would you say to an assassin who softly enters one of our up- town palaces while the family are at dinner; who, slowly entering the room when the family are seated, throws out before him a vapour more subtle than chloroform, the inhalation of which shall fascinate and hold spell- bound, without rendering unconscious; who dexterously proceeds with an iron clamp, under the eyes of the parents, to crush into a jelly the heads of each of the children ; and next, with the same smooth-running gesture. like the flow of water, so natural is it, strikes a light cross-gash upon the faces of all the rest, and inserting at the same time a slow poison, but the deadliest known ; then quietly possessing himself of all the wealth of the mansion, glides away to his don in a distant basement? Would you call him a criminal? I think you would. And the act, it is not too much to say, is a felony. Now, to me the act is the same, whether it be committed by that most aristocratic of animals, man, or by some of the lower ones ; whether it take place in the Belgravia mansion, or in the heights of a wild bird's tree in the forest. The serpent is the prince of criminals ; he is responsible for his acts, and every day he pays the penalty, receiving loathing and contumely and the most ignoble of deaths at the hands of all the superior animals."
Dr. Wood calls our attention by italics to what he considers the most important words in this passage, and they are important after their fashion. But the " new lesson " which Dr. Wood draws from the history of the serpent is startling. "It is, that punishment is not the reward of wickedness, but that wickedness is the effect of punishment. That evil, wherever we see it in the world, is the result of long suffering ; that vice is, in fact, nothing more than suffering in a concentrated form." We have never seen the principle of the essentially self-punitive nature of vice so pointedly, boldly, distinctly stated. Dr. Wood at once carries his theory into practical application. "Torture," he says, "by long continuance becomes exaggerated or condensed, as an extract is condensed from the vapour of the still ; and this sort of spiritual essence or woe we call vice, and sometimes personify it in imagination, depicting it with horns, hoof, and tail, calling it devil,--a pure fiction ; but in the eaten, or snake, nature has solidified that essence, given it tangibility, and moulded it into its proper shape." And if snakes and devils merit only pity, what shall we say of human criminals? Dr. Wood replies, in the words of an eminent American, "For the criminal we shall feel only the deepest pity when once fairly we have seen and felt the harshness and bitterness of the strife -of this world." At this, point, if not earlier, one cannot help feeling that the intoxication of confidence in his own theoretic logic has made the writer lose his head. If we feel only pity for the criminal, shall we not regard him, and the honest man whom he preys upon, with identical sentiments ? And is not such a conclusion peremptorily and authoritatively rejected by common-sense ? In point of fact, since the honest man has the reward of virtue, " the soul's calm sunshine," and the rest of it, ought we not, if Dr. Wood is right, to pity the criminal more than the honest man ? Reasoning which so speedily lands us in absurdity must have a flaw somewhere, and the flaw in Dr. Wood's reasoning, traceable in various parts of his book, consists in his trusting too much to misleading analogies drawn between man and the inferior animals. It is interesting to follow the thin lines of psychical relationship which connect man with the rest of the creatures, but the moment we attempt to apply to the former the deductions we have arrived at by consider- ing the latter, we go hopelessly wrong, and for the very simple- reason that we have passed into a world containing true free- will when we have passed from the animal world into that of humanity. To all ethical intents and purposes, vice in a man is quite a different thing from vice in a horse. At times this fact seems to break strongly upon Dr. Wood himself. "Man," he says, "is no longer an animal,—he is a great spirit" ; and again, "there is more difference between man and the gorilla than between any two animals whatever." Why, then, call the snake a criminal, and the criminal a snake ?
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