Chapter III: Part 3

“O, dash your parables! keep them for your disciples; they are not too amusing. Alack for the good old times!” “The wicked old times you mean, my father; the times when we were poor, and scorned, and oppressed; the times when heathenism and vain philosophy ruled everywhere in the world. Now, all civilised realms are subject to us, and worship us.” “And disobey us. You are very wise, much wiser than your old worn-out father; yet perchance a truth or two comes to me in solitude, when it can’t reach you through the press of your saints, and the noise of your everlasting preaching and singing and glorification. You know how I began life, the petty chief of a villainous tribe. But I was passionate and ambitious, subtle and strong-willed, and, in spite of itself, I made my tribe a nation; and I fought desperately against all the surrounding chiefs, and with pith of arm and wile of brain I managed to keep my head above water. But I lived all alone, a stern and solitary existence. None other of the gods was so friendless as I; and it is hard to live alone when memory is a sea of blood. I hated and despised the Greek Zeus and his shameless court; yet I could not but envy him, for a joyous life the rogue led. So I, like an old fool, must have my amour; and a pretty intrigue I got into with the prim damsel Mary! Then a great thought arose in me: men cannot be loyal to utter aliens; their gods must be human on one side, divine on the other; my own people were always deserting me to pay homage to bastard deities. I would adopt you as my own son (between ourselves, I have never been sure of the paternity), and admit you to a share in the government. Those infernal Jews killed you, but the son of a God could not die; you came up hither to dwell with me; I the old absolute king, you the modern tribune of the people. Here you have been ever since; and I don’t mind telling you that you were a much more loveable character below there as the man Jesus than you have proved above here as the Lord Christ. As some one was needed on earth to superintend the executive, we created the Comforter, prince royal and plenipotentiary; and behold us a divine triumvirate! The new blood was, I must own, beneficial. We lost Jerusalem, but we won Rome; Jove, Neptune, Apollo, Bacchus, and the rest, were conquered and slain; our leader of the opposition ejected Pluto and Pan. Only I did not bargain that my mistress should more than succeed to Juno, who was, at any rate, a lawful wife. You announced that our empire was peace; you announced likewise that it was war; both have served us. Our power extended, our glory rose; the chief of a miserable tribe has become emperor of Europe. But our empire was to be the whole world; yet instead of signs of more dominion, I see signs that what we have is falling to pieces. From my youth up I have been a man of war; and now that I am old and weary and wealthy, and want peace, peace flies from me. Have we not shed enough blood? Have we not caused enough tears? Have we not kindled enough fires? And in my empire what am I? Yourself and my mistress share all the power between you; I am but a name at the head of our proclamations. I have been a man of war, I am setting old and worn out, evil days are at hand, and I have never enjoyed life; therefore is my soul vexed within me. And my own subjects are as strangers. Your darling saints I cannot bear. The whimpering, simpering, canting, chanting blockheads! You were always happy in a pious miserableness, and you do not foresee the end. Do you know that in spite of our vast possessions we are as near bankruptcy as Spain or Austria? Do you know that our innumerable armies are a Chinese rabble of cowards and traitors? Do you know that our legitimacy (even if yours were certain) will soon avail us as little as that of the Bourbons has availed them? Of these things you are ignorant: you are so deafened with shouts and songs in your own praise that you never catch a whisper of doom. I would not quail if I had youth to cope with circumstance; none can say honestly that I ever feared a foe; but I am so weak that often I could not walk without leaning on you. Why did I draw out my life to this ignominious end? Why did I not fall fighting like the enemies I overcame? Why the devil did you get born at all, and then murdered by those rascally Jews, that I who was a warrior should turn into a snivelling saint? The heroes of Asgard have sunk into a deeper twilight than they foresaw; but their sunset, fervent and crimson with blood and with wine, made splendid that dawnless gloaming. The joyous Olympians have perished, but they all had lived and loved. For me, I have subsisted and hated. What of time is left to me I will spend in another fashion. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” And he swallowed hastily a bumper of the wine, which threw him into convulsions of coughing.

Serene and superior the son had let the old man run on. “Do not, I entreat you, take to drink in your old age, dear father. You say that our enemies lived and loved; but think how unworthy of divine rulers was their mode of life, how immoral, how imprudent, how disreputable, how savage, how lustful, how un-Chris-tian! What a bad example for poor human souls!” “Human souls be blessed! Are they so much improved now?... Would that at least I had conserved Jove’s barmaid; the prettiest, pleasantest girl they say (we know you are a Joseph, though you always had three or four women dangling about you); fair-ankled was the wench, bright-limbed; she might be unto me even as was Abishag, the Shunammite, unto my old friend David.” “Let us speak seriously, my father, of the great celebration to-morrow.” “And suppose I _am_ speaking very seriously, you solemn prig; not a drop of my blood is there in you.”

Here came a hurried knocking at the door, and the angelic ministers of state crawled in, with super-elaborate oriental cringings, to deliver their daily reports. “Messages from Brahma, Ormuzd, etc., to congratulate on the son’s birthday.” “The infidels! the mockers!” muttered the son. “Good words,” said the father; “they belong to older families than ours, my lad, and were once much more powerful. You are always trying to win over the parvenus.” “A riot in the holy city. The black angels organised to look after the souls of converted negroes having a free fight with some of the white ones. My poor lambs!” sighed the son. “Black sheep,” growled the father; “what is the row?” “They have plumed themselves brighter than peacocks, and scream louder than parrots; claim precedence over the angels of the mean whites; insist on having some of their own hymns and tunes in the programme of to-morrow’s concert.” “Lock’em all up, white and black, especially the black, till Tuesday morning; they can fight it out then—it’s Boxing Day. Well have quite enough noise to-morrow without ’em. Never understood the nigger question, for my part: was a slave-holder myself, and cursed Ham as much as pork.” “New saints grumbling about lack of civilised accommodation: want underground railways, steamers for the crystal sea, telegraph wires to every mansion, morning and evening newspapers, etc., etc,; have had a public meeting with a Yankee saint in the chair, and resolved that heaven is altogether behind the age.” “Confound it, my son, have I not charged you again and again to get some saints of ability up here? For years past every batch has been full of good-for-nothing noodles. Have we no engineers, no editors at all.” “One or two engineers, we believe, sire, but we can’t find a single editor.” “Give one of the _Record_ fellows the measles, and an old _l’Univers_ hand the cholera, and bring them up into glory at once, and we’ll have two daily papers. And while you are about it, see whether you can discover three or four pious engineers—not muffs, mind—and blow them up hither with their own boilers, or in any other handy way. Haste, haste, post haste!” “Deplorable catastrophe in the temple of the New Jerusalem: a large part of the foundation given way, main wall fallen, several hundred workmen bruised.” “Stop that fellow who just left; countermand the measles, the cholera will be enough; we will only have one journal, and that must be strictly official. If we have two, one will be opposition. Hush up the accident. It is strange that Pandemonium was built so much better and more quickly than our New Jerusalem!” “All our best architects and other artists have deserted into Elysium, my lord; so fond of the company of the old Greeks.”

When these and many other sad reports had been heard, and the various ministers and secretaries savagely dismissed, the father turned to the son and said: “Did I not tell you of the evil state we are in?” “By hope and faith and charity, and the sublime doctrine of self-renunciation, all will yet come right, my father.” “Humph! let hope fill my treasury, and faith finish the New Jerusalem, and charity give us peace and quietness, and self-renunciation lead three-quarters of your new-fangled saints out of heaven; and then I shall look to have a little comfort.” “Will you settle to-morrow’s programme, sire? or shall I do my best to spare you the trouble?” “You do your best to spare me the trouble of reigning altogether, I think. What programme can there be but the old rehearsal for the eternal life (I wish you may get it)? O, that horrible slippery sea of glass, that bedevilled throne vomiting thunders and lightning, those stupid senile elders in white nightgowns, those four hideous beasts full of eyes, that impossible lamb with seven horns and one eye to each horn! O, the terrific shoutings and harpings and stifling incense! A pretty set-out for my time of life I And to think that you hope some time or other to begin this sort of thing as a daily amusement, and to carry it on for ever and ever! Not much appearance of its beginning soon, thank goodness—that is to say,, thank badness. Why can’t you have a play of Aristophanes, or Shakespeare, or Molière? Why should I meddle with the programme? I had nothing to do with first framing it. Besides, it is all in your honor, not in mine. You like playing the part of the Lamb; I’m much more like an old wolf. You are ravished when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks; as for me, I am utterly sick of them. Behold what I will do; I must countenance the affair, but I can do so without disturbing myself. I’ll not go thundering and roaring in my state-carriage of the whirlwind; I’ll slip there in a quiet cloud. You can’t do without my glory, but it really is too heavy for my aged shoulders; you may lay it upon the throne; it will look just as well. As for my speech, here it is all ready written out; let Mercury, I mean Raphael or Uriel, read it; I can’t speak plainly since I lost so many teeth. And now I consider the matter, what need is there for my actual presence at all? Have me there in effigy; a noble and handsome dummy can wear the glory with grace* Mind you have a handsome one; I wish all the artists had not deserted us. Your pious fellows make sad work of us, my son. But then their usual models are so ugly; your saints have good reason to speak of their vile bodies. How is it that all the pretty girls slip away to the other place, poor darlings? By the bye, who are going on this occasion to represent the twelve times twelve thousand of the tribes of Israel? Is the boy Mortara dead yet? He will make one real Jew.” “We are converting them, sire.” “Not the whole gross of thousands yet, I trust? Faugh! what a greasy stench there would be—what a blazing of Jew jewelry!

“Hand me the latest bluebook, with the reports....

“Ah, I see; great success! Power of the Lord Christ! (always you, of course). Society flourishing. Eighty-two thousand pounds four shillings and twopence three-farthings last year from Christians aroused to the claims of the lost sheep of the House of Israel. (Very good.) Five conversions!! Three others have already been persuaded to eat pork sausages. (Better and better.) One, who drank most fervently of the communion wine suffered himself to be treated to an oyster supper. Another, being greatly moved, was heard to ejaculate, ‘O, Christ!’... Hum, who are the five? Moses Isaacs: wasn’t he a Christian ten years ago in Italy, and afterwards a Mahommedan in Salonica, and afterwards a Jew in Marseilles? This Mussulman is your oyster-man, I presume? You will soon get the one hundred and forty-four thousand at this rate, my son! and cheap too!”

He chuckled, and poured out another glass of Lachryma Christi; drank it, made a wry face, and then began coughing furiously. “Poor drink this for a god in his old age. Odin and Jupiter fared better. Though decent for a human tipple, for a divinity it is but _ambrosie stygiale_, as my dear old favorite chaplain would call it. I have his devotional works under lock and key there in my desk. _Apropos_, where is he? Left us again for a scurry through the more jovial regions? I have not seen him for a long time.” “My father! really, the words he used, the life he led; so corrupting for the young saints! We were forced to invite him to travel a little for the benefit of his health. The court _must_ be kept pure, you know.” “Send for him instantly, sir. He is out of favor because he likes the old man and laughs at your saints, because he can’t cant and loves to humbug the humbugs. Many a fit of the blues has he cured for me, while you only make them bluer. Have him fetched at once. O, I know you never liked him; you always thought him laughing at your sweet pale face and woebegone airs, laughing ‘_en horrible sarcasm et sanglante derision_’ (what a style the rogue has! what makes that of your favorite parsons and holy ones so flaccid and flabby and hectic?) ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ So, in plain words, you have banished him; the only jolly soul left amongst us, my pearl and diamond and red ruby of Chaplains, abstracter of the quintessence of pantagruelism! The words he used! I musn’t speak freely myself now, and the old books I wrote are a great deal too coarse for you Michael and Gabriel told me the other day that they had just been severely lectured on the earnestness of life by one of your new _protégés_; they had to kick him howling into limbo. A fine set of solemn prigs we are getting!” “My father, the holiness of sorrow, the infiniteness of suffering!” “Yes, yes, I know all about it. That long-winded poet of yours (he does an ode for you to-morrow?) began to sermonise me thereon. By Jupiter, he wanted to arouse me to a sense of my inner being and responsibilities and so forth. I very soon packed him off to the infant school where he teaches the alphabet and catechism to the babies and sucklings. Have you sent for my jovial, joyous, jolly Curé of Meudon?” “I have; but I deeply regret that your Majesty thinks it fitting to be intimate with such a free-liver, such a glutton and wine-bibber and mocker and buffoon.” “Bah! you patronised the publicans and sinners yourself in your younger and better days. The strict ones blamed you for going about eating and drinking so much. I hear that some of your newest favorites object to the wine in your last supper, and are going to insist on vinegar-and-water in future.”

Whereupon entered a man of a noble and courtly presence, lively-eyed and golden bearded, ruddy complexioned, clear-browed, thoughtful, yet joyous, serene and unabashed. “Welcome, thrice welcome, my beloved Alcofribas!” cried the old monarch; “very long is it since last I saw you.” “I have been exiled since then, your Majesty.” “And I knew nothing of it!” “And thought nothing of it or of me until you wanted me. No one expects the King to have knowledge of what is passing under his eyes.” “And how did you manage to exist in exile, my poor chaplain?” “Much better than here at court, sire. If your Majesty wants a little pleasure, I advise you to get banished yourself. Your parasites and sycophants and courtiers are a most morose, miserable, ugly, detestable, intolerable swarm of blind beetles and wasps; the devils are beyond comparison better company.” “What! you have been mixing with traitors?” “Oh, I spent a few years in Elysium, but didn’t this time go into the lower circles. But while I sojourned as a country gentleman on the heavenly borders, I met a few contrabandists. I need not tell you that large, yea, enormous quantities of beatitude are smuggled out of your dominions.” “But what is smuggled in?” “Sire, I am not an informer; I never received anything out of the secret-service money. The poor angels are glad to run a venture at odd times, to relieve the tedium of everlasting Te Deum. By the bye, I saw _the_ Devil himself.” “The Devil in my kingdom! What is Uriel about? he’ll have to be superannuated.” “Bah! your Majesty knows very well that Satan comes in and returns as and when he likes. The passport system never stops the really dangerous fellows. When he honored me with a call he looked the demurest young saint, and I laughed till I got the lockjaw at his earnest and spiritual discourse. He would have taken yourself in, much more Uriel. You really ought to get him on the list of court chaplains. He and I were always good friends, so if anything happens.... It may be well for you if you can disguise yourself as cleverly as he. A revolution is not quite impossible, you know.” The Son threw up his hands in pious horror; the old King, in one of his spasms of rage, hurled the blue-book at the speaker’s head, which it missed, but knocked down and broke his favorite crucifix. “Jewcy fiction _versus_ crucifixion, sire; _magna est veritas et prevalebit!_ Thank Heaven, all that folly is _out*side my brains; it is not the first book full of cant and lies and stupidity that has been flung at me. Why did you not let me finish? The Devil is no fonder than your sacred self of the new opinions; in spite of the proverb, he loves and dotes upon holy water. If you cease to be head of the ministry, he ceases to be head of the opposition; he wouldn’t mind a change, an innings for him and an outings for you; but these latest radicals want to crush both Whigs and Tories. He was on his way to confer with some of your Privy Council, to organise joint action for the suppression of new ideas. You had better be frank and friendly with him. Public opposition and private amity are perfectly consistent and praiseworthy. He has done you good service before now; and you and your Son have always been of the greatest assistance to him.” “By the temptation of Job! I must see to it. And now no more business. I am hipped, my Rabelais; we must have a spree. The cestus of Venus, the lute of Apollo, we never could find; but there was sweeter loot in the sack of Olympus, and our cellars are not yet quite empty. We will have a *petit souper_ of ambrosia and nectar.” “My father! my father! did you not sign the pledge to abstain from these heathen stimulants?” “My beloved Son, with whom I am not at all well pleased, go and swill water till you get the dropsy, and permit me to do as I like. No wonder people think that I am failing when my child and my mistress rule for me!”

The Son went out, shaking his head, beating his breast, scrubbing his eyes, wringing his hands, sobbing and murmuring piteously. “The poor old God! my dear old father! Ah, how he is breaking! Alack, he will not last long! Verily, his wits are leaving him! Many misfortunes and disasters would be spared us were he to abdicate prudently at once. Or a regency might do. But the evil speakers and slanderers would say that I am ambitious. I must get the matter judiciously insinuated to the Privy Council. Alack! alack!”

“Let him go and try on his suit of lamb’s wool for to-morrow,” said the old monarch. “I have got out of the rehearsal, my friend; I shall be conspicuous by my absence; there will be a dummy in my stead.” “Rather perilous innovation, my Lord; the people may think that the dummy does just as well, that there is no need to support the original.” “Shut up, shut up, O, my Curé; no more politics, confound our politics! It is Sunday, so we must have none but chaplains here. You may fetch Friar John and sweet Dean Swift and the amiable parson Sterne, and any other godly and devout and spiritual ministers you can lay hold of; but don’t bring more than a pleiad.” “With Swift for the lost one; he is cooling his ‘sæva indignatio’ in the Devil’s kitchen-furnace just now, comforting poor Addison, who hasn’t got quit for his death-bed brandy yet.” “A night of devotion will we have, and of inextinguishable laughter; and with the old liquor we will pour out the old libations. Yea, Gargantuan shall be the feast; and this night, and to-morrow, and all next week, and twelve days into the new year the hours shall reel and roar with Pantagruelism. Quick, for the guests, and I will order the banquet!” “With all my heart, sire, will I do this very thing. Parsons and pastors, pious and devout, will I lead back, choice and most elect souls worthy of the old drink delectable. And I will lock and double bolt the door, and first warm the chamber by burning all these devilish books; and will leave word with the angel on guard that we are not to be called for three times seven days, when all these Christmas fooleries and mummeries are long over. Amen. Selah. _Au revoir_. Tarry till I come.”

A WORD ON BLASPHEMY.

(1867.)

This is one of our few and far-between outbursts of Rabelasian laughter, irresistibly provoked by the aggressive absurdities of theology; and as such I consider it thoroughly defensible. In all seriousness I affirm that its mockery is far less “blasphemous” than the solemn outrage on reason, the infernal damnation of all mankind who are sensible and sane or who are even mad otherwise than the author, the cold-blooded dissection of the infinite and eternal God as a superior surgeon may dissect an inferior corpse, perpetrated by its prototype the so-called Athanasian Creed. I do not see in what the statement that an old monkey of the tribe once saw the tail of this great big monkey is more irreverent than that other statement how Moses of the tribe of Levi once saw the back parts of the Lord; whom the Church believes to be a Spirit infinite, without parts, a sort of omnipresent æther or supersubtle gas. Nor do I see that the monkey, who is at least a natural animal, is a more outrageous symbol or emblem than the utterly unnatural Lamb as it had been slain, with seven horns and seven eyes, encompassed by all “the menagerie of the Apocalypse.” It would be easy to produce, I think, mockeries far more insulting, buffooneries far more bitter and malignant, lavished upon Paganism, Socinianism, Atheism, and many another _ism_, in the works of the most saintly divines. The hierarchy of Olympus is more venerable than the triune Lord of the New Jerusalem; yet how is it treated in our most popular burlesques? I go to a theatre and find a Christian audience, very tenderly sensitive as to their own religious feelings rolling with laughter and thundering applause at the representation of a ballet-girl Jupiter ascending in a car like a monstrous coal-scuttle, with a deboshed mechanical eagle nodding its head tipsily to the pit; a male Minerva, spectacles on nose, who takes sly gulps from a gin bottle and dances a fish-fag carmagnole; a Bacchus sprawling about drunken and brutish as Caliban; all uttering idiotic puns and singing idiotic songs. And if other mythologies were equally familiar, they would doubtless be maltreated with equal contempt. You thus deliver over to your dismal comic writers, to your clowns and merry-andrews and bayaderes, the gods of Homer and Æschylus, of Herodotus, Pindar and Phidias, you the sanctimonious and reverent modern Britons; and you cry out aghast against “atrocious blasphemy” touching a Divinity, who was first the anthropomorphic clan-god of a petty Syrian tribe, who grew afterwards into a vague Ormuzd with the devil for Ahriman when this tribe had been captive in Babylonia, whom you have filched from this tribe which you still detest and disdain, with whom you have associated two colleagues declared by this tribe (which surely ought to know best) utterly spurious, whom you worship with rites borrowed from old pagans you decry, and discuss in divinity borrowed from old philosophers and schoolmen you sneer at; who gave to his tribe some millenniums back laws which you preserve in the filched book of your idolatry, but which not one of you dare read to his wife and children; whose son and colleague gave you laws which are certainly readable enough, but which you are so far from obeying that you would assuredly consign to Bedlam any one seeking to act upon them perfectly.

But mockery of the Olympians hurts no one’s feelings, while mockery of the Tri-unity hurts the feelings of nearly all who hear or see it? I know that there are here and there a few pious and tender hearts, with whom habitude has become nature; people who, having less intellectual than cordial energy, more affection and reverence than curiosity and self-reliance, pour their whole melted nature into whatever religious moulds chance to be nearest, and harden to the exact shape and size of the mould, so that any blow struck upon it jars and wounds them; and the feelings of these I should be very loth to hurt. I care not for propagandism in general, and in such cases above all propagandism is certainly useless. Why seek to convert women to a struggling faith? Let the women be always on the victorious side, let the men do the fighting and endure the hardships. When their struggling faith has conquered such triumph as it merits, they will find the women all at once in agreement with them, converted not by ideas (for which women care not an apple-dumpling) but by feminine love and loyalty to manhood. One must always be very loth, I say, to wound the feelings of the pious and tender hearts, of the beautiful feminine souls; and fortunately these love to seclude themselves in tranquillity, avoiding debates and controversies. Whose religious feelings, then, are likely to be wounded by “atrocious blasphemies,” by “blasphemous indecencies”? The feelings of “the gentle spirit of our meek Review,” the benign and holy _Saturday!_ The feelings of tract distributors, scripture-readers, polemical parsons, all those in general who violate every courtesy of life to thrust their narrowminded dogmas upon others, and who preach everlasting damnation against people too sensible to care for their ranting! They outrage our reason, they vilify our human nature, they blaspheme our world, they pollute our flesh, and they wind up by dooming us to eternal torture because we differ from them: these trifles are, of course, not supposed to hurt _our_ feelings. We endeavor to enthrone human reason, to ennoble human nature, to restore the human body to its pure dignity, to develop the beauty and glory of the world; and we wind up, not by retorting upon them their fiendish curses, not even by laughing at the idea of an almighty and all-good God, but by laughing at their notions of an almighty and all-good God, who has a Hell ready for the vast majority of us: this horrible laugh lacerates their pious sensibilities, and we hear the venomous whine of “atrocious blasphemy.” After condemning us to death they commit us for contempt of court, which surely is an anomalous procedure!

You can mock the Grecian mythology, you can burlesque Shakespeare, without wounding any pious heart? No: Olympus is as sacred to many as Mount Sion is to you; our own Shakespeare is as venerable and dear to us as to you that bundle of dissimilar anonymous treatises which you have made coherent by help of the bookbinder and called the Book of Books. And mark this; the Grecian mythology is dead, is no longer aggressive in its absurdities; the priestcraft and the foul rites have long since perished, the beauty and the grace and the splendor remain. But your composite theology is still alive, is insolently aggressive, its lust for tyrannical dominion is unbounded; therefore we must attack it if we would not be enslaved by it. The cross is a sublime symbol; I would no more think of treating it with disrespect while it held itself aloft in the serene heaven of poetry than of insulting the bow of Phoebus Apollo or the thunderbolts of Zeus; but if coarse hands will insist on pulling it down upon my back as a ponderous wooden reality, what can I do but fling it off as a confounded burden not to be borne?

And now let us consider for a moment the meaning of this word “blasphemy,” which is the burden of the _S. R.’s_ slanderous song; not the legal meaning, but the philosophic, the sense in which it would be used by enlightened and fair controversialists. The most Christian _S. R._ says to the Atheistic Iconoclast, You blaspheme. Whom? The Christian God! And the _S, R._ does not appear to see that it is assuming the very existence of God which is in dispute between itself and Iconoclast! For the Atheist, God is a figment, nothing; in blaspheming God he therefore blasphemes nothing. A man really blasphemes when he mocks, insults, pollutes, vilifies that which he really believes to be holy and awful. Thus a Christian who really believes in the Christian God (and there _may_ be a hundred such Christians in England) can be guilty of blasphemy against that God, whether that God really subsists or not; for such a Christian in mocking or vilifying God would really be violating the most sacred convictions of his own nature. Speaking philosophically, an honest Atheist can no more blaspheme God than an honest Republican can be disloyal to a King, than an unmarried man can be guilty of conjugal infidelity.

[This “Word on Blasphemy,” as I have ventured to call it, is
from a long article on the _Saturday Review_ and the _National
Reformer_, the rest of which was of merely temporary interest,
and that only to the readers of those two journals. The
“outburst of Rabelasian laughter” which so provoked the
_Saturday Review_, was a short satire on Christian theology and
priestcraft, entitled “The Fanatical Monkeys,” ascribed to
Charles Southwell, and just then published in the _National
Reformer_.—Editor.]

HEINE ON AN ILLUSTRIOUS EXILE WITH SOMETHING ABOUT WHALES

(From the “De l’Allemagne.”) (1867.)

Neptune is still the monarch of the empire of the seas, and Pluto (although metamorphosed into the Devil) has retained the throne of Tartarus. They have both been more lucky than their brother Jupiter, who had to suffer specially the vicissitudes of fortune. This third son of Saturn, who after the fall of his sire assumed the sovereignty of the heavens, reigned for a long series of years on the summit of Olympus, surrounded by a jovial court of high and of most high gods and demigods, as well as on high and of most high goddesses and nymphs—their celestial ladies of the bedchamber and maids of honor, who all led a joyous life, replete with ambrosia and nectar, despising the clowns attached to the soil down here, and taking no thought of the morrow. Alas, when the reign of the Cross, the empire of suffering, was proclaimed, the supreme Chronide emigrated and disappeared amidst the tumult of the barbarian tribes which invaded the Roman world. All traces of the ex-God were lost, and I have questioned in vain old chronicles and old women; no one has been able to furnish me with any information as to his destiny. I have burrowed in many a library, where I made them bring me the most magnificent _codex_ enriched with gold and jewels, veritable odalisques in the harem of science; and as is the custom, I here render my public thanks to the erudite eunuchs who, without too much grumbling and sometimes even with affability, have given me access to these luminous treasures confided to their care. I am now convinced that the middle ages have not bequeathed to us any traditions concerning the fate of Jupiter after the fall of Paganism. All that I have been able to discover in connection with this subject is the history told me long ago by my friend Niels Andersen.

I have just mentioned Niels Andersen, and this good figure, at once so droll and so lovable, emerges all riant in my memory. I must devote a few lines to him here. For the rest, I like to indicate my authorities and to show their good or bad qualities, in order that the reader may be in a position to judge himself how far these authorities deserve to be trusted.

Niels Andersen, born at Drontheim, in Norway, was one of the most skilful and intrepid whalers I have ever known. It is to him that I am indebted for what knowledge I have of the whale fishery. He taught me all the subtleties of the art; he made me acquainted with all the stratagems and dodges which the intelligent animal employs to baffle these subtle snares and make its escape. It was Niels Andersen who taught me the management of the harpoon; he showed me how you should fix the knee of the right leg against the gun-whale of the boat when launching the harpoon, and how with the left leg you launch a vigorous kick at the imbecile sailor who don’t pay out quickly enough the rope attached to the harpoon. To him I owe all, and if I have not become a famous whaler the fault rests neither with Niels Andersen nor with myself, but with my evil star, which has never allowed me in the course of my life to encounter any whale with which I might have engaged in honorable combat. I have only encountered vulgar stockfish and miserable herrings. Of what use is the best harpoon when you have to deal with a herring? Now that my limbs are paralysed I must renounce for ever the hope of pursuing whales. When at Ritzebuttel, near Cuxhaven, I made the acquaintance of Niels Andersen. He was scarcely more nimble himself, for off the coast of Senegal a young shark, which no doubt took his right leg for a stick of barley sugar, had snapped it off with a snap of his teeth. Since then poor Niels Andersen went limping upon an artificial leg manufactured from one of the firs of his country, and which he extolled as a masterpiece of Norwegian carpentry. His greatest pleasure at this period was to perch himself on the top of a large empty barrel, on the belly of which he drummed away with his wooden leg. I often helped him to climb upon this barrel; but sometimes, when he wished to get down again, I would not give him my help except on the condition that he told me one of his curious traditions of the Arctic Sea.

As Mahomet-Ebn-Mansour commences all his poems with a eulogy of the horse, so Niels Andersen prefaced all his narratives with a panegyrical enumeration of the qualities of the whale. He of course commenced with such a panegyric the legend we give here.

“The whale,” he said, “is not only the largest, but also the most magnificent of animals; the two jets of water leaping from his nostrils, placed at the top of his head, give him the appearance of a fountain, and produce a magical effect, above all at night, in the moonshine. Moreover, this beast is sympathetic. He has a good character and much taste for conjugal life. It is a touching sight,” he added, “to see a family of whales grouped around its venerable patriarch, and couched upon an enormous mass of ice, basking in the sun. Sometimes the young ones begin to frisk and romp, and at length all plunge into the sea to play at hide-and-seek among the immense ice-blocks. The purity of manners and the chastity of the whales should be attributed less to moral principles than to the iciness of the water wherein they continually sport. Nor can it, unhappily, be denied,” went on Niels Anderson, “that they have not any pious sentiment, that they are totally devoid of religion....”

“I believe this is an error,” I cried, interrupting my friend. “I have lately read the report of a Dutch missionary, wherein he describes the magnificence of the creation, which, according to him, reveals itself even in the polar regions at the hour of sunrise, and when the teams of day, transfiguring the gigantic rocks of ice, make them resemble those castles of diamonds we read of in fairy tales. All this beauty of the creation, in the judgment of the good _dominie_, is a proof of the power of God which influences every living creature, so that not only man, but likewise a great brute of a fish, ravished by this spectacle, adores the Creator and addresses to him its prayers. The _dominie_ assures us that he has seen with his own eyes a whale which held itself erect against the wall of a block of ice, and swayed the upper part of its body as men do in prayer.”

Niels Andersen admitted that he had himself seen whales which, propping themselves against a cliff of ice, indulged in movements very similar to those we remark in the oratories of the various religious sects, but he maintained that devotion has nothing to do with this phænomenon. He explained it on physiological grounds; he called my attention to the fact that the whale, this Chimborazo of animals, has beneath its skin strata of fat of a depth so prodigious that a single whale often furnishes a hundred to a hundred and fifty barrels of tallow and oil. These layers of fat are so thick that while the colossus sleeps, stretched at its full length upon an icefield, hundreds of water rats can come and settle in it. These _convives_ immensely larger and more voracious than the rats of the mainland, lead joyous life under the skin of the whale, where day and night they gorge themselves with the most delicious fat without being obliged to quit their holes. These banquets of vermin at length trouble their involuntary host and even cause him excessive sufferings. Not having hands as we have, who, God be thanked, can scratch ourselves when we feel an itching, the whale tries to mitigate his pangs by placing himself against the protruding and sharp angles of a rock of ice, and by there rasping his back with a real fervor and with vigorous movements up and down, as we see the dogs rasping their skin against a bed-post when the fleas bite them overmuch. Now in these movements the good _dominie_ thought he saw the edifying act of prayer, and he attributed to devotion the jerkings occasioned by the orgies of the rats. Enormous as is the quantity of oil in the whale, it has not the least religious sentiment. It is only among animals of mediocre stature that we find any religion; the very great, the creatures gigantic like the whale are not endowed with it. What can be the reason? Is it that they cannot find a church sufficiently spacious to afford them entrance into its pale? Nor have the whales any taste for the prophets, and the one which swallowed Jonah was not able to digest that great preacher; seized with nausea, it vomited him after three days. Most certainly that proves the absence of all religious sentiment in these monsters. The whale, therefore, would never choose an ice-block for prayer-cushion, and sway itself in attitudes of devotion. It adores as little the true God who resides above there in heaven, as the false pagan god who dwells near the arctic pole, in the Isle of the Rabbits, where the dear beast goes sometimes to pay him a visit.

“What is this _Isle of Rabbits_?” I asked Niels Andersen. Drumming on the barrel with his wooden leg, he answered, “It is exactly in this isle that the events took place of which I am going to tell you. I am not able to give you its precise geographical position. Since its first discovery no one has been able to visit it again; the enormous mountains of ice accumulated around it bar the approach. Once only has it been visited, by the crew of a Russian whaler driven by-tempests into those northern latitudes, and that was more than a hundred years ago. When these sailors, reached it with their ship they found it deserted and uncultivated. Sickly stalks of broom swayed sadly upon the quicksands; here and there were scattered some dwarf shrubs and stunted firs crouching on the sterile soil. Rabbits ran about everywhere in great numbers; and this is the reason the sailors call the islet the _Isle of Rabbits_. A cabin, the only one they discovered, announced the presence of a human being. When the mariners had entered the hut they saw an old man, arrived at the most extreme decrepitude and miserably muffled in rabbit skins. He was seated upon a stone settle, and warmed his thin hands and trembling knees at the grate where some brushwood was burning. At his right hand stood a monstrously large bird, which seemed to be an eagle; but the moulting of time had so cruelly stripped it that only the great stiff main-plumes of its wings were left, so that the aspect of this naked animal was at once ludicrous and horribly ugly. On the left of the old man was couched upon the ground an aged bald-skinned she-got, yet with a gentle look, and which, in spite of its great age, had the dugs swollen with milk and the teats fresh and rosy.

“Among the sailors who had landed on the Isle of Rabbits there were some Greeks, and one of these, thinking that the man of the hut could not understand his tongue, said to his comrades in Greek, ‘This queer old fellow must be either a ghost or an evil spirit.’ At these words the old man trembled and rose suddenly from his seat, and the sailors, to their great astonishment, saw a lofty and imposing figure, which, with imperious and even majestic dignity, held itself erect in spite of the weight of years, so that the head reached the rafters of the roof. His lineaments, though worn and ravaged, conserved traces of beauty; they were noble and perfectly regular. Thin locks of silver hair fell upon the forehead wrinkled by pride and by age; his eyes, though glazed and lustreless, darted keen regards, and his finely-curved lips pronounced in the Greek language, mingled with many archaisms, these words resonant and harmonious:—‘You are mistaken, young man, I am neither a spectre nor an evil spirit; I am an unfortunate who has seen better days. But you—what are you.’

“At this demand the seamen acquainted their host with the accident which had driven them out of their course, and they begged him to tell them all about the isle. But the old man could give them but scant information. He told them that from immemorial times he had dwelt in this isle, of which the ramparts of ice offered him a sure refuge against his implacable enemies, who had usurped his legitimate rights; that his main subsistence was derived from the rabbits with which the isle abounded; that every year, at the season when the floating ice-blocks formed a compact mass, troops of savages in sledges visited him, who, in exchange for his rabbit skins, gave him all sorts of articles most necessary to life. The whales, he said, which now and then approached his isle, were his favorite society. Nevertheless, he added that he felt much pleasure at this moment in speaking his native language, being Greek by birth. He begged his compatriots to inform him as to the then state of Greece. He learnt with a malicious joy, badly dissimulated, that the Cross once surmounting the towers of the Hellenic cities had been shattered; he showed less satisfaction when they told him that this Christian symbol had been replaced by the Crescent. The most singular thing was that none of the seamen knew the names of the towns concerning which he questioned them, and which, according to him, had been flourishing cities in his time. On the other hand, the names by which the seamen designated the towns and villages of modern Greece were completely unknown to him; and the old man shook his head often, as if quite overwhelmed, and the sailors looked at each other with wonder. They saw well that he knew perfectly the localities of the country, even to the minutest details; for he described clearly and exactly the gulfs, the peninsulas, the capes, often even, the most insignificant hills and isolated groups of rocks. His ignorance of the commonest typographical names, therefore astonished them all the more.

“The old man asked, with the most lively interest, and even with a certain anxiety, about an ancient temple, which, he said, had been of old the grandest in all Greece. None of his hearers recognised the name,, which he pronounced with tender emotion. At last,, when he had minutely described the place where this, monument stood, a young seaman suddenly recognised the spot. ‘The village where I was born,’ he exclaimed, ‘is situated precisely there. During my childhood I have long watched there the pigs of my father. On this site there are, in fact, the ruins of very ancient constructions, which must have been incredibly magnificent. Here and there you see some columns still erect; they are isolated or connected by fragments of roofing, whence hang tendrils of honeysuckle and red bind-weeds. Other columns, some of them red marble, lie fractured on the grass. The ivy has invaded their superb capitals, formed of flowers and foliage delicately chiselled. Great slabs of marble, squared fragments of wall and triangular pieces of roofing, are scattered about, half-buried in the earth. I have often, continued the young man, ‘passed hours at a time in examining the combats and the games, the dances and the processions, the beautiful and ludicrous figures which are sculptured there. Unfortunately these sculptures are much injured by time, and are covered with moss and creepers. My father, whom I once asked what these ruins were, told me that they were the remnants of an ancient temple, of old inhabited by a Pagan God, who not only indulged in the most gross debaucheries, but who was, moreover, guilty of incest and other infamous vices; that in their blindness the idolators had, nevertheless, immolated oxen, often by hundreds, at the foot of his altar. My father assured me that we still saw the marble basin wherein they had gathered the blood of the victims, and that it was precisely the trough to which I frequently led my swine to drink the rain-water, and in which I also preserved the refuse which my animals devoured with so much appetite.’

“When the young sailor had thus spoken, the old man gave a deep sigh of the most bitter anguish; he sank nerveless upon the stone seat, and hiding his visage in his hands, wept like a child. The bird at his side emitted terrible cries, spread its enormous wings, and menaced the strangers with talons and beak. The she-goat moaned and licked the hands of her master, whose sorrows she seemed trying to comfort by her humble caresses. At this sight a strange trouble swelled in the hearts of the seamen; they hastily quitted the hut, and did not feel at ease until they could no more hear the sobbings of the old man, the croakings of the hideous bird, and the bleatings of the goat. When they got on board their vessel again they related their adventures. Among the crew there chanced to be a scholar, who declared that it was an event of the highest importance. Applying with a sagacious air his right forefinger to his nose, he assured the seamen that the old man of the Isle of Rabbits was beyond all doubt the ancient god Jupiter, son of Saturn and Rhea, once sovereign lord of the gods; that the bird which they had seen at his side was evidently the famous eagle which used to bear the thunderbolts in its talons; and that, in all probability, the goat was the old nurse Amalthea, which had of old suckled the god in the isle of Crete, and which now continued to nourish him with its milk in the Isle of Rabbits.”

Such was the history of Niels Andersen, and it made my heart bleed. I will not dissemble; already his revelations concerning the secret sufferings of the whale had profoundly saddened me. Poor animal! against this vile mob of rats, which house themselves in your body and gnaw you incessantly, no remedy avails, and you carry them about with you to the end of your days; rush as you will to the north and to the south, rasp yourself against the ice-rocks of the two poles, you can never get rid of these villainous rats? But pained as I had been by the outrage wreaked upon the poor whales, my soul was infinitely more troubled by the tragical fate of this old man who, according to the mythological theory of the learned Russian, was the heretofore King of the gods, Jupiter the _Chronide_. Yes, he, even he, was subject to the fatality of Destiny, from which not the immortals themselves can escape; and the spectacle of such calamities horrifies us, in filling us with pity and indignation. Be Jupiter, be the sovereign lord of the world, the frown of whose brows made tremble the universe! be chanted by Homer, and sculptured by Phidias in gold and ivory; be adored by a hundred nations during long centuries; be the lover of Semele, of Danae, of Europa, of Alcmena, of Io, of Leda, of Calisto! and after all, nothing will remain at the end but a decrepit old man, who to gain his miserable livelihood has to turn dealer in rabbit skins, like any poor Savoyard. Such a spectacle will no doubt give pleasure to the vile multitude, which insults to-day that which it adored yesterday. Perhaps among these worthy people are to be found some of the descendants of those unlucky bulls which were of old immolated in hecatombs upon the altar of Jupiter; let such rejoice in his fall, and mock him at their ease, in revenge for the blood of their ancestors, victims of idolatry; as for me, my soul is singularly moved, and I am seized with dolorous commiseration at the view of this august misfortune.

THE DAILY NEWS

(1874.)

:: “Ich hab’ mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt,
Juchhe! Drum ist’s so wohl mir in der Welt; Juchhe!”—Gôthe.

“He got so subtle that to be Nothing was all his glory.” Shelley,
“Peter Bell the Third”