Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

And as for the improvements at which I have hinted, I will boldly answer that they will pay.

They will pay directly and at once, in the saving of poor-rates.  They will pay by exterminating epidemics, and numberless chronic forms of disease which now render thousands burdens on the public purse; consumers, instead of producers of wealth.  They will pay by gradually absorbing the dangerous classes; and removing from temptation and degradation a generation yet unborn.  They will pay in the increased content, cheerfulness, which comes with health in increased goodwill of employed towards employers.  They will pay by putting the masses into a state fit for education.  They will pay, too, in such fearful times as these, by the increased physical strength and hardihood of the town populations.  For it is from the city, rather than from the country, that our armies must mainly be recruited.  Not only is the townsman more ready to enlist than the countryman, because in the town the labour market is most likely to be overstocked; but the townsman actually makes a better soldier than the countryman.  He is a shrewder, more active, more self-helping man; give him but the chances of maintaining the same physical strength and health as the countryman, and he will support the honour of the British arms as gallantly as the Highlander or the Connaughtman, and restore the days when the invincible prentice-boys of London carried terror into the heart of foreign lands.  In all ages, in all times, whether for war or for peace, it will pay.  The true wealth of a nation is the health of her masses.

It may seem to some here that I have dealt too much throughout this lecture with merely material questions; that I ought to have spoken more of intellectual progress; perhaps, as a clergyman, more also of spiritual and moral regeneration.

I can only answer, that if this be a fault on my part, it is a deliberate one.  I have spoken, whether rightly or wrongly, concerning what I know—concerning matters which are to me articles of faith altogether indubitable, irreversible, Divine.

Be it that these are merely questions of physical improvement.  I see no reason in that why they should be left to laymen, or urged only on worldly grounds and self-interest.  I do not find that when urged on those grounds, the advice is listened to.  I believe that it will not be listened to until the consciences of men, as well as their brains, are engaged in these questions; until they are put on moral grounds, shown to have connection with moral laws; and so made questions not merely of interest, but of duty, honour, chivalry.

I cannot but see, moreover, how many phenomena, which are supposed to be spiritual, are simply physical; how many cases which are referred to my profession, are properly the object of the medical man.  I cannot but see, that unless there be healthy bodies, it is impossible in the long run to have a generation of healthy souls; I cannot but see that mankind are as prone now as ever to deny the sacredness and perfection of God’s physical universe, as an excuse for their own ignorance and neglect thereof; to search the highest heaven for causes which lie patent at their feet, and like the heathen of old time, to impute to some capricious anger of the gods calamities which spring from their own greed, haste, and ignorance.

And, therefore, because I am a priest, and glory in the name of a priest, I have tried to fulfil somewhat of that which seems to me the true office of a priest—namely, to proclaim to man the Divine element which exists in all, even the smallest thing, because each thing is a thought of God himself; to make men understand that God is indeed about their path and about their bed, spying out all their ways; that they are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, and that God’s hand lies for ever on them, in the form of physical laws, sacred, irreversible, universal, reaching from one end of the universe to the other; that whosoever persists in breaking those laws, reaps his sure punishment of weakness and sickness, sadness and self-reproach; that whosoever causes them to be broken by others, reaps his sure punishment in finding that he has transformed his fellow-men into burdens and curses, instead of helpmates and blessings.  To say this, is a priest’s duty; and then to preach the good news that the remedy is patent, easy, close at hand; that many of the worst evils which afflict humanity may be exterminated by simple common sense, and the justice and mercy which does to others as it would be done by; to awaken men to the importance of the visible world, that they may judge from thence the higher importance of that invisible world whereof this is but the garment and the type; and in all times and places, instead of keeping the key of knowledge to pamper one’s own power or pride, to lay that key frankly and trustfully in the hand of every human being who hungers after truth, and to say: Child of God, this key is thine as well as mine.  Enter boldly into thy Father’s house, and behold the wonder, the wisdom, the beauty of its laws and its organisms, from the mightiest planet over thy head, to the tiniest insect beneath thy feet.  Look at it, trustfully, joyfully, earnestly; for it is thy heritage.  Behold its perfect fitness for thy life here; and judge from thence its fitness for thy nobler life hereafter.

HEROISM

It is an open question whether the policeman is not demoralising 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 everyone and most interesting to everyone, 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 brutalised 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 god-like 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 his ἀτασθαλίη—

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 αἰδώς—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 re-discovery 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 towards 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 China-man 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 the 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.