Introduction
The DeathofExpertise
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac
Asimov
In the early 1990s, a small group of “AIDS denialists,” including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment’s consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no evidence for Duesberg’s beliefs, which turned out to be baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public health officials were able to save countless lives through measures aimed at preventing its transmission.
The Duesberg business might have ended as just another quirky theory defeated by research. The history of science is littered with such dead ends. In this case, however, a discredited idea nonetheless managed to capture the attention of a national leader, with deadly results. Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, seized on the idea that AIDS was caused not by a virus but by other factors, such as malnourishment and poor health, and so he rejected offers of drugs and other forms of assistance to combat HIV infection in South Africa.
Mbeki relented before he left office in 2008, but not before his fixation on AIDS denialism ended up costing, by the estimates of doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health, well over three hundred thousand lives and the births of some thirty-five thousand HIV-positive children whose infections could have been avoided.1 Mbeki, to this day, thinks he was on to something.
Many Americans might scoff at this kind of ignorance, but they shouldn’t be too confident in their own abilities. In 2014, the Washington Post polled Americans about whether the United States should engage in military intervention in the wake of the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The United States and Russia are former Cold War adversaries, each armed with hundreds of longrange nuclear weapons. A military conflict in the center of Europe, right on the Russian border, carries a risk of igniting World War III, with potentially catastrophic consequences. And yet only one in six Americans—and fewer than one in four college graduates—could identify Ukraine on a map. Ukraine is the largest country entirely in Europe, but the median respondent was still off by about 1,800 miles. In 2022, Russia launched a much larger invasion and tried to capture all of Ukraine—a nation that borders four members of NATO —sparking the largest war in Europe since 1939. And yet only a third of Americans today know where “Ukraine” is located.2
Map tests are easy to fail. Far more unsettling is that this lack of knowledge did not stop respondents from expressing fairly pointed views about the matter. Actually, this is an understatement: the public not only expressed strong views, but respondents showed special enthusiasm for military intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of knowledge about Ukraine. Put another way, people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about the use of US military force.3
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual
achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.
This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Googlefueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.
Attacks on established knowledge and the subsequent rash of poor information in the general public are occasionally amusing. Sometimes they’re even hilarious. Late-night comedians have made a cottage industry of asking people questions that reveal their ignorance about their own strongly held ideas, their attachment to fads, and their unwillingness to admit their own cluelessness about current events. It’s mostly harmless when people emphatically say, for example, that they’re avoiding gluten and then admit that they have no idea what gluten is. And let’s face it: watching people confidently improvise opinions about ludicrous scenarios like whether “Margaret Thatcher’s absence at Coachella is beneficial in terms of North Korea’s decision to launch a nuclear weapon” never gets old. When life and death are involved, however, it’s a lot less funny. The clownish antics of antivaccine entertainers such as Jenny McCarthy or Nicki Minaj undeniably make for great television or for a fun afternoon of reading on social media. (In a strange mini-drama in 2021, Minaj claimed that she had a cousin in Trinidad whose friend received the COVID vaccine and then suffered from swollen testicles and impotence.) 4 The price of AIDS denialism and COVID vaccine hesitation have already been immense, but the continued activism of uninformed celebrities and other public figures spreading myths and misinformation about vaccines is an ongoing danger to
millions of people, and especially children, who could suffer preventable afflictions like measles and whooping cough.
The growth of such stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of poor education or a lack of access to sources of reliable news. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.
By the “death of expertise,” I do not mean the death of actual expert abilities, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors and diplomats, lawyers and engineers, and many other specialists in various fields. On a day-to-day basis, the world cannot function without them. If we break a bone or get arrested, we call a doctor or a lawyer. When we travel, we take it for granted that the pilot knows how airplanes work. If we run into trouble overseas, we call a consular official who we assume will know what to do.
These concessions to the need for specialized assistance, however, only represent a reliance on experts as technicians. They are not part of a dialogue between experts and the larger community, but the use of established knowledge as an off-the-shelf convenience as needed and only so far as desired. Stitch this cut in my leg, but don’t lecture me about my diet. (More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight.) Help me beat this tax problem, but don’t remind me that I should have a will. (Roughly half of Americans with children haven’t bothered to write one.) Keep my country safe, but don’t confuse me with the costs and calculations of national security. (Most US citizens do not have even a remote idea of how much the United States spends on its armed forces.)
Such choices, from a nutritious diet to national defense, require a conversation between citizens and experts, but citizens are deeply resistant to having that conversation. They’d rather believe they’ve gained enough information to make all of their decisions on their
own, and in some cases, when it comes to national policy, they seem uninterested in making any decisions at all.
On the other hand, many experts, and particularly those in the academy, have abandoned their duty to engage with the public. They have retreated into jargon and irrelevance, preferring to interact only with each other. Meanwhile, the people holding the middle ground to whom we often refer as “public intellectuals”—I’d like to think I’m one of them—are becoming as frustrated and polarized as the rest of society.
The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization. It is a sign, as the art critic Robert Hughes once described late twentieth-century America, of “a polity obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics,” chronically “skeptical of authority” and “prey to superstition.” We have come full circle from a premodern age, in which folk wisdom filled unavoidable gaps in human knowledge, through a period of rapid development based heavily on specialization and expertise, and now to a postindustrial, information-oriented world where all citizens believe themselves to be experts on everything.
Any assertion of expertise from an actual expert, meanwhile, produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy. Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous. This book, then, is about expertise. Or, more accurately, it is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about it.
The immediate response from most people when confronted with the death of expertise is to blame the Internet. Professionals, especially, tend to point to the Internet as the culprit when faced with clients and customers who think they know better. As we’ll see, that’s not entirely wrong, but it is also too simple an explanation. Attacks on established knowledge have a long pedigree, and the Internet is only the most recent tool in a recurring problem that in the past misused television, radio, the printing press, and other innovations the same way.
So why all the fuss? What exactly has changed so dramatically for me to have written this book and for you to be reading it? Is this really the “death of expertise,” or is this nothing more than the usual complaints from intellectuals that no one listens to them despite their self-anointed status as the smartest people in the room? Maybe it’s nothing more than the anxiety about the masses that arises among professionals after each cycle of social or technological change. Or maybe it’s just a typical expression of the outraged vanity of overeducated, elitist professors like me.
Indeed, maybe the death of expertise is a sign of progress. Educated professionals, after all, no longer have a stranglehold on knowledge. The secrets of life are no longer hidden in giant marble mausoleums, the great libraries of the world whose halls are intimidating even to the relatively few people who can visit them. Under such conditions in the past, there was less stress between experts and laypeople, but only because citizens were simply unable to challenge experts in any substantive way. Moreover, there were few public venues in which to mount such challenges in the era before mass communications.
Participation in political, intellectual, and scientific life until the early twentieth century was far more circumscribed, with debates about science, philosophy, and public policy all conducted by a small circle of educated males with pen and ink. Those were not exactly the Good Old Days, and they weren’t that long ago. The time when most people didn’t finish high school, when very few went to college, and when only a tiny fraction of the population entered professions is still within living memory of many Americans.
Social changes only in the past half century finally broke down old barriers of race, class, and sex not only between Americans in general but also between uneducated citizens and elite experts. A wider circle of debate meant more knowledge but more social friction. Universal education, the greater empowerment of women and minorities, the growth of a middle class, and increased social mobility all threw a minority of experts and the majority of citizens into direct contact, after nearly two centuries in which they rarely had to interact with each other.
And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.
WHAT’S AHEAD
In the chapters that follow, I’ll suggest several sources of this problem, some of which are rooted in human nature, others that are unique to America, and some that are the unavoidable product of modernity and affluence.
In the next chapter, I’ll discuss the notion of an “expert” and whether conflict between experts and laypeople is all that new. What does it even mean to be an expert? When faced with a tough decision on a subject outside of your own background or experience, whom would you ask for advice? (If you don’t think you need any advice but your own, you’re likely one of the people who inspired me to write this book.)
In chapter 2, I’ll explore why conversation in America has become so exhausting not just between experts and ordinary citizens, but among everyone. If we’re honest, we all would admit that any of us can be annoying, even infuriating, when we talk about things that
mean a great deal to us, especially regarding beliefs and ideas to which we’re firmly attached. Many of the obstacles to the working relationship between experts and their clients in society rest in basic human weaknesses, and in this chapter we’ll start by considering the natural barriers to better understanding.
We all suffer from problems, for example, like “confirmation bias,” the natural tendency to accept only evidence that confirms what we already believe. Personal experiences, prejudices, fears, and even phobias—all of them prevent us from accepting expert advice. If we think a certain number is lucky, no mathematician can tell us otherwise; if we believe flying is dangerous, even reassurance from an astronaut or a fighter pilot will not allay our fears. And some of us, as indelicate as it might be to say it, are not intelligent enough to know when we’re wrong, no matter how good our intentions. Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument.
Education is supposed to help us to recognize problems like “confirmation bias” and to overcome the gaps in our knowledge so that we can be better citizens. Unfortunately, the modern American university, and the way students and their parents treat it as a generic commodity, is now part of the problem. In chapter 3 I’ll discuss why the broad availability of a college education— paradoxically—is making many people think they’ve become smarter when in fact they’ve gained only an illusory intelligence bolstered by a degree of dubious worth. When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.
The modern era of technology and communications is empowering great leaps in knowledge, but it’s also enabling and reinforcing our human failings. While the Internet doesn’t explain everything about the death of expertise, it explains quite a lot of it, at least in the
twenty-first century. In chapter 4, I’ll examine how the greatest source of knowledge in human history since Gutenberg stained his fingers has become as much a platform for attacks on established knowledge as a defense against them. The Internet is a magnificent repository of knowledge, and yet it’s also the source and enabler of a spreading epidemic of misinformation. Not only is the Internet making many of us dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone behind their keyboards, people argue rather than discuss, and insult rather than listen.
In a free society, journalists are, or should be, among the most important referees in the great scrum between ignorance and learning. And what happens when citizens demand to be entertained instead of informed? We’ll look at these unsettling questions in chapter 5.
We count on the media to keep us informed, to separate fact from fiction, and to make complicated matters comprehensible to people who do not have endless amounts of time and energy to keep up with every development in a busy world. Professional journalists, however, face new challenges in the Information Age. In an earlier time, even a half-century ago, journalists and editors had to make hard choices about what should claim inches on a newspaper page and minutes of broadcast time on radio and television. Today, cable and broadband provide virtually bandwidth space for news, but consumers expect all of that space to be filled instantaneously, to be updated continuously, and to be entertaining—despite the reality that there are not enough hours in the day for them to process all of it.
In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and producers no longer have the patience—or the financial luxury—to allow journalists to develop their own expertise or deep knowledge of a subject. Nor is there any evidence that most news consumers want such detail. Experts are often reduced to sound bites or “pull quotes,” if they are consulted at all. And everyone involved in the news industry knows that if the reports aren’t pretty or glossy or entertaining enough, the fickle viewing public can find other, less
taxing alternatives with the click of a mouse or the press of a button on a television remote.
Experts are not infallible. They have made terrible mistakes, with ghastly consequences. To defend the role of expertise in modern America is to invite a litany of these disasters and errors: thalidomide, Vietnam, the Challengerspace shuttle disaster, the dire warnings about the dietary hazards of eggs. (Go ahead and enjoy them again. They’re off the list of things that are bad for you.) Experts, understandably, retort that this is the equivalent of remembering one plane crash and ignoring billions of safely traveled air miles. This rejoinder may be true, but sometimes airplanes do crash, and sometimes they crash because an expert screwed up.
In chapter 6, I’ll consider what happens when experts are wrong. Experts can be wrong in many ways, from outright fraud to wellintentioned but arrogant overconfidence in their own abilities. And sometimes, like other human beings, they just make mistakes. It is important for laypeople to understand, however, how and why experts can err, not only to make citizens better consumers of expert advice but also to reassure the public about the ways in which experts try and police themselves and their work. Otherwise, expert errors become fodder for ill-informed arguments that leave specialists resentful of attacks on their profession and laypeople fearful that the experts have no idea what they’re doing.
When I wrote the first edition of The Death of Expertise, I was confident that a major crisis would remind people how much they rely on experts. After all, in the aftermath of two world wars, experts rebuilt the planetary economy, conquered a slew of diseases, beat back global poverty, and raised living standards faster and higher than any time in human history. And when a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic arrived, scientists and governments managed to produce a vaccine and avert more death (and a possible global economic meltdown) within a few years.
And yet, the COVID pandemic served only to deepen distrust between experts, policymakers, and ordinary citizens. In chapter 7, we will consider the failures and mistakes from government and expert communities, and how they combined with the preexisting
suspicion of expertise to overshadow the successes of the global response to COVID.
Finally, in the conclusion I’ll raise the most dangerous aspect of the death of expertise: how the narcissistic rejection of established knowledge and the collapse of critical thinking has undermined American democracy. The United States is a republic, in which the people designate others to make decisions on their behalf. Those elected representatives cannot master every issue, and they rely on experts and professionals to help them. Despite what many people think, experts and policymakers are not the same people, and to confuse the two, as Americans often do, corrodes trust among experts, citizens, and political leaders, all of whom must cooperate to make democracy work
Experts advise. Elected leaders decide. If they are to judge the performance of the experts and the decisions of their representatives, laypeople must familiarize themselves with the issues at hand. This does not mean that every American must engage in deep study of policy, but if citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives, they abdicate control over those issues whether they intended to or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk not only the sudden hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, but the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.
Experts, too, have important responsibilities in a democracy, and they’ve been shirking those duties in recent decades. Where public intellectuals (often in tandem with journalists) once strove to make important issues understandable to laypeople, educated elites now increasingly speak only to each other. Citizens, to be sure, reinforce this reticence by arguing rather than questioning an important difference—but that does not relieve experts of their duty to serve society and to think of their fellow citizens as their clients rather than as annoyances.
Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a responsibility to learn. In the end, regardless of how much advice the professionals might provide, only the public can decide the
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Et præceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus et uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis.”
By the way, nobody who has not endeavoured to render Latin poetry into English can appreciate the vigour and terseness of the older language Here are six lines in the one version and four in the other, required to translate three of the original, perhaps without producing after all so full a meaning or so complete a picture.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his poetical predilections for the country, Horace, like many other people, seems of his two homes to have always preferred the one at which he was not. An unhappy prejudice little calculated to enhance the comfort and content of daily life.
Had he settled anywhere in the neighbourhood of our hermitage here, he need not have accused himself of this fickle longing, which he denounces by the somewhat ludicrous epithet of “ventose.” He might have combined the advantages of town and country, alternating the solitude of the desert with the society of his fellowmen, blowing the smoke out of his lungs while inhaling the fresh breezes off the Serpentine, stretching his own limbs and his horses’ by walks and rides round Battersea, Victoria, and Hyde Parks.
If you look for rus in urbe, where will you find it in such perfection as within a mile of the Wellington statue in almost any direction you please to take? If you choose to saunter on a hot June day towards the Ranger’s Lodge or the powder-magazine, I could show you a spot from which I defy you to see houses, spires, gas-towers, or chimneys, anything, indeed, but green grass and blue sky, and towering elms motionless, in black massive shade, or quivering in golden gleams of light. A spot where you might lie and dream of nymph and faun, wood-god and satyr, Daphne pursued by Phœbus, Actæon flying before Diana, of Pan and Syrinx and Echo, and all the rustic joys of peaceful Arcady—or of elves and brownies, fair princesses and cruel monsters, Launcelot, Modred, and Carodac, Sir Gawain the courteous with his “lothely ladye,” the compromising cup, the misfitting mantle, all the bright pageantry, quaint device, and deep, tender romance that groups itself round good King Arthur and
the Knights of his Round Table—or of Thomas the Rhymer as he lay at length under the “linden tree,” and espied, riding towards him on a milk-white palfrey, a dame so beautiful, that he could not but believe she was the mother of his lord, till undeceived by her own confession, he won from her the fatal gift of an unearthly love. And here, perhaps, you branch off into some more recent vision, some dream of an elfin queen of your own, who also showed you the path to heaven, and gave you an insight into the ways of purgatory, ere she beckoned you down the road to Fairyland, that leads—ah! who knows where? From this sequestered nook you need not walk a bowshot to arrive at the seaboard of the Serpentine; and here, should there be a breath of air, if you have any taste for yachting, you may indulge it to your heart’s content. The glittering water is dotted with craft of every rig and, under a certain standard, of almost every size. Yawls, cutters, schooners, barques, brigs, with here and there a three-masted ship. On a wind and off a wind, close-hauled and free, rolling, pitching, going about, occasionally missing stays, and only to be extricated from the “doldrums” by a blundering, overeager water-dog, the mimic fleet, on its mimic ocean, carries out its illusion so completely that you can almost fancy the air off the water feels damp to your forehead, and tastes salt upon your lips.
An ancient mariner who frequents the beach below the boat-house feels, I am convinced, thoroughly persuaded that his occupation is strictly professional, that he is himself a necessity, not of amusement, but business. He will tell you that when the wind veers round like that, “suddenways, off Kensington Gardens, you may look out for squalls;” that “last Toosday was an awful wild night, and some on ’em broke from their moorings afore he could turn out. The Bellerophon, bless ye, was as nigh lost as could be, and that there Water Lily, the sweetest thing as ever swam—she sprang her boom, damaged her bowsprit, and broke her nose. He was refitting all Wens’day, he was, up to two o’clock, and a precious job he had!”
Every one who constantly “takes his walks abroad” in the Great City, becomes a philosopher in spite of himself, of the Peripatetic School, no doubt, but still a philosopher; so you sympathise mildly with the mariner’s troubles; for to you no human interests are either
great or small, nor does one pursuit or person bore you more than another. You hazard an opinion, therefore, that the Water Lily is somewhat too delicate and fragile a craft to encounter boisterous weather, even on such an inland sea as this, and find, to your dismay, that so innocent an observation stamps you in his opinion as not only ignorant, but presumptuous. He considers her both “wholesome,” as he calls it, and “weatherly,” urging on you many considerations of sea-worthiness, such as her false keel, her bulwarks, her breadth of beam, and general calibre. “Why, she’s seven-and-twenty,” says he, rolling a peppermint lozenge round his tongue, just as a real seaman turns a quid; “now look at the SeaSarpent lying away to the eastward yonder, just beyond the point where the gravel’s been washed adrift. She’s fifty-two, she is, but I wouldn’t trust her, not in lumpy water, you know, like the schooner. No. If I was a-building of one now, what I call, for all work and all weathers, thirty would be my mark, or from that to thirty-five at the outside!”
“Thirty-five what? Tons?” you ask, a little abashed, and feeling you have committed yourself.
“Tons!” he repeats, in a tone of intense disgust—“tons be blowed! h’inches! I should have thought any landsman might ha’ knowed that —h’inches!” and lurching sulkily into his cabin under the willow-tree, disappears to be seen no more.
Later, when September has begun to tinge the topmost twigs with gold, and autumn, like a beautiful woman, then indeed at her loveliest, who is just upon the wane, dresses in her deepest colours, and her richest garments, go roaming about in Kensington Gardens, and say whether you might not fancy yourself a hundred miles from any such evidences of civilisation as a pillar-post or a cab-stand.
It was but the other day I sauntered through the grove that stands nearest the Uxbridge Road, and, while an afternoon mist limited my range of vision and deadened the sounds of traffic on my ears, I could hardly persuade myself that in less than five minutes I might if I liked make the thirteenth in an omnibus.
Alone? you ask—of course I was. Yet, stay, not quite alone, for with me walked the shadow that, when we have learned to prefer solitude to society, accompanies us in all our wanderings, teaching us, I humbly hope, the inevitable lesson, permanent and precious in proportion to the pain with which the poor scholar gets his task by heart.
Well, I give you my word, the endless stems, the noiseless solitude, the circumscribed horizon, reminded me of those forest ranges in North America that stretch interminable from the waters of the St. Ann’s and the Batsicon to the wild waves breaking dark and sullen on the desert seaboard of Labrador.
I am not joking. I declare to you I was once more in moccasins, blanket-coat, and bonnet-rouge, with an axe in my belt, a pack on my shoulders, and a rifle in my hand, following the track of the treborgons[3] on snow-shoes, in company with Thomas, the French Canadian, and François, the half-breed, and the Huron chief with a name I could never pronounce, that neither I nor any man alive can spell. Ah! it was a merry life we led on those moose-hunting expeditions, in spite of hard work, hard fare, and, on occasion, more than a sufficiency of the discomfort our retainers called expressively misère. There was a strange charm in the marches through those silent forests, across those frozen lakes, all clothed alike in their winter robe of white and diamonds. There was a bold, free, joyous comfort in the hole we dug through a yard and a half of snow, wherein to build our fire, boil our kettle, fry our pork (it is no use talking of such things to you, but I was going to say, never forget a frying-pan on these expeditions; it is worth all the kitchen-ranges in Belgravia), to smoke our tobacco, ay, and to take our rest.
There was something of sweet adventurous romance in waking at midnight to see the stars flash like brilliants through the snowencrusted branches overhead, wondering vaguely where and why and what were all those countless worlds of flame. Perhaps to turn round again and dream of starry eyes in the settlements, then closed in sleep, or winking drowsily at a night-light, while the pretty watcher pondered, not unmindful of ourselves, pitying us, it may be, couching here in the bush, and thinking in her ignorance how cold we were!
Then when we reached our hunting-ground and came up with our game at last, though, truth to tell, the sport as sport was poor enough, there was yet a wild delightful triumph in overtaking and slaying a gigantic animal that had never seen the face of man. The chase was exciting, invigorating, bracing; the idea grand, heroic, Scandinavian.
“An elk came out of the pine-forest; He snuffed up east, he snuffed up west, Stealthy and still; His mane and his horns were shaggy with snow, I laid my arrow across my bow, Stealthily and still; The bowstring rattled the arrow flew, And it pierced his blade-bone through and through, Hurrah!
I sprang at his throat like a wolf of the wood, And I dipped my hands in the smoking blood, Hurrah!”
Kingsley had not written Hypatia then. Kingsley never went moose-hunting in his life. How could he so vividly describe the gait and bearing of a forest elk stalking warily, doubtfully, yet with a kingly pride through his wintry haunts? Probably from the instinctive sense of fitness, the intuition peculiar to poets, that enabled him to feel alike with a fierce Goth sheltering in his snow-trench, and a soft, seductive southern beauty, languishing, lovely and beloved, in spite of dangerous impulses and tarnished fame, in spite of wilful heart, reckless self-abandonment, woman weakness, and the fatal saffron shawl.
I tell you that I could not have been more completely alone in Robinson Crusoe’s island than I found myself here within a rifle-shot of Kensington Palace, during a twenty minutes’ walk, to and fro, up and down, threading the stems of those tall, metropolitan trees; nor when my solitude was at last disturbed could I find it in me to grudge the intruders their share of my retreat. More especially as they were themselves thoroughly unconscious of everything but their own companionship, sauntering on, side by side, with murmured words,
and loving looks, and steps that dwelt and lingered on the path, because impossible roses seemed springing into bloom beneath their very feet, and that for them Kensington Gardens were indeed as the gardens of Paradise.
I knew right well for me the mist was gathering round, ghostly and damp and chill. It struck through my garments, it crept about my heart, but for these, thank God! the sky was bright as a midsummer noon. They were basking in the warmth and light of those gleams that come once or twice in a lifetime to remind us of what we might be, to reproach us, perhaps, gently for what we are. They did not speak much, they laughed not at all. Their conversation seemed a little dull, trite, and commonplace, yet I doubt if either of them has forgotten a word of it yet. It was pleasant to observe how happy they were, and I am sure they thought it was to last for ever. Indeed I wish it may!
But the reflections of a man on foot are to those of a man on horseback as the tortoise to the hare, the mouse to the lion, tobacco to opium, chalk to cheese, prose to poetry.
“As moonshine is to sunshine, and as water is to wine ”
Get into the saddle, leap on a thorough-bred horse, if you have got one. Never mind his spoiling you for every other animal of meaner race, and come for a “spin” up the Ride from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington Gate, careful only to steady him sufficiently for the safety of Her Majesty’s subjects, and the inquisition, not very rigorous, of the policemen on duty For seven months in the year, at least, this is perhaps the only mile and a half in England over which you may gallop without remorse for battering legs and feet to pieces on the hard ground. Away you go, the breeze lifting your whiskers from the very roots (I forgot, you have no whiskers, nor indeed would such superfluities be in character with the severe style of your immortal beauty). Never mind, the faster you gallop the keener and cooler comes the air. Sit well down, just feel him on the curb, let him shake his pretty head and play with his bridle, sailing away with his hindlegs under your stirrup-irons, free, yet collected, so that you could let
him out at speed, or have him back in a canter within half-a-dozen strides; pat him lovingly just where the hair turns on his glossy neck like a knot in polished woodwork, and while he bends to meet the caress, and bounds to acknowledge it, tell me that dancing is the poetry of motion if you dare!
Should it not be the London season—and I am of opinion that the rus in urbe is more enjoyable to both of us at the “dead time of year” than during the three fashionable months—do not, therefore, feel alarmed that you will have the ride to yourself, or that if you come to grief there will be nobody to pick you up! Here you will meet some Life-Guardsman “taking the nonsense” out of a charger he hates; there some fair girl, trim of waist, blue of habit, and golden of chignon, giving her favourite “a breather,” ready and willing to acknowledge that she is happier thus, speeding along in her sidesaddle, than floating round a ball-room to Coote and Tinney’s softest strains with the best waltzer in London for a partner.
But your horse has got his blood up, and you yourself feel that rising within, which reminds you of the merry youthful days, when everything in life was done, so to speak, at a gallop. You long to have a lark—you cannot settle down without a jump or two at least. You look wistfully at the single iron rail that guards the footway, but refrain: and herein you are wise. Nevertheless, you shall not be disappointed; you have but to jog quietly out of the Park, through Queen’s Gate, turning thereafter to your right, and within a quarter of a mile you shall find what you require. Yes, in good truth, our rus in urbe, to be the more complete, is not without a little hunting-ground of its own. Mr. Blackman has laid out a snug enclosure, walled in on all sides and remote from observation, where man and horse may disport themselves with no more fear of being crowded and jostled than in Launde Woods or Rockingham Forest during the autumnal months. Here you will find every description of fence in miniature, neat and new and complete, like the furniture in a doll’s baby-house —a little hedge, a little ditch, a little double, and a very little gate, cunningly constructed on mechanical principles so as to let you off easily should you tamper with its top bar, the whole admirably adapted to encourage a timid horse or steady a bold one.
All this is child’s-play, no doubt—the merest child’s-play, compared with the real thing. Yet there is much in the association of ideas; and a round or two over this mimic country cannot but bring back to you the memory of the merriest, ay, and the happiest, if not the sweetest, moments of your life. Mounted, with a good start, in a grass country, after a pack of foxhounds, there is no discord in the melody, no bitter in the cup—your keenest anxiety the soundness of the level watermeadow, your worst misgiving the strength of the farther rail, the width of the second ditch. The goddess of your worship bids your pulses leap and your blood thrill, but never makes your heart ache, and the thorns that hedge the roses of Diana can only pierce skindeep.
Wasn’t it glorious, though you rode much heavier then than you do now,—wasn’t it glorious, I say, to view a gallant fox going straight away from Lilburne, Loatland Wood, Shankton Holt, John-o’-Gaunt, or any covert you please to name that lies in the heart of a goodscenting, fair-fenced, galloping country? Yourself, sheltered and unseen, what keen excitement to mark his stealing, easy action, gliding across the middle of the fields, nose, back, and brush carried in what geometricians call a “right” line, to lead you over what many people would call a “serious” one! A chorus ringing from some twenty couple of tongues becomes suddenly mute, and the good horse beneath you trembles with delight while the hounds pour over the fence that bounds the covert, scattering like a conjuror’s pack of cards, ere they converge in the form of an arrow, heads and sterns down, racing each other for a lead, and lengthening out from the sheer pace at which a burning scent enables them to drive along!
They have settled to it now You may set to and ride without compunction or remorse. A dozen fields, as many fences, a friendly gate, and they have thrown their heads up in a lane. Half-a-score of sportsmen, one plastered with mud, and the huntsman now come up; you feel conscious, though you know you are innocent, that he thinks you have been driving them! You remark, also, that there is more red than common in the men’s faces and the horses’ nostrils; both seem to be much excited and a little blown.
The check, however, is not of long duration. Fortunately, the hounds have taken the matter in hand for themselves, ere the only person qualified to do so has had time to interfere. Rarpsody, as he calls her, puts her nose down and goes off again at score. You scramble out of the lane, post-haste, narrowly escaping a fall. Your horse has caught his wind with that timely pull. He is going as bold as a lion, as easy as a bird, as steady as a rock. You seem to have grown together, and move like one creature to that long swinging stride, untiring and regular as clock-work. A line of grass is before you, a light east wind in your face, two years’ condition and the best blood of Newmarket in his veins render you confident of your steed’s enduring powers, while every field as he swoops over it, every fence as he throws it lightly behind him, convinces you more and more of his speed, mettle, and activity. What will you have? The pleasures of imagination, at least, are unlimited. Shall it be two-and-twenty minutes up wind and to ground as hard as they can go? Shall it be thirty-five without another check, crossing the best of the Vale, and indulging the good horse with never a pull till you land in the field where old Rhapsody, with flashing eyes and bristles all on end, runs into her quarry, rolling him over and herself with him, to be buried in the rush of her eager worrying followers? Would you prefer twelve miles from point to point, accomplished in an hour and a half, comprising every variety of country, every vicissitude of the chase, and ending only when the crows are hovering and swooping over a staunch, courageous, travel-wearied fox, holding on with failing strength but all-undaunted spirit for the forest that another mile would reach but that he is never to see again? You may take your choice. Holloa! he has disappeared!—he has taken refuge in his cupboard. Not even such a skeleton as mine can sustain the exorcism of so powerful a spell as fox-hunting! So be it. Who-whoop! Gone to ground? I think we will leave him there for the present. It is better not to dig him out!
CHAPTER IX
HAUNTED
A hundred years ago there was scarce a decent country house in England or Scotland that did not pride itself on two advantages—the inexhaustible resources of its cellar and the undoubted respectability of its ghost. Whether the generous contents of the one had not something to do with the regular attendance of the other, I will not take upon me to decide; but in those times hall, castle, manor-house, and even wayside inn were haunted every one. The phantoms used to be as various, too, as the figures in a pantomime. Strains of unaccountable music sometimes floated in the air. Invisible carriages rolled into courtyards at midnight, and door-bells rang loudly, pulled by unearthly visitors, who were heard but never seen. If you woke at twelve o’clock you were sure to find a nobleman in court-dress, or a lady in farthingale and high-heeled shoes, warming a pair of ringed and wasted hands at the embers of your wood-fire; failing these, a favourite sample of the supernatural consisted of some pale woman in white garments, with her black hair all over her shoulders and her throat cut from ear to ear. In one instance I remember a postinghouse frequented by the spirit of an ostler with a wooden leg; but perhaps the most blood-chilling tale of all is that which treats of an empty chamber having its floor sprinkled with flour to detect the traces of its mysterious visitant, and the dismay with which certain horror-stricken watchers saw footsteps printing themselves off, one by one, on the level spotless surface—footsteps plain and palpable, but of the Fearful Presence nothing more!
As with houses in those, so is it with men in these days. Most of the people I have known in life were haunted; so haunted, indeed, that for some the infliction has led at last to madness, though in most instances productive only of abstracted demeanour, wandering attention, idiotic cross-purposes, general imbecility of intellect, and, on occasion, reckless hilarity, with quaint, wild, incoherent talk.
These haunted head-pieces, too, get more and more dilapidated every day; but how to exorcise them, that is the difficulty! What spells shall have power to banish the evil spirit from its tenement, and lay it in the Red Sea? if indeed that is the locality to which phantoms should properly be consigned. Haunted men are, of all their kind, the most unhappy; and you shall not walk along a London street without meeting them by the dozen.
The dwelling exclusively on one idea, if not in itself an incipient symptom, tends to produce, ere long, confirmed insanity. Yet how many people have we seen going about with the germs of so fearful a calamity developing into maturity! This man is haunted by hope, that by fear,—others by remorse, regret, remembrance, desire, or discontent. Each cherishes his ghost with exceeding care and tenderness, giving it up, as it were, room after room in the house, till by degrees it pervades the whole tenement, and there is no place left for a more remunerative lodger, healthy, substantial, and real. I have seen people so completely under the dominion of expectation, that in their morbid anticipation of the Future, they could no more enjoy the pleasures afforded by the Present than the dead. I have known others for whom the brightest sunshine that ever shone was veiled by a cloud of apprehension, lest storms should be lurking below their horizon the while, who would not so much as confess themselves happy because of a conviction such happiness was not to last,—and for whom time being—as is reasonable—only temporal could bring neither comfort nor relief. It is rarer to find humanity suffering from the tortures of remorse, a sensation seldom unaccompanied, indeed, by misgivings of detection and future punishment; still, when it does fasten on a victim, this Nemesis is of all others the most cruel and vindictive. Regret, however, has taken possession of an attic, in most of our houses, and refuses obstinately to be dislodged. It is a quiet, well-behaved ghost enough, interfering but little with the ordinary occupations of the family, content to sit in a dark corner, weeping feebly and wringing its hands, but with an inconvenient and reprehensible tendency to emerge on special occasions of rejoicing and festivity, to obtrude its unwelcome presence when the other inmates are gladdened by any unusual beauty of sight or sound.
Discontent, perhaps, should hardly be dignified with the title of a ghost. He resembles rather those Brownies and Lubbers of northern superstition, who, unsightly and even ludicrous in appearance, were not yet without their use in performing the meaner offices of a household. If properly treated and never dragged into undue notice, the Brownie would sweep up the hearth, bring in the fuel, milk the cows, and take upon him the rough work generally, in an irregular, uncouth, but still tolerably efficient style. So perhaps a spirit of discontent, kept within proper bounds, may prove the unsuspected mainspring of much useful labour, much vigorous effort, much eventual success. The spur is doubtless a disagreeable instrument to the horse, and its misapplication has lost many a race ere now; but there is no disputing that it can rouse into action such dull torpid temperaments as, thus unstimulated, would never discover their own powers nor exert themselves to do their best.
But I should draw a wide distinction between the discontent which instigates us to improve our lot, and the desire, the desiderium, the poisonous mixture of longing and sorrow, defiance and despair, which bids us only rend our garments, scatter ashes on our heads, and sit down in the dust unmanly to repine. It is the difference between the Brownie and the Fiend. Of all evil spirits I think this last is the most fatal, the most accursed. We can none of us forget how our father Abraham, standing at his tent door on the plains of Mamre, entertained three angels unawares. And we, too, his descendants, are always on the look-out for the visitors from heaven. Do they ever tarry with any of us for more than a night’s lodging? Alas! that the very proof of our guest’s celestial nature is the swiftness with which he vanishes at daybreak like a dream. But oftener the stranger we receive, though coming from another world, is not from above. His beauty, indeed, seems angelic, and he is clad in garments of light. For a while we are glad to be deceived, cherishing and prizing our guest, the more perhaps for those very qualities which should warn us of his origin. So we say to him, “Thou art he for whom we have been looking. Abide with us here for ever.” And he takes us at our word.
Henceforth the whole house belongs to the ghost. When we go to dinner, he sits at the head of the table. Try to shame him away with laughter, and you will soon know the difference between mirth and joy. Try to drown him with wine. No. Don’t try that. It is too dangerous an experiment, as any doctor who keeps a private mad-house will tell you. Our duties we undertake hopelessly and languidly, because of his sneer, which seems to say, “What is the use? Am I not here to see that you reap no harvest from your labour, earn no oblivion with your toil?” And for our pleasures—how can we have any pleasures in that imperious presence, under the lash of that cruel smile?
Even if we leave our home and walk abroad, in hope to free ourselves from the tenacious incubus, it is in vain. There is beauty in the outside world, quiet in the calm distant skies, peace in the still summer evening, but not for us—nevermore for us—
“Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright sun, When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the sun ”
Ay, therein lurks our curse. We bear the presence well enough when cold winds blow and snow falls, or when all the landscape about is bleak and bare and scathed by bitter frosts. The cruel moment is that in which we feel a capability of enjoyment still left but for our affliction, a desire to bask in his rays, a longing to turn our faces towards his warmth—
“When that strange shape drives suddenly Betwixt us and the sun ”
There is no exorciser from without who can help us. Alas! that we can so seldom help ourselves. The strength of Hercules could not preserve the hero from his ghastly fate. Our ghost is no more to be got rid of by main force than was Dejanira’s fatal tunic, clinging, blistering, wrapping its wearer all the closer, that he tore away the smarting flesh by handfuls. Friends will advise us to make the best of it, and no doubt their counsel is excellent though gratuitous, wanting
indeed nothing but the supplementary information, how we are to make the best of that which is confessedly at its worst. Enemies opine that we are weak fools, and deserve to be vanquished for our want of courage—an argument that would hold equally good with every combatant overpowered by superior strength; and all the time the ghost that haunted us sits aloft, laughing our helplessness to scorn, cold, pitiless, inexorable, and always
“Betwixt us and the sun.”
If we cannot get rid of him, he will sap our intellects and shorten our lives; but there is a spell which even this evil spirit has not power to withstand, and it is to be found in an inscription less imitated perhaps than admired by the “monks of old.”
“Laborare est orare,” so runs the charm. Work and worship, and a stern resolve to ignore his presence, will eventually cause this devil to “come out of the man.” Not, be sure, till he has torn and rent him cruelly—not till he has driven him abroad to wander night and day amongst the tombs, seeking rest, poor fevered wretch, and finding none, because of his tormentor—not till, in utter helplessness and sheer despair, stunned, humbled, and broken-hearted, the demoniac has crept feebly to the Master’s feet, will he find himself delivered from his enemy, weary, sore, and wasted, but “clothed, and in his right mind.”
Amongst the many ghost stories I have read there is one of which I only remember that it turned upon the inexplicable presence of a window too much in the front of a man’s house. This individual had lately taken a farm, and with it a weird, long-uninhabited dwelling in which he came to reside. His first care, naturally enough, was to inspect the building he occupied, and he found, we will say, two rooms on the second floor, each with two windows. The rooms were close together, and the walls of not more than average thickness. It was some days ere he made rather a startling discovery. Returning from the land towards his own door, and lifting the eyes of proprietorship on his home, he counted on the second story five windows in front instead of four! The man winked and stared and
wondered. Knowing he was not drunk, he thought he must be dreaming, and counted them over again—still with the same result. Entering his house, he ran up-stairs forthwith, and made a strict investigation of the second floor. There were the two rooms, and there were the four windows as usual. Day after day he went through the same process, till by degrees his wonder diminished, his apprehensions vanished; his daily labour tired him so that he could have slept sound in a graveyard, and by the time his harvest was got in, the subject never so much as entered his head.
Now this is the way to treat the haunted chamber in our own brain. Fasten its door; if necessary, brick up its window. Deprive it of air and light. Ignore it altogether. When you walk along the passage never turn your head in its direction, no, not even though the dearest hope of your heart lies dead and cold within; but if duty bids you, do not shrink from entering—walk in boldly! Confront the ghost, and show it that you have ceased to tremble in its presence. Time after time the false proportions, once so ghastly and gigantic, will grow less and less—some day the spectre will vanish altogether. Mind, I do not promise you another inmate. While you live the tenement will probably remain bare and uninhabited; but at the worst an empty room is surely better than a bad lodger! It is difficult, you will say, thus to ignore that of which both head and heart are full. So it is. Very difficult, very wearisome, very painful, yet not impossible! Make free use of the spell. Work, work, till your brain is so overwrought it cannot think, your body so tired it must rest or die. Pray humbly, confidingly, sadly, like the publican, while your eyes can hardly keep open, your hands droop helpless by your side, and your sleep shall be sound, holy, unhaunted, so that with to-morrow’s light you may rise to the unremitting task once more.
Do not hope you are to gain the victory in a day. It may take months. It may take years. Inch by inch, and step by step, the battle must be fought. Over and over again you will be worsted and give ground, but do not therefore yield. Resolve never to be driven back quite so far as you have advanced. Imperceptibly, the foe becomes weaker, while you are gaining strength. The time will come at last, when you can look back on the struggle with a half-pitying wonder
that he could ever have made so good a fight. Do not then forget to be grateful for the aid you prayed so earnestly might be granted at your need; and remember also, for your comfort, that the harder won the victory, the less likely it is you will ever have to wage such cruel battle again.
“Would it not be wiser,” observed Bones quietly, “never to begin the conflict? Not to take possession of the haunted house at all?”
There is a pseudo-philosophy about some of his remarks that provokes me intensely.
“Would it not be wiser,” I repeated, in high disdain, “to sit on the beach than put out to sea, to walk afoot than ride on horseback, to loll on velvet cushions in the gallery, than go down under shield into the lists, and strike for life, honour, and renown? No. It would not be wiser. True wisdom comes by experience. He who shrinks from contact with his fellow-men—who fears to take his share of their burdens, their sorrows, their sufferings, is but a poor fool at best. He may be learned in the learning of the schools, but he is a dunce in all that relates to ‘the proper study of mankind’; he is ignorant of human nature, its sorrows, its passions, its feelings, its hidden vein of gold, lying under a thick crust of selfishness and deceit; above all, he knows nothing of his inmost heart, nothing of the fierce, warlike joy in which a bold spirit crushes and tramples out its own rebellion— nothing of that worshipper’s lofty courage who
‘Gives the first watch of the night To the red planet Mars,’
who feels a stern and dogged pride in the consciousness that he
‘Knows how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong ’
No: in the moral as in the physical battle, though you be pinned to the earth, yet writhe yourself up against the spear, like the ‘grim Lord of Colonsay,’ who, in his very death-pang, swung his claymore, set his teeth, and drove his last blow home.
“Besides, if you are to avoid the struggle entirely, how are you ever to learn the skill of self-defence, by which a thrust may be parried or returned? the art of tying an artery or stanching a wound? How are you to help others who cannot help yourself? A man is put into this world to do a certain share of the world’s work; to stop a gap in the world’s fencing; to form a cog, however minute, in the world’s machinery. By the defalcation even of the humblest individual, some of its movements must be thrown out of gear. The duty is to be got through, and none of us, haunted or unhaunted, ghost or no ghost, may shirk our share. Stick to your post like a Roman soldier during the watches of the night. Presently morning will come, when every phantom must vanish into air, every mortal confront that inevitable reality for which the dream we call a lifetime is but a novitiate and a school.”
CHAPTER X
WEIGHT CARRIERS
Fifty years ago, when the burning of a bishop at Smithfield would scarce have created more sensation in clerical circles than a Ritualistic Commission or a Pan-Anglican Synod, our divines took their share of secular pastime far more freely than at present. It was the parson who killed his thirty brace of partridges, and this, too, with a flint-and-steel gun, over dogs of his own breaking, on the broiling 1st of September. It was the parson who alone got to the end of that famous five-and-forty minutes from “The Church Spinneys,” when a large field were beat off to a man, and the squire broke his horse’s back. It was the parson who knew more about rearing pheasants, circumventing wild ducks, otter-hunting, fly-fishing, even rat-catching, than any one else in the parish; and it was the parson, too, who sometimes took the odds about a flyer at Newmarket, and landed a good stake by backing his own sound ecclesiastical opinion.
Concerning one of these racing divines I remember the following anecdote:—
Returning from afternoon service on a Sunday, he happened to witness a trial of speed between two of his school-children. Unequally matched in size, the big boy, as was natural, beat the little one, but only by a couple of yards. The parson stood still, watched them approvingly, and meditated.
“Come here,” said he to the winner. “Go into my study, and fetch me my big Bible.”
The urchin obeyed, and returned bearing a ponderous quarto volume. “Now,” continued his reverence, “start fair, and run it over again.”
The competitors wished no better fun, and finished this time with a dead heat.
“Good boys! Good boys!” said the parson, reflectively “Ah! I thought the weight would bring you together.”
Yes; how surely the weight brings us together! How often have we not seen the universal handicap run out over the course of daily life? Some of us start so free, so light-hearted, so full of hope and confidence, expecting no less than to gallop in alone. Presently the weight begins to tell; the weight that we have voluntarily accepted, or the weight imposed on us by the wisdom of superior judgment. We labour, we struggle, we fail; we drop back to those whom we thought so meanly of as our competitors; they reach us, they pass us, and though punishment be not spared, they gain the post at last, perhaps many, many lengths ahead! And even if we escape the disgrace of having thus to succumb, even if our powers be equal to the tax imposed on them, we are not to expect an easy victory; there is no “winning in a canter” here. Every effort tells on mettle, nerve, and spirits; on heart, body, and brain. We want them all, we summon them, we use them freely, and then, it may be within one stride of victory, comes the cruel and irretrievable breakdown.
Men, like horses, must be content to carry weight. Like horses, too, though some are far more adapted than others to the purpose, all learn in time to accommodate themselves, so to speak, in pace and action to their inevitable burden. How they fight under it at first! How eager, and irritable, and self-willed it renders them; how violent and impetuous, as if in haste to get the whole thing over and done with. But in a year or two the back accustoms itself to the burden; the head is no longer borne so high, the proud neck bends to the curb, and though the stride be shortened, the dashing, bird-like buoyancy gone for ever, a gentle, docile temper has taken its place, with sufficient courage and endurance for all reasonable requirements left. Neither animal, indeed, is ever so brilliant again; but thus it is that both become steady, plodding, useful creatures, fit to perform honestly and quietly their respective duties in creation.
We think we know a great deal in England of athletics, pedestrianism, and the art of training in general. It may astonish us to learn how a Chinese postman gets himself into condition for the work he has to do. The Celestials, it would appear, like meaner
mortals, are extremely particular, not to say fidgety, about the due transmission of their correspondence. Over that vast empire extend postal arrangements, conducted, I believe, as in our own country, by some mandarin of high rank, remarkable for their regularity and efficiency. The letters travel at a uniform rate of more than seven English miles an hour; and as they are conveyed by runners on foot, often through thinly-populated districts in which it is impossible to establish frequent relays, the pedestrian capabilities of these postmen are of the greatest importance. This is how a Chinaman prepares himself to accomplish his thirty miles in less than four hours.
He has a quantity of bags constructed which he disposes over his whole person, like Queen Mab’s pinches—
“Arms, legs, back, shoulders, sides, and shins.”
Into these he dribbles handfuls of flour before he starts for walking exercise, increasing the quantity little by little every day till the bags are quite full, and he carries clinging to every part of his body several pounds of dead weight, nor considers himself fit for his situation till he can move under it with the freedom and elasticity of a naked man. He will then tell you that, on throwing off his self-imposed burden, he finds all his muscles so invigorated by their own separate labours, his strength so stimulated, his wind so clear, his condition so perfect, that he shoots away over the plains, mountains, and tea-gardens of the Flowery Land less like John Chinaman with a letter-bag than an arrow from a bow. What would our old friend Captain Barclay, of peripatetic memory, say to such a system as this?
I doubt if the Chinaman’s theory of training be founded on sound principles; but I am quite sure that in bearing our moral burden we cannot dispose it over too extended a surface, or in too many separate parcels. I see fathers of families carrying surprising weights, such as make the bachelor’s hair stand on end from sheer dismay, with a buoyancy of step and carelessness of demeanour only to be accounted for by an equal distribution of pressure over the entire victim. A man who has his own business to attend to, his
