MY DEAR PROFESSOR,
You were kind enough to promise me that you would assist me in any
professional or scientific investigations in which I might become
engaged. I have of late become deeply interested in a class of
subjects which present peculiar difficulty, and I must exercise the
privilege of questioning you on some points upon which I desire
information I cannot otherwise obtain. I would not trouble you, if I
could find any person or books competent to enlighten me on some of
these singular matters which have so excited me. The leading doctor
here is a shrewd, sensible man, but not versed in the curiosities of
medical literature.
I proceed, with your leave, to ask a considerable number of
questions,--hoping to get answers to some of them, at least.
Is there any evidence that human beings can be infected or wrought
upon by poisons, or otherwise, so that they shall manifest any of the
peculiarities belonging to beings of a lower nature? Can such
peculiarities--be transmitted by inheritance? Is there anything to
countenance the stories, long and widely current, about the "evil
eye"? or is it a mere fancy that such a power belongs to any human
being? Have you any personal experience as to the power of
fascination said to be exercised by certain animals? What can you
make of those circumstantial statements we have seen in the papers,
of children forming mysterious friendships with ophidians of
different species, sharing their food with them, and seeming to be
under some subtile influence exercised by those creatures? Have you
read, critically, Coleridge's poem of "Christabel," and Keats's
"Lamia"?--If so, can you understand them, or find any physiological
foundation for the story of either?
There is another set of questions of a different nature I should like
to ask, but it is hardly fair to put so many on a single sheet.
There is one, however, you must answer. Do you think there may be
predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate
constitutional, which shall take out certain apparently voluntary
determinations from the control of the will, and leave them as free
from moral responsibility as the instincts of the lower animals? Do
you not think there may be a crime which is not a sin?
Pardon me, my dear Sir, for troubling you with such a list of notes
of interrogation. There are some very strange things going on here
in this place, country-town as it is. Country-life is apt to be
dull; but when it once gets going, it beats the city hollow, because
it gives its whole mind to what it is about. These rural sinners
make terrible work with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get
started. However, I hope I shall live through my year's school-
keeping without catastrophes, though there are queer doings about me
which puzzle me and might scare some people. If anything should
happen, you will be one of the first to hear of it, no doubt. But I
trust not to help out the editors of the "Rockland Weekly Universe"
with an obituary of the late lamented, who signed himself in life
Your friend and pupil,
BERNARD C. LANGDON.
The Professor to Mr. Langdon.
MY DEAR MR. LANGDON,
I do not wonder that you find no answer from your country friends to
the curious questions you put. They belong to that middle region
between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are called,
are very shy of meddling with. Some people think that truth and gold
are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion, that,
unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense
respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, so long as one can
find anything else to do. I don't doubt there is some truth in the
phenomena of animal magnetism, for instance; but when you ask me to
cradle for it, I tell you that the hysteric girls cheat so, and the
professionals are such a set of pickpockets, that I can do something
better than hunt for the grains of truth among their tricks and lies.
Do you remember what I used to say in my lectures?---or were you
asleep just then, or cutting your initials on the rail? (You see I
can ask questions, my young friend.) Leverage is everything,--was
what I used to say;--don't begin to pry till you have got the long
arm on your side.
To please you, and satisfy your doubts as far as possible, I have
looked into the old books,--into Schenckius and Turner and Kenelm.
Digby and the rest, where I have found plenty of curious stories
which you must take for what they are worth.
Your first question I can answer in the affirmative upon pretty good
authority. Mizaldus tells, in his "Memorabilia," the well-known
story of the girl fed on poisons, who was sent by the king of the
Indies to Alexander the Great. "When Aristotle saw her eyes
sparkling and snapping like those of serpents, he said, 'Look out for
yourself, Alexander! this is a dangerous companion for you!'"--and
sure enough, the young lady proved to be a very unsafe person to her
friends. Cardanus gets a story from Avicenna, of a certain man bit
by a serpent, who recovered of his bite, the snake dying therefrom.
This man afterwards had a daughter whom venomous serpents could not
harm, though she had a fatal power over them.
I suppose you may remember the statements of old authors about
Zycanthropy, the disease in which men took on the nature and aspect
of wolves. Actius and Paulus, both men of authority, describe it.
Altomaris gives a horrid case; and Fincelius mentions one occurring
as late as 1541, the subject of which was captured, still insisting
that he was a wolf, only that the hair of his hide was turned in!
Versipelles, it may be remembered, was the Latin name for these
"were-wolves."
As for the cases where rabid persons have barked and bit like dogs,
there are plenty of such on record.
More singular, or at least more rare, is the account given by Andreas
Baccius, of a man who was struck in the hand by a cock, with his
beak, and who died on the third day thereafter, looking for all the
world like a fighting-cock, to the great horror of the spectators.
As to impressions transmitted at a very early period of existence,
every one knows the story of King James's fear of a naked sword, and
the way it is accounted for. Sir Kenelm Digby says,--"I remember
when he dubbed me Knight, in the ceremony of putting the point of a
naked sword upon my shoulder, he could not endure to look upon it,
but turned his face another way, insomuch, that, in lieu of touching
my shoulder, he had almost thrust the point into my eyes, had not the
Duke of Buckingham guided his hand aright." It is he, too, who tells
the story of the mulberry mark upon the neck of a certain lady of
high condition, which "every year, to mulberry season, did swell,
grow big, and itch." And Gaffarel mentions the case of a girl born
with the figure of a fish on one of her limbs, of which the wonder
was, that, when the girl did eat fish, this mark put her to sensible
pain. But there is no end to cases of this kind, and I could give
some of recent date, if necessary, lending a certain plausibility at
least to the doctrine of transmitted impressions.
I never saw a distinct case of evil eye, though I have seen eyes so
bad that they might produce strange effects on very sensitive
natures. But the belief in it under various names, fascination,
jettcztura, etc., is so permanent and universal, from Egypt to Italy,
and from the days of Solomon to those of Ferdinand of Naples, that
there must be some peculiarity, to say the least, on which the
opinion is based. There is very strong evidence that some such power
is exercised by certain of the lower animals. Thus, it is stated on
good authority that "almost every animal becomes panic-struck at the
sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at once deprived of the power of
motion, or the exercise of its usual instinct of self-preservation."
Other serpents seem to share this power of fascination, as the Cobra
and the Buccephalus Capensis.
Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it to the
"strange powers that lie
Within the magic circle of the eye,"--
as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.
You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between
children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded.
I am sure I cannot tell what to make of them. I have seen several
such accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the
seventeenth century, which is as striking as any of the more modern
ones:
"Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to
eat his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but
a large Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did
so for a considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake
on the Head, it hissed at him. Upon which he told his Mother that
the Baby (for so he call'd it) cry'd Hiss at him. His Mother had it
kill'd, which occasioned him a great Fit of Sickness, and 'twas
thought would have dy'd, but did recover."
There was likewise one "William Writtle, condemned at Maidston
Assizes for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after
he was condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child,
there crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him. Sometimes
she would convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she
should be sure to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never
perceived it did him any harm."
One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious
relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the
influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed
to produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by
Dr. Hering at Surinam. There is something frightful in the
disposition of certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at
the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive.
It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been
represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of
introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.
You know all about the Psylli, or ancient serpent tamers, I suppose.
Savary gives an account of the modern serpent-tamers in his "Letters
on Egypt." These modern jugglers are in the habit of making the
venomous Naja counterfeit death, lying out straight and stiff,
changing it into a rod, as the ancient magicians did with their
serpents, (probably the same animal,) in the time of Moses.
I am afraid I cannot throw much light on "Christabel" or "Lamia " by
any criticism I can offer. Geraldine, in the former, seems to be
simply a malignant witch-woman with the evil eye, but with no
absolute ophidian relationship. Lamia is a serpent transformed by
magic into a woman. The idea of both is mythological, and not in any
sense physiological. Some women unquestionably suggest the image of
serpents; men rarely or never. I have been struck, like many
others, with the ophidian head and eye of the famous Rachel.
Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the sphere
of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very
wide range of speculation. I can give you only a brief abstract of
my own opinions on this delicate and difficult subject. Crime and
sin, being the preserves of two great organized interests, have been
guarded against all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the
Royal Forests. It is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow! It is so
much simpler to consign a soul to perdition, or say masses, for
money, to save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it
grow up in neglect and run to ruin for want of humanizing influences!
They hung poor, crazy Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval. The
ordinary of Newgate preached to women who were to swing at Tyburn for
a petty theft as if they were worse than other people,--just as
though he would not have been a pickpocket or shoplifter, himself, if
he had been born in a den of thieves and bred up to steal or starve!
The English law never began to get hold of the idea that a crime was
not necessarily a sin, till Hadfield, who thought he was the Saviour
of mankind, was tried for shooting at George the Third;--lucky for
him that he did not hit his Majesty!
It is very singular that we recognize all the bodily defects that
unfit a man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that
limit his range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his
moral powers were perfect. I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we
extirpate vermin; but I don't know that we have any more right to
judge them than we have to judge rats and mice, which are just as
good as cats and weasels, though we think it necessary to treat them
as criminals.
The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly
studied, unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures
that I consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a
branch of positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense
debt. It has melted the world's conscience in its crucible, and cast
it in a new mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more
like those of humanity. If it has failed to demonstrate its system
of special correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed
relations between organization and mind and character. It has
brought out that great doctrine of moral insanity, which has done
more to make men charitable and soften legal and theological
barbarism than any one doctrine that I can think of since the message
of peace and good-will to men.
Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems
to be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such
(metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody
shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action
in the bodily system, I would not give much for men's judgments of
each others' characters. Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we
must. But what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle
and bred in a North-Street cellar? What if you are drinking a little
too much wine and smoking a little too much tobacco, and your son
takes after you, and so your poor grandson's brain being a little
injured in physical texture, he loses the fine moral sense on which
you pride yourself, and doesn't see the difference between signing
another man's name to a draft and his own?
I suppose the study of automatic action in the moral world (you see
what I mean through the apparent contradiction of terms) may be a
dangerous one in the view of many people. It is liable to abuse, no
doubt. People are always glad to, get hold of anything which limits
their responsibility. But remember that our moral estimates come
down to us from ancestors who hanged children for stealing forty
shillings' worth, and sent their souls to perdition for the sin of
being born,--who punished the unfortunate families of suicides, and
in their eagerness for justice executed one innocent person every
three years, on the average, as Sir James Mackintosh tells us.
I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself
to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will
find it a good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane.
They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to
sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless
administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid
collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper,
if you can,--for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them
from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible
injury, just as in the case of maniacs,--and when you have got rid of
them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief,
sit down and contemplate them charitably, remembering that nine
tenths of their' perversity comes from outside influences, drunken
ancestors, abuse in childhood, bad company, from which you have
happily been preserved, and for some of which you, as a member of
society, may be fractionally responsible. I think also that there
are special influences which work in the brood lake ferments, and I
have a suspicion that some of those curious old stories I cited may
have more recent parallels. Have you ever met with any cases which
admitted of a solution like that which I have mentioned?
Yours very truly,
_____________ _____________
Bernard Langdon to Philip Staples.
MY DEAR PHILIP,--
I have been for some months established in this place, turning the
main crank of the machinery for the manufactory of accomplishments
superintended by, or rather worked to the profit of, a certain Mr.
Silas Peckham. He is a poor wretch, with a little thin fishy blood
in his body, lean and flat, long-armed and large-handed, thick-
jointed and thin-muscled,--you know those unwholesome, weak-eyed,
half-fed creatures, that look not fit to be round among live folks,
and yet not quite dead enough to bury. If you ever hear of my being
in court to answer to a charge of assault and battery, you may guess
that I have been giving him a thrashing to settle off old scores; for
he is a tyrant, and has come pretty near killing his principal lady-
assistant with overworking her and keeping her out of all decent
privileges.
Helen Darley is this lady's name,--twenty two or three years old, I
should think,--a very sweet, pale woman,--daughter of the usual
country-clergyman,--thrown on her own resources from an early age,
and the rest: a common story, but an uncommon person,--very. All
conscience and sensibility, I should say,--a cruel worker,--no kind
of regard for herself, seems as fragile and supple as a young willow-
shoot, but try her and you find she has the spring in her of a steel
cross-bow. I am glad I happened to come to this place, if it were
only for her sake. I have saved that girl's life; I am as sure of it
as if I had pulled her out of the fire or water.
Of course I'm in love with her, you say,--we always love those whom
we have benefited; "saved her life,--her love was the reward of his
devotion," etc., etc., as in a regular set novel. In love, Philip?
Well, about that,--I love Helen Darley--very much: there is hardly
anybody I love so well. What a noble creature she is! One of those
that just go right on, do their own work and everybody else's,
killing themselves inch by inch without ever thinking about it,--
singing and dancing at their toil when they begin, worn and saddened
after a while, but pressing steadily on, tottering by and by, and
catching at the rail by the way-side to help them lift one foot
before the other, and at last falling, face down, arms stretched
forward
Philip, my boy, do you know I am the sort of man that locks his door
sometimes and cries his heart out of his eyes,--that can sob like a
woman and not be ashamed of it? I come of fighting-blood on one
side, you know; I think I could be savage on occasion. But I am
tender,--more and more tender as I come into my fulness of manhood.
I don't like to strike a man, (laugh, if you like,--I know I hit hard
when I do strike,)--but what I can't stand is the sight of these
poor, patient, toiling women, who never find out in this life how
good they are, and never know what it is to be told they are angels
while they still wear the pleasing incumbrances of humanity. I don't
know what to make of these cases. To think that a woman is never to
be a woman again, whatever she may come to as an unsexed angel,--and
that she should die unloved! Why does not somebody come and carry
off this noble woman, waiting here all ready to make a man happy?
Philip, do you know the pathos there is in the eyes of unsought
women, oppressed with the burden of an inner life unshared? I can
see into them now as I could not in those 'earlier days. I sometimes
think their pupils dilate on purpose to let my consciousness glide
through them; indeed, I dread them, I come so close to the nerve of
the soul itself in these momentary intimacies. You used to tell me I
was a Turk,--that my heart was full of pigeon-holes, with
accommodations inside for a whole flock of doves. I don't know but I
am still as Youngish as ever in my ways,--Brigham-Youngish, I mean;
at any rate, T. always want to give a little love to all the poor
things that cannot have a whole man to themselves. If they would
only be contented with a little!
Here now are two girls in this school where I am teaching. One of
them, Rosa M., is not more than sixteen years old, I think they say;
but Nature has forced her into a tropical luxuriance of beauty, as if
it were July with her, instead of May. I suppose it is all natural
enough that this girl should like a young man's attention, even if he
were a grave schoolmaster; but the eloquence of this young thing's
look is unmistakable,--and yet she does not know the language it is
talking,--they none of them do; and there is where a good many poor
creatures of our good-for-nothing sex are mistaken. There is no
danger of my being rash, but I think this girl will cost somebody his
life yet. She is one of those women men make a quarrel about and
fight to the death for,--the old feral instinct, you know.
Pray, don't think I am lost in conceit, but there is another girl
here who I begin to think looks with a certain kindness on me. Her
name is Elsie V., and she is the only daughter and heiress of an old
family in this place. She is a portentous and almost fearful
creature. If I should tell you all I know and half of what I fancy
about her, you would tell me to get my life insured at once. Yet she
is the most painfully interesting being,--so handsome! so lonely!---
for she has no friends among the girls, and sits apart from them,--
with black hair like the flow of a mountain-brook after a thaw, with
a low-browed, scowling beauty of face, and such eyes as were never
seen before, I really believe, in any human creature.
Philip, I don't know what to say about this Elsie. There is
something about her I have not fathomed. I have conjectures which I
could not utter to any living soul. I dare not even hint the
possibilities which have suggested themselves to me. This I will
say, that I do take the most intense interest in this young person,
an interest much more like pity than love in its common sense. If
what I guess at is true, of all the tragedies of existence I ever
knew this is the saddest, and yet so full of meaning! Do not ask me
any questions,--I have said more than I meant to already; but I am
involved in strange doubts and perplexities,--in dangers too, very
possibly,--and it is a relief just to speak ever so guardedly of them
to an early and faithful friend.
Yours ever, BERNARD.
P. S. I remember you had a copy of Fortunius Licetus' "De Monstris"
among your old books. Can't you lend it to me for a while? I am
curious, and it will amuse me.