Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

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Various. Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

A FAITHLESS WORLD

FOOD AND FEEDING

BYGONE CELEBRITIES AND LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS

III

IV

AN ACTOR IN THE REBELLION OF 1798

Tragedies at Maghera

Micky O’Donnel’s Wake

SAMUEL JOHNSON

THE DEMOCRATIC VICTORY IN AMERICA

RONSARD: ON THE CHOICE. OF HIS TOMB

WÜRZBURG AND VIENNA: SCRAPS FROM A DIARY

II

ENGLISHMEN AND FOREIGNERS

FRENCH DUELLING

JOHN WYCLIFFE: HIS LIFE AND WORK

CURIOSITIES OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND

THE RYE HOUSE PLOT

MR. ARNOLD’S LAY SERMON

AUTHORS AS SUPPRESSORS OF THEIR BOOKS

HOW SHOULD WE DRESS?

THE MAN IN BLUE

LITERARY NOTICES

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES

MISCELLANY

Отрывок из книги

When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest, it makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at least, whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear. We haven’t the slightest difficulty in deciding afterwards which of the two, in each particular case, has been the eater, and which the eaten. Here, we say, is the grizzly that ate the man; or, here is the man that smoked and dined off the hams of the grizzly. Basing our opinion upon such familiar and well-known instances, we are apt to take it for granted far too readily that between eating and being eaten, between the active and the passive voice of the verb edo, there exists necessarily a profound and impassable native antithesis. To swallow an oyster is, in our own personal histories, so very different a thing from being swallowed by a shark that we can hardly realise at first the underlying fundamental identity of eating with mere coalescence. And yet, at the very outset of the art of feeding, when the nascent animal first began to indulge in this very essential animal practice, one may fairly say that no practical difference as yet existed between the creature that ate and the creature that was eaten. After the man and the bear had finished their little meal, if one may be frankly metaphorical, it was impossible to decide whether the remaining being was the man or the bear, or which of the two had swallowed the other. The dinner having been purely mutual, the resulting animal represented both the litigants equally; just as, in cannibal New Zealand, the chief who ate up his brother chief was held naturally to inherit the goods and chattels of the vanquished and absorbed rival, whom he had thus literally and physically incorporated.

A jelly-speck, floating about at his ease in a drop of stagnant water under the field of a microscope, collides accidentally with another jelly-speck who happens to be travelling in the opposite direction across the same miniature ocean. What thereupon occurs? One jelly-speck rolls itself gradually into the other, so that, instead of two, there is now one: and the united body proceeds to float away quite unconcernedly, without waiting to trouble itself for a second with the profound metaphysical question, which half of it is the original personality, and which half the devoured and digested. In these minute and very simple animals there is absolutely no division of labor between part and part; every bit of the jelly-like mass is alike head and foot and mouth and stomach. The jelly-speck has no permanent limbs, but it keeps putting forth vague arms and legs every now and then from one side or the other; and with these temporary and ever-dissolving members it crawls along merrily through its tiny drop of stagnant water. If two of the legs or arms happen to knock up casually against one another, they coalesce at once, just like two drops of water on a window-pane, or two strings of treacle slowly spreading along the surface of a plate. When the jelly-speck meets any edible thing – a bit of dead plant, a wee creature like itself, a microscopic egg – it proceeds to fold its own substance slimily around it, making, as it were, a temporary mouth for the purpose of swallowing it, and a temporary stomach for the purpose of quietly digesting and assimilating it afterwards. Thus what at one moment is a foot may at the next moment become a mouth, and at the moment after that again a rudimentary stomach. The animal has no skin and no body, no outside and no inside, no distinction of parts or members, no individuality, no identity. Roll it up into one with another of its kind, and it couldn’t tell you itself a minute afterwards which of the two it had really been a minute before. The question of personal identity is here considerably mixed.

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“His heart was in his two early poems – ‘Venus and Adonis,’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’” said Dr. Milman, “the only compositions, it should be observed, that were ever published by his authority, and to which he appended his name. His sonnets, which some people admire so much – an admiration in which I do not share – were published surreptitiously, without his consent, and probably more than one-half of them were not written by him. Some of them are undoubtedly by Marlowe, and some by authors of far inferior ability. Shakespeare’s name was popular at the time; there was no law of copyright, and booksellers did almost what they pleased with the names and works of celebrated men; and what seems extraordinary in our day, the celebrated men made no complaint – most probably because there was no redress to be obtained for them if they had done so. The real law of copyright only dates from the eighth year of the reign of Queen Anne, 1710, or nearly a century after Shakespeare’s death.”

“But authors in those early days, even in the absence of a well-defined law of copyright,” said Mr. Miller, “received payment for their works; witness the receipt of John Milton for five pounds on account of ‘Paradise Lost’ – now in the possession of our host – and which we have all seen.”

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