Prologue
22 April 1970
On a remarkable spring day in 1970, environmental activism entered the mainstream of American life and politics, stirring ripples worldwide.
It was Earth Day, and the American environmental movement was forever changed. Twenty million people—10 percent of the United States population—mobilized to show their support for a clean environment. They attended marches, rallies, concerts, and teach-ins. They planted trees and picked up tons of trash. They confronted polluters and held classes on environmental issues. They signed petitions and wrote letters to politicians. They gathered in parks, on city streets, in campus auditoriums, in small towns and major cities. The weather cooperated; in most of the country, it was a clear and sunny day. The news media also cooperated and covered the event extensively.
Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to traffic for two hours, and a photo of tens of thousands of New Yorkers strolling and jamming the temporary pedestrian mall dominated
the front page of the next day’s New York Times. An estimated one hundred thousand people took part during the day in activities at Union Square, the center for speeches and teach-ins. Mayor John Lindsay set the tone in a brief speech, saying that environmental issues might sound complicated, but it all boiled down to a simple question: “Do we want to live or die?”1
InChicago,thesunseemedpaleanddistantonEarthDay,andthecity’smonitoring devicesshowedlevelsofsulfurdioxideinthe atmosphereabovethedangerpointforinfants andtheelderly.SeveralthousandpeopleattendedarallyatCivicCenterPlaza,whereIllinoisAttorneyGeneralWilliamScottdeclared thathewouldsuetheCityofMilwaukeefor dumpingsewageintoLakeMichigan.Onthe frontpageofthe Chicago Tribune, side-by-side photostakenduringandaftertherallyshowed anamazingsight.Whenthedemonstratorsleft, “therewasnopost-rallylitterremainingtobe cleanedup,”thenewspaperreported.2
In Washington, at the Washington Monument, a crowd of ten thousand gathered to hear folk music from Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and speechesbySenatorEdmundMuskie,muckrakerI.F.Stone,Chicago Seven defendant Rennie Davis, and others. Earlier, seventeen hundred people had marched to the Interior Department offices to leave symbolic puddles of oil on the
doorstep, and some Connecticut Girl Scouts in canoes had pulled tires and debris from the Potomac River.3 In Philadelphia, twenty-five thousand people heard Muskie call for “an environmental revolution” and criticize government priorities that spent “twenty times as much on Vietnam as we are to fight water pollution, and twice as much on the supersonic transport as we are to fight air pollution.”4
Congress had adjourned so its members could go home and give Earth Day speeches. For many, it was the first time they had given an environmental speech, and they drew heavily on material from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day. At least twentytwo U.S. senators participated, as did governors and local officials across the nation. The governors of New York and New Jersey signed laws creating state environmental agencies. The Massachusetts legislature passed an environmental bill of rights. President Nixon, through an aide, said he had said enough about his concern about pollution and would be watching, rather than participating in Earth Day, and hoping it would lead to an ongoing antipollution campaign. Nixon had, in fact, in his State of the Union speech three months earlier, called for a national fight against air and water pollution.5 There were plenty of theatrics, dramatic gestures, and attention-getting stunts. So many
students in Omaha, Nebraska, wore gas masks that the supply ran out. Indian sitar music greeted the dawn over Lake Mendota at the University of Wisconsin, accompanied by “an apology to God.” In San Francisco, “Environmental Vigilantes” dumped oil into a reflecting pool at Standard Oil Company offices to protest oil spills. At Boston’s Logan Airport, a group of young people was arrested for blocking a corridor to protest the development of a supersonic transport. A group in Denver gave the Atomic Energy Commission an award—“Environmental Rapist of the Year.”
Old automobiles were pounded, demolished, disassembled, and buried. Schoolchildren and adults alike collected trash and litter from roadsides, parks, streams, and lakes. In Ohio, students put “This Is a Polluter” stickers on autos, and at Iowa State and Syracuse Universities, students blocked autos from coming onto the campus. In Tacoma, Washington, one hundred students rode down a freeway on horseback to protest auto emissions. In Cleveland, one thousand students filled garbage trucks with trash. In Appalachia, students buried a trash-filled casket. California students cut up their oil company credit cards. In Coral Gables, Florida, a demonstrator paraded with dead fish and a dead octopus in front of a power plant.
But the real focus was the schools. The National Education Association estimated that ten million public school children took part in Earth Day programs. Earth Day organizers said two thousand colleges and ten thousand grade and high schools participated.6
In Clear Lake, Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson’s hometown, junior and senior high school students observed Earth Day at a school assembly with speeches, songs, and skits, then cleaned up more than 250 bags full of litter from the streets and highways in and around the village. A photo of young “demonstrators” with picket signs ran on page one of the Clear Lake Star the next week.7
Many businesses put on their best faces and joined the call for a cleaner earth. In New York, Consolidated Edison supplied the rakes and shovelsthatschoolchildrenusedtocleanup UnionSquareandprovidedanelectrically poweredbustotakeMayorLindsayaroundthe city. Scott Paper, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Sun Oil, Rex Chainbelt, and other companies used the occasion to announce projects to clean up or control pollution. Continental Oil introduced four new cleaner gasolines, Alcoa ran newspaper ads touting a new antipollution process at its plants, and Republic Steel sent twenty-five company executives to speak at high schools and colleges.8
The business participation drew a mixed reaction. Organizers said some companies spent more money on advertising their support of Earth Day than on Earth Day itself. General Electric stockholders meeting in Minneapolis were greeted outside by a protester dressed as the Grim Reaper and later at the meeting were confronted by a student leader demanding that the company refuse war contracts and instead use its influence to channel government expenditures into protecting the environment.9
Thenation’snewsmediawereuncertain whattomakeofEarthDay. Newsweek wasbemusedandsomewhatdismissive,callingEarth Day“abizarrenationwideraindance”andthe nation’s“biggeststreetfestivalsincetheJapanesesurrenderedin1945.” Time saidtheday “hadaspectsofasecular,almostpaganholiday.”Thequestion, Newsweek said,was“whether thewholeuprisingrepresentedagiantstepforwardforcontaminatedEarthmenorjusta springtimeskipalong.”Theeventlackedthe passionofantiwarandcivilrightsmovements, Newsweek said,andtheissuesweresounfocused astogiveriseto“thekindofnearlyunanimous blatherusuallyreservedfortheflag.” Time said therealquestionwaswhetherthemovement wasafadorcouldsustaintheinterestandcommitmentitwouldtaketobringaboutreal change.“Wasitallapassingfancy?”the New
YorkTimes askedinamorning-aftereditorial, thenanswereditsownquestion:“Wethinknot. Conservationisacause...whosetimehas comebecauselifeisrunningout.Manmust stoppollutionandconservehisresources,not merelytoenhanceexistencebuttosavethe racefromintolerabledeteriorationandpossibleextinction.”10
Gaylord Nelson framed the question differently. In a four-day speaking tour that took him from New England to the Midwest to the West Coast, Nelson said: “This is not just an issue of survival. Mere survival is not enough. How we survive is the critical issue. ... Our goal is not just an environment of clean air, and water, and scenic beauty—whileforgettingabouttheAppalachiasandtheghettoeswhereourcitizens live in America’s worst environment. ... Our goal is an environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all other human creatures and all other living creatures—an environment without ugliness, without ghettoes, without discrimination, without hunger, poverty, or war. Our goal is a decent environment in the deepest and broadest sense.”11
A tall order, bordering on utopian. But on this first Earth Day, anything seemed possible. Nelson, after years of talking quietly, persuasively, and persistently about the environment, had unleashed a whirlwind. Time wondered whether
Nelson was “a bit too euphoric” when he said, in his Earth Day speech in Denver: “Earth Day may be a turning point in American history. It may be the birth date of a new American ethic that rejects the frontier philosophy that the continent was put here for our plunder, and accepts the idea that even urbanized, affluent, mobile societies are interdependent with the fragile, lifesustaining systems of the air, the water, the land.”12
Buthisassessmentwasreasonablyaccurate. OtherswholookedatEarthDayinretrospect agreedthatitwasawatershedevent.PhilipShabecoff,alongtime NewYorkTimes environmentalreporter,calledit“thedayenvironmentalism intheUnitedStatesbegantoemergeasamass socialmovement.” AmericanHeritage magazine describedEarthDayas“oneofthemostremarkablehappeningsinthehistoryofdemocracy.... Americanpoliticsandpublicpolicy wouldneverbethesameagain.”DenisHayes, thenationalcoordinatorforEarthDay,later calleditthelargestorganizeddemonstrationin thehistoryoftheworld.13
Nelson, the visionary behind Earth Day, had spent a decade searching for a catalyst to make the environment a prominent part of the nation’s political agenda. As the leading environmentalist in the U.S. Senate, Nelson had given hundreds of speeches on the issue
and visited twenty-five states during the 1960s. It was clear to him that there was widespread concern about environmental pollution. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and other important and critical writing about the environment had helped raise awareness. But issues closer to home were what energized people. Even environmental politics are local. Almost everyone had a cause, a personal connection, some special project or concern, a reason to care about the environment. It wasn’t all about Lake Erie dying, or the Cuyahoga River catching fire, or the Santa Barbara oil spill, or other highly publicized examples of the growing threat to the environment. It was about the local landfill leaching into wells, or the city spraying DDT, or fish dying in the river, or a myriad of other local environmental problems that became apparent during the 1960s. Nelson heard it everywhere he went. What was needed, he decided, was something dramatic, “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and finally force this issue permanently into the political arena.”14
That was the genius of Earth Day—tapping the wellspring of environmental concern that was bubbling just below the surface of the
national consciousness. When it happened, “[i]t was truly an astonishing grassroots explosion,” Nelson said. “The people cared and Earth Day became the first opportunity they ever had to ... send a big message to the politicians—a message to tell them to wake up and do something. It worked because of the spontaneous, enthusiastic reception at the grassroots. Nothing like it had ever happened before. While our organizing on college campuses was very well done, the thousands of events in our schools and communities were self-generated at the local level.”15
That it was Nelson who had the inspiration should have been no surprise. He had spent his life “in a career that, like a planet hooked in orbit around its star, never strayed far from a central concern over resources and the quality of the environment.”16
Where did Nelson get his lifelong interest and dedication to the environment, which in his view became more important than issues of war and peace? By osmosis, he would say, while growing up in Clear Lake, Wisconsin.17 That is where his story begins.
The Nelsons of Clear Lake
Anonymity is the enemy of civility, and produces insensitivity and callousness. The nice thing about small towns is everybody has to be civil to each other. You can’t live that close without being civil. Nobody in our hometown suppressed arguing something on the merits, but it was done in a civil fashion. I think there actually tends to be more independent thinking in small towns. It helps develop individuality to be in smaller communities.
Gaylord Nelson
Gaylord Nelsonwas a small town boy his entire life.
He achieved more than he dared imagine possible. He became a friend and confidant of some of the nation’s most powerful political leaders. He won recognition as the unquestioned national leader, eloquent spokesman, and major influence on the issue closest to his heart, the environment. He mobilized millions of people and launched a new wave of environmental activism. He traveled widely to give thousands of speeches in a half-century in public life. He received high honors and prestigious
awards for his work and achievements. But none of it changed, disturbed, or unsettled his inner core. He was always the boy from Clear Lake, Wisconsin, off on an adventure.
On his one hundredth birthday, Ernie Goodspeed observed, “When I came to Clear Lake eighty years ago there was a whole lot of nothing up here and there still is.”1
Gaylord Nelson could have said the same thing. His hometown, Clear Lake, is a village in northwestern Wisconsin, about fifty miles from SaintPaul,Minnesota.PolkCounty,inwhich ClearLakeislocated, is a sparsely populated rural county, separated from Minnesota on the west by the Saint Croix River and sprinkled with four hundred small lakes left by the glaciers. Three small lakes—Mud Lake on the east and Big Clear Lake and Little Clear Lake on the west—bordered the village.2
Polk County, named for President James Polk, was formed in 1853. Its 598,400 acres were acquired by treaty from the Chippewa Indians in 1837, the year after Wisconsin became a territory. Clear Lake is in the southeastern part of the county, an area known as the Lake Country. The deep, spring-fed lake for which it is named is about a half-mile from town and is home to crappies, sunfish, bass, and a few trout. The first settlers, mostly Scandinavians and Germans, came in 1864, when the whole region
The Nelsons of Clear Lake 13 was a dense forest. There were no roads, so the settlers had to carry flour and other provisions on their backs. No village existed until 1874, when the railroad came through what was called Black Brook Crossing, where a sawmill and store with a post office were erected. Later that year, Israel Graves set up a mill near a small lake, which he named Clear Lake. The village was organized in 1877. By 1882 there was a sawmill, a stave mill, three hotels, two churches, a threeroom schoolhouse, Good Templar and Odd Fellows halls, six dry goods and grocery stores, a hardware store, a furniture store, two drug stores, a meat market, two millinery shops, one shoe shop, a local newspaper, and about fifty dwellings. Five years after its founding, the village population was about seven hundred.3
When Gaylord Anton Nelson was born on 4 June 1916, the village was much the same. The population was 689 in the 1920 census, almost the same as forty years earlier.4 The biggest additions to the business district were a Ford dealership and two gas stations. A creamery, established in 1906, was the largest employer and the only year-round employer of any size.
It wasn’t that the village’s early years had been uneventful. Clear Lake had survived several major fires, a diphtheria epidemic, and a tornado before the end of the nineteenth century. The forest was gone, having been logged
before the turn of the century, like much of northern Wisconsin, stripped of its vast acreage of pines and hardwoods. What was left—endless tracts of stumps, dead branches, brush, and slashings—often burned in huge fires. Polk County fared better than much of the “cutover,” the huge area of the state that had been logged out. The giant logging companies, the worst practitioners of clear-cutting, did not operate in Polk County. Smaller local mills did most of the logging, so few areas were totally cutover. The forest was largely pine, but with large stands of sugar maple, mixed with other hardwoods and some softwoods. When the county was settled, “the timber grew so tall and close together that the sun scarcely shone through, and it was dark as twilight even at noon time,” recalled William Phillips, who was born in Clear Lake in 1881.5
Logging camps operated all winter, when it was easier to skid the logs. Oxen and horse teams hauled huge pine logs, railroad ties, and bridge pilings to Clear Lake for shipment on the railroad. When the pine was gone, woodsmen cut the maple hardwood, sawed and split it in the woods, and shipped thousands of cords of it to Minneapolis by rail. Finally, it was gone too and Polk County’s lumbering days were over. By 1894, all of the land south of Clear Lake had been logged, and in a summer drought a fire raged
through the pine slashings, so “it seemed that the whole country south of us was on fire,” Phillips said. Besides what was cleared by natural disaster and fire, hundreds of thousands of pine stumps were dynamited to clear farmland. Dairy farming became the main industry.6 In 1916 Clear Lake was still very much a small rural village, with boardwalks along the gravel streets and hitching posts to tie up horses. Wagons or the few automobiles sent up huge clouds of dust, so the village watered the streets with a large tank pulled by a team of horses. There were no paved roads in the entire county, or anywhere in the northern half of Wisconsin. 7 Once the first big snowfall hit, roads were closed for the winter. Automobiles were put up on blocks until spring, and horse and sleigh became the main mode of transportation. Farmers brought their milk to the creamery by sleigh, often with their dogs running behind. Gaylord’s father, a country doctor, called on his patients in a horse-drawn cutter. He usually owned at least six horses, since he might tire out three teams on a busy day. In spring, when the snow melted and the roads broke up, he used a buggy with high wheels to get through the mud holes. By late May it would be dry enough to get out the Model T, or later, his De Soto. It wasn’t until 1929 that the roads were plowed and passable in winter.
When Gaylord was born the attending physician was his father, Dr. Anton Nelson, assisted by Gertrude Holmes, a grade school teacher in whose home the birth took place. That wasn’t the plan. Dr. Nelson had arranged for another doctor and nurse from nearby Amery to deliver thebaby,butthedoctorwasoutoftownand thenursecouldn’tbelocated that Sunday afternoon, so Gaylord’s father delivered his own son. It is likely that Gaylord’s mother, Mary Bradt Nelson, a registered nurse, offered some assistance and advice herself, since she was not shy about sharing her opinions. When Gaylord’s sister Janet was being born, Dr. Nelson said, “You won’t be getting any chloroform or anything.” Mary replied, “Who asked you?”
Gaylord joined sisters Marah Janet, age three, and Nora Margaret, eighteen months. Neither ever used her first given name; they were always known as Janet and Margaret, or Peg. His mother chose Gaylord’s uncommon first name. He was named after Gaylord Smiley, the young son of a neighboring farm family when Mary Bradt was growing up in northern Wisconsin. When brother Stannard Keen Nelson was born on Gaylord’s second birthday, the Nelsons had four children age five or younger. Stannard— the family called him Stan—was named for muckraker Ray Stannard Baker, a Polk County native whom Dr. Nelson admired and author of popular
sketches of rural life under the pen name of David Grayson. The Nelsons’ first child, a son, had died at birth in 1911.
Progressive Politics
Gaylord was born into a politically active household. Both Anton and Mary were active Progressives, deep believers in the populist, reform politics of Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette that won Wisconsin national attention. La Follette, a fiery orator, became the symbol of the movement, which—in Progressive rhetoric— pitted the people against the special interests. Wisconsin Chief Justice Edward G. Ryan had described the choice in an 1873 commencement speech at the University of Wisconsin: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead— money or intellect; who shall fill public stations— educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporatecapital?”8
LaFollettechallengedtheRepublicanleaderswhocontrolledtheparty’scandidateselectionprocess,caucuses,andconventions,calling fordirectprimaryelectionstoletthevoterschoose theparty’snominees.Hetookonthepowerful railroads,insistingtheypaytheirfairshareofpropertytaxesandcallingforestablishmentofa statecommissiontoregulatetheirrates.He railed againstcorporatepowerandinfluenceonthe
18 The Nelsons of Clear Lake
politicalsystem,andvowedtogivegovernment backtothepeople.
The power struggle took place mostly within the Republican Party, pitting the established leadership—known as the Old Guard, Regulars, or Stalwarts—against the insurgents, first known as the Half-Breeds, and later as Progressives. La Follette, a former district attorney and congressman, launched his intraparty crusade in the 1890s and, after two unsuccessful attempts to win the GOP nomination for governor, finally was elected governor in 1900. La Follette went to the U.S. Senate in 1906, but Governors James O. Davidson and Francis McGovern carried on the progressive agenda at the state level. Fourteen years of progressive rule had produced a long list of reforms and innovations—the direct primary, property tax equalization, a civil service system, lobbying regulations, a worker’s compensation law, a state life insurance program, a state industrial commission, laws regulating labor by women and children, and the nation’s first progressive (in another sense of the word) income tax.9
When Gaylord was born, Progressive dominance of Wisconsin politics had just ended. While Wisconsin’s model reforms were being debated in other states and in the Congress, an internal split between La Follette and McGovern cost the Progressives the 1914 election.
A Stalwart, Emanuel Philipp, won the Republican primary and the governor’s race, and McGovern lost the Senate race to a Democrat. The final blow was the defeat of all ten Progressive-backed referenda questions on the statewide ballot. It was the end of the first Progressive Era in Wisconsin politics, but the Progressives and the La Follettes—Fighting Bob and his sons, Young Bob and Phil—would continue to wield power and influence intermittently for the next thirty years. In 1916, five months afterGaylord’s birth,StalwartGovernorPhilippandProgressiveSenator La Follette—one from each wing of the GOP—easily won their Republican primaries and were reelected in November. The struggle would continue.10
Gaylord’sfather,Anton,wasaProgressive leader,oftenservingasthePolkCountyProgressivechairman.Hispoliticaladvicewasfrequently sought and well regarded. He was elected village president several times, served as president of the local bank, and was an active Mason. Gaylord’s mother—everyone called her simply Mary B.—was politically active at a time when few women were, and was widely admired in the community. She served as district Progressive Party chair, president of the school board, head of the Red Cross, president of the cemetery association, and leader and activist in a variety of civic and political causes, including
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called Aunnays, remarkable for the gracefulness of their walk, wonderfully endowed with knowledge and speech, incapable of deceit, and having power to look into the thoughts of men.
These creatures of imagination are conceived in better taste than the Rabbis have displayed in the invention of their great bird Ziz, whose head when he stands in the deep sea reaches up to Heaven; whose wings when they are extended darken the sun; and one of whose eggs happening to fall crushed three hundred cedars and breaking in the fall, drowned sixty cities in its yolk. That fowl is reserved for the dinner of the Jews in heaven, at which Leviathan is to be the fish, and Behemoth the roast meat. There will be cut and come again at all of them; and the carvers of whatever rank in the hierarchy they may be, will have no sinecure office that day.
The monks have given us a prettier tale;—praise be to him who composed,—but the lyar's portion to those who made it pass for truth. There was an Abbot of S. Salvador de Villar who lived in times when piety flourished, and Saints on earth enjoyed a visible communion with Heaven. This holy man used in the intervals of his liturgical duties to recreate himself by walking in a pine forest near his monastery, employing his thoughts the while in divine meditations. One day when thus engaged during his customary walk, a bird in size and appearance resembling a black bird alighted before him on one of the trees, and began so sweet a song, that in the delight of listening the good Abbot lost all sense of time and place, and of all earthly things, remaining motionless and in extasy. He returned not to the Convent at his accustomed hour, and the Monks supposed that he had withdrawn to some secret solitude; and would resume his office when his intended devotion there should have been compleated. So long a time elapsed without his reappearance that it was necessary to appoint a substitute for him pro tempore; his disappearance and the forms observed upon this occasion being duly registered. Seventy years past by, during all which time no one who entered the pine forest ever lighted upon the Abbot, nor did he think of any thing but the bird before him, nor
hear any thing but the song which filled his soul with contentment, nor eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor feel either want or weariness or exhaustion. The bird at length ceased to sing and took flight: and the Abbot then as if he had remained there only a few minutes returned to the monastery. He marvelled as he approached at certain alterations about the place, and still more when upon entering the house, he knew none of the brethren whom he saw, nor did any one appear to know him. The matter was soon explained, his name being well known, and the manner of his disappearance matter of tradition there as well as of record: miracles were not so uncommon then as to render any proof of identity necessary, and they proposed to reinstate him in his office. But the holy man was sensible that after so great a favour had been vouchsafed him, he was not to remain a sojourner upon earth: so he exhorted them to live in peace with one another, and in the fear of God, and in the strict observance of their rule, and to let him end his days in quietness; and in a few days, even as he expected, it came to pass, and he fell asleep in the Lord.
The dishonest monks who for the honour of their Convent and the lucre of gain palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was) upon their neighbours as a true legend, added to it, that the holy Abbot was interred in the cloisters; that so long as the brethren continued in the observance of their rule, and the place of his interment was devoutly visited, the earth about it proved a certain cure for many maladies, but that in process of time both church and cloisters became so dilapidated through decay of devotion, that cattle strayed into them, till the monks and the people of the vicinity were awakened to a sense of their sin and of their duty, by observing that every animal which trod upon the Abbot's grave, fell and broke its leg.1 The relics therefore were translated with due solemnity, and deposited in a new monument, on which the story of the miracle, in perpetuamreimemoriam, was represented in bas-relief.
1 Superstition is confined to no country, but is spread, more or less, over all. The classical reader will call to mind what Herodotus tells happened in the territory of
Agyllæi. Clio. c. 167, ἐγίνετοδιάστροφακαὶἔμπηρα
The Welsh have a tradition concerning the Birds of Rhianon,—a female personage who hath a principal part in carrying on the spells in Gwlad yr Hud or the Enchanted Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened to hear the singing of her birds, stood seven years listening, though he supposed the while that only an hour or two had elapsed. Owen Pughe could have told us more of these Birds.
Some Romish legends speak of birds which were of no species known on earth and who by the place and manner of their appearances were concluded to have come from Paradise, or to have been celestial spirits in that form. Holy Colette of portentous sanctity, the Reformeress of the Poor Clares, and from whom a short-lived variety of the Franciscans were called Colettines, was favoured, according to her biographers, with frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which was no mortal creature. It was small, resembling a squirrel in agility, and an ermine in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not in other respects like either; and it had this advantage over all earthly pets, that it was sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would play about the saint, and invite her attention by its gambols. Colette felt a peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure when it showed itself; and for awhile not supposing that there was anything supernatural in its appearance, endeavoured to catch it, for she delighted in having lambs and innocent birds to fondle: but though the Nuns closed the door, and used every art and effort to entice or catch it, the little nondescript always either eluded them, or vanished; and it never tasted of any food which they set before it. This miracle being unique in its kind is related with becoming admiration by the chroniclers of the Seraphic Order; as it well may, for, for a monastic writer to invent a new miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary power of invention.
If this story be true, and true it must be unless holy Colette's reverend Roman Catholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot be
admitted sanstireràconsequence;and it would follow as a corollary not to be disputed, that there are animals in the world of Angels. And on the whole it accorded with the general bearing of the Doctor's notions (notions rather than opinions he liked to call them where they were merely speculative) to suppose that there may be as much difference between the zoology of that world, and of this, as is found in the zoology and botany of widely distant regions here, according to different circumstances of climate: and rather to imagine that there were celestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, exempt from evil, and each happy in its kind to the full measure of its capacity for happiness, than to hold the immortality of brutes. Cudworth's authority had some weight with him on this subject, where the Platonical divine says that as “human souls could not possibly be generated out of matter, but were sometime or other created by the Almighty out of nothing preexisting, either in generations, or before them,” so if it be admitted that brute animals are “not mere machines, or automata (as some seem inclinable to believe), but conscious and thinking beings; then from the same principle of reason, it will likewise follow, that their souls cannot be generated out of matter neither, and therefore must be derived from the fountain of all life, and created out of nothing by Him: who, since he can as easily annihilate as create, and does all for the best, no man need at all to trouble himself about their permanency, or immortality.”
Now though the Doctor would have been pleased to think, with the rude Indian, that when he was in a state of existence wherein no evil could enter
His faithful dog should bear him company, he felt the force of this reasoning; and he perceived also that something analogous to the annihilation there intended, might be discerned in his own hypothesis. For in what may be called the visible creation he found nothing resembling that animalcular world which the microscope has placed within reach of our senses; nothing
like those monstrous and prodigious forms which Leeuwenhoeck, it must be believed, has faithfully delineated.—Bishop has a beautiful epigram upon the theme καλὰπέφανται
When thro a chink,2 a darkened room
Admits the solar beam, Down the long light that breaks the gloom, Millions of atoms stream.
In sparkling agitation bright, Alternate dies they bear; Too small for any sense but sight, Or any sight, but there.
Nature reveals not all her store
To human search, or skill; And when she deigns to shew us more She shows us Beauty still.
But the microscopic world affords us exceptions to this great moral truth. The forms which are there discovered might well be called
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.
Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly, beaucoup plusdemonstres, sanscomparaison,que laterre, and the Sieur de Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their knowledge, explains it àcausedelafacilitédelagenerationqui
est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la grande chaleurqui se trouve en la mer, l'humeury estant gras, et l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et humidité, qui produisent toutes choses. With such reasoning our Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves its exuviæwhen its perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is beautiful as well as good.
2 The Reader may not be displeased to read the following beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor.
“If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty mirrors, which, like a creviceinthewall,througha narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency: much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the natural, as being near communications of himself.”—Invalidity of a lateorDeath-bedRepentance, Vol.v.p.464.
He was not acquainted with the speculation, or conception (as the Philotheistic philosopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, that deformium animalium formæ, formosæ sunt in cœlo. Nor would he have assented to some of the other opinions which that pious and high minded victim of papal intolerance, connected with it. That metallorum in se non lucentium formæ, lucent in planetis suis, he might have supposed, if he had believed in the relationship between metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark applied to the Planets only, as so many other worlds, and did not regard the future state of
the creatures of this our globe, the Doctor might then have agreed to his assertion that non enim homo, nec animalia, nec metalla ut hicsunt, illic existunt. But the Philotheist of Nola, in the remaining part of this his twelfth ConceptusIdearumsoared above the Doctor's pitch: Quodnempe hicdiscurrit, he says, illicactuviget,discursione superiori. Virtutes enim quæ versus materiam explicantur: versus actum primum uniuntur , et complicantur . Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici,ideamquamlibetrerumetiamnonviventium,vitamesseet intelligentiam quandam. Item et in Primâ Mente unam esse rerum omnium ideam. Illuminandoigitur , vivificando, et uniendo est quod te superioribus agentibus conformans, in conceptionem et retentionemspecierum efferaris. Here the Philosopher of Doncaster would have found himself in the dark, but whether because “blinded by excess of light,” or because the subject is within the confines of uttermost darkness, is not for me his biographer to determine.
CHAPTER CCXIV.
FURTHER DIFFICULTIES.—QUESTION CONCERNING INFERIOR APPARITIONS.
BLAKE THE PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA.
Inamplissimácausâ,quasimagnomari,pluribusventissumusvecti.
There was another argument against the immortality of brutes, to which it may be, he allowed the more weight, because it was of his own excogitating. Often as he had heard of apparitions in animal
PLINY.
forms, all such tales were of some spirit or hobgoblin which had assumed that appearance; as, for instance that simulacrum admodum monstruosum, that portentous figure in which Pope Gregory the ninth after his death was met roaming about the woods by a holy hermit: it was in the form of a wild beast with the head of an ass, the body of a bear, and the tail of a cat. Well might the good hermit fortify himself with making the sign of the cross when he beheld this monster: he approved himself a courageous man by speaking to the apparition which certainly was not “in such a questionable shape” as to invite discourse: and we are beholden to him for having transmitted to posterity the bestial Pope's confession, that because he had lived an unreasonable and lawless life, it was the will of God and of St. Peter whose chair he had defiled by all kinds of abominations, that he should thus wander about in a form of ferine monstrosity.
He had read of such apparitions, and been sufficiently afraid of meeting a barguest1 in his boyish days; but in no instance had he ever heard of the ghost of an animal. Yet if the immaterial part of such creatures survived in a separate state of consciousness why should not their spirits sometimes have been seen as well as those of our departed fellow creatures? No cock or hen ghost ever haunted its own barn door; no child was ever alarmed by the spirit of its pet lamb; no dog or cat ever came like a shadow to visit the hearth on which it rested when living. It is laid down as a certain truth deduced from the surest principles of demonology by the Jesuit Thyræus, who had profoundly studied that science that whenever the apparition of a brute beast or monster was seen, it was a Devil in that shape. Quotiescumque sub brutorum animantium forma conspiciuntur spiritus, quotiescumque monstra exhibentur dubium nonest,autoprosopos adesseDæmoniorumspiritus.For such forms were not suitable for human spirits, but for evil Demons they were in many respects peculiarly so: and such apparitions were frequent.
1 A northern word, used in Cumberland and Yorkshire. Brocket and Grose neither of them seem aware that this spirit or dæmon had the form of the beast. Their
derivations are severally “Berg a hill, and geest ghost;”—“Bar, a gate or style, and gheist.”
The locality of the spirit will suggest a reference to the Icelandic Berserkr. In that language Beraand Bersiboth signify a bear.
Thus the Jesuit reasoned, the possibility that the spirit of a brute might appear never occurring to him, because he would have deemed it heretical to allow that there was anything in the brute creation partaking of immortality. No such objection occurred to the Doctor in his reasonings upon this point. His was a more comprehensive creed; the doubt which he felt was not concerning the spirit of brute animals, but whether it ever existed in a separate state after death, which the Ghost of one, were there but one such appearance well attested, would sufficiently prove.
He admitted indeed that for every authenticated case of an apparition, a peculiar cause was to be assigned, or presumed; but that for the apparition of an inferior animal, there could in general be no such cause. Yet cases are imaginable wherein there might be such peculiar cause, and some final purpose only to be brought about by such preternatural means. The strong affection which leads a dog to die upon his master's grave, might bring back the spirit of a dog to watch for the safety of a living master. That no animal ghosts should have been seen afforded therefore in this judgment no weak presumption against their existence.
O Dove, “my guide, philosopher and friend!” that thou hadst lived to see what I have seen, the portrait of the Ghost of a Flea, engraved by Varley, from the original by Blake! The engraver was present when the likeness was taken, and relates the circumstances thus in his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy.
“This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of
this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and a pencil, with which he drew the portrait of which a fac-simile is given in this number. I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he left off, and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it. During the time occupied in compleating the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country. He added that if in attempting to leap from one island to another he should fall into the sea, he could swim, and should not be lost.”
The Ghost of the Flea spoke truly when he said what a formidable beast he should be, if with such power of leg and of proboscis, and such an appetite for blood he were as large as a horse. And if all things came by chance, it would necessarily follow from the laws of chance that such monsters there would be; but because all things are wisely and mercifully ordered, it is, that these varieties of form and power which would be hideous, and beyond measure destructive upon a larger scale, are left in the lower stages of being, the existence of such deformity and such means of destruction there, and their non-existence as the scale of life ascends, alike tending to prove the wisdom and the benevolence of the Almighty Creator.
