OMENS.
O1? course all educated people believe themselves to be free from the superstition of attaching importance to Omens. We doubt, however, very much whether many of us are wholly free from it. And assuredly amongst the most remarkable men who have lived, even in the modern world, a good many have really attached importance to them. In the new volume of the " Life of the Prince Consort," we are told that the late Emperor of the French was profoundly struck with the coincidence that the letters in which, on the opening of the Crimean War, his own and the Empress Eug6nie's name were illuminated in London side by side with those of the Queen and the Prince Consort, "N. E.V. A.," together made up the name of the river on which St. Petersburg is built ; and from the stress he laid on this fact, he would seem to have re- garded it as a favourable omen for the conquest of the Allies over the Czar. And Sir Walter Scott recorded, without any smile at himself for his superstition, that when Mungo Pask left him on the eve of his last fatal exploring journey to Africa, his horse stumbled in pass- ing a little ditch in their path, and that he remarked to Mungo Park that it was a bad omen for his intended journey. And cer- tainly there are very few women in England who would like to be married on a Friday, and exceedingly few sailors who would consent to weigh anchor for a long voyage on such a day. A well-known story as to the late Lord Shelburne shows that in the very highest class the superstition against sitting down thirteen to dinner is still as vivid as over. Even the l'rince Con- sort records with some interest that the bonfire built near Bal- moral on occasion of the false news that Sebastopol had fallen in 1854, and which was actually lighted nearly a year later when it really fell in September, 1855, was blown down by the storm which raged on the terrible day of Inkermann (November 5, 1854), which so nearly proved fatal, to the British Army in the Crimea. Probably hardly any one who had noted this curious coincidence would have been quite free from a lurking suspicion that it was more than a coincidence, however honestly he might have repudiated the notion that he believed there was any real augury in the matter. Indeed, as the battle really proved much more fatal to the Russians than to the Allied armies, it would be very difficult to make much of an omen which, if it had meant anything, would have seemed to portend the ruin of the British hopes. Nevertheless, it seems probable that most of the Royal party, in spite of this proof that credulity in the matter would be absurd, continued to attach some more or less mysterious importance to the col- lapse of that pile of wood on the day of the battle of Inkermann.
What is it which makes men in such a day as ours,—a day so little disposed to And esoteric meanings in anything,—so unable
to shake off this superstition ? We imagine that it is the pale reflection of a belief of a very much deeper kind,—namely, that the issue of every enterprise of the least import to any human being is in some way predetermined and foreseen, and that though men in their blindness cannot decipher the enigma of their destiny, the secret is an open one, the key to which might possibly be found by any one with eyes to read writings on the wall, even when written up in some common place where no one would think of looking for the required answer. All the poor superstitions as to finding an answer to your thought in the text of the Bible on which your eye first alights, or as to finding it in the images of a dream, or still more vulgar, the superstition as to the way of finding the initials of some required name by throwing the peel of an orange over your shoulder, imply a suspicion that there is nothing anywhere in nature, however far removed from the subject of your thoughts,—indeed, many would say, the farther removed the better for the purpose,—from which an oracle as to your inmost questions may not be obtained, if only you have the gift for understanding the irony of nature. Perhaps the old Greek legend that Proteus, who changes into so many forms, would answer any question you could put to him, if, nu.. dismayed, you held him fast till he resumed his own shape, ex- presses in some way this curiously wide-spread notion that external nature herself, many-sided as she is, always contains some symbol, if you can but find it, that is intended to respond to your deepest questionings. The story of Robert Bruce watching the spider and finding in its perseverance and success an augury of his own, is a good illustration enough of the ineradicable tendency to believe that whenever you need some authoritative reply, ' yes' or no,' to your queries, there is somewhere a chink in the sensible world through which you may gaze and find what you want, if you have but the spiritual tact. A notion that the universe is everywhere full of legends and oracles intended to correspond with individual states of high mental excitement, seems to haunt men in every age, and to be the ex- planation of the vulgarer superstitions. Over and above all the common-place meanings and lessons written on the surface of the world, there is, says the faith of mankind, if you are only in a state of feeling exalted enough to look for it with the proper eyes, a number of distinct replies to individual questionings, though the right finding and reading of them are given only to those who have a special faculty for their discovery and inter- pretation. Probably the belief ultimately means only that there is a Providence in Nature which converses with men by outward as well as by inward channels, by predetermined cone- spondences to his thought, as well as by help given to his conscience and his will ; only the curious thing is that those who find most comfort in these answers of the stars or of external coincidences to their eager questionings, are in nine cases out of ten those who believe least in Providence or prayer. The two Napoleons always listened eagerly to the auguries which they had the ingenuity to extract from circumstantial coincidences, but Louis Napoleon would far sooner have found a preternatural meaning in the letters 4 6 N.E.V.A." than in the effect of prayer upon his hesitating resolutions. Indeed, those who feed most eagerly on auguries feed least eagerly on the food which their mind receives from religious meditation.
We must suppose, then, that while there may well be something common in the origin of religious convictions, and of superstitions of this kind, these superstitions are rather the revenge which the mystic part of us takes on that sceptical and defiant part which will not accept the nobler elements of religious faith, than the ex- pression of that faith itself. When Byron called Circumstance " that unspiritual god," he went deeper probably than he himself was aware of into the nature of superstition. It is when men have nothing higher than themselves to believe genuinely in, that they attach the most importance to those odds-and-ends of circumstance, the flight of a bird, or the falling of a leaf, or the blaze of a meteor, or the emphasis with which a particular word is accidentally spoken in their ears, and call such things the indi- cations of destiny,---whereas, if there be a destiny at all, it must be through the command of some Being who is able to see and determine the end from the beginning, and to help us much better through the heart than through the eyes. Yet it is quite certain that the less such a Being is directly addressed, the more importance does the questioning mind attach to the grotesqueries of Circumstance. Those who can believe in no healthy and normal guidance from within are the most given to believe in that capri- cious and almost grotesque guidance from without, by which bar- barous and heathen peoples have so often agreed to be guided on very important issues. The belief in luck and unluckiness, the recoil from bad omens, the acceptance of a hybrid sort of astrology, is generally the form assumed by a perverted religious instinct, where there is no real trust in spiritual help and direction. And oven when, as is not uncommon, the most superstitious and the most genuine spiritual belief are combined, we take it that the former is but the survival of the superstitious bias of ruder epochs, deeply
ingrained into human nature before the instinct which implanted it had received that higher and purer satisfaction which it gains in the revelation of Christ.
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