THE PROFESSOR'S WIFE.* IT is difficult to say how far
stories written to illustrate the moral evil of particular practices answer their purpose. That this story, which is not without power, does draw an alarming and a not unjust picture of that hardening of the heart which comes of asserting the right and cultivating the habit of inflict- ing pain deliberately on our fellow-creatures, in order to add to the knowledge of vital laws, cannot be denied. The real question, however, is whether the charge which is sure to be made of exaggeration and over-painting in stories intended to exhibit such a warning as this, may not do more to stimulate sympathy with the wrong side than to enlist sympathy with the right. On the one hand, it is sure to be said that such a picture as that of Sir Eric Grant is a libel on any of our English apologists for Vivisection. And, on the other hand, it may be fairly asserted that if the practice of vivisection is to grow hero as it has grown in Italy, Germany, and France, it would soon become a libel no longer, and that there is no one feature in the practice here given which may not be more or less closely illustrated from the revolting annals of Continental or American vivisection. To suppose that a man who had loved his wife passionately, and loved her pas- sionately within a few months, would ever permit her to be made the subject of painful nervous excitations, in the interest of pure scientific investigation, even after consciousness and mind had gone, is, indeed, to suppose an extremity of inhumanity such as one would consider hardly possible, unless, indeed, in a true bell. And we think that the author of this book has coloured his picture too highly, even for his purpose, in adding this last hint to his indictment against the Professor's steely sins. At the same time, no one who knows anything of the facts of the case can deny that, admitting the picture to be exaggerated as a repre- sentation of the facts of to-day, as, in this respect, even accepting the Continental standard, it certainly is, such a sketch as that of Sir Eric Grant is the ideal to which the vivisectionist morality ought to point,—and that
* The Professor's Wife : a Story, By Leonard Graham. London: Chatto and Windoe.
there is hardly one touch in it which might not be fairly justified as belonging to the ideal of the same general school of morality towards which the teaching of the vivisectionists, that any amount of pain may be inflicted on sensitive beings for sufficient scientific ends, obviously tends. The vivisec- tionist must reject with all his soul Schiller's aphorism, " Woo to him who wades through sin to extend his knowledge of truth !" unless, indeed, he chooses arbitrarily to deny that the infliction of torture on fellow-creatures, when it is inflicted for the purpose of extending his knowledge of truth, can be a sin. And if he denies that with his lips, his conscience will hardly back his lips. If the delineation here given tends in any degree to alarm society with the picture of that artificial hardness to which a noble and may degrade a man who uses evil means to obtain that end, this story, painful as it is to read, will not have been written in vain.
We should add that iu the body of the story there is no introduction of physical horrors. Sufficient information is given in the notes to indicate what cruelty Science does inflict in other countries,—and even now only too often in this, in spite of our anti-vivisection statute, with its discreditable special permissions to dispense with aneasthetics,—but there is no attempt, even in the notes, to overwhelm the nerves with physical horror. What is attempted is something very different, —to make us realise the chasm which such practices must open between a man and his own best nature and best affections, and the steady tendency they have to alienate him from the true life of the heart. This is effected with a good deal of power; and the only question is, whether it will strengthen the cause on behalf of which it is written, or by presenting as possible and probable a kind of hardness of heart of which there is,—in Great Britain, at all events, we hope,—no present example, will play into the hands of the enemy, and induce them to boast of the exaggerations to which the humanitarians are reduced, in order to excite public opinion against them. Fiction may, we think, fairly picture the tendency of evil, as well as its actually perceived and experienced aspects. Aud though, as we trust, no such monster as Sir Eric Grant becomes before the end of this story, is as yet possible in Great Britain, we would not answer for it that—judging exclusively by the num- ber and dreadful cruelty of their experiments on animals—the late Claud Bernard might not possibly have reached that point, or Majeudie or Mantegazza might not even have passed it. .
Previous page
