Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

Trappists wait in turn at table upon their brethren. No one, not even the abbot, is to ask for anything for himself, but each monk is bound to see that those seated on either side of him get everything they are entitled to, and to give notice of any omission by giving a slight tap upon the table and pointing with the finger to the neglected brother.

Any monk arriving in the refectory after grace prostrates himself in the middle of the room and remains there until the abbot knocks with a small hammer and thus liberates him. A graver punishment is inflicted now and again at the conclusion of dinner. The culprit, so called, lies flat on the stones across the doorway, and each brother and guest is compelled to step over him as he makes his exit. I say guest advisedly, for it is the privilege of all who receive hospitality at La Trappe to dine once – not oftener – in the monks’ refectory. During meals one of the Brotherhood reads aloud, in accordance with Cistercian practice.

The dinner at Le Port du Salut consists generally of vegetable soup, salad without oil, whole-meal bread, cheese, and a modicum of light beer. Though the cooking is of the plainest description the quality of the vegetables is excellent, and the cheese has become quite famous. The meal never lasts longer than twenty minutes, and when over, all remaining scraps are distributed to the poor assembled at the gate. Six hundred pounds weight of bread and several casks of soup are also distributed weekly, besides what the abbot may send to any sick person in the vicinity.

The ailing Trappist is allowed to indulge in what is called Le Soulagement, viz. two eggs taken early in the morning. In cases of very severe illness, and when under medical treatment in the hospital, animal food may be used; but the attachment to rules is so great that the authority of the Superiors has frequently to be exercised in order to enforce the doctor’s prescription. In the words of Father Martin, the attendant of the hospital, “When a Trappist consents to eat meat, he is at death’s very door.”

The cemetery is surrounded on all sides by the buildings of the Communauté, so that from every window the monks may see their last resting place. The graves are indicated by a slight rising of the grass and by a cross bearing the saint’s name assumed by the brother on his profession. Nothing else is recorded save his age and the date of his death. Threescore years and ten seem to be the minimum of life at La Trappe, and astonishing as this longevity may appear primâ facie, it is more so when one considers that the vocation of most postulants has been determined by a desire to separate themselves from a world, in which they had previously lost their peace of soul and their bodily health.

Under the regularity of monastic life, its labor, its tranquillity, and either despite the severity of the diet or in virtue of it, it is wonderful how soon the dejected and feeble become restored to health. Out of fifteen novices, statistics show that only one remains to be what is called a profès, the other fourteen leaving the monastery before the expiration of two years. A touching custom may be here mentioned. Trappists are told in their Chapter meeting, “Brethren, one of us has lost a father (or any other relation); let us pray for the departed soul.” But none know the name of the bereft brother.

After having taken vows as a profès the Trappist holds a co-proprietorship in the buildings and lands of the association and must live and die in the monastery. Death is his goal and best hope. In order to remind him of it, a grave is always ready in the cemetery; but the belief is altogether erroneous that each Trappist digs his own grave. When the earth yawning for the dead has been filled, another pit is opened by any one ordered for the task. Each Trappist then comes and prays at the side of this grave which may be his own. Neither do Trappists when they meet each other say, “Brother, we must die,” as is also generally accredited to them. This is, we think, the salute of the disciples of Bruno at La Grande Chartreuse.

The farm buildings of Le Port du Salut are many and various, including sheds for cattle, a corn-mill, and looms for the manufacture of the woollen and cotton clothing the monks wear. There is much land, outside, as well as inside the walls of the precinct, which the monks cultivate, and they may be often seen in their full robes, despite the heat of the summer, working steadfastly in the fields, and the abbot harder than any of them.

During the twenty-four hours of an ordinary working day the Trappist is thus employed. He rises generally at two a. m., but on feast days at midnight or at one o’clock in the morning according to the importance of the festival. He immediately goes to church, which is shrouded in darkness, except the light that glimmers from the small lamps perpetually burning before the altar as in all Roman Catholic churches. The first service continues until three o’clock; at that hour and with the last words of the hymn all the monks prostrate themselves on the stones and remain in silent meditation during thirty minutes. The nave is then lighted, and the chants are resumed until five a. m., when masses commence. The number of hours given to liturgic offices is, on an average, seven per day. Singing, but in a peculiar way, forms a part of the worship. All the musical notes are long and of equal duration, and this because the Trappist must sing hymns “for the love of God, and not for his own delectation.” Moreover, he must exert his voice to its utmost, and this being prolonged at intervals during seven hours per diem proves a greater fatigue than even manual labor.

The distribution of the labor takes place every day under the superintendence of the abbot, the prior, and the cellérier, the last named official having the care of all the temporalities of the place, and being permitted, like the Superior, to hold intercourse with the outer world. The cellérier stands indeed in the same relation to the monastery as does a supercargo to a ship.

Labor is regular or occasional. To the first the brethren are definitely appointed, and their work is every day the same; the latter, which is mainly agricultural, is alloted by the Superior according to age, physical condition, and aptitude, but it is imperative that every monk must participate in manual labor. Even a guest may, if he pleases, claim, what is considered as a privilege, three hours of work a day.

After dinner the Trappist gives one hour to rest, but the maximum never exceeds seven hours, and on feast days is materially reduced by earlier rising. The mid-day siesta over, labor continues until a quarter to five o’clock, which is the hour of refection. Then comes the last religious office of the day, the “Salve Regina,” at which guests as well as brethren are expected to assist. The last word of the hymn at this service is the last word of the day. It is called “The Time of the Great Silence.” Monks and guests then leave the church, smothering the sound of their footsteps as much as possible, and noiselessly retire to their respective resting places; lights are put out, except in case of special permission of the abbot, and a death-like quiet and gloom reigns everywhere throughout the habitation.

The life of guests at Le Port du Salut differs from that of a Trappist. There is a parlor common to all, with a fire burning in it during winter, but each one sleeps in a separate cell, and has three meals a day; he may eat eggs from Easter until September, and have his vegetables cooked with butter. Last, though not least, his wants are attended to, and his cell swept and cleaned by the father and the brother of the hostelerie, who are also at liberty to hold conversation with him.

A guest may stay in the monastery for three days without giving any particulars of himself, for fourteen days if he chooses to disclose who and what he is, and for as much as three months if his circumstances seem to need it. After that time, if he be poor, he may be sent away to another monastery at the cost of the senders; but the abbot is free to extend a guest’s visit to any duration.

Trappists are most useful citizens. They perform, per head, more labor than any farmer; they expend upon their own maintenance the very minimum necessary to support existence; they undertake at the cost of their lives works of great public utility, such as the draining of the extensive marshes of Les Dombes, in the south of France, and of La Metidja, at Staouëli, near Algiers, which they are converting into fruitful fields. As horticulturists, agriculturists, dairymen, millers, and breeders of cattle they are unrivalled; for men whose faith is that to work is to pray, cannot fail to excel those with whom work is, if even necessary, a tiresome obligation. Lastly, in all new establishments, the Trappist only considers his monastery founded when a dead brother has taken possession of the land and lies buried in the first open grave.

Such is the real life of the Trappists. It is apparently a happy one; and it is with feelings of deep regret and of friendly remembrance that the departing guest, as he reaches a turning of the road, and sees the steeple of the monastery of Le Port du Salut disappear, stands for a moment to cast a last look upon that peaceful abode ere he wends his way again into the wide, wide world. —Good Words.

THUNDERBOLTS

The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and all the more so because there are no such things in existence at all as thunderbolts of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole history might, from the positive point of view at least, be summed up in the simple statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least, I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance? Not a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of the whole subject. Does any one feel as keenly interested in any real living cobra or anaconda as in the non-existent great sea-serpent? Are ghosts and vampires less attractive objects of popular study than cats and donkeys? Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed by our own correspondent, equal the romantic charm of Prester John, or the butcher in the next street rival the personality of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if there were thunderbolts, the question of their nature and action would be a wholly dull, scientific, and priggish one; it is their unreality alone that invests them with all the mysterious weirdness of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common thing that one reads about wearily in the books on electricity, a mere ordinary matter of positive and negative, density and potential, to be measured in ohms (whatever they may be), and partially imitated with Leyden jars and red sealing-wax apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin Franklin, a fat old gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it down from the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near Philadelphia? and does not Mr. Robert Scott (of the Meteorological Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within the next twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published regularly in the morning papers? This is lightning, mere vulgar lightning, a simple result of electrical conditions in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently connected with algebraical formulas in x, y, z, with horrid symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra hurls down upon the head of the trembling malefactor – how infinitely grander, more fearsome, and more mysterious!

And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety the simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts are the mythical or fanciful or verbal representation. We all of us know now that lightning is a mere flash of electric light and heat; that it has no solid existence or core of any sort; in short, that it is dynamical rather than material, a state or movement rather than a body or thing. To be sure, local newspapers still talk with much show of learning about the “electric fluid” which did such remarkable damage last week upon the slated steeple of Peddington Torpida church; but the well-crammed schoolboy of the present day has long since learned that the electric fluid is an exploded fallacy, and that the lightning which pulled the ten slates off the steeple in question was nothing more in its real nature than a very big immaterial spark. However, the word thunderbolt has survived to us from the days when people still believed that the thing which did the damage during a thunderstorm was really and truly a gigantic white-hot bolt or arrow; and as there is a natural tendency in human nature to fit an existence to every word, people even now continue to imagine that there must be actually something or other somewhere called a thunderbolt. They don’t figure this thing to themselves as being identical with the lightning; on the contrary, they seem to regard it as something infinitely rarer, more terrible, and more mystic; but they firmly hold that thunderbolts do exist in real life, and even sometimes assert that they themselves have positively seen them.

But if seeing is believing, it is equally true, as all who have looked into the phenomena of spiritualism and “psychical research” (modern English for ghost-hunting), know too well that believing is seeing also. The origin of the faith in thunderbolts must be looked for (like the origin of the faith in ghosts and “psychical phenomena”) far back in the history of our race. The noble savage, at that early period when wild in woods he ran, naturally noticed the existence of thunder and lightning, because thunder and lightning are things that forcibly obtrude themselves upon the attention of the observer, however little he may by nature be scientifically inclined. Indeed, the noble savage, sleeping naked on the bare ground, in tropical countries where thunder occurs almost every night on an average, was sure to be pretty often awaked from his peaceful slumbers by the torrents of rain that habitually accompany thunderstorms in the happy realms of everlasting dog-days. Primitive man was thereupon compelled to do a little philosophising on his own account as to the cause and origin of the rumbling and flashing which he saw so constantly around him. Naturally enough, he concluded that the sound must be the voice of somebody; and that the fiery shaft, whose effects he sometimes noted upon trees, animals, and his fellow-man, must be the somebody’s arrow. It is immaterial from this point of view whether, as the scientific anthropologists hold, he was led to his conception of these supernatural personages from his prior belief in ghosts and spirits, or whether, as Professor Max Müller will have it, he felt a deep yearning in his primitive savage breast toward the Infinite and the Unknowable (which he would doubtless have spelt like the professor, with a capital initial, had he been acquainted with the intricacies of the yet uninvented alphabet); but this much at least is pretty certain, that he looked upon the thunder and the lightning as in some sense the voice and the arrows of an aërial god.

Now, this idea about the arrows is itself very significant of the mental attitude of primitive man, and of the way that mental attitude has colored all subsequent thinking and superstition upon this very subject. Curiously enough, to the present day the conception of the thunderbolt is essentially one of a bolt– that is to say, an arrow, or at least an arrowhead. All existing thunderbolts (and there are plenty of them lying about casually in country houses and local museums) are more or less arrow-like in shape and appearance; some of them, indeed, as we shall see by-and-by, are the actual stone arrow heads of primitive man himself in person. Of course the noble savage was himself in the constant habit of shooting at animals and enemies with a bow and arrow. When, then, he tried to figure to himself the angry god, seated in the stormclouds, who spoke with such a loud rumbling voice, and killed those who displeased him, with his fiery darts, he naturally thought of him as using in his cloudy home the familiar bow and arrow of this nether planet. To us nowadays, if we were to begin forming the idea for ourselves all over again de novo, it would be far more natural to think of the thunder as the noise of a big gun, of the lightning as the flash of the powder, and of the supposed “bolt” as a shell or bullet. There is really a ridiculous resemblance between a thunderstorm and a discharge of artillery. But the old conception derived from so many generations of primitive men has held its own against such mere modern devices as gunpowder and rifle balls; and none of the objects commonly shown as thunderbolts are ever round: they are distinguished, whatever their origin, by the common peculiarity that they more or less closely resemble a dart or arrowhead.

Let us begin, then, by clearly disembarrassing our minds of any lingering belief in the existence of thunderbolts. There are absolutely no such things known to science. The two real phenomena that underlie the fable are simply thunder and lightning. A thunderstorm is merely a series of electrical discharges between one cloud and another, or between clouds and the earth; and these discharges manifest themselves to our senses under two forms – to the eye as lightning, to the ear as thunder. All that passes in each case is a huge spark – a commotion, not a material object. It is in principle just like the spark from an electrical machine; but while the most powerful machine of human construction will only send a spark for three feet, the enormous electrical apparatus provided for us by nature will send one for four, five, or even ten miles. Though lightning when it touches the earth always seems to us to come from the clouds to the ground, it is by no means certain that the real course may not at least occasionally be in the opposite direction. All we know is that sometimes there is an instantaneous discharge between one cloud and another, and sometimes an instantaneous discharge between a cloud and the earth.

But this idea of a mere passage of highly concentrated energy from one point to another was far too abstract, of course, for primitive man, and is far too abstract even now for nine out of ten of our fellow-creatures. Those who don’t still believe in the bodily thunderbolt, a fearsome aërial weapon which buries itself deep in the bosom of the earth, look upon lightning as at least an embodiment of the electric fluid, a long spout or line of molten fire, which is usually conceived of as striking the ground and then proceeding to hide itself under the roots of a tree or beneath the foundations of a tottering house. Primitive man naturally took to the grosser and more material conception. He figured to himself the thunderbolt as a barbed arrowhead; and the forked zigzag character of the visible flash, as it darts rapidly from point to point, seemed almost inevitably to suggest to him the barbs, as one sees them represented on all the Greek and Roman gems, in the red right hand of the angry Jupiter.

The thunderbolt being thus an accepted fact, it followed naturally that whenever any dart-like object of unknown origin was dug up out of the ground, it was at once set down as being a thunderbolt; and, on the other hand, the frequent occurrence of such dart-like objects, precisely where one might expect to find them in accordance with the theory, necessarily strengthened the belief itself. So commonly are thunderbolts picked up to the present day that to disbelieve in them seems to many country people a piece of ridiculous and stubborn scepticism. Why, they’ve ploughed up dozens of them themselves in their time, and just about the very place where the thunderbolt struck the old elm-tree two years ago, too.

The most favorite form of thunderbolt is the polished stone hatchet or “celt” of the newer stone age men. I have never heard the very rude chipped and unpolished axes of the older drift men or cave men described as thunderbolts: they are too rough and shapeless ever to attract attention from any except professed archæologists. Indeed, the wicked have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather like a bit of nature’s exquisite workmanship than a simple relic of prehistoric man. There is something very fascinating about the naïf belief that the neolithic axe is a genuine unadulterated thunderbolt. You dig it up in the ground exactly where you would expect a thunderbolt (if there were such things) to be. It is heavy, smooth, well shaped, and neatly pointed at one end. If it could really descend in a red-hot state from the depths of the sky, launched forth like a cannon-ball by some fierce discharge of heavenly artillery, it would certainly prove a very formidable weapon indeed; and one could easily imagine it scoring the bark of some aged oak, or tearing off the tiles from a projecting turret, exactly as the lightning is so well known to do in this prosaic workaday world of ours. In short, there is really nothing on earth against the theory of the stone axe being a true thunderbolt, except the fact that it unfortunately happens to be a neolithic hatchet.

But the course of reasoning by which we discover the true nature of the stone axe is not one that would in any case appeal strongly to the fancy or the intelligence of the British farmer. It is no use telling him that whenever one opens a barrow of the stone age one is pretty sure to find a neolithic axe and a few broken pieces of pottery beside the mouldering skeleton of the old nameless chief who lies there buried. The British farmer will doubtless stolidly retort that thunderbolts often strike the tops of hills, which are just the places where barrows and tumuli (tumps, he calls them) most do congregate; and that as to the skeleton, isn’t it just as likely that the man was killed by the thunderbolt as that the thunderbolt was made by a man? Ay, and a sight likelier, too.

All the world over, this simple and easy belief, that the buried stone axe is a thunderbolt, exists among Europeans and savages alike. In the West of England, the laborers will tell you that the thunder-axes they dig up fell from the sky. In Brittany, says Mr. Tylor, the old man who mends umbrellas at Carnac, beside the mysterious stone avenues of that great French Stonehenge, inquires on his rounds for pierres de tonnerre, which of course are found with suspicious frequency in the immediate neighborhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese Encyclopædia we are told that the “lightning stones” have sometimes the shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols made the lightning stones instead of digging them up out of the earth. So deeply had the idea of the thunderbolt buried itself in the recesses of his soul, that though a neighboring people were still actually manufacturing stone axes almost under his very eyes, he reversed mentally the entire process, and supposed they dug up the thunderbolts which he saw them using, and employed them as common hatchets. This is one of the finest instances on record of the popular figure which grammarians call the hysteron proteron, and ordinary folk describe as putting the cart before the horse. Just so, while in some parts of Brazil the Indians are still laboriously polishing their stone hatchets, in other parts the planters are digging up the precisely similar stone hatchets of earlier generations, and religiously preserving them in their houses as undoubted thunderbolts. I have myself had pressed upon my attention as genuine lightning stones, in the West Indies, the exquisitely polished greenstone tomahawks of the old Carib marauders. But then, in this matter, I am pretty much in the position of that philosophic sceptic who, when he was asked by a lady whether he believed in ghosts, answered wisely, “No, madam, I have seen by far too many of them.”