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The Role of Targeted Killing in the Campaign Against Terror

The Role of Targeted Killing in the Campaign Against Terror
The U.S. Army Professional Writing Collection

Peter M. Cullen

Joint Force Quarterly

Issue 48, 1st Quarter 2008

Targeted killing1 is "the intentional slaying of a specific individual or group of individuals undertaken with explicit government approval."2 In recent years, targeted killing as a tactic in the ongoing campaign against terrorism has generated considerable controversy. Some commentators view it as an indispensable tool and argue for its expanded use, while others question its legality and claim that it is immoral and ultimately ineffective. The tactic of targeted killing is most closely associated with Israel's campaign against the Second Palestinian Intifada.3 Since September 11, 2001, however, the United States has consistently conducted targeted killing operations against terrorist personnel.

This article examines the legality, morality, and potential efficacy of a U.S. policy of targeted killing in its campaign against transnational terror.4 The conclusion is that, in spite of the genuine controversy surrounding this subject, a carefully circumscribed policy of targeted killing can be a legal, moral, and effective tool in a counterterror campaign. Procedures to guide the proper implementation of a U.S. policy of targeted killing are proposed.

While the United States has not explicitly acknowledged pursuing a policy of targeted killing, insights can be gleaned from published national security documents5 and official statements6 that shed light on U.S. willingness to employ targeted killing as a tactic in the campaign against terror. This was most recently demonstrated in January 2007 by the use of an Air Force AC-130 Spectre gunship to target suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Somalia.7 Based on publicly available information, if the capture of designated terrorists is not deemed feasible, the United States is prepared to use Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or U.S. military assets to target them in lethal operations.8 In addition to the recent operations in Somalia, targeted killings attributed9 to the United States since 2001 have included attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan and in Yemen.10 These actions resulted in the deaths of numerous civilians,11 highlighting the grim reality of collateral damage that adds greatly to the controversy surrounding targeted killing operations.

Legal Considerations
Legal Considerations

There is broad divergence of opinion in the extensive literature on the legality of targeted killing of transnational terrorists. On one side, it is argued that targeted killings constitute extrajudicial killings or assassinations, which are prohibited under international law. Proponents of this position argue that terrorists are civilians, not combatants, and should be dealt with using conventional law enforcement methods rather than the more permissive law of war. They contend that terrorists can be killed only when there is no other way to prevent them from perpetrating an attack that endangers the lives of others. In all other circumstances, terrorists should be arrested, prosecuted, and punished for their crimes under the law. On the other side, it is argued that terrorists are direct participants in an armed conflict, so they may be lawfully targeted. According to this position, a state threatened by terrorists may always act in self-defense and properly target terrorists provided the methods are in compliance with the law of war.

That the topic of targeted killing can generate such divergent opinions from informed commentators reveals that the campaign against transnational terrorism represents a new paradigm with which international law has yet to come to terms. Public international law, accustomed to regulating actions by states, is in uncharted territory when dealing with nonstate actors and their involvement in the changing face of war. The ongoing U.S. campaign against terrorism does not fit neatly into the existing system on the use of force in international law. Although we are now years into the campaign against transnational terror, legal commentators are still wrestling with how best to analyze the legal issues generated when states use force against transnational terrorists.

Given the current need to reassure allies of its strong commitment to the rule of law, the United States must ensure that its policy on targeted killing is able to withstand proper legal scrutiny and not be viewed as pushing the outer limits of authorized state action.12 The case for targeted killing must demonstrate that the United States is authorized to use force against terrorists in compliance with the law of conflict management, or jus ad bellum, and that the manner in which targeted killings are executed complies with the law on the conduct of war, or jus in bello.

Authority to Use Force against Transnational Terrorists (Jus ad Bellum). Article 2(4) of the United Nations (UN) Charter outlaws the use of aggressive force by a state in its international relations. One recognized exception is a state's inherent right of self-defense as found in Article 51 of the UN Charter. This authorizes a state to use military force to defend itself against an armed attack and the continuing threat of such an attack.13 The limitations on this right of self-defense are that the force used to defend against the attack must be both "necessary" and "proportionate." Clearly, al Qaeda's actions on 9/11 constituted an armed attack on America, and its subsequent actions and statements confirm that it represents a continuing and serious threat to the United States against which America is entitled to defend itself through the use of force, specifically the targeting of key al Qaeda personnel.

It has been argued that the right of self-defense only applies to interstate conflicts and not to a conflict with a transnational terrorist organization such as al Qaeda and its associated movements (AQAM).14 This textual interpretation of the UN Charter, however, is overcome by customary international law, which recognizes a state's inherent right of self-defense. This permits the United States to use force against nonstate actors such as transnational terrorists. It is a right that has not been challenged by the UN Security Council. Since AQAM are a continuing threat, the targeted killing of their key personnel is a military necessity to prevent future attacks. It is not designed to be punitive in nature or serve as a reprisal. This tactic is also a proportionate, or reasonable, response given the serious threat that AQAM pose to America.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter also requires the United States to respect the sovereignty of other nations. If America wishes to conduct a targeted killing on the sovereign territory of another nation, it must obtain the permission of that government. In the documented instances of U.S. targeted killing operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, it has been reported that these nations granted approval for these actions to be conducted within their borders.

Legality of the Tactic of Targeted Killing
Legality of the Tactic of Targeted Killing

(Jus in Bello). Although the United States is authorized to use force in self-defense against AQAM for as long as they remain a threat, each specific use of force, such as a targeted killing, must comply with the law on the conduct of war. The primary sources of jus in bello are found in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977.15 Application of the law of war is triggered if a state of "armed conflict" exists between America and AQAM. Treaties do not define this term. It is broader than "war," which is limited to interstate conflict.16 Commentators recommend looking to the nature, intensity, and duration of the violence to make this determination.17 The level and frequency of actual or planned violence around the globe between the United States or its allies and AQAM satisfy these criteria. Certainly, the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision had little difficulty in determining that U.S. military operations against AQAM were properly characterized as an "armed conflict."18

It is also necessary to determine the type of conflict that exists between the United States and AQAM; namely, is it an international or a noninternational armed conflict? The answer determines which rules regulate the conduct of the conflict. With the exception of Common Article 3,19 the four Geneva Conventions only apply to international armed conflicts. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdan20 concluded that the armed conflict between the United States and AQAM was of a noninternational nature. This type of conflict is normally regulated by Additional Protocol II, but its provisions are limited to internal conflict between a government and nonstate actors within its territory. Clearly, this is not the case with the current U.S. conflict with AQAM, which is taking place primarily on the territory of third countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Since such a restrictive interpretation would place the parties to the armed conflict between America and AQAM outside jus in bello and create an unacceptable gap in the law's coverage, it is necessary to expand the definition of a noninternational conflict to include one between a state and nonstate actors outside the state's own territory.21 At a minimum, the provisions of Additional Protocol II relating to noninternational armed conflict that reflect standards of customary international law should regulate this type of armed conflict,22 to include that between the United States and AQAM.

Article 13(2) of Additional Protocol II incorporates the principle of distinction and mandates that the civilian population and individual civilians shall not be the object of attack. An exception to this is found in Article 13(3), which states that civilians forfeit protection "for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities." The combatants in a noninternational armed conflict are the armed forces of the state and, inter alia, "organized armed groups." In the International Committee of the Red Cross commentary on Additional Protocol II, it states that "[t]hose who belong to the armed forces or armed groups may be attacked at any time."23 In the context of the armed conflict between the United States and AQAM, this means that active members of AQAM are combatants and may be lawfully targeted at will.24 Given the status of AQAM operatives as combatants, the United States is under no obligation to attempt to arrest individuals before targeting them. This combatant status remains in effect for the duration of the armed conflict unless the individual takes some action to renounce this status.

This analysis raises the question of how active members of a terrorist organization are properly identified. Unlike combatants in international armed conflicts, they are not required to display "a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance."25 Nor should their combatant status be limited to the time that they have a weapon in their hands. The answer lies in designating as combatants those members of the terrorist organization who have taken an active part in hostilities. Proponents of this position argue that this status is established if the individual takes a direct part in hostilities by planning, directing, or executing attacks or "if there is other evidence of his or her combatant role."26 Such evidence will be primarily derived from intelligence information, often supplemented by the statements and admissions of the individuals themselves. A difficult issue is whether an individual who provides purely financial support for terrorist activities can be targeted as a combatant. Given the critical enabling role of financing in terrorist activities, such individuals should be viewed as having an active role in hostilities. The requirement for active participation, however, would exclude individuals from being targeted who provide purely political support to a terrorist organization.

Even where terrorists are properly designated as combatants under Additional Protocol II and therefore subject to targeting at will, the actual targeting must still meet the requirement of proportionality under customary international law. The targeting operation will be held to violate international law if it "may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."27 Although the principle of proportionality is easy to state, it is notoriously difficult to apply. There is no mathematical formula to assist in determining whether the successful targeting of a terrorist outweighs the potential for collateral damage. The question of proportionality must be resolved based on the facts known at the time of the attack and not on the actual outcome of the operation. In reviewing the targeted killing operations attributed to the United States, it is clear that many, if not most, have resulted in the deaths of noncombatants. What is less certain is how many such operations have been aborted due to the risk they posed to noncombatants. David Kretzmer identified the dilemma facing decisionmakers: "When as a result of an attack innocent persons are killed or wounded, a heavy burden rests on the state to show either that this could not reasonably have been foreseen, or that even if it could have been foreseen, the necessity of the attack was great enough to justify the risk."28

Jus in bello also contains a prohibition of assassination in armed conflict.29 This is often cited as a legal objection to the policy of targeted killing. Assassination in this context, however, is a term of art. It refers to the targeting of an individual using treachery or perfidy in time of war. There have been longstanding prohibitions of such unlawful ruses that undermine adherence to the law of war. Provided the manner of a targeted killing does not involve treachery or perfidy, it is not an illegal assassination under international law.

Legality of Targeted Killing under Domestic Law. Even if U.S. targeted killing of terrorists is legal under international law, it is also necessary to determine its legality under U.S. domestic law. Some commentators have pointed to Executive Order 1233330 and its prohibition on assassination. Although this executive order regulating intelligence activities does have legal effect, it does not apply to actions in time of war or to the Armed Forces. Accordingly, it does not impact military operations that target terrorist operatives outside the United States.31 Even if these exceptions were not available, it can reasonably be argued that the congressional resolution of September 18, 2001, authorizing the President to "use all necessary and appropriate force . . . in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States,"32 would suffice to address any domestic legal concerns about a policy of targeted killing of AQAM operatives.

While Executive Order 12333 presents no legal impediment to targeted killings executed by the Armed Forces, it could impact such operations conducted by CIA personnel, who are considered noncombatants under the law of war. Existing intelligence oversight laws have established a legal regime requiring Presidential findings and reporting to the intelligence committees before U.S. intelligence agencies can engage in covert actions, to include targeted killing operations.33

A review of the U.S. policy of targeted killing confirms that it has a valid basis under international and domestic law. The United States is legally justified in taking military action against AQAM as a matter of self-defense. AQAM are an organized force and their operatives are combatants in a noninternational armed conflict who can be targeted at will, provided such action is proportionate, does not involve perfidy or treachery, and respects the sovereignty of other nations.

Moral Considerations
Moral Considerations

Provided that targeted killing operations comply with the law of war, one can make a convincing argument that they are consistent with the Just War tradition. By their very nature, they seek to target those terrorists who are intent on killing, maiming, and injuring innocent civilians. Even if targeted killings are lawful from a technical perspective, however, the question remains whether a democracy should choose to pursue such a policy in its campaign against terrorism. There are the inevitable concerns that targeted killing operations often result in the death of innocent civilians, even if proportionality concerns are satisfied.

These concerns highlight some of the dilemmas that terrorism presents any democratic society. It is part of the asymmetric advantage that terrorism enjoys. The alternatives to targeted killings, however, can also carry significant downsides. While the apprehension of a terrorist may seem an attractive option, it can often pose a grave risk to the people conducting the arrest operation and endanger innocent noncombatants. Perhaps the best example was the attempt by U.S. personnel to arrest senior aides to Mohammed Farrah Aideed, the Somali clan leader in Mogadishu, in December 1993. This single operation ultimately led to the death of 18 U.S. military personnel and hundreds of Somalis, both militia members and noncombatants.34 If targeted killing is removed as an option and arrest is precluded, the remaining alternative-letting the terrorist continue to kill innocent civilians-is surely the least attractive moral option.

It is also important to remember that the fatalities associated with targeted killing operations are unintended deaths that result from terrorists deliberately hiding and operating among civilians. Significant moral responsibility for civilian casualties during targeted killing operations thus rests with the terrorists themselves. Finally, it must always be remembered that the sole reason for such operations is that the United States is acting in self-defense and seeking to protect its citizens from the continuing threat of attack by terrorists.

Targeted killing operations are a moral option provided that earnest efforts are taken to verify the accuracy of the intelligence on which they are based and that the operations are conducted in a manner to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, as a matter of policy, they should be used sparingly and only when no reasonable alternative is available. They must be preventive in nature and designed to forestall terrorist operations rather than as measures of punishment or reprisal.

Is targeted killing likely to be an effective policy choice for the United States? Even if it is legal and moral, if it is not effective in combating terrorism, it should not be employed.

Opponents of targeted killing challenge the effectiveness of the policy on a number of grounds. The most frequent criticism is that successful targeted killings are counterproductive in that they create martyrs and generate a desire for retaliation. As such, they are viewed as motivating the terrorists and their base of support and thereby intensifying the cycle of violence. The counterargument is that terrorists such as AQAM have demonstrated that they are already highly motivated and their terrorism needs no encouragement.

Another criticism is that the policy is strategically flawed. The U.S.-led global campaign against terror is fundamentally a battle of ideas35 in which a belief in freedom, democracy, and the rule of law competes against terror, intolerance, and extremist ideology. In this context, critics argue that targeted killings severely diminish global support for the American position among friends and allies. Unfortunately, targeted killings have yet to be broadly accepted as a legitimate exercise of a state's right to defend itself against terrorism. Criticism of U.S. targeted killings has come from respected entities such as the United Nations Special Rapporteur,36 Amnesty International,37 and the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.38 The United States must counter this criticism by doing more to promote the legitimacy of the policy. America must articulate the policy's legal and moral bases to international partners and the public at large and push for a formal updating of jus in bello to reflect a state's legitimate right to defend itself against transnational terrorism.

A third criticism is that in the campaign against terror-which is so dependent on intelligence-it does not make sense to kill the target when capture and interrogation would produce significant benefits. This would be a valid criticism if the United States consistently passed on opportunities to apprehend targets in favor of killing them. Yet there are numerous instances where America has worked with allies to apprehend key terrorists. The targeted killings that have occurred were presumably under circumstances where capture was not a viable option or presented unreasonable risk to U.S. personnel.

The opposition to targeted killings increases dramatically when targeting errors occur and innocent noncombatants are killed. The answer, however, is not to stop targeted killings when they are justified, but to minimize mistakes with more timely and reliable intelligence and a careful process that reviews and approves all targeting missions.

In spite of the likelihood that mistakes will occur, the policy of targeted killing remains an effective tactic in the campaign against terror. The persistent targeting of key leaders significantly disrupts terrorist operations. Although the impact on AQAM is somewhat diminished because of their decentralized structure, skilled leaders in global terrorism are always difficult to replace, especially in the short term. Of equal importance is the fact that it compels terrorists to act defensively and devote a disproportionate amount of their time and energy to avoid being targeted instead of planning and executing attacks.

There are no metrics to measure the effectiveness of targeted killing. Although the Israeli government remains a strong proponent of the tactic in its campaign against terrorism, its situation is so different from America's that its experience may not be a useful reference. The policy of targeted killing must be viewed as one element of the broader U.S. campaign against global terror. More time may be needed before it is possible to evaluate the cumulative impact of the policy. It is clear, however, that targeted killing has at least contributed to a cessation of AQAM attacks on U.S. territory. Outside of the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operations, there have been no significant attacks on major U.S. interests since September 11, 2001.

Proposed Guidelines
Proposed Guidelines

The U.S. policy on targeted killing remains extremely controversial. It is a high risk, high payoff component in the campaign against terror. When successful, it eliminates key adversaries, disrupts terrorist planning, and highlights U.S. military prowess. When unsuccessful, it undermines U.S. credibility and severely the persistent targeting of key leaders significantly disrupts terrorist operations strains relations with other nations. As with any critical policy, it must be constantly reviewed, refined, and improved based on lessons learned. The following guidelines propose limitations designed to ensure the policy's continued legality and make it more acceptable to the world community without compromising its effectiveness.39 Establishing formal guidelines would also provide legal reassurance to those who are assigned the difficult task of planning and executing such operations.

Whom to Target. Although all active members of AQAM can legally be targeted, political considerations favor limiting the candidates for such operations to a short list40 of high value operatives. The list should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis using the latest intelligence.

Generally, political leaders should not be targeted. This comes too close to political assassination and would encourage retaliatory attacks on U.S. or friendly nation political leaders. The distinction between members of the military and political wings of terrorist organizations may often be very difficult to draw, but the focus should remain on those individuals who take a direct role in planning, financing, or executing terrorist operations.

Targeted killings should not be conducted against U.S. citizens41 or persons located within U.S. territory. Such operations in either circumstance would raise political concerns and troublesome issues related to domestic U.S. law.42 If a legitimate terrorist target is located in another country, the United States must obtain authorization from the host nation before launching the operation. This avoids any violation of sovereignty under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

Under What Circumstances to Authorize an Operation. As an exercise of the right of self-defense, each targeted killing operation should be conducted to avoid reasonably imminent harm to U.S. or allied personnel or interests.43 Given the continuing serious threat posed by AQAM, this requirement can be easily met. Targeted killing operations, however, should always be an option of last resort, where arrest is not feasible or the risk of casualties to U.S. personnel in apprehending the target is too great.

Who Conducts Operations. The analysis supporting the legality of targeted killings was premised on the fact that these operations are conducted by U.S. military personnel who qualify as combatants under the law of war. It is clear, however, that many U.S. targeted killing operations have been conducted by the CIA, whose personnel are noncombatants. Apart from the legal issues this creates, the use of CIA paramilitary personnel is troublesome because of the agency's past association with illegal assassinations.44 Such involvement produces skepticism in the international arena and makes it more difficult to prevail in the information war. The CIA has an important role in developing the actionable intelligence that is key to success. The operations themselves, however, should be executed solely by military personnel.45 Another option is to encourage the governments within whose territory the terrorists are located to take the lead in conducting these operations, with appropriate assistance from the United States.46

How to Conduct Targeted Killing Operations. Targeted killing operations must always comply with the law of war. They must be a necessary and proportionate use of force in which every effort is made to minimize collateral damage. The use of treachery or perfidy is specifically prohibited.

The availability of precision-guided munitions is both a benefit and a hindrance. While such munitions are extremely effective in targeted killing operations and help minimize collateral damage, they have exponentially increased expectations that these operations can be conducted surgically without harm to noncombatants. As a result, there is less tolerance for collateral damage of any kind. This creates an almost impossible standard, as potential targets will deliberately seek refuge in civilian areas to discourage attack.

Who Approves Targeted Killing? Given the sensitivity of such operations, approval should be at the highest levels, preferably the President. This would help ensure a thorough vetting of each operation before it is submitted for approval. The current system used in approving covert intelligence operations47- Presidential findings of fact and reporting to the intelligence committees of Congress-is a model worth following. The Presidential finding of the operation's necessity (that is, the target poses a serious threat to the United States and arrest is not a viable option) would have to be based on clear and convincing evidence using the most current intelligence. Once approved, the mission would be tasked to the U.S. military.48

The notification to Congress is an important check on the process and will help ensure that the policy maintains public support. Obviously, notification may be difficult in the case of time sensitive operations, but every effort should be made to inform the intelligence committees prior to the operation or immediately thereafter.

Some have even argued that there should be legislative authorization for any policy of targeted killing.49 While legally superfluous, such legislation would ensure a public debate of the policy and its implications and a political consensus in support of its execution.50

Others have argued that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-type court should be established, whose review and approval would be required before launching a targeted killing operation.51 Establishing judicial oversight of what is essentially an operational decision with clear political overtones would be excessive and set a precedent that might be problematic for other types of counterterror operations in the future.

Finally, the approval of the government in whose territory the terrorist is located will be required. In the case of governments that actively support terrorism, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the United States may fall back on the inherent right of self-defense as the basis for acting without the authority of the host government.

The National Security Advisor should be responsible for overseeing the process and ensuring it is properly implemented. To be effective, targeted killings must be interagency operations supported by all elements of national power. This would include a review of each operation to ensure compliance with procedures and identify lessons learned.52

The long-term success or failure of targeted killing as a component of the campaign against terror will depend on two capabilities in which the United States has been deficient to date: first, obtaining actionable intelligence to identify and locate targets; and second, winning the information war to persuade the domestic and international communities of the legality, morality, and effectiveness of such operations. The United States is expending considerable resources to improve its intelligence systems, but much more needs to be done to enhance its information operations capabilities.

America cannot afford to take a passive posture and allow critics to dominate the debate and characterize the tactic as extrajudicial killings or assassinations. The United States must aggressively explain the strong legal and moral bases for the policy and assure the world community that the tactic is invoked only when no reasonable alternatives are available to prevent the target from threatening the Nation and innocent civilians. It must be clearly demonstrated that all reasonable efforts are made to minimize collateral damage and that, where it does occur, responsibility rests with the terrorists who operate out of civilian areas. All this requires a more transparent policy on targeted killing in which there is public confidence in its checks and balances to ensure proper targeting decisions are made. If targeted killing operations are supported by a comprehensive information operations strategy and professionally executed using timely and accurate intelligence, they will become an even more potent weapon against transnational terrorism.


text: Category:Targeted killing

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Category:Targeted killing


text:
Author:Peter M. Cullen

Works

 * The Role of Targeted Killing in the Campaign Against Terror (2008)

title: Author:Peter M. Cullen


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/61

Case of Capt. Thomas Green, Commander of the Ship Worcester, and his Crew, tried and condemned for Pyracy and Murther in the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland, London, 1705, 4to; Remarks upon the Tryal of Capt. Thomas Green and his Crew … London, 1705, fol.; Burton's Hist. of the Reign of Queen Anne, i. 311 et seq.]

GREEN, THOMAS, D.D. (1658–1738), successively bishop of Norwich and of Ely, born in the parish of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, 1658, was son of Thomas Green, a citizen of Norwich, and Sarah, his wife. He received his early education in the grammar school of the city, whence he passed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, of which he was admitted pensioner, 28 July 1674, and became a fellow in 1680, graduating B.A. 1678-9, M.A. 1682, B.D. 1690, D.D. 1695. Tenison, afterwards bishop of Lincoln (1692) and archbishop of Canterbury (1695), was of Green's college, and used his powerful influence on his behalf. He introduced Green to Sir [q. v.], made him his domestic chaplain, and appointed him to the incumbency of Minster in Kent. In 1698, on the death of Dr. Castle, Tenison's recommendation secured his election to the mastership of Corpus Christi College. Green's administration of his college (1698-1710) was successful. He was 'a strict disciplinarian.' So that he might know 'what scholars were abroad,' he introduced the practice of 'publick prayers in the Chapel immediately after locking the gates.' He also made some beneficial regulations regarding scholarships, but his vain attempts to remove Robert Moss (afterwards dean of Ely), one of the fellows, who held much preferment, and was rarely in residence in Cambridge, involved him in an awkward controversy. He himself (, Lit. Anecd. iv. 232) is said to have 'resided as much as he could.' He was twice vice-chancellor, in 1699 and again in 1713. His second term of office was forced upon him at a time peculiarly inconvenient to him, but he acquitted himself well, and liberally entertained visitors to the university.

In 1701 he had received from Tenison a prebendal stall at Canterbury, in 1708 the rectory of Adisham, Kent, and in the same year the archdeaconry of Canterbury. After Tenison's death Green was appointed by the archbishop's trustees, February 1716, to the important living of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and thereupon resigned his mastership at Cambridge. Green was a whig, and a warm supporter of the protestant succession, and, according to Masters (Hist. of Corpus Christi College), 'the zeal he shewed for the House of Hanover on the death of Queen Ann, and his prudent conduct at that juncture, laid the foundation of his fortunes.' He was made a domestic chaplain to George I. Green was consecrated bishop of Norwich 8 Oct. 1721, keeping St. Martin's in commendam. In 1723, on the death of [q. v.], he was removed to Ely, which at that time seems to have been looked on as the natural goal of the bishops of Norwich. His episcopate in both sees was undistinguished.

As bishop of Ely, Green had visitatorial powers over Trinity College, Cambridge, which the quarrel between Richard Bentley, the master, and his fellows forced him to exercise. On 5 May 1729 Green cited Bentley to appear before him at Ely House in London to answer the fellows' charges. Bentley applied to the court of king's bench for a prohibition, which was refused. The bishop sent Bentley a copy of the articles alleged against him, with notice of a day when he was prepared to hear any preliminary objections to them. Bentley appeared in person at Ely House, 5 June, and made his objections, all of which Green overruled. On this Bentley made a second application to the king's bench for another writ of prohibition, which, after sundry legal delays, was granted 10 Nov. On 31 March 1730 the bishop applied to have the prohibition removed and the cause sent back to his jurisdiction. Bentley interposed fresh delays, and it was Michaelmas term before his objections to the bishop's jurisdiction were fully argued. They were overruled by the king's bench, but in Trinity term 1731 the judges, on Bentley's application, reversed their judgment, and continued the prohibition against the bishop. Green appealed to the House of Lords, and, by a majority of twenty-eight against sixteen, 6 May 1732, his authority was re-established, much of his success being attributed to the arguments of Bishop Sherlock. Green again cited Bentley to appear before him at Ely House, 13 June 1733, and after much evidence for the prosecution and defence had been heard, Green pronounced sentence of deprivation on Bentley on 27 April 1734. Bentley declined to yield. His friend Walker, the vice-master, whose duty it was to execute the sentence, refused to act. Attempts to obtain a mandamus to compel either Walker or the bishop himself to execute the sentence failed. Finally Green's death at Ely House on 18 May 1738 'put a period to the controversy by the course of nature, and not by the determination of law' (, Life of Bentley, ii. 385) [see, 1662-1742].

Green had the character among his


text:
Translation:Mikraot Gedolot/Genesis/1:3

Rashbam
מ"ג בראשית א ג

title: Translation:Mikraot Gedolot/Genesis/1:3


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Jonathan


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Joseph Henry


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Matthew


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Richard (1716-1793)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Samuel


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Thomas (d.1705)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Green, Richard


text:
Page:The Effect of External Influences upon Development.djvu/55

Rh finely graduated and regulated the sensitiveness of parts may be in the case of the gradual differentiation of the body in plants and animals according to the principle of division of labour; for sensitiveness has gone hand in hand with morphological differentiation, gradually becoming more finely graduated and increased. And how wonderfully fine it can become we see by reference to the various special activities of the elements of our own body, as well as to the numerous processes of all kinds which occur both in plants and animals. For example, we know that as a rule self-fertilization is avoided among Phanerogams, that numerous complicated arrangements exist in the flowers to prevent its occurrence, and that even the very existence of many flowers depends on the fact that cross-fertilization by the agency of insects is an advantage. This presupposes that self-fertilization is always possible, and that it would always be less advantageous in these cases. But neither of these suppositions is universally true:—all degrees of sensitiveness to self-pollination exist. Many orchids which are in every respect adapted for cross-fertilization by insects, have proved to be fully fertile with their own pollen; others, on the other hand, like Corydalis cava, which could very easily effect self-pollination, are quite unfruitful with their own pollen: in contrast to these, again, we have cleistogamic flowers, which never open, and consequently are designed for self-fertilization only. Most striking of all, however, is the varying sensitiveness for minute differences of stimulus in the case of dimorphic and trimorphic flowers, which are so


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Page:The Effect of External Influences upon Development.djvu/56

52 adjusted that self-fertilization never occurs, and only the pollen from another flower of different form can successfully effect fertilization. Here, again, we seem to have an insight into the means by which this adaptation has been brought about: the pollen-grains are of different diameters, and the length of the pollen-tubes to which they give rise corresponds to that of the style of another form of flower. In most other cases we are as yet unable to observe the mechanism of sensitiveness, which is usually of a much finer kind. But a mechanism it must always be, and it can only have originated on the one principle with which we are acquainted in connexion with the origin of adaptations,—viz. by selection, based on individual variation.

Many more facts could be brought forward to illustrate the subject of the present lecture, but I fear that the numerous details I have been obliged to give may have already exhausted your patience, and lessened your interest in the general conclusions to which they lead. I will therefore conclude with a brief summary of my remarks.

It has long been recognized that external influences serve to stimulate the functions of the body, and I have attempted to show that in a great number of cases they also act in another and less apparent manner. They are used—so to speak—by nature to regulate in a purposeful manner the appearance of the various forms which members of a species may take. The germ must thus contain all the primary constituents (Anlagen) of these different forms; and a stimulus-produced by the kind of food, by light, by warmth, or by some other


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466 character of both Glen and Frederic, to remain entirely untouched by disquietude, concerning what those two fiery youths might now be plotting against him, as the imagined monster, by whose infernal tricks Lucy Tartan was supposed to have been seduced from every earthly seemliness. Not happily, but only so much the more gloomily, did he augur from the fact, that Mrs. Tartan had come to Lucy unattended; and that Glen and Frederic had let eight-and-forty hours and more go by, without giving the slightest hostile or neutral sign. At first he thought, that bridling their impulsive fierceness, they were resolved to take the slower, but perhaps the surer method, to wrest Lucy back to them, by instituting some legal process. But this idea was repulsed by more than one consideration.

Not only was Frederic of that sort of temper, peculiar to military men, which would prompt him, in so closely personal and intensely private and family a matter, to scorn the hireling publicity of the law's lingering arm; and impel him, as by the furiousness of fire, to be his own righter and avenger; for, in him, it was perhaps quite as much the feeling of an outrageous family affront to himself, through Lucy, as her own presumed separate wrong, however black, which stung him to the quick: not only were these things so respecting Frederic; but concerning Glen, Pierre well knew, that be Glen heartless as he might, to do a deed of love, Glen was not heartless to do a deed of hate; that though, on that memorable night of his arrival in the city, Glen had heartlessly closed his door upon him, yet now Glen might heartfully burst Pierre's open, if by that he at all believed, that permanent success would crown the fray.

Besides, Pierre knew this;—that so invincible is the natural, untamable, latent spirit of a courageous manliness in man, that though now socially educated for

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Rh external influence—serves sooner or later to start the development of one kind or of another, as well as to decide which kind it shall be. Various degrees of difference may exist amongst these forms; they may refer merely to the colouration and marking—as in cases of the adaptive seasonal dimorphism which I have attempted to show probably occurs in caterpillars and butterflies,—or they may be so considerable as those which exist between the castes of state-forming insects.

External influences are in none of these cases the actual cause of the differences; they merely play the part of the stimulus that decides which of the primary constituents shall undergo development. The actual cause of these individual dissimilarities is in all cases to be sought in the preformed modifications occurring amongst the primary constituents of the organism itself; and such modifications, as they are always purposeful, can only have originated by selection. Even when to all appearance external influences have had a direct action in causing purposeful modification, a more careful examination of the case in point will always show that in reality they have only served to incite into activity some preformed adaptation. This is shown in a specially conclusive manner by the consideration of sterility in the workers of bees and ants. The sterility is not due to poor nourishment, but to the presence in the egg, owing to selection, of the primary constituents of a rudimentary ovary as well as those of a perfect one, the former undergoing development when the young larva is less richly nourished. Poorer food serves as the impulse which starts their development.


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Rh thousands of years in an arbitrary homage to the Law, as the one only appointed redress for every injured person; yet immemorially and universally, among all gentlemen of spirit, once to have uttered independent personal threats of personal vengeance against your foe, and then, after that, to fall back slinking into a court, and hire with sops a pack of yelping pettifoggers to fight the battle so valiantly proclaimed; this, on the surface, is ever deemed very decorous, and very prudent—a most wise second thought; but, at bottom, a miserably ignoble thing. Frederic was not the watery man for that,—Glen had more grapey blood in him.

Moreover, it seemed quite clear to Pierre, that only by making out Lucy absolutely mad, and striving to prove it by a thousand despicable little particulars, could the law succeed in tearing her from the refuge she had voluntarily sought; a course equally abhorrent to all the parties possibly to be concerned on either side.

What, then, would those two boiling bloods do? Perhaps they would patrol the streets; and at the first glimpse of lonely Lucy, kidnap her home. Or if Pierre were with her, then, smite him down by hook or crook, fair play or foul; and then, away with Lucy! Or if Lucy systematically kept her room, then fall on Pierre in the most public way, fell him, and cover him from all decent recognition beneath heaps on heaps of hate and insult; so that broken on the wheel of such dishonour, Pierre might feel himself unstrung, and basely yield the prize.

Not the gibbering of ghosts in any old haunted house; no sulphurous and portentous sign at night beheld in heaven, will so make the hair to stand, as when a proud and honourable man is revolving in his soul the possibilities of some gross public and corporeal disgrace. It is not fear; it is a pride-horror, which is more terrible

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 This case is of additional interest as it may serve to convince those Naturalists who are still inclined to maintain that acquired characters are inherited and to support the Lamarckian principle of development, that their view cannot be the right one. It has not proved tenable in a single instance—not even in the particular case on which so much stress has been laid by one of the recent advocates of this doctrine.

The facts here brought forward, as well as the interpretation of them at which I have arrived, confirm me more strongly than ever in the belief that selection is the all-sufficient principle on which the development of the organic world has been guided on its course.


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 Oxford

HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY


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468 than any fear. Then, by tremendous imagery, the murderer's mark of Cain is felt burning on the brow, and the already acquitted knife blood-rusts in the clutch of the anticipating hand.

Certain that those two youths must be plotting something furious against him; with the echoes of their scorning curses on the stairs still ringing in his ears—curses, whose swift responses from himself, he, at the time, had had much ado to check;—thoroughly alive to the supernaturalism of that mad frothing hate which a spirited brother forks forth at the insulter of a sister's honour—beyond doubt the most uncompromising of all the social passions known to man—and not blind to the anomalous fact, that if such a brother stab his foe at his own mother's table, all people and all juries would bear him out, accounting everything allowable to a noble soul made mad by a sweet sister's shame caused by a damned seducer;—imagining to himself his own feelings, if he were actually in the position which Frederic so vividly fancied to be his; remembering that in love matters jealousy is as an adder, and that the jealousy of Glen was double-addered by the extraordinary malice of the apparent circumstances under which Lucy had spurned Glen's arms, and fled to his always successful and now married rival, as if wantonly and shamelessly to nestle there;—remembering all these intense incitements of both those foes of his, Pierre could not but look forward to wild work very soon to come. Nor was the storm of passion in his soul unratified by the decision of his coolest possible hour. Storm and calm both said to him,—Look to thyself, oh Pierre!

Murders are done by maniacs; but the earnest thoughts of murder, these are the collected desperadoes. Pierre was such; fate, or what you will, had made him such. But such he was. And when these things now swam

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Rh before him; when he thought of all the ambiguities which hemmed him in; the stony walls all round that he could not overleap; the million aggravations of his most malicious lot; the last lingering hope of happiness licked up from him as by flames of fire, and his one only prospect a black, bottomless gulf of guilt, upon whose verge he imminently teetered every hour;—then the utmost hate of Glen and Frederic were jubilantly welcome to him; and murder, done in the act of warding off their ignominious public blow, seemed the one only congenial sequel to such a desperate career.

III

As a statue, planted on a revolving pedestal, shows now this limb, now that; now front, now back, now side; continually changing, too, its general profile; so does the pivoted, statued soul of man, when turned by the hand of Truth. Lies only never vary; look for no invariableness in Pierre. Nor does any canting showman here stand by to announce his phases as he revolves. Catch his phases as your insight may.

Another day passed on; Glen and Frederic still absenting themselves, and Pierre and Isabel and Lucy all dwelling together. The domestic presence of Lucy had begun to produce a remarkable effect upon Pierre. Sometimes, to the covertly watchful eye of Isabel, he would seem to look upon Lucy with an expression illy befitting their singular and so-supposed merely cousinly relation; and yet again, with another expression still more unaccountable to her,—one of fear and awe, not unmixed with impatience. But his general detailed manner toward Lucy was that of the most delicate and affectionate considerateness—nothing more. He was never alone with her; though, as before, at times alone with Isabel.

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470 Lucy seemed entirely undesirous of usurping any place about him; manifested no slightest unwelcome curiosity as to Pierre, and no painful embarrassment as to Isabel. Nevertheless, more and more did she seem, hour by hour, to be somehow inexplicably sliding between them, without touching them. Pierre felt that some strange heavenly influence was near him, to keep him from some uttermost harm; Isabel was alive to some untraceable displacing agency. Though when all three were together, the marvellous serenity, and sweetness, and utter unsuspectingness of Lucy obviated anything like a common embarrassment: yet if there was any embarrassment at all beneath that roof, it was sometimes when Pierre was alone with Isabel, after Lucy would innocently quit them.

Meantime Pierre was still going on with his book; every moment becoming still the more sensible of the intensely inauspicious circumstances of all sorts under which that labour was proceeding. And as the now advancing and concentring enterprise demanded more and more compacted vigour from him, he felt that he was having less and less to bring to it. For not only was it the signal misery of Pierre, to be invisibly—though but accidentally—goaded, in the hour of mental immaturity, to the attempt at a mature work,—a circumstance sufficiently lamentable in itself; but also, in the hour of his clamorous pennilessness, he was additionally goaded into an enterprise long and protracted in the execution, and of all things least calculated for pecuniary profit in the end. How these things were so, whence they originated, might be thoroughly and very beneficially explained; but space and time here forbid.

At length, domestic matters—rent and bread—had come to such a pass with him, that whether or no, the first pages must go to the printer; and thus was added still another tribulation; because the printed pages now

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Rh dictated to the following manuscript, and said to all subsequent thoughts and inventions of Pierre—Thus and thus; so and so; else an ill match. Therefore, was his book already limited, bound over, and committed to imperfection, even before it had come to any confirmed form or conclusion at all. Oh, who shall reveal the horrors of poverty in authorship that is high? While the silly Millthorpe was railing against his delay of a few weeks and months; how bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart, that to most of the great works of humanity, their authors had given, not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated lives. On either hand clung to by a girl who would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from anything divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as at the Pole.

And the great woe of all was this: that all these things were unsuspected without, and undivulgible from within; the very daggers that stabbed him were joked at by Imbecility, Ignorance, Blockheadedness, Self-Complacency, and the universal Blearedness and Besottedness around him. Now he began to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate. He felt as a moose, hamstrung. All things that think, or move, or lie still, seemed as created to mock and torment him. He seemed gifted with loftiness, merely that it might be dragged down to the mud. Still, the profound wilfulness in him would not give up. Against the breaking heart, and the bursting head; against all the dismal lassitude, and deathful faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness, and craziness, still he like a demi-god bore up. His soul's ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous

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472 wreck. Now he gave jeer for jeer, and taunted the apes that jibed him. With the soul of an Atheist, he wrote down the godliest things; with the feeling of death and misery in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And everything else he disguised under the so conveniently adjustable drapery of all-stretchable Philosophy. For the more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations; nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself. The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest. So beforehand he despised those laurels which in the very nature of things, can never be impartially bestowed. But while thus all the earth was depopulated of ambition for him; still circumstances had put him in the attitude of an eager contender for renown. So beforehand he felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures, equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So beforehand he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole infinite company of infinitesimal critics. His was the scorn which thinks it not worth the while to be scornful. Those he most scorned, never knew it. In that lonely little closet of his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or dispraise; and thus

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Rh both goblets, anticipatingly hurled them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism of any sort, would come too late for Pierre.

But man does never give himself up thus, a doorless and shutterless house for the four loosened winds of heaven to howl through, without still additional dilapidations. Much oftener than before, Pierre laid back in his chair with the deadly feeling of faintness. Much oftener than before, came staggering home from his evening walk, and from sheer bodily exhaustion economised the breath that answered the anxious inquiries as to what might be done for him. And as if all the leagued spiritual inveteracies and malices, combined with his general bodily exhaustion, were not enough, a special corporeal affliction now descended like a sky-hawk upon him. His incessant application told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening them wide to the light. Through the lashes he peered upon the paper, which so seemed fretted with wires. Sometimes he blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper;—thus unconsciously symbolising the hostile necessity and distaste, the former whereof made of him this most unwilling states-prisoner of letters.

As every evening, after his day's writing was done, the proofs of the beginning of his work came home for correction, Isabel would read them to him. They were replete with errors; but preoccupied by the thronging and undiluted, pure imaginings of things, he became impatient of such minute, gnat-like torments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished to the entomological critics.

But at last he received a tremendous interior intimation, to hold off—to be still from his unnatural struggle.

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474 In the earlier progress of his book, he had found some relief in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfare of the city; that so, the utter isolation of his soul, might feel itself the more intensely from the incessant jogglings of his body against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights, than pleasant ones; for then, the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners' broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ships' blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempests through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark, triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive peltings of hailstones,—striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body,—melted into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled from off him.

By and by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the dark, narrow side-streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious tap-rooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half-pint of ale before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from the bitterest midnights.

But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him. Among these he had now been accustomed to wind in and out every evening; till one night as he paused a moment previous to turning about for home, a sudden, unwonted, and all-pervading sensation seized him. He knew not where he was; he did not have any ordinary life-feeling at all. He could not

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NOTE I (p. 9).

movements of the leaves of tropical Leguminosae had previously been studied by others—we may mention in particular the admirable investigations of Charles and Francis Darwin—but a definite explanation of their biological significance has only been arrived at through the most recent researches, carried out in the tropics and under the natural conditions of life of the plants. A visit to the botanical station at Buitenzorg, in Java, enabled Stahl and Haberlandt to shed some new light on the subject, and to show that the closing and erecting of the feather-like leaves of these plants is essentially connected with a proportionate diminution of the force of the tropical showers of rain, as well as with the regulation of the amount of light that falls upon them; for the more they are exposed to the sun the more do they become directed upwards, until eventually they close completely. This is at any rate the case in numerous other tropical Leguminosae, in which it is not the impulse of touch which starts the movement, but a certain intensity of the light:—the closing of the leaves here serves as a protection not only from the rain, but also from the excessive effects of the sun's rays. The leaves of these plants close when the light is strong, as well as when it is not so, and in the latter case the adaptation is looked upon by Haberlandt as an arrangement which causes the closing of the leaves even before the rain begins, when the sky is usually considerably clouded over. Compare Stahl, 'Regenfall u. Blattgestalt.; ein


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Rh see; though instinctively putting his hand to his eyes, he seemed to feel that the lids were open. Then he was sensible of a combined blindness, and vertigo, and staggering; before his eyes a million green meteors danced; he felt his foot tottering upon the curb, he put out his hands, and knew no more for the time. When he came to himself he found that he was lying crosswise in the gutter, dabbled with mud and slime. He raised himself to try if he could stand; but the fit was entirely gone. Immediately he quickened his steps homeward, forbearing to rest or pause at all on the way, lest that rush of blood to his head, consequent upon his sudden cessation from walking, should again smite him down. This circumstance warned him away from those desolate streets, lest the repetition of the fit should leave him there to perish by night in unknown and unsuspected loneliness. But if that terrible vertigo had been also intended for another and deeper warning, he regarded such added warning not at all; but again plied heart and brain as before.

But now at last since the very blood in his body had in vain rebelled against his Titanic soul; now the only visible outward symbols of that soul—his eyes—did also turn downright traitors to him, and with more success than the rebellious blood. He had abused them so recklessly, that now they absolutely refused to look on paper. He turned them on paper, and they blinked and shut. The pupils of his eyes rolled away from him in their own orbits. He put his hand up to them, and sat back in his seat. Then, without saying one word, he continued there for his usual term, suspended, motionless, blank.

But next morning—it was some few days after the arrival of Lucy—still feeling that a certain downright infatuation, and no less, is both unavoidable and

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56 Beitrag zur Pflanzenbiologie.' Extract du Jardin Botanique de Buitenzorg, vol xi., 1893; and Haberlandt, Eine botanische Tropenreise, Leipzig, 1893, pp. 112 and 113.

NOTE II (p. 11).

The matter is, if possible, still clearer in the case of geotropism, for there is no doubt that the habit of the plant to react in some particular way to the force of gravity cannot be a general and primary peculiarity of plants. A Volvox colony, rotating freely in water, is in a sense a living klinostat, uninfluenced by the attraction of the earth. The geotropic sensitiveness of plants can only have arisen when they became attached to the ground, and may therefore, even in its most general form, be regarded as an adaptation. This becomes much more evident when we consider that the various parts of existing plants have totally different susceptibilities to the stimulus of gravity: not only may the root be positively geotropic, while the stem is negatively geotropic, but each of the secondary roots and of the branches passes off at a perfectly definite angle from the primary root and stem, and this angle is due, at least to a certain extent, to a reaction to the stimulus of gravity. Thus the geotropic sensitiveness of plants, just like the sensitiveness of their different parts to light, may manifest itself in opposite manners; and—what is still more noteworthy—the sensitiveness is specially regulated for every part in such a way that the plant is enabled to adapt itself most advantageously to its different conditions. But a mode of reaction which responds very differently to the same stimulus cannot be originally or primarily characteristic of the plant: it cannot always have been possessed by all plants, but is due to an adaptation in connexion with the fixed condition of these organisms. The delicate 'molecular' structure, to which this wonderful sensitiveness is to be referred, cannot depend upon the direct action of external stimuli, but only on their indirect influence, i.e. on processes of selection.


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476 in the composition of any great, deep book, or even any wholly unsuccessful attempt at any great, deep book; next morning he returned to the charge. But again the pupils of his eyes rolled away from him in their orbits: and now a general and nameless torpor—some horrible foretaste of death itself—seemed stealing upon him.

IV

During this state of semi-unconsciousness, or rather trance, a remarkable dream or vision came to him. The actual artificial objects around him slid from him, and were replaced by a baseless yet most imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But though a baseless vision in itself, this airy spectacle assumed very familiar features to Pierre. It was the phantasmagoria of the Mount of the Titans, a singular height standing quite detached in a wide solitude not far from the grand range of dark blue hills encircling his ancestral manor.

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood. Thus a high-aspiring, but most moody, disappointed bard, chancing once to visit the Meadows and beholding that fine eminence, christened it by the name it ever after bore; completely extinguishing its former title—The Delectable Mountain—one long ago bestowed by an old Baptist farmer, an hereditary admirer of Bunyan and his most marvellous book. From the spell of that name the mountain never afterward escaped; for now, gazing upon it by the light of those suggestive syllables, no poetical observer could resist the apparent felicity of the title. For as if indeed the immemorial mount would

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Rh fain adapt itself to its so recent name, some people said that it had insensibly changed its pervading aspect within a score or two of winters. Nor was this strange conceit entirely without foundation, seeing that the annual displacements of huge rocks and gigantic trees were continually modifying its whole front and general contour.

On the north side, where it fronted the old manor-house, some fifteen miles distant, the height, viewed from the piazza of a soft haze-canopied summer's noon, presented a long and beautiful, but not entirely inaccessible-looking purple precipice, some two thousand feet in air, and on each hand sideways sloping down to lofty terraces of pastures.

Those hillside pastures, be it said, were thickly sown with a small white amaranthine flower, which, being irreconcilably distasteful to the cattle, and wholly rejected by them, and yet, continually multiplying on every hand, did by no means contribute to the agricultural value of those elevated lands. Insomuch, that for this cause, the disheartened dairy tenants of that part of the manor, had petitioned their lady-landlord for some abatement in their annual tribute of upland grasses, in the Juny-load; rolls of butter in the October crock; and steers and heifers on the October hoof; with turkeys in the Christmas sleigh.

'The small white flower, it is our bane!' the imploring tenants cried. 'The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this! The terraced pastures grow glittering white, and in warm June still show like banks of snow:—fit token of the sterileness the amaranth begets! Then free us from the amaranth, good lady, or be pleased to abate our rent!'

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478 Now, on a somewhat nearer approach, the precipice did not belie its purple promise from the manorial piazza—that sweet imposing purple promise, which seemed fully to vindicate the Bunyanish old title originally bestowed;—but showed the profuse aerial foliage of a hanging forest. Nevertheless, coming still more nigh, long and frequent rents among the mass of leaves revealed horrible glimpses of dark-dripping rocks, and mysterious mouths of wolfish caves. Struck by this most unanticipated view, the tourist now quickened his impulsive steps to verify the change by coming into direct contact with so chameleon a height. As he would now speed on, the lower ground, which from the manor-house piazza seemed all a grassy level, suddenly merged into a very long and weary acclivity, slowly rising close up to the precipice's base; so that the efflorescent grasses rippled against it, as the efflorescent waves of some great swell or long rolling billow ripple against the water-line of a steep gigantic warship on the sea. And, as among the rolling sea-like sands of Egypt, disordered rows of broken Sphinxes lead to the Cheopian pyramid itself; so this long acclivity was thickly strewn with enormous rocky masses, grotesque in shape, and with wonderful features on them, which seemed to express that slumbering intelligence visible in some recumbent beasts—beasts whose intelligence seems struck dumb in them by some sorrowful and inexplicable spell. Nevertheless, round and round those still enchanted rocks, hard by their utmost rims, and in among their cunning crevices, the misanthropic hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest food; for the rocks, so barren in themselves, distilled a subtile moisture, which fed with greenness all things that grew about their igneous marge.

Quitting those recumbent rocks, you still ascended toward the hanging forest, and piercing within its lower-most fringe, then suddenly you stood transfixed, as a

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Rh marching soldier confounded at the sight of an impregnable redoubt, where he had fancied it a practicable vault to his courageous thews. Cunningly masked hitherto, by the green tapestry of the interlacing leaves, a terrific towering palisade of dark mossy massiness confronted you; and, trickling with unevaporable moisture, distilled upon you from its beetling brow slow thunder-showers of water-drops, chill as the last dews of death. Now you stood and shivered in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning August down the meads. All round and round, the grim scarred rocks rallied and re-rallied themselves; shot up, protruded, stretched, swelled, and eagerly reached forth; on every side bristlingly radiating with a hideous repellingness. Tossed, and piled, and indiscriminate among these, like bridging rifts of logs up-jammed in alluvial-rushing streams of far Arkansas: or, like great masts and yards of overwhelmed fleets hurled high and dashed amain, all splintering together, on hovering ridges of the Atlantic sea,—you saw the melancholy trophies which the North Wind, championing the unquenchable quarrel of the Winter, had wrested from the forests, and dismembered them on their own chosen battle-ground, in barbarous disdain. 'Mid this spectacle of wide and wanton spoil, insular noises of falling rocks would boomingly explode upon the silence and fright all the echoes, which ran shrieking in and out among the caves, as wailing women and children in some assaulted town.

Stark desolation; ruin, merciless and ceaseless; chills and gloom,—all here lived a hidden life, curtained by that cunning purpleness, which, from the piazza of the manor-house, so beautifully invested the mountain once called Delectable, but now styled Titanic.

Beaten off by such undreamed-of glooms and steeps, you now sadly retraced your steps, and, mayhap, went

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480 skirting the inferior sideway terraces of pastures; where the multiple and most sterile inodorous immortalness of the small, white flower furnished no aliment for the mild cow's meditative cud. But here and there you still might smell from far the sweet aromaticness of clumps of catnip, that dear farm-house herb. Soon you would see the modest verdure of the plant itself; and wheresoever you saw that sight, old foundation stones and rotting timbers of log-houses long extinct would also meet your eye; their desolation illy hid by the green solicitudes of the unemigrating herb. Most fitly named the catnip; since, like the unrunagate cat, though all that's human forsake the place, that plant will long abide, long bask and bloom on the abandoned hearth. Illy hid; for every spring the amaranthine and celestial flower gained on the mortal household herb; for every autumn the catnip died, but never an autumn made the amaranth to wane. The catnip and the amaranth!—man's earthly household peace, and the ever-encroaching appetite for God.

No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt, but took your way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic height. In mid field again you paused among the recumbent sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with upborne moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at him;—turbaned with upborne moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl.

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Rh To Pierre this wondrous shape had always been a thing of interest, though hitherto all its latent significance had never fully and intelligibly smitten him. In his earlier boyhood a strolling company of young collegian pedestrians had chanced to light upon the rock; and, struck with its remarkableness, had brought a score of picks and spades, and dug round it to unearth it, and find whether indeed it were a demoniac freak of nature, or some stern thing of antediluvian art. Accompanying this eager party, Pierre first beheld that deathless son of Terra. At that time, in its untouched natural state, the statue presented nothing but the turbaned head of igneous rock rising from out the soil, with its unabasable face turned upward toward the mountain, and the bull-like neck clearly defined. With distorted features, scarred and broken, and a black brow mocked by the upborne moss, Enceladus there subterraneously stood, fast frozen into the earth at the junction of the neck. Spades and picks soon heaved part of his Ossa from him, till at last a circular well was opened round him to the depth of some thirteen feet. At that point the wearied young collegians gave over their enterprise in despair. With all their toil, they had not yet come to the girdle of Enceladus. But they had bared good part of his mighty chest, and exposed his mutilated shoulders, and the stumps of his once audacious arms. Thus far uncovering his shame, in that cruel plight they had abandoned him, leaving stark naked his in vain indignant chest to the defilements of the birds, which for untold ages had cast their foulness on his vanquished crest.

Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan, wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush, in elemental rivalry with those Etna

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482 flames, of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding from the broken bronze;—not unworthy to be compared with that bold trophy of high art, this American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure moulded by the inferior skill of man. Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenceless; but Nature, more truthful, performed an amputation, and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh.

Such was the wild scenery—the Mount of Titans, and the repulsed group of heaven-assaulters, with Enceladus in their midst shamefully recumbent at its base;—such was the wild scenery, which now to Pierre, in his strange vision, displaced the four blank walls, the desk, and camp-bed, and domineered upon his trance. But no longer petrified in all their ignominious attitudes, the herded Titans now sprung to their feet; flung themselves up the slope; and anew battered at the precipice's unresounding wall. Foremost among them all, he saw a moss-turbaned, armless giant, who despairing of any other mode of wreaking his immitigable hate, turned his vast trunk into a battering-ram, and hurled his own arched-out ribs again and yet again against the invulnerable steep.

'Enceladus! it is Enceladus!' Pierre cried out in his sleep. That moment the phantom faced him; and Pierre saw Enceladus no more; but on the Titan's armless trunk, his own duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with prophetic discomfiture and woe. With trembling frame he started from his chair, and woke from that ideal horror to all his actual grief.

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Rh V

Nor did Pierre's random knowledge of the ancient fables fail still further to elucidate the vision which so strangely had supplied a tongue to muteness. But that elucidation was most repulsively fateful and foreboding; possibly because Pierre did not leap the final barrier of gloom; possibly because Pierre did not wilfully wrest some final comfort from the fable; did not flog this stubborn rock as Moses his, and force even aridity itself to quench his painful thirst.

Thus smitten, the Mount of Titans seems to yield this following stream:—

Old Titan's self was the son of incestuous Coelus and Terra, the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married his mother Terra, another and accumulatively incestuous match. And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both the son and grandson of an incest; and even thus, there had been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again, by its terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother, generated there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so that the present mood of Pierre—that reckless sky-assaulting mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the sky. For it is according to eternal fitness, that the precipitated Titan should still seek to regain his paternal birthright even by fierce escalade. Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in the moat before that crystal fort, shows it was born within that slime, and there forever will abide.

Recovered somewhat from the after-spell of this wild vision folded in his trance, Pierre composed his front as

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484 best he might, and straightway left his fatal closet. Concentrating all the remaining stuff in him, he resolved by an entire and violent change, and by a wilful act against his own most habitual inclinations, to wrestle with the strange malady of his eyes, this new death-fiend of the trance, and this Inferno of his Titanic vision.

And now, just as he crossed the threshold of the closet, he writhingly strove to assume an expression intended to be not uncheerful—though how indeed his countenance at all looked, he could not tell; for dreading some insupportably dark revealments in his glass, he had of late wholly abstained from appealing to it—and in his mind he rapidly conned over, what indifferent, disguising, or light-hearted gamesome things he should say, when proposing to his companions the little design he cherished.

And even so, to grim Enceladus, the world the gods had chained for a ball to drag at his o'erfreighted feet;—even so that globe put forth a thousand flowers, whose fragile smiles disguised his ponderous load.

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 BOOK XXVI

A WALK: A FOREIGN PORTRAIT: A SAIL: AND THE END

I

', Isabel, come, Lucy; we have not had a single walk together yet. It is cold, but clear; and once out of the city, we shall find it sunny. Come: get ready now, and away for a stroll down to the wharf, and then for some of the steamers on the bay. No doubt, Lucy, you will find in the bay scenery some hints for that secret sketch you are so busily occupied with—ere real living sitters do come—and which you so devotedly work at, all alone and behind closed doors.'

Upon this, Lucy's original look of pale-rippling pleasantness and surprise—evoked by Pierre's unforeseen proposition to give himself some relaxation—changed into one of infinite, mute, but unrenderable meaning, while her swimming eyes gently, yet all-bewildered, fell to the floor.

'It is finished, then,' cried Isabel,—not unmindful of this by-scene, and passionately stepping forward so as to intercept Pierre's momentary rapt glance at the agitated Lucy,—'That vile book, it is finished!—Thank heaven!'

'Not so,' said Pierre; and, displacing all disguisements, a hectic unsummoned expression suddenly came to his face;—'but ere that vile book be finished, I must get on some other element than earth. I have sat on earth's saddle till I am weary; I must now vault over to the other saddle awhile. Oh, seems to me, there should be two ceaseless steeds for a bold man to 5em

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486 Land and the Sea; and like circus-men we should never dismount, but only be steadied and rested by leaping from one to the other, while still, side by side, they both race round the sun. I have been on the Land steed so long, oh I am dizzy!'

'Thou wilt never listen to me, Pierre,' said Lucy lowly; 'there is no need of this incessant straining. See, Isabel and I have both offered to be thy amanuenses;—not in mere copying, but in the original writing; I am sure that would greatly assist thee.'

'Impossible! I fight a duel in which all seconds are forbid.'

'Ah Pierre! Pierre!' cried Lucy, dropping the shawl in her hand, and gazing at him with unspeakable longings of some unfathomable emotion.

Namelessly glancing at Lucy, Isabel slid near to him, seized his hand and spoke.

'I would go blind for thee, Pierre; here, take out these eyes, and use them for glasses.' So saying, she looked with a strange momentary haughtiness and defiance at Lucy.

A general half-involuntary movement was now made, as if they were about to depart.

'Ye are ready; go ye before,' said Lucy meekly; 'I will follow.'

'Nay, one on each arm,' said Pierre—'come!'

As they passed through the low arched vestibule into the street, a cheek-burnt, gamesome sailor passing, exclaimed, 'Steer small, my lad; 'tis a narrow strait thou art in!'

'What says he?' said Lucy gently. 'Yes, it is a narrow strait of a street indeed.'

But Pierre felt a sudden tremble transferred to him from Isabel, who whispered something inarticulate in his ear.

Gaining one of the thoroughfares, they drew near to a

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Rh conspicuous placard over a door, announcing that above-stairs was a gallery of paintings, recently imported from Europe, and now on free exhibition preparatory to their sale by auction. Though this encounter had been entirely unforeseen by Pierre, yet yielding to the sudden impulse, he at once proposed their visiting the pictures. The girls assented, and they ascended the stairs.

In the anteroom, a catalogue was put into his hand. He paused to give one hurried, comprehensive glance at it. Among long columns of such names as Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino, Da Vinci, all shamelessly prefaced with the words 'undoubted,' or 'testified,' Pierre met the following brief line:—'No. 99. A stranger's head, by an unknown hand.'

It seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those wretched imported daubs, which with the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of the foreign picture-dealers in America, were christened by the loftiest names known to Art. But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections of antiquity are not unworthy the student's attention, neither are the most bungling modern incompletenesses: for both are torsoes; one of perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet unfulfilled perfections in the future. Still, as Pierre walked along by the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the attempted execution by feeble hand of vigorous themes; he could not repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself. All the walls of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller and humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were by far the best executed; but these, though touching him not unpleasingly, in one restricted sense, awoke no dormant

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488 majesties in his soul, and therefore, upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory.

At last Pierre and Isabel came to that painting of which Pierre was capriciously in search—No. 99.

'My God! see! see!' cried Isabel, under strong excitement, 'only my mirror has ever shown me that look before! See! see!'

By some mere hocus-pocus of chance, or subtly designing knavery, a real Italian gem of art had found its way into this most hybrid collection of impostures.

No one who has passed through the great galleries of Europe, unbewildered by then-wonderful multitudinousness of surpassing excellence—a redundancy which neutralises all discrimination or individualising capacity in most ordinary minds—no calm, penetrative person can have victoriously run that painted gauntlet of the gods, without certain very special emotions, called forth by some one or more individual paintings, to which, however, both the catalogues and the criticisms of the greatest connoisseurs deny any all-transcending merit, at all answering to the effect thus casually produced. There is no time now to show fully how this is; suffice it, that in such instances, it is not the abstract excellence always, but often the accidental congeniality, which occasions this wonderful emotion. Still, the individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause; hence, the head-long enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men for things not at all praised by—or at most, which are indifferent to—the rest of the world;—a matter so often considered inexplicable.

But in this Stranger's Head by the Unknown Hand, the abstract general excellence united with the all-surprising, accidental congeniality in producing an accumulated impression of power upon both Pierre and Isabel. Nor was the strangeness of this at all impaired by the

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Reed Anthony, Cowman

 * In Retrospect
 * My Apprenticeship
 * A Second Trip To Port Sumner
 * A Fatal Trip
 * Summer Of '68
 * Sowing Wild Oats
 * "The Angel"
 * The "Lazy L"
 * The School Of Experience
 * The Panic Of '73
 * A Prosperous Year
 * Clear Fork And Shenandoah
 * The Centennial Year
 * Establishing A New Ranch
 * Harvest Home
 * An Active Summer
 * Foreshadows
 * The Beginning Of The Boom
 * The Cheyenne And Arapahoe Cattle Company
 * Holding The Fort
 * The Fruits Of Conspiracy
 * In Conclusion

title: Reed Anthony, Cowman