The Shining Pyramid (collection)/The Martyr

All progressive and advanced thinkers must have heard with great regret of the death of Charles Hexton, for so many years editor and director of the Materialist. Hexton was not an old man, and up to a week or two of the end his friends had always spoken of him as the incarnation of health and vigour and energy; they were horrified at the sudden change which took place in a few days; at the terrible emaciation which seemed to transform the "Hearty Hexton" of his Old-street associates with a feeble and tottering invalid. It became known at last that he was unable to take any nourishment, and it was felt that under such circumstances there could be but little hope. He was delirious for some hours before his death, and his niece says that denunciation of clericalism and superstition were oddly mixed with broken phrases about roast beef, potatoes, and bottled beer.

The fact is that Hexton died a martyr to the consistency of his principles. He was always thorough, he never shrank from carrying out his premises to their logical conclusions, however ridiculous the results might seem to minds out of sympathy with his aim; and the last weeks of his life were a crowning testimony to the great cause of which he was a devoted leader. It may be worth while to tell the story of the end of a great career.

Hexton, of course, had parted from superstition at an early age. Mrs. Besant has told us how her infant's severe stomach-ache demonstrated to her the falsity and absurdity of Christian dogma; and in the same way Hexton, finding that he suffered some gastric inconvenience from eating a box of cough lozenges, became a Freethinker at the age of ten. "I was logical even then," he said afterwards, "and I saw that the theory of a benevolent direction of the Universe was quite inconsistent with the bilious attack from which I suffered. From that moment I laboured to release my fellow creatures from the bondage of a cruel and degrading superstition." He became, indeed, a redoubtable enemy of clericalism in all its forms; he was a power in the press and on the platform, and obscurantists and reactionaries of all shades dreaded his undoubted influence.

It was some six or seven weeks before his death that he set about a task which had long been in his mind—the writing of a brief pamphlet which should show at a glance the absurdity of all superstitious beliefs and practices, and at the same time furnish a test or criterion by which the presence of superstition should be infallibly detected. He meant to run over the usual topics; but in the first place he wished to demonstrate the palpable futility of the arguments on the other side. These were the appeal to antiquity, to universal consent and usage, to great names, to instinct, and so forth; and then he was to show how utterly irrational all superstition was, how there was usually no connection between the supposed cause and the supposed effect. Next, he would point out that if the "out works" of any system were absurd, it was highly probable that the "citadel," or central position, was absurd also; and further, he would note how superstitious notions and habits flourished chiefly among ignorant, backward races, among children, and among the men of the middle ages, who were childish in all their ideas. He must show also that we were bound to reject any system, any action which did not lead to a distinct material good.

"For [he jotted down among his notes] even the Bishops would not deny that we are material and live in a material Universe. This being so, anything which conflicts with these conditions, must be profoundly absurd and (in the true sense) immoral. It is evident then that a creed which leads to a man being burned alive must be a very bad and a very foolish creed. Martyrdom is the true blasphemy."

Hexton had reached this point in the rough sketch of his treatise, when a sudden thought shot through his brain "like a lightning flash." He was as a man stunned; he could not move or speak; he was overwhelmed with the discovery that he had made. When he was able to reflect calmly he knew that a most astounding truth had been revealed to him. He never wrote the intended pamphlet; but the manuscript of his last work—"Deipnomoria, or the Folly of Dining"—is before me.

It shows in the first place that it is monstrous to defend the habit of eating and drinking because "everybody did it." At one time "everybody" heard Mass. Equally idle was it to quote the names of great men in praise of food and drink; great men had approved the most hideous habits, and the most preposterous beliefs. It was not necessary to argue the pretence that persons received any benefit from the insane orgy they called dinner. Other persons were ready to protest that they had received benefit from bathing in "Holy Wells," from kissing the mouldering bones of a dead man, from uttering irrational formulæ called prayers.

As for the plea of antiquity, Hexton expressed his surprise that such a plea could be put forward for a moment. This was the plea that had been advanced in favour of every abuse, of every folly, of every monstrosity of thought or practice of which the human race had been guilty—the fact of this defence being made was in itself à priori evidence that the case was past defending. Men had been eating and drinking for countless ages? Certainly; and they had been committing many other disgusting, irrational, criminal, useless and offensive actions for countless ages. The very antiquity of beef and beer, walnuts and water, was a strong presumption against them. Astrology was one of the oldest beliefs in the world, and its antiquity was a sure argument of its absurdity.

Then, some people would say that they felt they must have something to eat and drink. A Chinaman would tell the same tale about his opium-pipe, a dipsomaniac of the brandy-bottle, an habitual smoker of his tobacco. Each of these deluded and degraded persons would protest that he could not live without his stimulant or his narcotic, and would, very likely, suffer severely enough if it were denied him, the vicious craving induced by indulgence co-operating with the imagination, so that a very real state of misery might result from deprivation. But were we to call opium, brandy, tobacco, necessaries of life? Of course, if the drug maniac or the drunkard were guarded and the drug withheld he would generally, in process of time, be cured of his longing, and it was only reasonable to suppose that such would be the experience of the food-and-drink maniac. In some cases the victim of drugs or alcohol turned out to be incurable; even then we did not consider that death in delirium tremens proved that brandy is a necessary of life.

Then, one had to consider the supreme irrationality of the actions of eating and drinking. People said that they experienced certain sensations, which they called by the arbitrary and conventional names of "hunger" and "thirst." They could give no clear account of these sensations, doubtless because they were entirely imaginary, the results of auto-suggestion. [Note the exact similarity between the cases of the food-maniac and the religious maniac] If you cross-examined one of the sufferers from that acute form of food-mania known as starvation, you would probably be astonished at the vagueness of the man's replies. He would, probably, be totally unable to give any account whatever of his supposed symptoms: you might get "a sort of sinking feeling," or "a sort of gnawing feeling," or "a sort of all-overish feeling," or some such unintelligible gibberish, coupled, very likely, with an unmeaning gesture in the direction of the abdomen. If the mania were far advanced the patient might even be delirious; in any case, the average hysterical sufferer would be able to describe her supposed symptoms with infinitely greater clearness. Yet no one imagines that the hysterical sensations or disabilities have any existence out of the diseased brain of the sufferer. The strength of the hunger-illusion was conceded; it was not so great, however, as the strength of the hysteria-illusion. "The starving man thinks he wants food; the hysterical woman thinks she has paralysis; the one delusion is as reasonable as the other."

"But let us suppose [Hexton writes] that out of mistaken kindness you are so thoughtless as to gratify the horrible and ridiculous longings of the hunger-maniac. You give him, let us say, a steak, that is a portion of ox-flesh, partially burned at a fire. He divides this object into portions, conveys these to his mouth, and lets them slip down his throat. He will then tell you that his craving is appeased, that he 'feels better'; a look of contentment may come into his face, not at all unlike the expression of stupid beatitude which may be seen on the faces of the drug-maniac and devotee when their cravings have been satisfied. Now appeal to the patient and ask him as a reasonable man to tell you how the swallowing of ox-flesh, partially burned, can lead to content or happiness. He will not tell you, he cannot; nor can any one else. It is true that medical men, who have their formulas, just as priests have their creeds, have written many unintelligible volumes concerning nutrition, assimilation, gastric juice, peptones, proteids [note the resemblance between the jargon of medicine and the jargon of theology!] but it is not, we may presume, seriously contended that the average 'starving' man has read these volumes, and has been convinced by their arguments, that he has mastered, in all its detail, the intricate and wonderful and supernatural process [the theological 'mystery'] by which somehow or other, the burned flesh of the ox is converted and 'transubstantiated' into content, and happiness, and high thoughts of joy. It is certain that the sufferer from 'starvation' has done nothing of the kind, that he is no more able to demonstrate the irrational action he has performed than a poor Catholic is able to demonstrate the Sacrifice of the Mass. The 'starving' man who chews beef, the 'devout' man who goes to mass are, in plain language, persons who perform actions for which they are unable to give the semblance of a reasonable account. They are in the same class as lunatics, drunkards, and morphomaniacs.

"Probably it would not be difficult to trace this extraordinary delusion to its origin. At some very early and barbarous period in human history, eating and drinking were probably invented as a kind of initiatory rite; it was supposed that he who received the flesh of the ox into his body partook mystically of the ox's strength and powers of endurance. Different animals were added to obtain different qualities; the whole process being, no doubt, a curious ritual, which it might not be impossible to reconstruct. The ancient Mexicans had an odd yearly festival, during which they went into the woods and devoured reptiles, and modern savages believe that to eat of the heart of the lion gives courage. The theory long pervaded medicine, and is perhaps not quite extinct in the medicine of the present day."

Hexton had an easy task when he came to consider the "outworks" of eating and drinking.

"No man [he protests] can maintain that mustard and horse-radish are necessary to life, no one can possibly believe that dishes are rendered more wholesome or more nourishing by the addition of elaborate sauces and condiments. Bedlam alone could advance the proposition that a jelly sustains and fortifies any the more by being made in an extravagant shape, and coloured with some bright pigment. If food were really a necessary, as is pretended, probably five minutes would suffice for its consumption: it would be prepared in some soluble form, and would be swallowed by the bedside, the first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night. It would certainly not be served to people in a silly costume by ministrants dressed in a sillier; it would not be disguised in all imaginable forms and colours, concealed by strange flavourings, on a board richly draped, decorated like an altar with lights and flowers; while, in some cases, music is played on a band of instruments. [Note: how all these circumstances fit in with a savage rite of initiation.] Thus: the accidents of the food and drink mania being frankly lunatic, we may safely conclude that the habit is irrational in its essence."

He demonstrated the fact that the practice of dining appealed to children and backward races: that young people, savages, and the middle ages were all gluttonous, obsessed by the thought of the banquet. As for material advantage, a frightful food scandal was even then the chief topic of the papers, and pages of the treatise deal with the poisonous adulteration of food and drink, with the dangers that lurk in the very purest products, with the estimated mortality due to the use of milk—a more dangerous beverage than brandy or strong beer. Water, of course, had slain whole armies, had spread plague and pestilence over continents. It would be difficult to say whether opium and its preparations or tea and coffee worked the greatest harm to men. The vegetarians had shown conclusively enough that the carnivorous habit was a fatal and horrible vice; and it was not possible to deny that the vegetarian races had surpassed the carnivorous in the record of inhuman crime. The rice-eating Indian was at once feeble physically and diabolically cruel and treacherous. It was clear that the platter and the cup were responsible for more disease, misery, and death than all the plagues of the Dark Ages; they were, perhaps, more fatal to humanity than the Christian Church itself.

The last lines are written in a staggering and uneven script. Charles Hexton died, as he had lived, a progressive and liberal thinker. When once the truth was clear to him, neither food nor drink passed his lips; as he said: "I might as well say my prayers as dine; the one process is no more illogical than the other." He was, indeed, a martyr to principle.