Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

“I give him a whole milk-dish full o’ scraps; but if people tells the truth, there’s nobody in the world can say black is the white o’ my eye; an’ you may believe me or believe me not⁠—”

“You’ll need to give Pup a drink, Ida.”

“He’s got a dish o’ good rainwater aside him; but if people would on’y consider⁠—”

“True⁠—very true. Now go away, dear, and don’t come fooling about me, or you’ll give her liberty to talk.”

The girl limped back to the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made a feeble effort to shake the dewdrops from my mane, and, so to speak, look myself in the face. I must give this life over, I thought; and I will give it over; an I do not, I am a villain. After all, there are not two sides to this question; there is only one; and you may trust an overclean man to be an authority on the evil effects of bathing, upon mind, body, and estate; just as the grogbibber is our highest authority on headaches, fantods, and bankruptcy.

The Spartans (so ran my reflections) were as much addicted to dirt as the Sybarites to cleanliness; and just compare the two communities. The conquering races of later ages⁠—Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards, etc.⁠—were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other. It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick man of Europe. Latifundia perdidere Italiam (Large estates ruined Italy). Yes. Blame it on the large estates. Would a large estate ruin you? Bathing did the business for Italy, as it does the business for all its victims. If Rome had left to the soft Capuan his baths and his perfumes, she would have pulled-through. But think of the polished Roman debating the question of survival with the superlatively dirty barbarian of the North! Polished is good, for, in the ruins of the fatal Roman baths, the innumerable strigulae, used by the bathers to polish their skins, bear sad testimony to the suicidal cleanliness of that doomed race. And just compare your strigula-polished Roman, morally and physically, with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid⁠—the former flickering briefly in a puerile, semi-vital way, and going out with a sulphurous smell; the latter, on a ration of six dates per week, attaining an interminable longevity, and possessing the power of striking scoffers dead, or blind, or paralytic, at pleasure.

And, talking of hermits⁠—do you think Peter of Picardy could have launched the muscular Christianity of Western Europe against the less muscular, because cleaner, Islamism of Western Asia, but for his well-advertised vow, never to change his clothes, nor wash himself, till his contract should be completed? Prouder in his rags than the Emperor in his purple! and justly too, for he achieved the very apotheosis of dirt⁠—animate, no doubt, as well as inanimate. Or take the first Teutonic Emperor of Rome⁠—conqueror, arbitrator, legislator, and whatnot. In those middle ages, you know, it was the custom to name monarchs from some peculiarity of person or habitude⁠—and I put it to any reasonable soul; Was this mere Yarman Brince likely to have become the central figure of the 10th century, but for such rigid abstinence from external application of water as is implied in the significant name of Otto the Great?

Indeed, the most sweepingly appropriate bestowal of the title, “Great,” is made when we refer to the adherents of the dirt-cult, collectively, as the Great Unwashed. Again, Dr. Johnson’s biographies lovingly preserve the personal habits of most of the loftiest and sweetest poets that ever trod English soil; and think what a large percentage of those Muse-invokers, according to their historian, carried a fair quantity of that soil perennially on their hides. And speaking of the Diogenes of Fleet Street himself, we know, on good authority, that his antipathy to the Order of the Bath caused him to appeal to more senses than one. He was another Otto the Great. The original Diogenes, by the way, revelled in dirt, as well as in wisdom. And the mighty scholar, Porson, as you may remember, never needed to wash, because he never perspired.

Yet in spite of this cloud of witness, and in the face of our own experience, we will entice external leakage of such incipient greatness as we have⁠—soaking ourselves in water, as if we were possums, and our virility a eucalyptus flavour that we sought to dissipate. Look at myself⁠—now a king; now thus! Thunder-and-turf! have I fallen so low? And yet I was once like our Otto and Co.!

Before touching the forbidden thing, I felt as if I wanted to pursue an inspiring, if purposeless, journey up uncomfortable Alpine heights, with my Excelsior-banner in my hand, and a tear in my solitary bright blue eye; now, the maiden’s invitation seems to be the only part of the enterprise that has any pith in it. Then, I gloried in the fiendish adage of, “Two hours’ sleep for a man, three for a woman, and four for a fool”; now, my livelist ambition is to gaze my fill on yon calm deep, then, like an infant, sink asleep on this form, and so remain till dinnertime⁠—lunchtime, I should say; belonging, as I do, to the better classes. Then, I was like Hotspur on his crop-eared roan; now, I merely wish the desert were my dwelling-place, with one fair Spirit for my minister. To confess the truth, I note a certain weak glimmer of self-righteousness investing the thought that I would be content with one fair Spirit. Go to, go to! By virtue, thou enforcest laughter.

“I wish I was as happy as you,” murmured Ida, who had again silently approached. “Here’s two newspapers; they done with them in the house. O, Mr. Collins!”⁠—and the girl’s tears broke forth afresh, whilst ungovernable sobs shook her from head to foot⁠—“I can’t git it off o’ my mind what Mrs. Bodyzart said.”

“Ida! Ida!” I remonstrated;