Between Man and Beast Page 17

  Layard looked to his right, where the gorilla stood in his attitude of frozen pontification. “We are now to be entertained by Mr. Spurgeon’s lecture on the gorilla,” he said. “But in after ages, according to the ‘development theory,’ we shall doubtless have a gorilla lecturing on Mr. Spurgeon!”

  To win the favor of a religious-minded constituency, the politician mocked the scientists. The strategy, Layard discovered, worked very well: the crowd erupted in laughter. The portly reverend rose, as if on cue, and approached the center of the stage.

  “Mr. Chairman, and my very good friends, I am very glad to see you here, though you have taken me very much by surprise,” Spurgeon said. “I was reckoning upon a quiet evening with a moderate audience, but you have crowded this vast house, and I regret to say there have been great multitudes turned away from the doors. We are doomed to disappointments, but such as these one can afford to endure with equanimity.”

  He was in fine form. He fed on the audience’s laughter, and he encouraged it by assuring them there was no harm in letting loose with a guffaw or two. Christians needed an outlet for entertainment, he believed, and what better place to find it than in a church? The tabernacle shouldn’t be restricted to dry theological discourse, he told them. Entertainment, science, politics—his church had room for everything.

  With that, Spurgeon turned toward Paul.

  “So, is Mr. Du Chaillu’s book true or not?” Spurgeon asked rhetorically. “You can see him for yourself.”

  Thousands sized up the unimposing adventurer, who remained at the side of the stage.

  “When you look at him, you would hardly think he was able to shoot a gorilla, or to bring home as many as twenty-two.”

  Thousands exploded in laughter.

  “I do verily believe, in spite of all that has been said, that Mr. Du Chaillu’s book is matter of fact. It is not written so carefully as a scientific man might write it, nor so orderly and regularly as the author might re-write it, if he had another seven years to do it in. Yet I believe that it is true, and that he himself is worthy of our praise as one of the greatest modern discoverers—a man who has done and dared more for science, and, I think I may add, more for the future spread of religion, than most men of his time.”

  Spurgeon quickly turned to face the gorilla.

  “He is an enormous ape, which claims to approach the nearest to man of any other creature,” he said. “How nearly he approaches, I leave you to judge.”

  Spurgeon was steering the talk toward evolutionary theory. He wanted to make certain that his congregation knew which side of the debate he endorsed.

  “If we should admit this gentleman to be our cousin,” Spurgeon declared, wheeling away from the gorilla and back toward his audience, “there is Mr. Darwin, who at once is prepared to prove that our great-grandfather’s father—keep on for about a millennium or two—was a guinea-pig, and that we were ourselves originally descended from oysters, or seaweeds, or starfishes!”

  He was working himself into a lather, and the crowd rewarded him with applause. “Seriously, let us see to what depths men will descend in order to cast a slur upon the Book of God. It is too hard a thing to believe that God made man in His own image; but, indeed, it is philosophical to hold that man is made in the image of a brute, and is the offspring of ‘laws of development.’ Oh, infidelity!”

  Du Chaillu listened in silence as his gorilla became the subject of a two-hour sermon that ended with Spurgeon stressing the importance of missions in Africa.

  Spurgeon concluded, “I am pleased to say that my friend Mr. Du Chaillu—if he will allow me to call him so—wherever he has been, has sought to open the way for missionary efforts, and has been the missionaries’ friend everywhere.”

  Paul had, in fact, done precisely nothing to pave the way for missions during his travels. He could have proudly accepted the title that Spurgeon seemed so eager to bestow—that of the voyaging religious crusader—but Paul didn’t. He thanked Spurgeon for defending the general truth of his book and for underscoring its faults in a good-hearted spirit.

  “I can only say that if I travel again, I will try and do better,” Paul said. “I have learned a great deal of wisdom during the last five or six months, and I will put it into practice during my next travels.”

  Spurgeon announced that all the proceeds from the night’s event would go to the Band of Hope Union, an organization promoting total abstinence from alcohol—a cause that Paul had dismissed in his book, declaring that a daily tipple of wine, brandy, or ale was “absolutely necessary” to maintain a traveler’s physical equilibrium in Africa. A children’s chorale group brought the evening to a close, singing gospel hymns as the audience began filing out of the tabernacle. One writer attending the event described Paul’s reaction to the entire spectacle as “bewildered.”

  IF PAUL wasn’t sure what to make of what he’d witnessed at that altar, London’s cultural critics knew exactly how to assess Spurgeon’s lecture: as a mockery deserving ridicule.

  Spurgeon had been criticized before, but never like this. By delving into the subject of the gorilla, the press said, the evangelist was blurring the lines between theology and theater, between the sanctified and the secular. The fact that he’d invited Layard, the politician, onstage was a sign of a disturbing new trend. According to one reviewer, it seemed that elected officials were now required “to eat dirt and lick the shoes of their constituencies” by pandering to people like Spurgeon, who had a firm grip on the hearts and wallets of his electorate.

  “Of course such an exhibition is a disgrace to London,” declared an article in the Literary Budget. “It is a lamentable disgrace that one of our largest halls can be filled with people ready to listen to a fellow whose sole claim to attention has been his willingness to practise the easiest and most evil form of all buffoonery, that of making jokes over the Bible and burlesquing the inculcation of its truths. One very slight and indirect consequence for good, however, it is possible to detect in these his secular escapades. They have completely vulgarized the practice of amateur lecturing. Now that Spurgeon has taken to lecturing, every young gentleman, who has had a fancy for it, must give it up. He has followed a fashion and destroyed it.”

  Other reviews were no less devastating. Spurgeon was perplexed by the reaction. He’d been injecting emotion and drama into his sermons for years, but never had he been the subject of so much public scorn. In the weeks following the lecture, he fell ill, but the abuse continued, unabated. Two weeks after the lecture, with Spurgeon too sick to deliver his Sunday sermon, his church’s leaders unanimously passed the following resolution:

  That the members of this church, constantly refreshed by the gospel ministry of their beloved Pastor, and deeply obliged to him for the lectures he gives upon secular and social subjects, have noticed, with sincere regret, and heart-felt sympathy with him, the scandals heaped upon his name by the public press, and beg to express to him their most loving confidence, their strong desire to endure with him a full share of his reproach, and their full determination, by God’s help, to bear him constantly on their heart in prayer.

  The support buoyed Spurgeon, and a week later he wrote to a friend that the outrage over his gorilla exhibition only strengthened his belief that conceding any ground to the cultural critics would be unforgivable.

  “This work of my Institution is of God; lectures are a part of the necessary plan, they do good, I have a call to this work, so all this opposition is a spur to increased zeal,” he said.

  For decades after this lecture, Spurgeon poured that zeal into an international fight against a relaxed, liberal reading of Scripture. His influence was felt strongly in the United States, where his lectures and sermons were circulated to millions of people and became models for America’s new evangelical movement. Preachers like Dwight Moody—whose emotional revivalism helped spearhead the fight against evolutionary theory in the United States—counted Spurgeon a pioneering hero for his determination to battle those wh
o questioned the sanctity of the book of Genesis. Before the evolution debate blurred the lines between men and animals, many people, like Owen, considered a metaphorical reading of the Bible to be compatible with a life of faith. Now an increasing number of evangelicals disavowed any interpretation that strayed from the strictly literal.

  “Compromise there can be none,” Spurgeon wrote, summing up his combative resistance against those whose liberal readings of the Bible allowed room for heresies such as evolutionary theory. It was a slippery slope, and he wanted no part of it.

  “One way or another we must go,” he wrote. “Decision is the virtue of the hour. Neither when we have chosen our way can we keep company with those who go the other way.”

  At Spurgeon’s lecture on the gorilla, a new brand of popular evangelicalism fully embraced the battle pitting science against religion, and it would never concede the debate.

  Paul seemed uninterested in joining the crusade. While Spurgeon dug in his heels, the adventurer began spending more time among a rowdy crowd who dedicated themselves to destroying the kind of public piety that the evangelist wore on his sleeve.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mrs. Grundy and the Cannibal Club

  Leicester Square was not a place where tender, pious souls often found themselves after dark. Once fashionable, the neighborhood had grown a little long in the tooth by the 1860s. When the sun went down, the street came to life, crawling with billiard-room sharks who stank of cheap cigars and ladies of ill repute who stank of cheap perfume. Bertolini’s, a restaurant in the middle of it all, specialized in both Italian and French food, and the owner—a cheerless old man who called himself either Giovanni Dominico Bertolini or John Dominique Bertolini, depending on which specialty was on the stove—had been treading the dining room floorboards for more than five decades. The food was cheap but tolerable, and the restaurant’s grubby charm drew bohemians who liked to slum it every now and then. Tennyson affectionately called it “Dirtolini’s.”

  If, by some devious twist of fate, a devout Victorian stumbled through the closed doors of the banquet room on a Tuesday evening, his fragile sensibilities would have been instantly shattered by the sacrilegious invitations to damnation on display. A small cadre of culture warriors calling themselves the Cannibal Club held court here. They were well-read sophisticates hell-bent on flouting the puritanical rules of decorum they believed strangled the life out of Victorian England. The members of the Cannibal Club celebrated everything that proper English society deemed taboo. Offensive ideas—whether they regarded race, religion, or sex—were aired without apology, in the name of unfettered intellectual inquiry. The only reason the club wasn’t the most notorious in England was that few outside the members themselves knew it even existed.

  Meetings were called to order when someone banged on a table with a carved wooden mace, which depicted a native African gnawing on a human thighbone. Then, before the group launched into discussions ranging from, say, female circumcision to an anthropological history of erotic flogging, a member would recite the club’s mock-religious invocation—a blasphemous send-up of the Eucharist called “The Cannibal Catechism,” which depicted the holy Christian sacrament as a cannibalistic ritual.

  Preserve us from our enemies

  Thou who art Lord of suns and skies

  Whose meat and drink is flesh in pies

  And blood in bowls!

  Of thy sweet mercy, damn their eyes

  And damn their souls!

  The verses were written by a young Algernon Swinburne, the licentious poet and Cannibal Club mainstay whose professed desire was to make the teakettles of British society “seethe and rage.” Other members included Charles Bradlaugh, the first openly atheistic member of Parliament; Henry Spencer Ashbee and Richard Monckton Milnes, who owned, respectively, the two most extensive stashes of pornography in England; and Richard Francis Burton, the explorer and Renaissance man whose literary translations would eventually introduce much of the English-speaking world to the Kama Sutra and the unexpurgated Arabian Nights. They’d eat, drink, and let their conversations veer absolutely wherever they wanted. According to legend, Burton (athletic, imposing) occasionally had to carry Swinburne (fragile, pixie-like) out of the restaurant under his arm after the liquor was gone.

  The members were drawn to one another thanks to a shared hatred for one “Mrs. Grundy”—a fictional composite who epitomized the tight-laced prudery that threatened to define the era. The name came from a play by Thomas Morton; one of the characters, when worrying about how she’d be viewed by her priggish neighbors, agonized, “What will Mrs. Grundy say?” It became a catchphrase, because England was crawling with Mrs. Grundys. They weren’t necessarily women; the Cannibal Club would have considered the Reverend Charles Spurgeon a classic Grundy, especially when he crusaded for temperance. The same went for the energetic members of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose public crusades against any literature it deemed morally damaging led to the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. When Burton was working on the Arabian Nights, a volume that one reviewer condemned as “absolutely unfit for the Christian population of the nineteenth century,” Burton’s reaction perfectly summarized the Cannibal Club’s defiant brand of moral disobedience: “Mrs. Grundy is already beginning to roar; already I hear the fire of her. And I know her to be an arrant whore, and tell her so, and don’t give a goddamn for her.”

  In the spring and summer of 1861 the core members of the Cannibal Club first forged their bonds, and Paul was drawn into their circle. The friendships he made would last for years and play a pivotal role in the course of his personal and professional history.

  Because Victorian London was a place with ample room for the outwardly pious and the secretly subversive, no acrobatic contortions were necessary for him to maintain one foot on Spurgeon’s altar and the other with the most notorious cultural rebels in Britain. All he needed was his talent for assimilation and a well-timed introduction to Burton.

  THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD Burton was at a crossroads in 1861. In January he had married Isabel Arundell, a devout and aristocratic Catholic, who promptly pulled strings among her well-placed relatives to secure her husband a position in the government’s Foreign Office. If Burton were anyone else, a comfortable transition toward conventional respectability would have been the logical next step. But his utter disregard of convention was already legendary. In the months immediately following his marriage, he seemed doubly determined to declare his independence from tradition.

  He’d earned his maverick reputation, in large part, thanks to his undercover journeys to the holy cities of Islam. In 1851 he’d made the hajj to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Persian dervish, and three years later he snuck into the walled city of Harar, in what is now Ethiopia. Both cities were considered off-limits to nonbelievers. His success during those journeys stemmed from much more than a gift for mere surface mimicry. He was dyed to the core with erudition, and he was possessed of a tireless attention to detail. Not only did he speak more than twenty languages; he spoke them well. Little escaped his notice, or his notebook. His uncanny ability—and undisguised eagerness—to deeply penetrate foreign cultures had earned him the nickname “the white nigger” among some of his less-than-admiring contemporaries. Burton himself preferred another nickname: “the amateur barbarian.”

  He chronicled both of his forbidden journeys in books, which made him famous. They also raised suspicions from those who believed that his charitable descriptions of Islam betrayed an absence of Christian faith. His refusal to be willfully ignorant of anything, no matter its social stigma, fueled rumors about his moral character.

  The most damaging story involved his sexuality. As a young officer stationed in what is now Pakistan, Burton was the only member of his unit who could speak Sindhi. As a result, he had been assigned to report on the existence of brothels that were reputedly corrupting British troops. Burton’s report was characteristically thorough and unflinchingly explicit, with detailed descri
ptions of the services available, even those offered by eunuchs and transvestites. The report apparently satisfied his superior, who ordered the brothels destroyed and continued to hold Burton in esteem. But two years later, when the commander was transferred to London, he left Burton’s report, or notes taken from it, behind. A new commander found it and was scandalized, apparently assuming that such a wealth of detail could only have been acquired through direct observation or participation. He sent the report to higher-ups in Bombay and recommended that Burton be dismissed from the service. Burton wasn’t discharged (he’d only been following orders, after all), but his reputation was smeared. Rumors of sexual deviancy dogged Burton for the rest of his career. Opportunities for promotion consistently passed him by, but his resolution to utter uncomfortable truths only got stronger.

  During the 1850s, Burton turned his back on the British military and embraced the Royal Geographical Society. But by early 1861, that relationship was also on shaky footing. The problems stemmed from an expedition he led in 1856 to search for the source of the Nile. Burton’s subordinate was John Hanning Speke. Burton’s respect for the haughty and highborn Speke, who spoke no African languages, was never strong, but by the end of the expedition in 1858 it had turned into near hatred. Speke had discovered Lake Victoria while Burton was temporarily sidetracked by illness, and he declared that he had discovered the Nile’s source, though he lacked evidence to support the conclusion. Burton said that more detailed observations would be necessary before such a claim could be made. The two men agreed to end the expedition and return separately to England, where they would jointly present their results to the RGS.