Fratricide

“ I have often felt anxious about the dangers which a high-flown spirit and active fancy prepare for you, the cradle gift of an envious fairy, who has made your Highness too brilliant and attractive. It is owing to these brilliant gifts that you have not the same aristocratic nature as your illustrious brother, the Hereditary Prince. There is too lively a desire in you to make yourself appreciated, and to influence others. One can leave your brother with full confidence to his own good nature. Every attempt to persuade the soul of the much-tormented child has come to naught. ”

“ Loving her brother with an affection more like that of mother than sister, she had often thought over the traits of his character, where, with many a noble gift, the evil seeds of wrong teaching had left, like tall weeds among flowers, the baneful errors of inordinate self-esteem and pride. ”

“ The boy may take his sister as the object for his love, to replace his faithless mother; situations of dangerous rivalry, which are of vast importance for later life, arise even in the nursery among numerous brothers who court the affection of a younger sister. A little girl finds in her older brother a substitute for her father, who no longer acts towards her with the same affection as in former years, or she takes a younger sister as a substitute for the child that she vainly wished of her father. ”

“ You mistake me, sister—It happens with us as among the men, the greatest talkers are the greatest cowards; and there's a reason for it; those spirits evaporate in prattle, which might do more mischief if they took another course——Though, to confess the truth, I do love that fellow;—and if I met him dressed as he should be,——Lookye, sister, I have no supernatural gifts;——I can't swear I could resist the temptation——though I can safely promise to avoid it; and that's as much as the best of us can do. ”

“ Such a one appeared in the new home of Frado; and as people of color were rare there, was it strange she should attract her dark brother; that he should inquire her out; succeed in seeing her; feel a strange sensation in his heart towards her; that he should toy with her shining curls, feel proud to provoke her to smile and expose the ivory concealed by thin, ruby lips; that her sparkling eyes should fascinate; that he should propose; that they should marry? ”

“ Guard against injuring the anchorite! If ye have done so, however, well then, kill him also!—
Thus spake Zarathustra.
XX. CHILD AND MARRIAGE.
I have a question for thee alone, my brother: like a sounding-lead, cast I this question into thy soul, that I may know its depth.
Thou art young, and desirest child and marriage. But I ask thee: Art thou a man ENTITLED to desire a child?
Art thou the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the ruler of thy passions, the master of thy virtues? Thus do I ask thee.
Or doth the animal speak in thy wish, and necessity? Or isolation? ”

“ Christ is represented, like the Moses, in a sitting posture, with a countenance, not like his raised to Heaven, but bent with looks somewhat sad and yet full of benevolence, as if upon persons standing before him. Fraternity, I think, is the idea you associate with it most readily. I should never suppose him to be a judge or censor, or arbitrary master, but rather an elder brother; elder in the sense of wiser, holier, purer; whose look is not one of reproach that others are not as himself, but of pity and desire ”

“ FRAILTY. O no, Madame, he’s above at break-fast, with, sir reverence, a Conjurer.
WIDOW.
A Conjurer? what manner a fellow is he?
FRAILTY. Oh, a wondrous rare fellow, Mistress, very strongly made upward, for he goes in a Buff-jerkin: he says he will fetch Sir Godfrey’s Chain again, if it hang between heaven and earth.
WIDOW. What, he will not? then he’s an exlent fellow, I warrant. How happy were that woman to be blest with such a Husband! a man a cunning! how do’s he look, Frailty? very swartly, I warrant, with black beard, scorcht cheeks, and smoky eyebrows. ”

“ Let the teaching of your Fraternity be to them an acceptable spur to urge them on, and your life an example for imitation. For your Fraternity’s preaching should disclose to them what to love and what to fear, and your efficiency in this way should reap the fruit of eternal retribution. ”

“ Who can tell the thoughts that cluster around the word sister? How ready she is to forgive the foibles of a brother! She never deserts him. In adversity she clings closely to him, and in trial she cheers him. When the bitter voice of reproach is poured in his ears she is ever ready to hush its hard tones, and to turn his attention away from its painful notes. Let him move in pleasant paths, she hangs clusters of flowers about him. ”

“ Art thou not wife Unto my father?
Val. Thinke upon thy life:
It lyes like mine, onely in gentle breath;
Or that thy father's dead, and after death
'Tis in my choice to marry whom I will.
Fred. Any but me.
Valen. O doe not thinke so ill,
Rather thinke, thou art a stranger, not his sonne;
Then 'tis no incest tho the Act be done.
Nature unto her selfe is too unkind
To buzze such scruples into Fredericks minde;
Twas a device of man to avoid selfe love,
Else every pleasure in one stocke should move,
Beautie in grace part never from the kinne. ”

“ The way in which they were each devoted to the other, and in which they were bound up in each other's well-being to the complete forgetfulness of self, suggests a pleasing and pathetic picture of fraternal fidelity, while it reveals a domestic history the most touching and tragic the world has known. ”

“ But the wife of Halfman was the prettiest of them all, and the other brothers were jealous and said to each other: ‘What, is he who is only half a man to get the best? Let us put him to death and give his wife to our eldest brother!’ And they waited for a chance. ”

“ If I was let off so lightly myself, I suffered horribly in the punishments of my nursery companions, particularly in the case of my one-year-older brother—a thoughtful, gifted, sensitive boy, with a fragile body and a spirit that could not be bent or intimidated, who, from his babyhood until he came to his deathbed at seventeen, was in constant collision with a passionate father who had not the capacity to understand him. ”

“ Ah! How could she sufficiently avenge herself! how could she throw all his canting counsels to the winds with most emphasis and effect!
At last a curious thing happened. Was it mere nervous reaction after such a strain of will and passion, or was it the sudden emergence of something in the sister which was also common to the brother—a certain tragic susceptibility, the capacity for a wild melancholy? ”

“ Discipline your heart that you may see in man everywhere a brother, whose keeper you are. Let fraternity be, not a theory only, but a realized fact, and then a factor of your life. Train your eye to watch for others' needs, to read another's woe. Train your soul to sympathy, and your hand to helpfulness ”

“ I ask you, is that Fraternity, when a man wants to pull off his brother's boots? and when a man will let his fellow-creature run about in the snow, like a crow, or if the snow is gone, in the mud? and a man boasts himself against another, and makes game of him? ”

“ To see my children united, as they are, in strong fraternal affection is doubly delightful, as it so forcibly reminds me of that which subsisted between my brother and myself to the moment of his death, and which will remain with me till quenched by the corresponding event. ”

“ As in a glass darkly, I have seen what I might feel as child, wife, mother, but I have never really approached the close relations of life. A sister I have truly been to many, — a brother to more, — a fostering nurse to, oh how many! ”

“ It might even be said that a lever is a lever only from the point of view of its own fulcrum. But the most unscrupulous quibbler would scarcely offer this as evidence against {47} the objective validity of our knowledge of levers. Your brother is necessarily related to you; but the proposition defining the relationship is not on that account relative, that is, peculiarly yours or any one else's. Fraternity is a complex involving a personal connection, but is none the less entirely objective. And precisely the same thing is true of goodness. ”

“ Treat me as a rational being, if you wish me to remain rational. But O, as you love my happiness here, and my soul’s salvation, do not, papa, do not, mamma, do not, Maria, do not, Agnes, William,—do not one or all of you keep your unhappy sister hanging in the agony of suspense! ”

“ They have been, comparatively speaking, experiments in the void—the great void that may spread so smilingly between wide natural borders before complications have begun to grow. The name of the complication before the fact is very apt to be the discovery—which latter term was so promptly to figure for the faith that living and working more intimately together than had up to then been conceived possible would infinitely improve both the condition and the performance of the brother and sister sexes. ”

“ I sink, I die, when I reflect—when I find in my Harrington a brother—I am penetrated with inexpressible grief—I experience uncommon sensations—I start with horrour at the idea of incest—of ruin—of perdition. ”

“ She had evidently learned to curb emotion and regret—the past for her was a sealed book, with all its remembrances; she was a woman without her sex's loveliest impulses—a sister without tenderness, a daughter without gratitude. They parted, as they had met, each unconvinced, each grieving for the other—the visiter returned to her holy filial duties, the devotee to her loneliness. My friend, on which of these sisters do the angels in heaven look down most rejoicingly? ”

“ So fraternal feeling is tender feeling, existing between members of the same family, or the love that we conceive ought to be present. Is such love instinctive, as is the maternal love? If it is, that instinct is very much weaker, and hostile feeling, indifference, rivalry, may easily replace it. We rarely conceive of a mortal world where so intense a love as that of the mother will be the common feeling; all we dare hope for is a world in which there will be a fine fraternal feeling. ”

“ O colleagues, if we indulge in deep sorrow at this new diminution of our fraternity by the death of one of its seniors, it must be forgiven, as consonant to our duty and piety, as well as to the affections of human nature. ”

“ I was thus again constantly attracted from the outer to the inner aspects of life. Life, with its inmost motives laid bare, passed before my eyes, with my father's comments pronounced upon it; and thing and word, act and symbol were thus perceived by me in their most vivid relationship. I saw the disjointed, heavy-laden, torn, inharmonious life of man as it appeared in this community of five thousand souls, before the watchful eyes of its earnest, severe pastor. Matrimonial and sexual circumstances especially were often the objects of my father's gravest condemnation and rebuke. ”

“ It chooses not only the wife of another, but, above all, those incestuous objects declared sacred by the agreement of mankind—the mother and sister in the man's case, the father and brother in the woman's. Even the dream of our fifty-year old lady is an incestuous one, its libido unmistakably directed toward her son. Desires which we believe to be far from human nature show themselves strong enough to arouse dreams. ”

“ If you cannot convince HIM, your own brother, I do not see how you expect me to convince HER, a servant, over whom I have no control except as a mistress of her WORK, when, on your own showing, she has everything to gain by the marriage. ”

“ Consequently, we commenced badly, and I, who am in my way proud as you are, stood aloof from you and exercised the duties of guardian and uncle without showing that my heart was filled with love for you. Thus have we lived, with a spiritual gulf dividing us. My dear niece, you are no longer a child, you are a woman who can think for herself, who is open to reason. ”

“ In regard to Frere, I leave you to judge; he is trustworthy as yourself. If he smile at my folly in loving so poor a thing as he holds woman to be, his kind heart will sympathise with my wretchedness, even if my own weakness has produced it. ”

“ As we look at her fading, withering, and wasting at the touch of cold cruelty, the object of anxious watchings and frequent and severe painstaking on the part of her elder sister, who spared no labor or fatigue to glean the saving morsel to prolong her sinking life, we can but adore that never-sleeping [211] Goodness that had strewn her way to this dark scene with so many preparing influences and counsels. ”

“ PEACHUM. A Word with you, Wife. 'Tis no new thing for a Wench to take Man without Consent of Parents. You know 'tis the Frailty of Women, my Dear.
MRS. PEACHUM. Yes, indeed, the Sex is frail. But the first time a Woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time to make her Fortune. After that, she hath nothing to do but to guard herself from being found out, and she may do what she pleases.
PEACHUM. Make yourself a little easy; I have a Thought shall soon set all Matters again to rights. Why so melancholy, Polly? ”

“ At its kindred passion without in the howling night.
‘Where is thy brother?’ O question not giving respite.
O mother! what do they answer, those lips, blood red,
Of Nature, in sport with her thousand deaths? I questioned. ”

“ But do not speculate too rashly on the horror of bloodshed which we so deeply feel. You have little to gain from it. You have been able to see from what I have told you how little, on the whole, we hesitate where women are concerned. Nothing would be easier that to sacrifice the so-called honor of the girl you love in exchange for the peace of mind of us three old men. No, nothing would be easier—as the count here explained to you, only a moment ago. ”