V.

Conjectures On The Mode Of Building Of Spiders In The Air.

Perhaps here I should stop, and, having stated facts, leave to others their explanation. How do spiders sustain themselves in the air? How can they so long brave the winds, the rains, the storms; arrange their webs in emptiness and without apparent means of support? Prudence counsels me to avoid these questions, but my _rôle_ of simple observer permits them. However, in waiting for better things, I decide still to hazard some conjectures, were it only to prove that a fact once admitted, it would not be absolutely impossible for the wisest to explain it.

The first idea that came to me was that these spider-webs raise themselves in the air as the kites of children, and, made fast to the tops of trees and edifices by long threads, they are sustained by their own lightness. This idea was suggested to me by a sight I was witness to one day at the Seminary of Vals, near Le Puy. From a corner where I was in shadow, I perceived distinctly on each high ridge of the roof, lightened by the rays of the sun, long threads which rose perpendicularly in the air, like large cords, balancing themselves slowly right and left, without ever going out of a certain field of oscillation. But I soon gave up this idea. How admit, in truth, that on two or three threads, and without any other means of support, spiders could weave their true webs? Would not some of these aerial constructions tumble down every day, ruined by their own weight? while it is acknowledged they only fall in autumn, and always together.

I therefore rather incline to believe that the spiders are sustained in the air by the distention of an interior vesicle, analogous to that of fish, and that they ejaculate by their threads, which are numerous, and pierced with an infinity of little tubes, large bundles of threads, by which are taken the insects that serve for their prey; that they resist the winds as fish do the tossing of the sea, and their threads, being glutinous, are not dampened by the rain; and also being excellent conductors of caloric, as is proved by the abundant drops of dew which they pearl near the earth, on the hedges, etc.; and if after a calm night they are touched by an autumn fog, these heavy and moistened threads weaken and fall one over the other, and form the silky flakes that are seen from ten to eleven o'clock in the morning, flying about in cloudy days with the spiders who inhabited them during the summer. {422} This, hoping for better, is the explanation I hazard, and I submit it with the rest to the appreciation of competent men. If only these pages attract attention to a merited subject, and provoke numerous observations, which alone can ever fully elucidate it, the author will be more than repaid for the few researches he has presented in this article.

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Translated From The "Revue Du Monde Catholique."

John Tauler.

By Ernest Hello.

History has an astonishing memory. She records the day and hour of battles with exact fidelity. She knows a thousand things. She has recently discovered, if I do not mistake, the name of Julian the Apostate's cook. She remembers everything of little importance. The names of celebrated mistresses who have amused or poisoned renowned personages, are transmitted from age to age. Erudition has been making strides during the last hundred years, as if she had seven-leagued boots. To deserve the admiration and gratitude of mankind, however, she should not have degraded herself, but taken a higher sphere in her progress. Her memory indicates greatness of genius; but she is like calumny, she increases in size as she advances through the centuries. In her labors, researches, and exploits, she has been mostly busied with soldiers, and frequently forgotten God and man. She could not think of everything at once; the hidden history of humanity is yet to be written; the greatest events of the world are secret to this very day; and those who reflect on them are men of a special caste.

If there were question of the battle of Marathon, or of Antony and Cleopatra, our contemporaries would be found well instructed; but do they know John Tauler, the German Tauler, of the Dominican or preaching order?

Master Tauler was a great preacher--powerful and popular. One day he gave a learned discourse, in which he taught the way of perfection, with all his characteristic assurance. To become perfect, he enumerated twenty-four conditions, which he developed before an attentive and brilliant audience. After the sermon, a layman, one of the poorest and most ignorant of his hearers, came to him. History, by one of those distractions so usual for her to have, when there is question of God, has forgotten the name of this individual. This simple layman said to Tauler:

"Master, the letter kills, and the spirit gives life; but you are a Pharisee."

Doctor Tauler: "My son, I am now old, and no one has ever spoken to me in this manner."

The Layman: "You think I speak too bluntly to you; but it is your own fault; and I can prove that what I say to you is true."

Doctor Tauler: "You will do me a favor, for I have never loved the Pharisees."

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Then the layman, probing into the doctor's mental condition, showed him that he was held captive by the mere letter of the evangelical law, and devoid of its spirit.

"You are a Pharisee," proceeded the layman, "but not a hypocritical Pharisee. You are not on the road to hell, but on that which leads to purgatory."

Doctor Tauler embraced the man, and said to him: "I feel at this moment as the Samaritan woman must have felt at the well; you have revealed to me all my faults, my son; you have told all that was most secret in my soul. Who, then, has told you? It is God; I am convinced it must be so. I entreat you, my son, by the death of our Lord, to be my spiritual father, and I, a poor sinner, will become your son."

The Layman: "Dear master, if you speak thus contrary to order and reason, I shall not remain with you any longer, but straightway return to my own house."

Doctor Tauler: "Oh! no. I beg you, in the name of God, to stay with me, and I promise not to speak thus again."

The docility of Tauler is sublime and touching. His great good will, which broke the pride of science, led him into the paths of spiritual contemplation.

"Tell me, I conjure you, in the name of God," said Tauler, "how you have succeeded in arriving at the contemplative state?"

The Layman: "You ask me a very odd question. I confess to you frankly that, if I should recount or write all the wonderful things which God has been doing to me, a poor sinner, for twelve years, there would be no book large enough to contain them."

The layman then recounted how he had been deceived in his spiritual life; how, influenced by Satan, he had practised imprudent austerities, which would have injured both his body and soul; and how, warned by God, he had returned to the paths of wisdom.

Both Tauler and the layman were then lifted up to the regions of contemplation. The unknown monitor then said: "If the God whom we worship could be comprehended by reason, he would not be worthy of our service."

But before his great illumination, Tauler suffered during two years frightful temptations. Abandoned, poor, suffering, that man of iron was shaken like a reed. The layman comes to his assistance, and sustains in his time of misery him whom he had crushed in his period of pride.

"For the first time," said the layman, "God has touched your superior faculties."

At the end of two years, the doctor again ascended the pulpit. The crowd which came to hear him was large. Tauler cast his eyes over the expectant multitude, then drew his cowl over his eyes and prayed.

The crowd awaited him; but he spoke not a word. Tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Tauler wept bitterly.

What a scene! The audience become impatient. Some one asks Tauler if he will preach. Tauler continues weeping. He wept and wept; and the multitude, anxious to hear his inferior oratory, and incapable of appreciating the higher eloquence of tears, could not comprehend the doctor's conduct. At last Tauler dismissed the assembly; for his sobs choked his utterance. He asked pardon of the people for having kept them uselessly waiting; and they went home. "Now," said some of them, "we see that he has become a fool."

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But after five days' silence, Tauler preached before the friars of the convent, and he was sublime. One of the friars went to the pulpit and addressed the congregation as follows: "I am requested to make known to you that Doctor Tauler will preach here to-morrow; but if he acts as he did last time, remember not to blame me." "How will he succeed?" said one to another. "I do not know," was the answer; "God knows."

This time Tauler could control his voice, and _silence_ was his theme. He had built his eyrie in silence, as an eagle on the summit of a cliff. His language, worked out in silence, seemed to long after it; to return to its home, and die away in the high sombre clouds of complete solitude. Silence is the doctrine of Tauler; his secret, his food, his substance and his slumber. Absolutely free from all oratorical finery, his sermons go right to the mark, without respect for conventionality or the cant of ordinary discourses. He utters what he wishes to express; praises solitude, and returns into it. This is the reason why his external word takes nothing away from his interior recollection. His words do not betray his soul. Silence is the guardian angel of strength.

It was doubtless this profound doctrine of silence which gave to the eloquence of Tauler an extraordinary virtue. This man, who seemed to come out of a tomb, appeared with a thunderbolt in his hand. Fifty men, after the sermon, remained in the church as if transfixed by an invisible hand. Thirty-eight of them were able to move during the half-hour which followed; but the twelve others could not stir. Tauler said to the unknown layman, his adviser: "What shall we do with these people, my son?" The layman went from one to the other and touched them, but they were as immovable as rocks.

Tauler was frightened at the paralysis which he had caused. "Are they dead or alive?" said he to his friend. "What do you think?" "If they are dead," replied the layman, "it is your fault, and that of the Spouse of souls."

This fact, which is historical, seems like a legend.

This picture would be magnificent, if an artist should sketch it. The place where Tauler had just preached was a cemetery, and the twelve men who were lying on the ground in ecstasy resembled those who slumbered in death beneath. The orator, walking with his friend through the audience, who had become almost his victims; feeling the pulse and the face of his hearers, to detect in them after the sermon, as after a battle, some sign of life; passing through the ranks of the vanquished and healing the wounded, must have seemed something superhuman. At last the friend of Tauler found that the thunderstruck hearers breathed still, "Master," said he, "those men still live. Request the nuns of the convent to take them away from here; for this cold floor will injure them." One of the nuns, who was a listener to the fearful discourse, had to be carried to her bed, where she lay motionless.

The biography of John Tauler, which serves as prologue to his sermons, says nothing of his exterior life; but dwells specially on his unhistorical and legendary character. Those who wrote about him have not deigned even to inquire in what century he lived. This strange man has dispensed history from its ordinary inquiries, as if eternity had been the sole theatre of his terrestrial existence.

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His friends are as strange as himself. The astonishing layman, who tells his name to nobody, and gives us no means of discovering it, was not the doctor's only teacher. Another of his instructors was a beggar, just as extraordinary.

Tauler, according to Surius, petitioned God during eight years for a master capable of teaching him the truth. One day when his desire was more than usually strong, he heard a voice saying to him, "Go to the door of the church. Thou wilt find there the man whom thou seekest." He obeyed, and met at the appointed spot a beggar, whose feet were soiled with mud, and whose rags were not worth three half-pence. They began a dialogue, of which the following is a portion:

Doctor Tauler. "_Good_ day, my friend."

The Beggar. "I do not remember ever to have had a _bad_ day in my life."

Tauler. "May God grant thee prosperity."

The Beggar. "I know not what adversity is."

Tauler. "Well, may God make thee happy!"

The Beggar. "I have never been unhappy."

Urged for an explanation, the mendicant affirms that, "by means of silence, he had arrived at perfect union with God; never being able to find pleasure in anything less than God."

Tauler. "Whence comest thou?"

The Beggar. "From God."

Tauler. "Where hast thou found God?"

The Beggar. "Where I have left all creatures."

Tauler. "Where is God?"

The Beggar. "In men of good will."

Tauler. "Who art thou?"

The Beggar. "I am a king."

Tauler. "Where is thy kingdom?"

The Beggar. "In my soul."

We need often recall to our minds, in reading Tauler's life, that he was really a man of flesh and bone, an historical personage. Surius, Fathers Echard and Touron, have written his real life circumstantially. He was born in 1294. He was an Alsatian. He lived at Cologne, and died probably at Strasburg. We cannot fix the date of his death. It happened May 17th, 1361, says Father Alexander. Father Echard places it in the year 1379. Another historian, M. Sponde, puts it in 1355.

Let us now speak of his doctrine.