Note 424.1 — Chapter XV · THE COUVADE AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE STRENGTH OF THE BLOOD-TIE—CONCLUSION OF THE INQUIRY INTO THE THEORY OF THE LIFE-TOKEN.

“The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones,” says Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, speaking of folksongs; and the observation might be extended with hardly any qualification to every species of tradition. The bond of blood has always proved stronger than any other force that can sway human nature, until it encounters the overmastering energy of one of the great world-religions, or becomes distracted and spent amid the complexities of modern life. Weakened as it is in Europe nowadays, it is yet not entirely dissipated. Its claims are put forth more timidly, but they are still within certain limits respected. To the utmost of those limits they are still efficient instruments in the hands of the poet, the playwright and the novelist,—and that not only on the moral side, where we are accustomed to appeals founded upon kinship, but also on what I may call the physical side. An unaccountable thrill, we are told, shoots through a father who meets unwittingly a child whom he has never seen, or has seen but for a moment long years before. This involuntary recognition of the same blood is a convention not yet wholly discarded by the writers who thus aim at affecting our emotions, because it has not quite passed out of the shadowy region bordering our clear beliefs into the limbo of things that neither prescribe our action nor convince and captivate our imagination. But the Italian peasant, a thousand years behindhand, a thousand leagues deeper in the realm where faith and fancy reign in indissoluble consort on a double throne, undisturbed by the far-off frontier raids of criticism and doubt,—the Italian peasant admits the extreme demands of blood in the vendetta, and believes that when a bottle supposed to contain a portion of the blood of Saint Januarius “was presented to the body such joy was evinced that the blood had nearly burst from the bottle.”424.1 If such were the conduct of blood severed for, say, fifteen centuries from the body of which it had once formed part, what may not be expected of blood still flowing in the veins of living men, themselves both parts of one body, the kin,—blood whose stream has welled from the same fount only a generation or so ago? In The Book of the Pious by Jehuda ben Samuel the Pious, who lived at Ratisbon about the year 1200, a story is told, founded on the idea of the physical unity of a kindred. A rich man died while travelling abroad, having at the time of his death a large sum of money in his possession. The servant stole this money and gave himself out as his master’s son. Shortly after the rich man’s departure from home, however, a son was born to him, who, when grown up, sought the aid of the Gaon Saadja. Saadja, it appears, was an historical personage who flourished at Sura in the former half of the tenth century. He advised the youth to apply to the king; and the king commissioned Saadja to decide the matter. The Gaon, accordingly, having the son and the servant both brought before him, caused a vein of each of them to be opened, and one of the bones of the dead man to be fetched from his grave. He laid the bone first in the servant’s blood, but without effect. He then laid it in the son’s blood, which it immediately sucked up; for the bone and the blood, we are told, were of one body. Saadja, therefore, gave judgment in favour of the son, directing the estate to be restored to him.425.1