HEPHÆSTUS
I
Ethnologists believe that the metamorphosis from beast-like savage to cultured civilian may be proximately explained as the result of accumulated changes that found their initial impulses in a half-a-dozen or so of practical inventions.
An Irish poet, disconsolately walking along Fleet Street one day, bethought himself of a small island in an Irish lake, where he could escape from the noise and bustle of the London streets. He wrote a lovely poem embodying that thought, a poem expressing the longing of every sensitive soul to retire within itself for a time and reconstruct its world from within instead of having it impressed from without.
Needless to say, he did not content himself with planting nine beans in a row, as he had longed to do in his fit of depression. On the contrary. He became an Irish statesman and Senator. He dwelt in surroundings far removed from the Stone Age. The very chair on which he sat down to write owed its existence to many factories and mechanical processes. Its wood was derived from planks cut in the saw mills. Its French polish, although put on by hand, was made of constituents—shellac, methylated spirit, whitening and what not—drawn from many sources, each involving a number of ingenious inventions. The coal which made his fire had been brought across the sea by a steamer—a miracle of complicated mechanism—and the shovel with which he put it on had been mined in Belgium, smelted in Germany, rolled in Sheffield, and shaped and finished in Birmingham.
Not that “Inishfree” was but an idle dream. There are many such islands in Ireland, peopled by men and women and children, living in one-roomed mud hovels on potatoes and stewed tea, infested with vermin and ravaged by tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, people who, if they cannot emigrate, suffer their fate with a stolid and pathetic resignation relieved by the hope of heavenly compensation hereafter.
Such is Inishfree, stripped of its glamour and shown in its naked reality.
Savagery does not mean simplicity but complexity, not peace but constant dread, not health but hopeless disease and premature death. The South American Indian suffers acutely from constipation, which is about the last disease we should expect him to suffer from. The negro in his native Africa is often horribly deformed through neglect at birth, neglected injuries, or the ravages of insect pests.