Death is easy.
To live, what boots it?
Death is peace.
Is this a Fijian Schopenhauer, or rather Leopardi; or does it mean contact with civilized thought and with Christian hymns? Before one accepts this as outcome of “primitive” poetic conditions, one must bring it into line with the poetry from such sources on which all evidence is agreed; at once the bard and his ditty fall under strong suspicion. Witty proverbial verses found in half-civilized tradition, say among the Finns,[[40]] get the same label of “primitive,” until one appeals to the chronological sense of fitness, and to other kinds of evidence:—
Praise no new horse till to-morrow,
No wife till two years are over,
No wife’s brother till the third year,
Praise thyself not while thou livest!
At this rate the letters of some Lord Chesterfield to his son will yet be reconstructed for the epoch of our hairy ancestors on the tree platform. It is clear that the great body of ethnological evidence, unequal in its parts, and in sad need of sifting and revision, has something of that uncertain quality as an ally in argument which Tom Nash imputed to “law, logic, and the Switzers.” They could be hired to fight, he said, for anybody.
Safety lies in making one kind of evidence control another kind, and in reckoning only with the carefully balanced result. What evidence is there that can control the evidence of ethnology? Philology, despite its overweening claims, is said to be unavailing; it may reveal verbal processes which belong to prehistoric times; but, as J. F. McLennan[[41]] remarked, “in the sciences of law and society, old means not old in chronology but in structure.... The preface of general history must be compiled from the materials presented by barbarism.” Yet McLennan himself declares that “a really primitive people nowhere exists,” and so puts a great restriction on the use of the material he has just praised. Can history be of help? “The study of the science of art,” says Professor Grosse,[[42]] “should not turn to history or to prehistory. History knows no primitive peoples.” Archæology, he thinks, is as powerless; the sole refuge is in ethnology, for it shows us “a whole series of primitive peoples in the full light of the present.” But this full light, now and then, has blinded even Professor Grosse; and there is a kind of history, not direct, indeed, not a matter of clear record, but still often as valuable as ethnological evidence, which has help of its own for the student of primitive institutions both by way of control and by way of suggestive facts. One of the first men who went about the reconstruction of prehistorical times by a sober application of the “known principles of human nature” to the facts offered by ethnology and sociology, sciences then unknown by name, was Adam Smith; in the highly interesting account of him written by Dugald Stewart and published as introduction to the Essays,[[43]] the name of “theoretical or conjectural history” is given to “this species of philosophical investigation which has no appropriated name in our language.” Stewart is speaking of Smith’s essay on the origin of speech,[[44]] and compares it with the famous pioneer work of Montesquieu and others in a related field of study, remarking on the way in which “casual observations of illiterate travellers and navigators” are combined into “a philosophical commentary on the history of law and of manners.” These “casual observations” have risen of late to almost absolute power, and “known principles of human nature” are out of office. Now it is true that one must be chary in the application of such “known principles” to the facts from which one has to construct one’s idea of human nature itself, a process close to the vicious circle; but there are, nevertheless, certain general controlling ideas to which appeal should be made when one has to set a value on a given bit of evidence. A controlling idea of this sort is the sense of literary evolution, an idea based on known literary facts, and quite valid as test for alleged facts which are brought forward as evidence in questions of prehistoric stages of poetry. This sense of literary evolution, moreover, need be no whim or freak of one’s own judgment. It is not merely that one feels the absurdity of those jingling platitudes which Dr. Mitchill fathers upon the lorn Wanapaska; it is the sense of evolution in the expression of emotion and of thought, a sense based on experience and due to a competent process of reasoning, which tells any person of information that savages do not make such a song. True, if a mass of such evidence lay before one, and it proved to be of the trustworthy sort, then the controlling idea would be driven off, and the old sense of evolution would be so modified as to conform to the new facts. But this is not the case.