Some Observations Upon the Civilization of the Western Barbarians, Particularly of the English / made during the residence of some years in those parts.

by John B. Swazey

The Prose writings are innumerable—largely, however, mere re-hashes [mi-pi-stu] of existing works. It is a trade to make these new forms of old books—cutting down, working over, and revising. History, accounts of bloody fights, forays, commotions, massacres, and burnings, now by one Christ-god tribe and now by another; Biography, Travels, Lives of Great men (never heard of out of some Barbarian tribe); these are many, and read by the Literati. A few books, rarely read, devoted to Science and to Art, are printed, commonly to the ruin of the printers.

Of romances and novels there are no ends. With these and the newspapers the English Barbarians almost entirely occupy themselves, when they do read. The novels pretend to portray life, in its usual vicissitudes and with a natural show of the feelings. But the feeling depicted is that of Love, and the Life, the life of a Lover. In this curious creature, unknown in our Central Kingdom, the English young people of both sexes delight. I cannot describe him; he has no existence outside of a diseased brain. The great Shakespeare describes him, "Sighing like a furnace, with a woful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow!" which will do as well as a more extended notice.

There are Metaphysical works. We have no term to represent it. It is a book which dimly suggests phantoms—things unseen, and not to be seen—mere words without bodies. Usually, making the matters of the common Worship still more inscrutable.

Close to these, and blended often in a confused mixture with them—a compound defying all reasonable analysis—come the Philosophical. This term is a grand one with the Barbarians, and embraces all knowledge. The Philosophical writers pretend to the most exalted insight and outsight—they measure the whole infinite and finite, mind, matter, and the very nature of moral and divine things. The Philosopher loves Wisdom, and Wisdom loves and teaches him!

Each philosopher, however, knowing everything, knows some things better than others; and usually exhibits to the world that eccentricity by which he is known. He parades this on all public occasions of the Literati; and feels happy and serene mounted on his Hobby-horse (again we have nothing to fit this word)—he appropriates the name of the ridden Hobby. Thus, some time since, one of these discovered and taught that man was an Ape—an Ape of high form. This discovery was not very well received; however, he was afterwards honoured by a title derived from his ancestor, and styled the Simian philosopher. In the old Roman, Simia means Ape. He is vulgarly and better known, however, as the Hobby-horse philosopher, from his own name, Hobbs!

Just now, this speculation has revived again, with but slight change. One Darwin dreams of immortality from the usefulness of his theory. In this, man no doubt is found in the Simia, but he passes through that type; it is well enough to find there the immediate origin, but the true germ lies further back among the tadpoles!

I do not know what tadpoles are, and did not think it worth while to inquire.

This philosophy, called Darwinian, is greatly admired for its profundity—especially by the select circle of Mutual Admiring Thinkers—but is strongly denounced by the Bonzes, and by the Halls of Learning and Literati of the Superstition. It makes man no immortal being at all, these say; and dethrones all the gods.

In our Flowery Land we may smile at these speculations and eccentricities—for such and similar vagaries are as old as Literature; and the special notion of Darwin, as to the Origin of Species, has not even the attraction of novelty. The speculation of evolution, by which all visible forms are developed from a form less perfect below it, and this from another below that, and so on, down to the beginning, is a clumsy mode of stating that original forms were few, and contained wrapped up in them, many—and that possibly there may have been primarily only one, containing all! The Sovereign Lord Himself! In truth, it is the immemorial out of nothing idea; for when a creator of worlds, in the shape of man, has got to a single form containing all, he has yet to account for that Single Form.