Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Thirdly, there is the view which is, generally, that of all non-English nations and peoples; not only do they not share the upas-tree theory with regard to the mission, the future, of the British people, but it is difficult to make them conceive that it is held by any wholly sane persons. To these non-English nations and peoples, the English are an energetic folk, shrewd even beyond the Jew in business matters, and with a subtlety which in every civilized country has appended to their name the adjective "perfidious." To men, French, German, Russian, Dutch, who have grown up from childhood to adult years surrounded by the arts and civilization that are the common inheritance of the modern world from the ancient, and whose religion and history have never more than incidentally mentioned the name of Britain to them, there is something not merely astonishing but ludicrous in the conception that earth's vast millions, civilized and uncivilized, Asiatic and European, black and white, are to be swept away by this trading fragment of the race; nor is it possible to adduce logical grounds on which to convince them that it will be so. How the Englishman is going to crush out and annihilate the countless millions of China, India, Russia, Japan and Europe, and people the earth they now occupy with the descendants of his body, so that Englishmen may be all and in all on the earth, is inconceivable to those who consider that in the space of some hundreds of years the Briton has not been able to annihilate or gain racial possession of the little island at his side, that Ireland still contains as many Irishmen as it did a thousand years ago; that America, their earliest founded colony, is largely filled by Germans, Swedes, Jews and Irish; that India, though the wealth, wrung from its poverty, flows into English pockets, and affords a noble exercise ground for the sons of the upper English classes, still is as thickly inhabited by men of the darker races as it was before the Englishmen landed. Looking at these facts it is indeed difficult to maintain the position which implies, if it does not assert, that the earth of the future will be peopled by the fruit of British loins, and, when looking round and inquiring, "Where are the descendants of all the races of earth?"—the reply will be, "Gone!"

There is, however, yet a fourth view with regard to the functions and destiny of the English race in the future. It may be that those of us who hold it are, unknown to ourselves, still blinded by that mist of race prejudice which, hanging before our eyes from the first moment of our birth, is perhaps more difficult for even the greatest and strongest man to brush aside than the obscuring vapours of personal egoism; nevertheless, it seems to some of us, looking at the matter with what impartiality we are capable of, that it is a view which is capable of being defended by logical argument, and that the hope founded on it is not wholly chimerical; moreover that it is a view, did they but give themselves time to contemplate it, that would win the assent of many who now seem to hold untenable views of the Englishman's upas-like powers.

We who hold this view are perfectly willing to allow that there have been, are, and will be races as great as and greater than ourselves in many if not in all respects. We not only know, but hold in mind the fact, that not much more than a thousand years ago our fathers were barbarians scarcely higher than the Kaffirs of to-day in the stage of culture and civilization they had reached; that even religion and the art of letters and of material civilization were brought to us by the higher barbarians of the Continent, who had received it as a relic from super-nations of antiquity, who in turn had received it from those wise small Semitic and Egyptian folk to whom mankind owe almost all they are; we did not receive it much more lustily than the Kaffir of to-day. And Alfred, like some white-skinned Khama, led or strove to lead his savage children to accept and prize a civilization and a learning they would never have invented and could hardly grasp.

We are aware that we have not been the leading race of the world in arts and science; that as those ancient fellow folk of ours, who are lost in the dawn of history, invented the alphabet and the art of inscription, and reading, and astronomy, and reared mighty palaces and wove rare garments when our fore-elders were dancing in hyperborean forests, or on Asiatic mountain peaks; so later all that the cultured man of to-day prizes in plastic art, philosophy and literary art was brought to a perfection in Greece which no people since has ever surpassed; and in Rome the arts of war and civil life were perfected and the colossal buildings and paths which we have never even equalled were laid down while, naked barbarians, we still hunted and drank. We know that even in the last thousand years we cannot set our names higher than our fellows in the regions of art and learning. Beside the Euclids, the Copernicuses, the Galileos, Theophrastuses, of the old, and the Herschels and Keplers of the modern, world, we have indeed the superb name of Newton to set down, but it cannot out-glitter its compeers; nor can even our prince, Shakespeare, outweigh the names of Dante, Goethe, Voltaire; nor have we, till Charles Darwin of this century, ever possessed a man who in the world of thought has transformed it, as Luther or the French thinkers of the eighteenth century transformed it, great and beloved as to many of us of to-day are the names of our J. S. Mill and Spencer. In the lower world of military art we have produced none of those men of genius before whom the whole civilized world has trembled, Tamurlane, Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon; even Alaric and Attila have had no counterpart among men of our blood. And perhaps no serene and impartial intellect can look at the history of the race and say we have ever produced a man who, in fame and extent of influence on the race, has equalled Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mohamet, Socrates and Plato, or even Paul. Even in the arts and mechanical inventions on which we so pride ourselves to-day, we start back with astonishment when we begin to examine how and when we came by them. While our fathers in skins or clotheless wandered in the wilds, the fertile brain of the Chinaman had not only invented the coarser or thicker woven fabrics, but had made from the thread of the silk-worm such silk as the most skilled looms in England can hardly yield to-day, and had formed porcelain of which our creations are a humble imitation; our savage forefathers, if they could have penetrated to the villas and cities of the Roman Empire, would have found them filled with articles of art and luxury, and of delicate manufacture, which he was slowly to be taught, and which to-day he often only imitates with difficulty. Our woollen manufactures were brought us from Flanders and Holland, our silk from France, our muslins from India, our carpets from Persia, and even to-day there is scarcely a manufactured article except in iron work which is not manufactured better in some other country than with us, in spite of the vast bulk of shoddy work we produce for sale. Even in dress to-day we are not only unable in many instances to equal the delicacy and finish of foreign fabrics and ornaments, but we are absolutely dependent on the brains and taste of a foreign people for the cut and manufacture of our clothing, and the direction which our manufacture of textiles and fabrics shall to a large extent assume. Hardly any free savage or civilized people in the world has not been able to invent and determine for itself what class or shape of clothing is suited to its needs, but the great English people hangs with a servility, which would excite our ridicule were it not a matter of national shame, on the breath of the Frenchman's lips and the throb of a French man or woman's brain to determine how it shall clothe itself and what materials its manufactories shall produce; and one French woman, she may be a prostitute, or a public dancer, or a woman of fashion, hitches her dress at one point or wears a protuberant sleeve, and five millions of English all over the earth, with patient zeal and much labour, cast aside their old skirt and sleeves and strive to do as she did; and a few throbs of the brain of a French man milliner will determine that hundreds of thousands of English hats and bonnets are to be thrown aside, while with abject servility five millions of English women seek to cover their heads with what he has invented.

Such abject dependence on the thought and guidance of another people in a matter of daily concern can only be ascribed to the profound conviction of the whole people of the Frenchman's superiority to himself in this direction, and the conviction of the English woman that she is not, in matters of taste, the equal of the French woman, a humble conviction which reduces the English folk to a species of buffoonery, when, in the simple wild suburbs of Cape Town or amid the dust storms and heat of Johannesburg or Kimberley, they persist in following the Frenchwoman and donning the garbs she with taste invented to harmonize with the artificial surroundings of a Paris home on the Champs Elysées!

Whether we allow it theoretically or only in practice, it is undoubtable that in the plastic arts we not only do not surpass, but cannot readily imitate other nations, ancient or modern. We have not only never produced a Phidias or a Praxiteles, but we have no Michaelangelo or Raphael or Tintoretto, like the Italian, no Albrecht Durer with the German, or even, if we except Turner, a man who can stand as a national representative beside Holbein and Rubens, and national painters of the Dutch and Flemish schools; and in the nineteenth century, great as has been our awakening in this respect, it is still to foreign schools that our artists go for instruction.

If we except our superb old abbeys and Gothic relics, which we share with the rest of Europe, our architecture is imitative, and, in the case of such buildings as St. Paul's, shows the grotesque folly of a people who, in an unsuitable climate and spot, will attempt in their search of the beautiful and harmonious to imitate the growths of other climates and conditions. The appalling hideousness of our cities when compared with those of any country in Europe, their grim indifference to harmony and beauty, and yet more appalling attempts to gain them, oppress the new arrival heavily.

In music we have produced no genius and no noble work; the Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Wagners are Germans, and we have no men who can approach the lesser but great Italians, or even the Chopins and Meyerbeers. Our music, like the Elgin marbles and the divine gods in the British Museum, is all imported; and when we would raise a monument to our own glory, we rob Egypt of one of her obelisks which, as a ruin among desert sands, was divine, and plant it in damp ugliness on the oozing bank of our mercantile river to proclaim to all the world, "Here is a people with money to import anything; but not the skill to raise their own monuments!"

In the modern arts and manufactures, we have during the last century taken a place in the front beside other peoples in right of a discovery hardly, if at all, less important in its practical effects than the electrical discoveries which in their inception we owe to the Italians and others; and in the daily and hourly small inventions and improvements in manufacture and the domain of practical science, England, if she holds her equal place, does no more than hold it beside the laboratories and workshops of France, Germany and Italy.[78] In the world of art, in those arts in which language is the medium, we are alone able to hold our heads proudly beside the best of modern peoples, not only because we possess a Shakespeare or a Chaucer, but because our literature as a whole is a noble accretion of the beautiful and great.

In that great and beneficent give and take which binds and has ever bound the children of men together, as the blood which flowing through the organs of the body blends and identifies it, we have received, like our fellows, all that humanity has thought or found, from the first and greatest discovery of fire by our prehistoric and perhaps Bushman-like ancestors, to the hardly less mighty invention of letters and arts, and we have also brought our quota to the common stock. But when we look at the matter impartially, the conviction must be forced upon every mind that, in arts and sciences, in manufacture and inventions, in spite of the contributions we have made, we are far more receivers from the common stock than contributors to it; that the world could still get on as far as religion, science, art, philosophy and material inventions are concerned without the Englishman, or were all he has contributed taken away; but the Englishman, if he lost all that in the last thousand years he has gained from Europe, and through it from all the earth, would be again a savage in aboriginal wildness.