Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

by Various

And as we find that the use of letters is by no means an indispensable element of true civilisation, we should arrive at the same conclusion in examining almost every discovery which has been pointed out as a sine quâ non of civilised life. Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilised life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilised to-day may be called barbarous to-morrow. Races who abstain from eating the flesh of animals are apt to look on carnivorous people as savages; people who abstain from intoxicating drinks naturally despise a nation in which drunkenness is prevalent. What should we say if we entered a town in which the streets were neither paved nor lighted, and in which the windows were without glass; where we saw no carriages in any of the thoroughfares, and where, inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen might be seen eating without forks and wearing garments that had never been washed? And yet even in Paris no street was paved before 1185. In London Holborn was first paved in 1417, and Smithfield in 1614, while Berlin was without paved streets far into the seventeenth century. No houses had windows of glass before the twelfth century, and as late as the fourteenth century anything might be thrown out of window at Paris, after three times calling out “Gare l'eau!” Shirts were an invention of the Crusades, and the fine dresses which ladies and gentlemen wore during the Middle Ages were hardly ever washed, but only refreshed from time to time with precious scents. In 1550 we are told that there existed in Paris no more than three carriages—one belonging to the Queen, the other to Diane de Poitiers, and the third to René de Laval. In England coaches (so called from the Hungarian kossi) date from 1580, though whirlicotes go back to the fourteenth century. So far as we know, neither Dante nor Beatrice used forks in eating, and yet we should hardly class them as savages.

It is easy to say that all these are matters of small importance. No doubt they are, but we often see them treated as matters of great importance, when we speak of races with red skins or black skins. With us civilisation, whether consisting of these small or great matters, has often become a burden, a check rather than a help to the free development of all that is noble in human nature; while many conditions of life which we are inclined to call barbarous were almost essential for the growth of the human mind during its earlier stages. Can we imagine a religion growing up in modern Paris? Would a travelling bard, such as Homer, find an audience in the streets of London? Would a Socrates be listened to by the professors of Berlin? A Panini sitting almost naked under a pippal tree and composing the rules of his marvellous grammar of Sanskrit, a Bâdârâyana with dishevelled hair, spinning out of his mind the subtle web of Vedânta philosophy, would be shunned as wild creatures by a young English officer, and yet, on the ladder that leads to the highest excellence of intellect, how many steps would the former stand above the latter! For carrying out the chief objects of our life on earth, very little of what is now called civilisation is really wanted. Many things are pleasant, without being really essential to our fulfilling our mission on earth. For laying the foundations of society, for settling the broad principles of law and morality, for discovering the deep traces of order and unity in nature, and for becoming conscious of the presence of the Divine within and without, a life in the forests, on the mountains, ay, even in the desert, is far more favorable than a lodging in Bond Street.

The latest attempt which has been made at defining the true character of a savage restricts the distinctive characteristics of a savage to three—(1) that he murders his children, (2) that he kills and eats his fellow-men, (3) that he disregards certain laws of nature.

Now in that sense it seems quite clear that the first man could not have been a savage, for if he had murdered his children we should not be alive; if he had eaten his fellow-men, supposing there were any to eat, again we should not be alive; and if he had disregarded certain laws of nature, in that case also, probably, we should not be alive.

What, then, is to be done? Are we to say that there never were any savages, or that it is impossible to distinguish between a savage and a non-savage? Certainly not. All we have to do is to be on our guard against a very common trick of language, or rather against a very common mistake of philosophers, who imagine that the same name must always mean the same thing. All the difficulties hitherto detailed which have prevented anthropologists from agreeing on any real definition of savage have arisen from their having mixed up under the same name at least two totally different classes of men, both called savages in ordinary parlance, but each occupying its own place in the history of the world. How this should have happened is difficult to explain, but I think we can trace the first beginnings in the works of some of the earlier anthropologists, who were carried away by the idea that we can study in the illiterate races of the present day, such as we find in Africa, America, and Polynesia, the true character of the primitive man, as he emerged new-born from the bowels of nature. Scientific ethnologists have long since awaked from this fond dream, but the primitive savage has remained as a troublesome legacy in other quarters. Nothing can be more interesting than the study of races who have no literature, but whose former history may be read in their languages and their tools, and whose present state of civilisation or savagery may certainly be used to throw collateral light on many phases in the history of more highly civilised nations. Only let us remember that these races and their languages are as old as the most civilised races and their languages, while their history, if so we may call it, seldom carries us back beyond the mere surface of the day. If we in England are old, the Fuegians are not a day younger. If the question as to the age of the European and American races could be settled by geological evidence, it would seem as if America is now able to produce human skulls older than the Neanderthal skull.[14] No one, so far as I know, has ever succeeded in proving that after man had once been evolved or created, a new evolution or creation of man took place, attested by contemporaneous witnesses. The Duke of Argyll goes so far as to maintain[15] that those who hold the opinion that different races of men represent different species, or a species which spread from more than one place, stand outside the general current of scientific thought.

But while scientific anthropologists have long given up the idea that, if we want to know the condition of primitive man, we must study it among the Fuegians or Eskimos, the subject has lost none of its charms. It is, no doubt, a very amusing occupation to run through the books of modern and ancient travellers, traders, or missionaries, to mark with pencil a strange legend here, and an odd custom there, to point out a similarity between a Shâman and an Archbishop, between a Hottentot and Homer. This kind of work can be done in the intervals of more serious studies, and if it is done with the facile pen of a journalist or the epigrammatic eloquence of a young lawyer, nothing can be more delightful. But it is dangerous work—so dangerous that the prejudice that has lately arisen among scientific anthropologists against Agriology seems justified, at least to a certain extent. There are truly scholarlike works on savages. I say scholarlike intentionally, because they are based on a scholarlike study of the languages spoken by the races whose mental organisation has to be analysed. The works of Bishops Callaway and Caldwell, of Brinton and Horatio Hale, of Gill, Bleek, and Hahn, the more general compilations of Waitz, Tiele, Lubbock, Tylor, and Reville, the clever contributions of A. Lang, John Fiske, and others, are but the first that occur to my mind as specimens of really useful work that may be done in this line. But the loose and superficial appeals to savages as the representatives of a brand-new humanity, fresh from the hands of the potter, the ignorant attempts at explaining classical myths from Melanesian tattle, the wild comparisons of Hebrew customs with the outrages of modern cannibals, have at last met with their well-merited reward, and the very name of savage is gradually disappearing from the best works on anthropology and philosophy.

And yet there are savages, only we must distinguish. There are, as I pointed out long ago, two classes of savages, to say nothing of minor subdivisions—namely, progressive and retrogressive savages. There is a hopeful and a hopeless barbarism, there is a growing and a decaying civilisation. We owe a great deal to the Duke of Argyll, particularly in his last great work, The Unity of Nature, for having laid so much stress on the fact that of all works of nature man is the one most liable to two kinds of evolution, one ascending and the other descending. Like the individual, a whole family, tribe, or race of men may, within a very short time, rise to the highest pitch of virtue and culture, and in the next generation sink to the lowest level of vice and brutality.

The first question, therefore, which we have to ask when we have to speak of savages, is whether there is any indication of their having once reached a higher stage from which they have descended, or whether they are only just ascending from that low but healthy level which must precede every attempt at what we call civilisation. We may call both by the same name of savages, but, if we do so, we must always remember that, from an historical point of view, no two stages in civilised life can be more apart from each other than that of the retrogressive and that of the progressive savage.

But even after we have laid down this broad line of demarcation, we shall by no means find it easy to catch either a progressive or a retrogressive savage pur et simple. If looking out for retrogressive or decaying savages, most people would naturally think of Fuegians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Ashantis, Veddas, and Red Indians, and one of the strongest proofs of their decay would be derived from the fact that they are dying out wherever they are brought in contact with European civilisation. Now it is true that the Tasmanians have become extinct, and that several of the Red Indian tribes, too, have actually been destroyed by our civilisation. But we must not generalise too quickly. Some of these very tribes, the Red Indians,[16] seem to be recovering, seem to increase again, and to be able to hold their own against the baneful influences which threatened to destroy them. The negroes also are by no means dwindling away. On the contrary, they are increasing both in Africa and in America. We must therefore be careful before we deny the recuperative powers even of retrogressive savages, and we must look for other evidence beyond mere statistics in support of their hopeless degeneracy.

Historical evidence of such gradual degeneracy is, from the nature of the case, almost impossible. We must trust, therefore, to less direct proof. I believe there is some distinct historical evidence in the case of the Central and South American races, that at the time of the arrival of Columbus and his successors civilisation had really been decaying for some time in America.[17] But in nearly all other cases we have to look out for other proofs in support of a higher antecedent civilisation possessed by tribes who, as we know them at present, have to be classed as savages. Such proofs, if they exist, must be sought for in language, religion, customs, tools, and works of art.