IS PROGRESS A TRUTH?
'Human nature has been the same in all ages.'
'Men are pretty much the same wherever you find them.'
If there be anything in this world from which it would be desirable to see men delivered, it is from a certain small, cheap wisdom which expresses itself in general verdicts on all humanity, and enables the fribbler or dolt who can not see beyond his nose to give an offhand summary of the infinite. There is 'an aping of the devil' in this flippant assumption of our immutability, which strangely combines the pitiful and painful. Oh! if the ne plus ultra which antique Ignorance complacently inscribes on the gates of its world should ever be worn away, let it be replaced by this owlish credo in the unchangeableness of man.
The refutation of these sayings has been the history of humanity, and yet no argument on political or social topics fails to contain them in one form or another. Even now, in the tremendous debate maintained by common logic and 'fist law' between our North and South, we find them enunciated with a clearness and precision unequaled in any state paper, unless we except that in which William the Conqueror coolly styled himself king 'by the right of the sword.' Science, which modestly announces itself as incomplete the nearer it approaches completion, has been assumed to be perfect by those most ignorant of it, in order that its mere observations as to climate and races may be found to prove that as man is, so he was in all ages, and so must be, 'forever and forever as we rove.' Races now vanished in the twilight of time have been boldly declared to be the prototypes of others, now themselves changing into new forms, and we, unconsciously, like the old Hebrew in Heine's Italy, repeat curses over the ancient graves of long-departed foes—ignorant that those curses were long since fulfilled by the unconquerable and terrible laws which ever hurry us onward and upward, from everlasting to everlasting, from the first Darkness to the infinite word of Light.
The assumption that mankind always has been and will be the same, involves the conclusion that the elements of slavery and scoundrelism, of suffering and of disorder, are immutable in essence and in proportion, and that human exertion wastes itself in vain when it aspires to anything save a rank in the upper ten millions. As for the mass,—'tis a great pity,—mais, que voulez vous? It is the fortune of life's war; and then who knows? Perhaps they are as happy in their sphere as anybody. Only see how they dance! And then they drink—gracious goodness, how they swig it off! the gay creatures! Oh,'tis a very fine world, gentlemen, especially if you whitewash it well, and keep up a plenty of Potemkin card cottages along the road which winds through the wilderness. But above all—never forget that they—drink.
It was well enough for a stormy past, but it may not be so well for the future, that man is prone to hero-worship. Under circumstances, varying, however, immensely, be it observed, humanity has produced Menus, Confuciuses, Platos, Ciceros, Sidneys, Spinozas, scholars and gentlemen, and the ordinary student, seeing them all through a Claude Lorraine glass of modern tinting, thinks them on the whole wonderfully like himself. Horace chaffs with Cæsar and Mæcenas, Martial quizzes the world and the reader very much as modern club-men and poets would do. It is very convenient to forget how much they have been imitated; still more so to ignore that in both are stores of recondite mode and feeling as yet unpenetrated by any scholar of these days. You think, my brave Artium Baccalaureus, that you feel all that Hafiz felt,—surely he toped and bussed like a good fellow of all times,—and yet for seven centuries the most embracing of scholars have folioed and disputed over the real meaning of that Song of Solomon which is now first beginning to be understood from Hafiz. Man, I tell you that in the old morning of history there were races whose life-blood glowed hotter than ever yours did, with a burning faith, such as you never felt, that all which you now believe to be most execrably infamous was intensely holy. Your wisest scholars lose themselves in trying to unthread the mazes and mysteries of those incomprehensible depths of diabolical worship and intertwined beauty and honor, now known only from trebly diminished mythologic reflection. Perhaps some of those undecipherable hieroglyphs of the East are not so unintelligible to you now as they would be if translated. Do you, for that matter, fully understand why a Hindu yoghi torments himself for thirty years? I observe that the great majority of our good, kind missionaries have no glimmering of an idea why it is done. Brother Zeal, of the first part, says it is superstition. Father Squeal, of the second part, says it is the devil. Very good indeed—so far as it goes.
But look to later ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense or feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith and hope of safety being in a goose and a pig which they bore with them? And they all died, those earnest Goose-and-Pigites; died in untold misery and murder—unhappy 'superstition again.' That bolt is soon shot; but I have my misgivings whether it reaches the mark.
Or what do you make of untold and unutterable horrors, or crimes, as they were deemed, which to us seem bewildering nonsense? What of were-wolf manias, of districts made horrible by nightmare and vampyreism, urged to literal and incredible reality; of abominations which no modern wickedness dare hint at, but which raged like epidemics? Or what of the Sieur de Gilles, with his thousand or two of girl children elaborately tortured to death—and he a type and not a sporad?
'But,' we are told, 'men would do all this over again, if they dared. The vice is all here, safely housed away snug as ever, only waiting its time.' I grant it—just as I grant that the same atoms and elements which once formed mastodons and trilobites are here—and with about as much chance of reappearing as mastodons as humanity has of reproducing those antique horrors. The fragments of witch-madness and star-faith may be still raked in tolerably perfect lumps out of the mire or chaff of mankind; but I do not think, young lady, that you will ever be accused of riding on a broom, though you unquestionably had an ancestress, somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of understanding that unpopular mode of volatility. Pommade Dupuytren and Eau de toilette have taken the place of the witch-ointments; and if the spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen from the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured that it will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright eyes, rustling fans, and Valenciennes-edged pocket-handkerchiefs.