Luxury has been a favorite theme of satire and denunciation by poets and moralists from time immemorial. But it may be doubted whether in nations or individuals its effects, even when it rages most fiercely, are half so pernicious as those springing from that indifference to comforts and luxuries which is sometimes dignified with the name of contentment, but which is only another name for sheer laziness. While thousands are ruined by prodigality and extravagance, tens of thousands are kept in poverty by indifference to the comforts and ornaments of life,—by a too feeble development of those desires to gratify which the mass of men are striving. It is a bad sign when a man is content with the bare necessities of life, and aspires to nothing higher; and equally ominous is it when a nation, however rich or powerful, is satisfied with the capital and glories it has already accumulated. Cry up as we may the virtues of simplicity and frugality, it is yet quite certain that a people content to live upon garlic, macaroni, or rice, are at the very lowest point in the scale both of intellect and morality. A civilized man differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his wants. The truth is, man is a constitutionally lazy being, and requires some stimulus to prick him into industry. He must have many difficulties to contend with, many clamorous appetites and tastes to gratify, if you would bring out his energies and virtues; and it is because they are always grumbling,—because, dissatisfied amid the most enviable enjoyments, they clamor and strive for more and more of what Voltaire calls les superflues choses, si nécessaires,—that the English people have reached their present pinnacle of prosperity, and accumulated a wealth which almost enables them to defy a hostile world.
Among the familiar words that we employ, few have been more frequently made the instrument of sophistry than “nature” and “art.” There are many persons who oppose the teaching of elocution, because they like a “natural” and “artless” eloquence, to which, they think, all elaborate training is opposed. Yet nothing is more certain than that nature and art, between which there is supposed to be an irreconcilable antagonism, are often the very same thing. What is more natural than that a man who lacks vocal power should cultivate and develop his voice by vocal exercises; or that, if he is conscious of faults in his manner of speaking,—his articulation, gestures, etc.,—he should try, by the help of a good teacher, to overcome them? So with the style of a writer; what is more natural than for one who feels that he has not adequately expressed his thought, to blot the words first suggested and try others, and yet others, till he despairs of further improvement? There are subjects so deep and complex, ideas so novel and abstruse, that the most practised writer cannot do justice to them without great labor. A conscientious author is, therefore, continually transposing clauses, reconstructing sentences, substituting words, polishing and repolishing paragraphs; and this, unquestionably, is “art,” or the application of means to an end. But is this art inconsistent with nature?
Similar to the fallacy which lurks in the words “nature” and “natural,” as thus employed, is that which lurks in a popular use of the word “simplicity.” It has been happily said that while some men talk as if to speak naturally were to speak like a natural, others talk as if to speak with simplicity meant to speak like a simpleton. But what is true “simplicity,” as applied to literary composition? Is it old, worn-out commonplace,—“straw that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat,” as Carlyle says,—the shallowest ideas expressed in tame and insipid language? Or is it not rather
“Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,”—
in other words, a just and striking thought expressed in the aptest and most impressive language? Those persons who declaim against the employment of art in speaking and writing, forget that we are all exceedingly artificial, conventional beings. Without training, a speaker is almost sure to be awkward in gesture and unnatural in utterance. The very preacher who in the street forgets himself and uses the most natural gesticulation and tones, will become self-conscious the moment he ascends the pulpit, and speak in a falsetto key. It is to get rid of these artificial habits that “art” (which is the employment of proper means) is needed.
How many controversies about the “transmutation of Species,” and the “fixity of Species,” would have been avoided, had the scientists who use these phrases fully pondered their meaning, or rather no-meaning! Some writers have tried to explain the law of constancy in transmission, and its independence of the law of variation, by maintaining that it is the Species only, not the individual, which is reproduced. “Species,” says Buffon, “are the only beings in nature.” A sheep, it is said, is always and everywhere a sheep, and a man a man, reproducing the specific type, but not necessarily reproducing any individual peculiarities. This hypothesis is a striking example of the confusion which results from the introduction of old metaphysical ideas into science. It is evident, as a late writer has clearly shown, that Species cannot reproduce itself, for Species does not exist. It is an entity, an abstract idea, not a concrete fact.
The thing Species no more exists than the thing Goodness or the thing Whiteness. “Nature only knows individuals. A collection of individuals so closely resembling each other as all sheep resemble each other, are conveniently classed under one general term, Species; but this general term has no objective existence; the abstract or typical sheep, apart from all concrete individuals, has no existence out of our systems. Whenever an individual sheep is born, it is the offspring of two individual sheep, whose structures and dispositions it reproduces; it is not the offspring of an abstract idea; it does not come into being at the bidding of a type, which as a Species sits apart, regulating ovine phenomena.... If, therefore, ‘transmutation of Species’ is absurd, ‘fixity of Species’ is not a whit less so. That which does not exist can neither be transmuted nor maintained in fixity. Only individuals exist; they resemble their parents, and they differ from their parents. Out of these resemblances we create Species; out of these differences we create Varieties; we do so as conveniences of classification, and then believe in the reality of our own figments.”[35]
A popular fallacy, which is partly verbal, is the notion, so tenaciously held by many, that exposure to hardship, and even want, in youth, is the cause of the bodily vigor of those men who have lived to a good age in countries with a rocky soil and a bleak climate. What is more natural, it is argued, than that hardships should harden the constitution? Look at the Indians; how many of them live till eighty or ninety! Yet no person who reasons thus would think, if engaged in cattle-breeding, of neglecting to feed and shelter his animals in their youth; nor if a dozen men, out of a hundred who had faced a battery, should survive and live to a good age, would he think of regarding the facing of batteries as conducive to longevity. The truth is, that early hardships, by destroying all the weak, merely prove the hardiness of the survivors,—which latter is the cause, not the effect, of their having lived through such a training. So “loading a gun-barrel to the muzzle, and firing it off, does not give it strength; though it proves, if it escape, that it was strong.”
The revelations of travellers have dissipated the illusions which once prevailed concerning the hardiness and health of the Indians and other savages. The savage, it is now known, lives in a condition but one degree above starvation. If he sink below it, he disappears instantaneously, as if he had never been. A certain amount of hardship he can endure; but it has limits, which if he passes, he sinks unnoticed and unknown. There is no registrar or newspaper to record that a unit has been subtracted from the amount of human existence. It is true that severe diseases are rarely seen by casual visitors of savage tribes,—and why? Because death is their doctor, and the grave their hospital. When patients are left wholly to nature, nature presses very hard for an immediate payment of her debt.