When Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write,
Westward the course of empire takes it way,
he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately
answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move
ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some
mysterious power, setting up new “empires” superior to those enfeebled
by time, as is the fate of empires? Many a thoughtful observer has
confessed himself unable to name the law at the back or front of the
movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come
about by accident.
A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this
universal tendency to “go West” may not lie too deep for discovery.
May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with
it?—has all to do with it, for that matter. In civilization sunsets
count for little—we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes
of the sunset are “airy nothings”—optical illusions. But we inherit
instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The
savage is a poet who
Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,
reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in
the light of exact knowledge we have read out of them. Not a Grecian
of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from
the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathèd horn could beat him at
that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and
beyond the sea-horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a
land wherein are all beauty and possibilities of happiness. To him the
crimson lakes, purple promontories, golden coasts and happy isles of
cloudland are veritable presentments of actual regions below. He never
bothers his shaggy pate with the question “Can such things be?”—his
eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the
wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily
points the way and sometimes discloses? That is the way he feels about
it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and
legends of many tribes. And because they so felt we have from them the
wanderlust that lures us ever a-west.
To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the
sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others, giving the race a
divided urge. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was
a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the
sunrise—so seldom that its fascination did not get into the blood of
him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the
dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in
rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his
sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country reflected in
the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover,
those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as we are assured by
credible witnesses who have observed them, through the happy chance of
having been up all night companioning the katydids and whip-poor-wills.
Transcriber’s Notes:
- Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
- Blank pages have been removed.
- A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected,
otherwise inconsistent spelling has been left as is.