By far the greatest advantage is that on which I observed before--that
to which I drew all the attention I was able by making the first of
these essays an essay on the Preliminary Age. The first thing to
acquire is if I may so express it, the LEGAL FIBRE; a polity
first--what sort of polity is immaterial; a law first--what kind of law
is secondary; a person or set of persons to pay deference to--though
who he is, or they are, by comparison scarcely signifies. 'There is,'
it has been said, 'hardly any exaggerating the difference between
civilised and uncivilised men; it is greater than the difference
between a tame and a wild animal,' because man can improve more. But
the difference at first was gained in much the same way. The taming of
animals as it now goes on among savage nations, and as travellers who
have seen it describe it, is a kind of selection. The most wild are
killed when food is wanted, and the most tame and easy to manage kept,
because they are more agreeable to human indolence, and so the keeper
likes them best. Captain Galton, who has often seen strange scenes of
savage and of animal life, had better describe the process:--'The
irreclaimably wild members of every flock would escape and be utterly
lost; the wilder of those that remained would assuredly be selected for
slaughter--whenever it was necessary that one of the flock should be
killed. The tamest cattle--those which seldom ran away, that kept the
flocks together, and those which led them homeward--would be preserved
alive longer than any of the others. It is, therefore, these that
chiefly become the parents of stock and bequeath their domestic
aptitudes to the future herd. I have constantly witnessed this process
of selection among the pastoral savages of South Africa. I believe it
to be a very important one on account of its rigour and its regularity.
It must have existed from the earliest times, and have been, in
continuous operation, generation after generation, down to the present
day.'[5]
[5] Ethnological Society's Transactions, vol. iii. p. 137.
Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was
obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way
in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes
are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and
the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigour, the savage
virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But
what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to
differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The
slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a
military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes
win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilisation begins,
because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage. Probably
if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages--if some
superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages
before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that
this first step in civilisation was the hardest step. But when we come
to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next
step. All the absolutely incoherent men--all the 'Cyclopes'--have been
cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them. And
the least coherent only remain in the 'protected' parts of the world,
as we may call them. Ordinary civilisation begins near the
Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic
civilisations were not far off. From this centre the conquering
SWARM--for such it is--has grown and grown; has widened its subject
territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography
long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an Australian
Ocean, an unapproachable interior Africa, an inaccessible and
undesirable hill India, were beyond its range. In such remote places
there was no real competition, and on them inferior, half-combined men
continued to exist. But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where
the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations
could not last. They died out and history did not begin till after they
were gone. The great difficulty which history records is not that of
the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is
not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed
law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake
of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first
preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something
better.
This is the precise case with the whole family of arrested
civilisations. A large part, a very large part, of the world seems to
be ready to advance to something good--to have prepared all the means
to advance to something good,--and then to have stopped, and not
advanced. India, Japan, China, almost every sort of Oriental
civilisation, though differing in nearly all other things, are in this
alike. They look as if they had paused when there was no reason for
pausing--when a mere observer from without would say they were likely
not to pause.
The reason is, that only those nations can progress which preserve and
use the fundamental peculiarity which was given by nature to man's
organism as to all other organisms. By a law of which we know no
reason, but which, is among the first by which Providence guides and
governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their
progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to DIFFER from
their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a
patchwork--part resemblance, part contrast. In certain respects each
born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other
respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested
civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in
early childhood, and before they can develop. The fixed custom which
public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it
suits them or not. In that case the community feel that this custom is
the only shelter from bare tyranny, and the only security for they
value. Most Oriental communities live on land which in theory is the
property of a despotic sovereign, and neither they nor their families
could have the elements of decent existence unless they held the land
upon some sort of fixed terms. Land in that state of society is (for
all but a petty skilled minority) a necessary of life, and all the
unincreasable land being occupied, a man who is turned out of his
holding is turned out of this world, and must die. And our notion of
written leases is as out of place in a world without writing and
without reading as a House of Commons among Andaman Islanders. Only one
check, one sole shield for life and good, is then possible;--usage. And
it is but too plain how in such places and periods men cling to customs
because customs alone stand between them and starvation.
A still more powerful cause co-operated, if a cause more powerful can
be imagined. Dryden had a dream of an early age, 'when wild in woods
the noble savage ran;' but 'when lone in woods the cringing savage
crept' would have been more like all we know of that early, bare,
painful period. Not only had they no comfort, no convenience, not the
very beginnings of an epicurean life, but their mind within was as
painful to them as the world without. It was full of fear. So far as
the vestiges inform us, they were afraid of everything; they were
afraid of animals, of certain attacks by near tribes, and of possible
inroads from far tribes. But, above all things, they were frightened of
'the world;' the spectacle of nature filled them with awe and dread.
They fancied there were powers behind it which must be pleased,
soothed, flattered, and this very often in a number of hideous ways. We
have too many such religions, even among races of great cultivation.
Men change their religions more slowly than they change anything else;
and accordingly we have religions 'of the ages'--(it is Mr. Jowett who
so calls them)--of the 'ages before morality;' of ages of which the
civil life, the common maxims, and all the secular thoughts have long
been dead. 'Every reader of the classics,' said Dr. Johnson, 'finds
their mythology tedious.' In that old world, which is so like our
modern world in so many things, so much more like than many far more
recent, or some that live beside us, there is a part in which we seem
to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it
could be credible, or how it came to be thought of. This is the archaic
part of that very world which we look at as so ancient; an 'antiquity'
which descended to them, hardly altered, perhaps, from times long
antecedent, which were as unintelligible to them as to us, or more so.
How this terrible religion--for such it was in all living detail,
though we make, and the ancients then made, an artistic use of the more
attractive bits of it--weighed on man, the great poem of Lucretius, the
most of a nineteenth-century poem of any in antiquity, brings before us
with a feeling so vivid as to be almost a feeling of our own. Yet the
classical religion is a mild and tender specimen of the preserved
religions. To get at the worst, you should look where the destroying
competition has been least--at America, where sectional civilisation
was rare, and a pervading coercive civilisation did not exist; at such
religions as those of the Aztecs.
At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable function
such awful religions can perform in the economy of the world. And no
one can fully explain them. But one use they assuredly had: they fixed
the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind. They were the prime agents of
the era. They put upon a fixed law a sanction so fearful that no one
could dream of not conforming to it. No one will ever comprehend the
arrested civilisations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early
society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes,
hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes
of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon
destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not. And then they a
themselves were caught in their own yoke. The customary discipline,
which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions,
continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the
propensities to variation which are the principle--of progress.
Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to
encourage the principle of originality. They will admit it in theory,
but in practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred
civilisations--returns again. Men are too fond of their own life, too
credulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at the pain
of new thoughts, to be able to bear easily with a changing existence;
or else, having new ideas, they want to enforce them on mankind--to
make them heard, and admitted, and obeyed before, in simple competition
with other ideas, they would ever be so naturally. At this very moment
there are the most rigid Comtists teaching that we ought to be governed
by a hierarchy--a combination of savans orthodox in science. Yet who
can doubt that Comte would have been hanged by his own hierarchy; that
his essor materiel, which was in fact troubled by the 'theologians and
metaphysicians' of the Polytechnic School, would have been more impeded
by the government he wanted to make? And then the secular Comtists, Mr.
Harrison and Mr. Beesly, who want to 'Frenchify the English
institutions'--that is, to introduce here an imitation of the
Napoleonic system, a dictatorship founded on the proletariat--who can
doubt that if both these clever writers had been real Frenchmen they
would have been irascible anti-Bonapartists, and have been sent to
Cayenne long ere now? The wish of these writers is very natural. They
want to 'organise society,' to erect a despot who will do what they
like, and work out their ideas; but any despot will do what he himself
likes, and will root out new ideas ninety-nine times for once that he
introduces them. Again, side by side with these Comtists, and warring
with them--at least with one of them--is Mr. Arnold, whose poems we
know by heart, and who has, as much as any living Englishman, the
genuine literary impulse; and yet even he wants to put a yoke upon
us--and, worse than a political yoke, an academic yoke, a yoke upon our
minds and our styles. He, too, asks us to imitate France; and what else
can we say than what the two most thorough Frenchmen of the last age
did say?--'Dans les corps a talent, nulle distinction ne fait ombrage,
si ce n'est pas celle du talent. Un due et pair honore l'Academie
Francaise, qui ne veut point de Boileau, refuse la Bruyere, fait
attendre Voltaire, mais recoit tout d'abord Chapelain et Conrart. De
meme nous voyons a l'Academie Grecque le vicomte invite, Corai
repousse, lorsque Jormard y entre comme dans un moulin.' Thus speaks
Paul-Louis Courier in his own brief inimitable prose. And a still
greater writer--a real Frenchman, if ever there was one, and (what many
critics would have denied to be possible) a great poet by reason of his
most French characteristics--Beranger, tells us in verse:--
Je croyais voir le president
Fairs bailler--en repondant
Que l'on vient de perdre un grand homme;
Que moi je le vaux, Dieu sait comme.
Mais ce president sans facon[6]
Ne perore ici qu'en chanson:
Toujours trop tot sa harangue est finie.
Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academia;
Ce n'est point comme a l'Academie.
Admis enfin, aurai-jo alors,
Pour tout esprit, l'esprit de corps?
Il rend le bon sens, quoi qu'on dise,
Solidaire de la sottise;
Mais, dans votes societe,
L'esprit de corps, c'est la gaite.
Cet esprit la regne sans tyrannie.
Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academie;
Ce n'est point comme a l'Acadenie.
[6] Desaugiers.
Asylums of common-place, he hints, academies must ever be. But that
sentence is too harsh; the true one is--the academies are asylums of
the ideas and the tastes of the last age. 'By the time,' I have heard a
most eminent man of science observe, 'by the time a man of science
attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance upon it, because
he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when he was young, but
which the new race have refuted.' These are the sort of ideas which
find their home in academies, and out of their dignified windows
pooh-pooh new things. I may seem to have wandered far from early
society, but I have not wandered. The true scientific method is to
explain the past by the present--what we see by what we do not see. We
can only comprehend why so many nations have not varied, when we see
how hateful variation is; how everybody turns against it; how not only
the conservatives of speculation try to root it out, but the very
innovators invent most rigid machines for crushing the 'monstrosities
and anomalies'--the new forms, out of which, by competition and trial,
the best is to be selected for the future. The point I am bringing out
is simple:--one most important pre-requisite of a prevailing nation is
that it should have passed out of the first stage of civilisation into
the second stage--out of the stage where permanence is most wanted into
that where variability is most wanted; and you cannot comprehend why
progress is so slow till you see how hard the most obstinate tendencies
of human nature make that step to mankind.
Of course the nation we are supposing must keep the virtues of its
first stage as it passes into the after stage, else it will be trodden
out; it will have lost the savage virtues in getting the beginning of
the civilised virtues; and the savage virtues which tend to war are the
daily bread of human nature. Carlyle said, in his graphic way, 'The
ultimate question between every two human beings is, "Can I kill thee,
or canst thou kill me?"' History is strewn with the wrecks of nations
which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal
of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as
soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. But these
nations have come out of the 'pre-economic stage' too soon; they have
been put to learn while yet only too apt to unlearn. Such cases do not
vitiate, they confirm, the principle--that a nation which has just
gained variability without losing legality has a singular likelihood to
be a prevalent nation.
No nation admits of an abstract definition; all nations are beings of
many qualities and many sides; no historical event exactly illustrates
any one principle; every cause is intertwined and surrounded with a
hundred others. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it
casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were
best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen. To make
a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and
you must omit much. But, not forgetting this caution, did not Rome--the
prevalent nation in the ancient world--gain her predominance by the
principle on which I have dwelt? In the thick crust of her legality
there was hidden a little seed of adaptiveness. Even in her law itself
no one can fail to see that, binding as was the habit of obedience,
coercive as use and wont at first seem, a hidden impulse of extrication
DID manage, in some queer way, to change the substance while conforming
to the accidents--to do what was wanted for the new time while seeming
to do only what was directed by the old time. And the moral of their
whole history is the same each Roman generation, so far as we know,
differs a little-and in the best times often but a VERY little--from
its predecessors. And therefore the history is so continuous as it
goes, though its two ends are so unlike. The history of many nations is
like the stage of the English drama: one scene is succeeded on a sudden
by a scene quite different,--a cottage by a palace, and a windmill by a
fortress. But the history of Rome changes as a good diorama changes;
while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly
different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is
complete, and scarcely anything is as it began. Just so in the history
of the great prevailing city: you begin with a town and you end with an
empire, and this by unmarked stages?--So shrouded, so shielded, in the
coarse fibre of other qualities--was the delicate principle of
progress, that it never failed, and it was never broken.
One standing instance, no doubt, shows that the union of
progressiveness and legality does not secure supremacy in war. The
Jewish nation has its type of progress in the prophets, side by side
with its type of permanence in the law and Levites, more distinct than
any other ancient people. Nowhere in common history do we see the two
forces--both so necessary and both so dangerous--so apart and so
intense: Judaea changed in inward thought, just as Borne changed in
exterior power. Each change was continuous, gradual and good. In early
times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage;
such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage
never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies,
it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued
endless consequences. But I cannot deal with such matters here, nor are
they to my purpose. As respects this essay, Judaea is an example of
combined variability and legality not investing itself in warlike
power, and so perishing at last, but bequeathing nevertheless a legacy
of the combination in imperishable mental effects.
It may be objected that this principle is like saying that men walk
when they do walk, and sit when they do sit. The problem, is, why do
men progress? And the answer suggested seems to be, that they progress
when they have a certain sufficient amount of variability in their
nature. This seems to be the old style of explanation by occult
qualities. It seems like saying that opium sends men to sleep because
it has a soporific virtue, and bread feeds because it has an alimentary
quality. But the explanation is not so absurd. It says: 'The beginning
of civilisation is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the
very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but
that legality--that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon
all men and all actions if it goes on, kills out the variability
implanted by nature, and makes different men and different ages
facsimiles of other men and other ages, as we see them so often.
Progress is only possible in those happy cases where the force of
legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far
enough to kill out all varieties and destroy nature's perpetual
tendency to change.' The point of the solution is not the invention of
an imaginary agency, but an assignment of comparative magnitude to two
known agencies.