The Patagonians passed through all the spiritual phases that earlier
races had experienced, but in a distinctive manner. They had their
primitive tribal religion, derived from the dark past, and based on the
fear of natural forces. They had their monotheistic impersonation of
Power as a vindictive Creator. Their most adored racial hero was a
god-man who abolished the old religion of fear. They had their phases,
also, of devout ritual and their phases of rationalism, and again their
phases of empirical curiosity.
Most significant for the historian who would understand their special
mentality is the theme of the god-man; so curiously did it resemble, yet
differ from, similar themes in earlier cultures of the first human
species. He was conceived as eternally adolescent, and as mystically the
son of all men and women. Far from being the Elder Brother, he was the
Favourite Child; and indeed he epitomises that youthful energy and
enthusiasm which the race now guessed was slipping away from it. Though
the sexual interest of this people was weak, the parental interest was
curiously strong. But the worship of the Favourite Son was not merely
parental; it expressed also both the individual’s craving for his own
lost youth, and his obscure sense that the race itself was senescent.
It was believed that the prophet had actually lived a century as a fresh
adolescent. He was designated the Boy who Refused to Grow up. And this
vigour of will was possible to him, it was said, because in him the
feeble vitality of the race was concentrated many millionfold. For he
was the fruit of all parental passion that ever was and would be; and as
such he was divine. Primarily he was the Son of Man, but also he was
God. For God, in this religion, was no prime Creator but the fruit of
man’s endeavour. The Creator was brute power, which had quite
inadvertently begotten a being nobler than itself. God, the adorable,
was the eternal outcome of man’s labour in time, the eternally realized
promise of what man himself should become. Yet though this cult was
based on the will for a young-hearted future, it was also overhung by a
dread, almost at times a certainty, that in fact such a future would
never be, that the race was doomed to grow old and die, that spirit
could never conquer the corruptible flesh, but must fade and vanish.
Only by taking to heart the message of the Divine Boy, it was said,
could man hope to escape this doom.
Such was the legend. It is instructive to examine the reality. The
actual individual, in whom this myth of the Favourite Son was founded,
was indeed remarkable. Born of shepherd parents among the Southern
Andes, he had first become famous as the leader of a romantic ‘youth
movement’; and it was this early stage of his career that won him
followers. He urged the young to set an example to the old, to live
their own life undaunted by conventions, to enjoy, to work hard but
briefly, to be loyal comrades. Above all, he preached the religious duty
of remaining young in spirit. No one, he said, need grow old, if he
willed earnestly not to do so, if he would but keep his soul from
falling asleep, his heart open to all rejuvenating influences and shut
to every breath of senility. The delight of soul in soul, he said, was
the great rejuvenator; it re-created both lover and beloved. If
Patagonians would only appreciate each other’s beauty without jealousy,
the race would grow young again. And the mission of his ever-increasing
Band of Youth was nothing less than the rejuvenation of man.
The propagation of this attractive gospel was favoured by a seeming
miracle. The prophet turned out to be biologically unique among
Patagonians. When many of his coevals were showing signs of senescence,
he remained physically young. Also he possessed a sexual vigour which to
the Patagonians seemed miraculous. And since sexual taboo was unknown,
he exercised himself so heartily in love-making, that he had paramours
in every village, and presently his offspring were numbered in hundreds.
In this respect his followers strove hard to live up to him, though with
small success. But it was not only physically that the prophet remained
young. He preserved also a strikingly youthful agility of mind. His
sexual prodigality, though startling to his contemporaries, was in him a
temperate overflow of surplus energy. Far from exhausting him, it
refreshed him. Presently, however, this exuberance gave place to a more
sober life of work and meditation. It was in this period that he began
to differentiate himself mentally from his fellows. For at twenty-five,
when most Patagonians were deeply settled into a mental groove, he was
still battling with successive waves of ideas, and striking out into the
unknown. Not till he was forty, and still physically in earliest prime,
did he gather his strength and deliver himself of his mature gospel.
This, his considered view of existence, turned out to be almost
unintelligible to Patagonians. Though in a sense it was an expression of
their own culture, it was an expression upon a plane of vitality to
which very few of them could ever reach.
The climax came when, during a ceremony in the supreme temple of the
capital city, while the worshippers were all prostrated before the
hideous image of the Creator, the ageless prophet strode up to the
altar, regarded first the congregation and then the god, burst into a
hearty peal of laughter, slapped the image resoundingly, and cried,
‘Ugly, I salute you! Not as almighty, but as the greatest of all jokers.
To have such a face, and yet to be admired for it! To be so empty, and
yet so feared!’ Instantly there was hubbub. But such was the young
iconoclast’s god-like radiance, confidence, unexpectedness, and such his
reputation as the miraculous Boy, that when he turned upon the crowd,
they fell silent, and listened to his scolding.
‘Fools!’ he cried. ‘Senile infants! If God really likes your adulation,
and all this hugger-mugger, it is because he enjoys the joke against
you, and against himself, too. You are too serious, yet not serious
enough; too solemn, and all for puerile ends. You are so eager for life,
that you cannot live. You cherish your youth so much that it flies from
you. When I was a boy, I said, “Let us keep young”; and you applauded,
and went about hugging your toys and refusing to grow up. What I said
was not bad for a boy, but it was not enough. Now I am a man; and I say,
“For God’s sake, grow up!” Of course we must keep young; but it is
useless to keep young if we do not also grow up, and never stop growing
up. To keep young, surely, is just to keep supple and keen; and to grow
up is not at all a mere sinking into stiffness and into disillusion, but
a rising into ever finer skill in all the actions of the game of living.
There is something else, too, which is a part of growing up—to see that
life is really, after all, a game; a terribly serious game, no doubt,
but none the less a game. When we play a game, as it should be played,
we strain every muscle to win; but all the while we are less for winning
than for the game. And we play the better for it. When barbarians play
against a Patagonian team, they forget that it is a game, and go mad for
victory. And then how we despise them! If they find themselves losing,
they turn savage; if winning, blatant. Either way, the game is murdered,
and they cannot see that they are slaughtering a lovely thing. How they
pester and curse the umpire, too! I have done that myself, of course,
before now; not in games but in life. I have actually cursed the umpire
of life. Better so, anyhow, than to insult him with presents, in the
hope of being favoured; which is what you are doing here, with your
salaams and your vows. I never did that. I merely hated him. Then later
I learned to laugh at him, or rather at the thing you set up in his
place. But now at last I see him clearly, and laugh with him, at myself,
for having missed the spirit of the game. But as for you! Coming here to
fawn and whine and cadge favours of the umpire!’
At this point the people rushed toward him to seize him. But he checked
them with a young laugh that made them love while they hated. He spoke
again.
‘I want to tell you how I came to learn my lesson. I have a queer love
for clambering about the high mountains; and once when I was up among
the snow-fields and precipices of Aconcagua, I was caught in a blizzard.
Perhaps some of you may know what storms can be like in the mountains.
The air became a hurtling flood of snow. I was swallowed up and carried
away. After many hours of floundering, I fell into a snow-drift. I tried
to rise, but fell again and again, till my head was buried. The thought
of death enraged me, for there was still so much that I wanted to do. I
struggled frantically, vainly. Then suddenly—how can I put it?—I saw
the game that I was losing, and it was good. Good, no less to lose than
to win. For it was the game, now, not victory, that mattered. Hitherto I
had been blindfold, and a slave to victory; suddenly I was free, and
with sight. For now I saw myself, and all of us, through the eyes of the
umpire. It was as though a play-actor were to see the whole play, with
his own part in it, through the author’s eyes, from the auditorium. Here
was I, acting the part of a rather fine man who had come to grief
through his own carelessness before his work was done. For me, a
character in the play, the situation was hideous; yet for me, the
spectator, it had become excellent within a wider excellence. I saw that
it was equally so with all of us, and with all the worlds. For I seemed
to see a thousand worlds taking part with us in the great show. And I
saw everything through the calm eyes, the exultant, almost derisive, yet
not unkindly, eyes of the playwright.
‘Well, it had seemed that my exit had come; but no, there was still a
cue for me. Somehow I was so strengthened by this new view of things
that I struggled out of the snow-drift. And here I am once more. But I
am a new man. My spirit is free. While I was a boy, I said, “Grow more
alive”; but in those days I never guessed that there was an aliveness
far intenser than youth’s flicker, a kind of still incandescence. Is
there no one here who knows what I mean? No one who at least _desires_
this keener living? The first step is to outgrow this adulation of life
itself, and this cadging obsequiousness toward Power. Come! Put it away!
Break the ridiculous image in your hearts, as I now smash this idol.’
So saying he picked up a great candlestick and shattered the image. Once
more there was an uproar, and the temple authorities had him arrested.
Not long afterwards he was tried for sacrilege and executed. For this
final extravagance was but the climax of many indiscretions, and those
in power were glad to have so obvious a pretext for extinguishing this
brilliant but dangerous lunatic.
But the cult of the Divine Boy had already become very popular, for the
earlier teaching of the prophet expressed the fundamental craving of the
Patagonians. Even his last and perplexing message was accepted by his
followers, though without real understanding. Emphasis was laid upon the
act of iconoclasm, rather than upon the spirit of his exhortation.
Century by century the new religion, for such it was, spread over the
civilized world. And the race seemed to have been spiritually
rejuvenated to some extent by widespread fervour. Physically also a
certain rejuvenation took place; for before his death this unique
biological ‘sport’, or throw-back to an earlier vitality, produced some
thousands of sons and daughters; and they in turn propagated the good
seed far and wide. Undoubtedly it was this new strain that brought about
the golden age of Patagonia, greatly improving the material conditions
of the race, carrying civilization into the northern continents, and
attacking problems of science and philosophy with renewed ardour.
But the revival was not permanent. The descendants of the prophet prided
themselves too much on violent living. Physically, sexually, mentally,
they over-reached themselves and became enfeebled. Moreover, little by
little the potent strain was diluted and overwhelmed by intercourse with
the greater volume of the innately ‘senile’; so that, after a few
centuries, the race returned to its middle-aged mood. At the same time
the vision of the Divine Boy was gradually distorted. At first it had
been youth’s ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical
loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a
little pure devilry. But insensibly it became a pattern of that which
was expected of youth by sad maturity. The violent young hero was
sentimentalized into the senior’s vision of childhood, naïve and docile.
All that had been violent was forgotten; and what was left became a
whimsical and appealing stimulus to the parental impulses. At the same
time this phantom was credited with all the sobriety and caution which
are so easily appreciated by the middle-aged.
Inevitably this distorted image of youth became an incubus upon the
actual young men and women of the race. It was held up as the model of
social virtue; but it was a model to which they could never conform
without doing violence to their best nature, since it was not any longer
an expression of youth at all. Just as, in an earlier age, woman had
been idealized and at the same time hobbled, so now youth.
Some few, indeed, throughout the history of Patagonia, attained a
clearer vision of the prophet. Fewer still were able to enter into the
spirit of his final message, in which his enduring youthfulness raised
him to a maturity alien to Patagonia. For the tragedy of this people was
not so much their ‘senescence’ as their arrested growth. Feeling
themselves old, they yearned to be young again. But, through fixed
immaturity of mind, they could never recognize that the true, though
unlooked-for, fulfilment of youth’s passionate craving is not the mere
achievement of the ends of youth itself, but an advance into a more
awake and far-seeing vitality.