CHAPTER II[8]

THE BOER

... And that one of these days that golden place

Shall be reached by the Lemmings yet!...

E. A.

[8] Written 1892.

As in describing the physical features of South Africa, we lingered

longest over the Karoo, not because it was one of the largest or

most important features in the country, but because it was the most

characteristically South African; so in describing its people, we shall

dwell first and at greatest length on the South African Boer--not

because he is the most important nor the most powerful element among

our peoples, but because he is the most typically South African. The

Bantu and the Englishman may be found elsewhere on the earth's surface

in equal or greater perfection; but the Boer, like our plumbagos, our

silver-trees, and our kudoos, is peculiar to South Africa. He is the

result of an intermingling of races, acted on during two centuries by a

peculiar combination of circumstances, and a result has been produced

so unique as only to be decipherable through long and sympathetic study.

Our limits will not allow of our entering into an analysis of all

those conditions of his early history which have made the Boer what he

is to-day. The bare facts are ably and concisely set forth in works

readily accessible to all[9]; but the great epic of South Africa which

lies beneath them, yet awaits its seer and singer.

[9] See Theal's invaluable works on South Africa, more

especially his artistic and finished volume, _Cape

Commanders_; also Noble's _History of South Africa_, etc.

For our purpose, it is possible only to note shortly a few of those

points in the early conditions of the Boer which bear most strongly on

his later development, which have shaped his peculiarities, and made

him what he is.

The history of the Boer begins, as is well known, in 1652, when Van

Riebeek landed at the Cape with his small handful of soldiers and

sailors to found a victualling station under the shades of Table

Mountain, for the ships of the Dutch East India Company as they sailed

to and from the East Indies.

If one climbs alone on a winter's afternoon to the old Block House on

the spur of the Devil's Peak at Cape Town, and lies down on the ruined

stone bastion, with the warm sun shining on one's back--as one lies

there dreaming; the town and shipping in the bay below, blotted out

in a haze of yellow light, leaving only the great curve of the sands

on the Blue-Berg Strand, and the far-off mountains that peer out and

disappear into the blue; then the noisy little life of the valley slips

away from one, and through the mist of two centuries one is almost able

to put out one's hand and touch the old, long-buried days, when the

first white men built their huts on the shores of Table Bay; when at

night the leopards crept down from the mountain and took lambs from the

kraals, and lions were shot before the hut-doors; when the Blue-Berg

Strand was trodden by elephants, and the Hottentots lit their watch

fires on the banks of the Liesbeck; when the great Hout-Bay valley was

flecked with antelopes; and the stream which comes down now from the

mountain gorge and flows through the valley muddy and dark, was clear

and crystal, and widened out into pools where the hippopotami played,

and then crept away into the sea through the white sand;--days when

the blue mountains were the limit of the world the white men knew, and

shut out the mysterious unknown beyond. Basking alone there on one's

face in the warm sunshine, so near do those old days seem, that one

half expects the lammervanger[10] to spread out its wings and sail out

from the cliffs above, and a bush-buck's step to break the stillness in

the brushwood; and one is loath to shake one's self and go down into

the hot, fretted life of the little city below; where the shop windows

glitter with the work of many lands, and where women with little waists

and high shoes trip down the pavement; and the Parliament Houses, with

their red brick and stucco, stare at one, and on the stoep of the Club

in Church Square tall-hatted men lounge and talk over the latest town

gossip or retire to the bar for whisky; and where in the side streets

are broken pavements, and Malays, and Half-castes, and fish-carts with

their shrill whistles; and in the docks coal-dust and shipping, and

convicts and sailors; and everywhere are canteens and brothels and

churches--all that makes the life of a civilized modern town. It is

hard to climb down through the fir-woods and go back to it.[11]

[10] Lammervanger (lamb-catcher) = an eagle.

[11] Roads now scar the mountain side; and within the last

months the Block House has been turned into a convict

station; so the strange shadow of the nineteenth century

civilized man casts itself month by month further across

our land.

So when one sits to write of African men and things, one would like to

linger long over those early days, every detail of which is precious

to us now; even how Annitje de Boeren was allowed to sell milk and

butter to the early men of the colony; how the handful of folks planted

gardens, and traded with the Hottentots for sheep, and made expeditions

into the unknown lands of Stellenbosch and Paarl. All the story of how

the sapling of white man's life in South Africa first struck its roots

into the soil has an interest no story of later growth can hold for us.

But for the present we can only notice hurriedly, and in passing, a few

of those facts in the condition of the early settlers which seem most

to have made the African Boer that which we to-day find him.

The first fact we have to note is that the men Van Riebeek brought with

him to found his little settlement were men of different nationalities;

largely Frisian or Dutch, but also German, Swedish, and even English.

They were also, almost to a man, soldiers and sailors, children of

fortune, and not agricultural labourers. A century later, when we find

the descendants of these men wanderers across the untrodden plains

of South Africa, their flint-locks as their only guard, the motive

that drives them forward and on only an unquenchable passion for

movement and change, and a fierce rebellion against the limitations

with which civilized life hedges about and crushes the life of the

individual--then we shall find it useful to remember that in part

the original stock from which these men sprang was composed of these

free-fighting children of fortune, rovers of the sea and the sword.

That power of persistent, patient, physical labour and submission to

restraint, that tenacious clinging to one spot of earth on which he

has once taken root, which constitutes at once the strength and the

weakness of the true agricultural classes in all countries, has always

been markedly absent from the character of our South African Boer,

and could hardly have been his through inheritance. For Van Riebeek's

men were not merely soldiers and sailors forced into service by

conscription, but men gathered from all nations by a species of natural

selection, their inborn love of a wild and roving life leading them

into the service of the Dutch East India Company. Over the shoulders

of the men who took their aim at Majuba Hill, and behind the men and

women who again and again, on their long and terrible marches through

South African deserts, have seen their kindred fall dead at their feet

of thirst and want, and have yet moved on, one sees the faces of these

old rough forebears looking! The South African Boer becomes fully

intelligible only when we remember that the blood of those men runs in

him, modified truly and powerfully by other elements, but active in him

still.

We come now to a second small point, to be noted as bearing on the

development of the Boer.

The commanders of the early settlement gave out to certain of their

men portions of land on the peninsula, to be cultivated for their

own and the Company's benefit. These men built huts, planted and

sowed. Thirty years after Van Riebeek landed there were two hundred

and ninety-three white men in the settlement, but only eighty-eight

white women, and the men on their little allotments grumbled for want

of wives. The directors of the Dutch East India Company conferred,

and it was determined to send out from certain orphan asylums in

Holland respectable girls to supply this want; and from time to time,

ships brought small numbers. The soldiers and the sailors at the Cape

welcomed them gladly; they were all speedily married and settled in

their homes at the foot of Table Mountain.

It may appear fanciful, but we believe it is not so, to suppose

that this small incident throws a sidelight on one of the leading

characteristics of the African Boer. For the South African Boer

differs from every other emigrant branch of a European people whom

we can recall, either in classical or modern times, in this: that

having settled in a new land, and not having mixed with the aboriginal

inhabitants, nor accepted their language, he has yet severed every

intellectual and emotional tie between himself and the parent lands

from which he sprang. The Greek, whether he settled in Asia Minor or

Sicily, though economically and politically independent, was still a

Greek; an uncut cord of intellectual and emotional sympathy still bound

him to the mother country; and after two hundred years the inhabitant

of Syracuse or Ephesus was still a Greek of the Greeks; bound not

only to Greece as a whole, but to that particular state from which he

sprang; among the most immortal and typical of Grecian names are those

of men not born in the parent home of the race, but in its colonies.

The modern Australian, Canadian, Yankee, or even American Spaniard, if

of unmixed European blood, turns still to Europe as Home. Political

differences may have had to be settled in blood, and commercial

interests may divide, but, emotionally and intellectually, the bond

which binds a European colonist to the home from which he sprang, and

to Europe as a whole, is an operative fact. The Boer has had no great

conflict with his parent peoples in Europe; he has not lost his race

by mingling it with the barbarous people among whom he settled; yet he

is as much severed from the lands of his ancestors and from Europe, as

though three thousand instead of two hundred years had elapsed since he

left it.

Later on we shall look at certain large and adequate reasons for

this remarkable phenomenon; but among the lesser causes which have

contributed to it, it seems to us more than probable that the position

of these early mothers of the race may have played its small part.

When the ordinary emigrant female bids farewell to Europe to make her

home in the new land, whether she leaves a mud cabin in Ireland, a

vine-grower's cottage in Germany, or a mansion in England, the moment

in which she catches a last glimpse of the land of her youth is one

of the emotionally intense of her existence. The life she leaves may

have been one of hardship, even of bitterness, and the life she goes

to may be one of ease; but binding her to the land behind her are the

ties of blood and childish remembrances of home--ties which shape

themselves as mightily in the mud-cabin or the back slum of the city

as in the palace. She is leaving the one spot on earth where she is

an object of interest and importance to her fellows. When she arrives

in the new world it is to that home that she sends the record of her

marriage--there that she knows the story of her sorrows and her gains

will be waited for! In the hour of childbirth it is to the women of

her own blood "at home" that her heart turns with yearning; and as

years go by "my people" and "my home" gain a colour and size they would

never have borne if near at hand. She thinks of them as a denizen of

the earth, removed to one of the fixed stars, might think of this

old planet, without remembrances of its aches and pains! And as her

children grow up, the first stories they hear are not of Colonial

things and people, but European--of fields in which little children

gather buttercups and daisies, of ice and snow, and the roaring life

of cities; and as the little Colonial children play in the hot sun

upon the kopjes among stapelias and aloes, they think how beautiful

those fields must be, and wonder how the daisy-chains are made, and

how primroses smell! and at night in their little hot beds they dream

of ice and snow, and fancy they hear the hum of vast cities. Even the

names of our European relatives who have played in those fields and

lived in those cities have acquired a certain mythological charm for

us, and the Aunt this and the Uncle that, of whom our mothers tell us,

they are not the commonplace, material uncles and aunts who may live in

the next street and be seen every day. They are real, yet invisible,

like the actual presence in the Holy Wafer of real flesh and blood,

yet removed from sight, like the heroes of a mythological fairy tale!

Europe and its life are to us, from our earliest years, the ideal and

mysterious, with which we have yet some real and practical tie.

No European who has not grown up in the Colony, being born of pure

European parentage, can understand the full force of this Mother

tradition.

Like the odour of an unknown plant or flower, it must be experienced

to be comprehended. Nor does it die out with the first generation. The

mother transmits it to her daughter, and the daughter to her child.

It is the echo of this legend which goes so largely to form that

curious body of sentiment with which the most commonplace colonist

visits Europe for the first time. The most sensitive man, growing up

in the original home of his race, does not understand this subtle and

delicate emotion; and the most hard-shell man of business among us is

not untouched by it when he sets his feet for the first time on the

old-race shores.

"And this is England! And this is Europe!" It is as though he woke up

in a kind of fairy land! The tile cottages with the moss upon them,

the hedgerows, the village greens with the churches, the blue-bells in

the woods--he has seen them all before--in a dream. In the roar of the

great city curious emotions come to him. As he drives in the omnibus

the conductor calls, "Shoreditch!" and he starts and looks out. Above

him is the great church tower--

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch!

and again he is one of the group of children holding each others'

hands to play at "oranges and lemons" in a Colonial garden. "So that

Shoreditch we sang of under the fig-trees was a real place! No doubt

the great bells hang up there!"--and for a moment the prosaic back-slum

is an inverted childhood's fairy-land.

And there are perhaps few among us who, on our first visit, do not at

some time creep away to find ourselves in some spot to which we do not

wish our acquaintance to accompany us. It may be a street in a great

city, or a village in a German forest, or an English parsonage; but

we feel we are bound to it with a tie others may not touch. Perhaps

it is only a shop-window at the corner of Finsbury Pavement at which

we stand gazing in, because we know that sixty years before a little

child with bright eyes and rosy cheeks came here, wrapped up in her

furs, and holding her mother's hand, to buy her Christmas doll! And we

stand gazing into it till we turn away sharply, fancying the people see

what we feel. Or we go to a little country village; no one tells us the

way from the station; but we see a church tower and an old elm-tree we

have heard of; and as we walk towards them down the village street,

we would like to run up to every one we meet, and say, "Oh! don't you

see, we are come home again!" We stand at the parsonage gate and look

over at the trim lawn, and the ivy on the bow-windows; and we go away.

There is a stile where we know a man and a woman once talked on summer

evenings, when they did not yet dream that the life they promised to

spend together was to be lived out far over the seas, in the strange

land which their children's children were to inherit. We wander into

the churchyard, and brush the ivy from the gravestones; we stand at

last before what we seek--years of European frost and rain have half

obliterated the writing on the stones; we trace the letters with our

fingers; the names are names we know, and which our kindred in the land

across the seas will bear for generations. And so it comes to pass

that we still call Europe "home"; though when we go there we may find

nothing to bear witness to the fact, but a few broken headstones in a

country churchyard--yet the land is ours![12]

[12] (Footnote added in 1906.) This I wrote in 1892. I

could not write it now.

This bond, light as air, yet strong as iron, those early mothers of the

Boer race could hardly have woven between the hearts of their children

and the country they come from. Alone in the world, without relatives

who had cared sufficiently for them to save them from the hard mercy

of a public asylum, these women must have carried away few of the warm

and tender memories happier women bear to plant in the hearts of their

children. The bare boards and cold charity of a public institution are

not the things of which to whisper stories to little children. The

ships that bore these women to South Africa carried them towards the

first "Land of Good Hope" that ever dawned on their lives; and the day

in which they landed at Table Bay and first trod on African soil, was

also the first in which they became individuals, desired and sought

after, and not mere numbers in a printed list. In the arms of the rough

soldiers and sailors who welcomed them, they found the first home they

had known; and the little huts on the banks of the Liesbeek, and the

simple boards at which they presided, were the first at which they

had been able to look round and see only the faces of those bound to

them by kindly ties. To such women it was almost inevitable that, from

the moment they landed, South Africa should be "home," and Europe be

blotted out: the first generation born of these women and the free,

tieless soldiers and sailors with whom they mated, probably looked on

South Africa as does their latest descendant to-day. On their lips,

when they looked at the valley of Stellenbosch, or the slopes of Table

Mountain, the words--_Ons Land_--meant all they mean on the lips of the

Transvaal Boer or the Free State Burgher of to-day,--"_Our Land; the

one and only land we know of, and care for, wish to know of, have any

tie or connection with!_"

If it be objected that the number of these women was too small to have

permanently influenced the attitude of the Boer race in its relation

towards Africa and the home countries, it must be answered, that small

as their number was, they were numerous in proportion to the whole

stock from which the race rose. For it must always be borne in mind

in studying the South African Boer, how very small that stock was.

He was produced--as are all suddenly developed, marked and permanent

varieties in the human or animal world--by the close interbreeding of

a very small number of progenitors.[13] The handful of soldiers and

sailors who first landed, a few agriculturists and their families,

the band of orphaned girls, and a small body of French exiles, to be

referred to later on, constitute the whole parent stock of the Boer

people. From this small stock, by a process of breeding in and in, they

have developed, there having been practically no addition made to the

breed for the last two hundred years; the comparatively large numbers

to which they have attained have entirely to be accounted for by the

fact of their personal vigour, very early marriages, and prolific rate

of increase. Thus the Boer represents rather a clan or family than a

nation; and there is probably no true Boer from the Zambesi to the Cape

who does not hold a common strain of blood with almost every other Boer

he meets. Each Boer has in him, probably, at least a drop of the blood

of these women; and their emotional and intellectual peculiarities can

hardly have failed to leave their mark, if slight, upon the racial

development.

[13] The permanent and fixed type of the Jewish variety of

the human race, which enables it to transmit its physical

and mental characteristics with perfect truth even when

crossed with another race, was probably created by the

fact that the Jews were all descended from one or a very

small body of ancestors, and bred rigorously in and in.

Their own very suggestive legend states that the original

founder mated with his own sister, which would make it

almost impossible for the true Jews to revert to any but

one type. So it is possible to understand how the Boer,

in the course of a few generations, has formed a type

fixed and marked, both mentally and physically, only when

we consider how small was the number of individuals from

which he originally sprung, and how he must of necessity

have bred in and in, cousin marrying cousin again and yet

again. There probably often land in a large American and

Australian port, on a single day, more European emigrants

than the number which composed the whole original stock

of the Boer, including all French additions; there is

therefore no possibility of the average colonist forming

so quickly an equally marked type. Even to-day it is not

uncommon to find a Boer three times related to his own

wife; she may be his first cousin on his father's side, his

second cousin on his mother's side, a fourth cousin through

a maternal grandmother, and there may have been antecedent

intermarriages of which there is no record. The children of

such a marriage inheriting an almost homogeneous blood from

both sides, can hardly fail to be some fixed type. On the

other hand, the Boer race has probably been preserved from

the dangers of interbreeding by the fact that the small

original stock were of such very distinct national types.

But we must turn now to the most interesting point in the early history

of the Boer, and one which alone would fully account for his attitude

towards Europe, and for many other of his unique characteristics.

In and about the year 1688, thirty-six years after the first landing of

Van Riebeek and his handful of men, there arrived at the Cape a body of

French Protestant refugees, numbering in all, men, women and children,

somewhat under two hundred souls. These people, driven from France by

the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were offered an asylum in South

Africa by the Dutch Government, which they accepted. They were not

an ordinary body of emigrants, but represented almost to a man and a

woman that golden minority which is so remorselessly winnowed from the

dross of the conforming majority by all forms of persecution directed

against intellectual and spiritual independence. Mere agriculturists,

vine-dressers and mechanics, with but a small sprinkling of persons

belonging to the professional classes, these men yet constitute an

aristocracy--ennobled, not through the fiat of any monarch, but

selected by that law deep-lying in the nature of things, which has

ordained that where men shall be found having the force to stand alone,

and suffer for abstract conviction, there also shall be found the

individuality, virility and power which founds great peoples and marks

dominant races.

The fate of the South African Boer was safe from the moment these men

came to mingle their blood with his; as the fate of the North American

States was safe when the _Mayflower_ had crossed with its load of

dissentient Englishmen; as the fate of the Spanish colonies would have

been safe, had Spain, in place of cauterizing her growing points in the

bonfires of the squares of Toledo and Madrid, simply nipped them off

from the parent tree and transplanted them alive in her colonies in the

New World, there to beget a newer and stronger Spain. One is sometimes

astonished at certain qualities found in the South African Boer, till

one recalls the fact that a strain of this uncompromising, self-guiding

blood runs in his veins; making him, what often in his lowest and

poorest conditions he yet remains--an aristocrat!

On the arrival of these men at the Cape, the Dutch East India Company

portioned them out lands to cultivate, mainly in the lovely valleys

of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek, and Drakenstein. At the time of their

arrival they formed probably about one-sixth of the whole population.

How rapidly they increased and how large is the share their blood holds

in the Boer race may be noted if one run one's eye over the list of the

occupants of any district or village inhabited by Boers, and marks how

great the number of French names which will occur. There are districts

in the Western Province of the Colony in which these names largely

predominate over those of Dutch or German origin; and even in the

Free State and Transvaal, they are numerous to an extent which their

original numbers would not have led us to expect. Of our most noted of

Cape families, many bear these names; the De Villiers, the Jouberts,

the Du Toits, the Naudès--and if other names, such as the Reitzes,

Van Aarts, Hofmeyrs or Krugers, are not less widely known, it will

generally be found on analysis that the proportion of French blood even

in these families is as large as in those whose patronymics are purely

French. There is probably not a Boer in South Africa at the present day

whose blood is not richly touched by that of the Huguenot.

But it was not only or mainly by bringing to the formation of the

new race this strong and select strain of blood that the Huguenot

influenced the Boer, and through him the future of South Africa. It is

he who has rendered permanent and complete the severance from Europe to

which we have referred.

When the ordinary settler leaves Europe he goes out more or less under

the ægis of his mother country, and for a time at least, wherever he

may settle, he still feels her flag wave over him; if wronged, it is

to the representative of his mother land that he turns; if he settles

in an uncivilized country, it is as the forerunner of those of his

people who shall follow him that he takes possession of it. Should he

go to a territory already colonized by another European race, he may

lose himself more quickly in the existing organization. But still, for

generations, the Irishman, Scotsman, German or Italian often feels a

certain bond between himself and his parent land; and Europe as a whole

holds a large place in his consideration.

Not infrequently his national feeling is intensified by

transplantation. Nowhere on the surface of the globe were toasts to

the health of the Queen and the Royal Family, and to the success of

old England, more heartily drunk than by the British settlers of 1820,

when they ate their first Christmas dinner, beneath the blazing South

African sun, under the kunee trees of Lower Albany. To these men, as

to the English colonists all the world over, the strength and dignity

of their position lay in the fact that they, a minute portion of the

great English nation, had come to this new land to implant themselves,

a branch from the old stock, which should in time take root and grow

to be a giant worthy of its parent tree. They felt themselves the

ambassadors of a great people, the bearers of a flag which waved over

every quarter of the globe; the representatives of a power which they

believed to be the most beneficent and powerful on earth.[14] So these

men named their little villages and their districts after the men

and places of the old country--"East London," "Port Alfred," "King

William's Town," "Queen's Town," "Lower Albany"--and their farms bore

often the names of the homes in England from which they came. Socially,

religiously, and more especially politically, they strove to reproduce,

line by line, as accurately as circumstances would permit, the national

life they had left. "So-and-so things are done at home." That settled,

as it still to-day to a large extent settles, all argument. To-day

the third generation of these men has arrived at adult years; but

consciousness of national identity with the parent people is hardly

dimmed. The young English African who has never been in Europe may

boast that South Africa is the finest country on earth, and swagger

of its skies, and wild, free life or, ridiculously enough, boast of

the civilization which it has attained; he may resent bitterly any

interference with what he considers his material rights on the part of

the "Home Government." But turn to the same man and ask him what his

nationality may be, suggest that he may possibly be of any other race

than his own, and you will not twice repeat your question--

For in spite of all temptation

To belong to another nation,

He remains an Englishman!

[14] Yes, we once all believed that.

Deep in the heart of every English-speaking colonist is a chord which

responds to the name of the parent people as to no other; and the depth

of the emotion is curiously exemplified in the most insignificant

matters. That seemingly imbecile passion which causes Colonials to drag

down and retain as mementos the curtains of a bed on which a British

princeling has slept; the comic manner in which the average colonist

will gravely inquire of you on your return from Europe whether you

have "seen the Queen," and their solemnity in all matters pertaining

to ancient and almost worn-out English institutions, all have in them

an element radically different from that which would animate the

average home Englishman, were he to act in a like manner; an element

not to be found in the sycophant crowds which loll open-mouthed

about St. James's on the afternoon of a Drawing-room; and which is

radically distinct from the servility which bows before mere wealth

and success. The colonist is perhaps rather more inclined than others

to criticize mercilessly the princeling or dignitary sent out from

home (and does so very freely after his arrival, when his gilt has

worn off him); but behind the individual man lies something of which

he is the representative, and it is this which causes him to have for

the colonist a quite peculiar value. The enthusiasm he awakens is an

enthusiasm for an emblem, not a man; for the representative of English

nationality, not for the ruler. The difference between the feeling of

an Englishman in the colony and the Englishman at home, with regard

to all the insignia and emblems of the common national life, forces

itself strongly on the notice of one who visits England for the first

time. There is an absence of the element of passion and romance in the

"Man at Home's" way of viewing these things; the difference between

these attitudes being best compared by likening it to the difference

between the feelings of two men, one of whom remains in the house of

his parents and possesses it, the other of whom leaves it for ever.

If outside the house windows grows a great lilac tree, it is simply a

material part of the house he inhabits to the man who possesses it. As

long as the branches shade the window, or do not damage the walls, he

regards it with passive approval; when they begin to obstruct the view,

and the roots interfere with the foundations, he has not the slightest

remorse in lopping off the branches, or, if need be, uprooting the

whole tree; the whole house is still his, the tree he regards from the

utilitarian standpoint. On the other hand, to the man who has left the

home of his childhood and gone to a foreign land--if one should by any

chance send him a sprig from the old tree that grew before the windows,

he would wrap it up and carry it about buried in his breast--the

small sprig is an emblem to him of the old home which once was his,

and to which he is still bound by ties of affection, though severed

for ever by space. It would be as irrelevant to accuse the one man of

insensibility because he did not weep over the chopped-down branches,

as to accuse the other of emotional weakness because he grew tender

over his sprig. The Englishman in England needs no visible emblem of

that national life in the centre of which he is imbedded, and of which

he forms an integral part. To the Englishman separated from that life

by wide space and material interests, the smallest representative of

the old nation has a powerful emotional value. It is to him what the

lock of his mistress's hair is to an absent lover; he treasures it and

kisses it to assure himself of her existence. If she were present he

would probably notice the lock little. The princeling is our lock of

hair, the Union Jack our sprig of lilac.

Even in the seemingly childish deference to manners and fashions

imported from home, along with less exalted motives, this

idealizing instinct plays its part. Nowhere on earth's surface

are English-speaking men so consciously Anglo-Saxon as in the new

lands they have planted. You may forget in England that you are an

Englishman; you can never forget it in Africa.

The colonist will oppose England if he fancies she interferes with

the material interests of the land he inhabits, as the married man

takes the part of his wife, should he fancy his own mother seeks to

over-dominate her. The wife is the bearer of his children, the minister

to his material comforts; but deep in his heart there is a sense in

which the mother has a place the wife will never fill. If his wife

die he may soon find another, and her hold will be lost and her place

taken; but his relation towards his mother is ineradicable; more

changeless because more purely ideal and immaterial. She is the one

woman he will never allow man or woman to speak slightingly of while he

lives. He may quarrel with her himself, may even wound her, but he will

allow no other man to touch her by word or in deed.

If to-morrow England lay prostrate, as France lay in 1871, with the

heel of the foreigner on her throat, there are sixty millions of

English-speaking men and women all the world over who would leap to

their feet. They would swear never to lie down again till they had seen

her freed. Women would urge on sons and husbands and forego all luxury,

and men would leave their homes and cross the seas, if in so doing

there was hope of aiding her. It will never be known what colonial

Englishmen feel for the national nest till a time comes when it may be

in need of them.

Our dearest bluid to do her guid

We'd give it her and a' that!

For it may be more than questioned whether even brother Jonathan, in

spite of the back score against her and the large admixture of foreign

blood in his veins, would sit still to see the foreigner crush the

nesting-place of his people; to see the cradle of his tongue, the land

of Chaucer and Shakespeare trampled down by men who know not their

speech. And the Irish-Englishman all the world over, forgetting six

centuries of contumely would, with the magnanimity of his generous

race, stand shoulder to shoulder with his English brother, as he stood

and died beside him in every country under the sun. Blood is thicker

than water--and language binds closer than blood.

The England of to-day may disregard this emotional attitude towards

herself and her colonists, and by persistent indifference and coldness

may kill it, as a father by neglect may alienate the heart of his

son, and turn to stone what was once throbbing flesh. And it is fully

possible that as England of the past, when her government was conducted

by an ignorant, monarchical aristocracy, despised her colonies because

they were small democracies, and alienated them by ruthlessly using

them for her own purposes; so the England of to-day, becoming rapidly

a democracy may, through the supine indifference and self-centred

narrowness inherent in the nature of over-worked uncultivated masses,

kill out for ever the possibilities which might arise from the full

recognition and cultivation of this emotion. But the fact remains that

to-day this bond exists; the English-speaking colonist is bound to the

birthplace of his speech; and little obtrusive as this passion may

be, it is yet one of the most pregnant social phenomena of the modern

world, one capable of modifying the future, not only of Anglo-Saxon

peoples, but of the human race.[15]

[15] (Footnote added in 1900.) Yet England killed it in

America a century ago, and she is killing it in South

Africa to-day.

We ask no forgiveness for thus digressing, for until the attitude

of other European colonists towards their home lands has been fully

grasped, the very exceptional position of the Boer, and the effect of

his attitude on himself and South Africa, and the importance of the

Huguenot influence in producing this attitude, cannot be understood.

So complete has been the Boer's severance from his fatherlands in

Europe, both France and Holland, that for him they practically do not

exist. For two hundred years their social and political life has

rolled on unrecked of by him; Paris and The Hague are no nearer to

his heart than Madrid or Vienna. He will swear more lustily at you if

you call him a Frenchman or a Hollander than should you call him an

Englishman or a German; and we have known primitive Boers who have

vigorously denied that they had even originally descended from either

Hollanders or Frenchmen.

The Huguenot has caused this severance in two ways.

Firstly, through the fact of his being a religious exile, and an exile

of a peculiar type.

The exiled Englishmen who founded the Northern States of America,

though they might wipe the dust off their feet against the land

they left, did not cut that land wholly out of their affections and

sympathies. A Government party, dominant for the moment, had made it

impossible for them to continue their own form of worship in peace; but

in the land they left, half their countrymen were bound to them by the

closest ties of spiritual and intellectual sympathy, and were a party

so strong as soon to become dominant. It was not England and its people

who expelled them, but a step-motherly Government. Therefore they

founded "New England" and clung to the old.

The Huguenot ancestor of the Boer left a country in which not only the

Government, but the body of his fellows were at deadly variance with

him; in which his religion was an exotic and his mental attitude alien

from that of the main body of the people.

To these men, when they shook off the dust of their feet against her,

France became the visible embodiment of the powers of evil; her rule

was the rule of Agag, whom the Lord should yet hew in pieces; her

people were the children of Satan, given over to believe a lie, and her

fields were the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which in judgment the

Almighty would yet rain down fire and brimstone; a righteous Lot fled

from them in horror with all that he had. To these homeless fugitives

the Europe that they had left was as the "house of bondage." The ships

which bore them to South Africa were the Ark of the Covenant of the

Lord their God, in which He bore His chosen to the Land of His Promise.

As the Huguenot paced the deck of his ship and saw the strange stars of

the Southern Hemisphere come out above him, like Abraham of old he read

in them the promise of his covenant-keeping God:--"To thee and to thy

seed shall the land be given and they shall inherit it. Look up and see

the stars of heaven if thou canst count them: so shall thy seed be for

multitude; like sand, like fine sand on the sea-shore. And when thou

comest to the land that I shall give thee, thou shalt drive out the

heathen from before thee."

And as he entered Table Bay, and for the first time the superb front of

Table Mountain broke upon him, he saw in it his first token from his

covenant-keeping God--"The land that I shall give thee!"

And the beautiful valleys of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek and the Paarl,

in which he settled, were to him no mere terrestrial territories on

which to plant and sow; they were the direct gifts of his God; the

answers to prayers; the fulfilment of a divine covenant; a fief which

he held, not through the fiat of any earthly sovereign, but directly

from the hand of the Lord his God. The vines and fig-trees which he

planted, and under which he sat, were not merely the result of his

labour; they were the trees which aforetime he had seen in visions when

he wandered a homeless stranger in Europe--"_The land that I shall

give thee!_" To this man France was dead from the moment he set his

foot on South African soil, and South Africa became his. Unlike the

Englishman, the Huguenot no more thought of perpetuating the memory

of France in "New Parises" and "New Orleanses" than the Jew, when he

had escaped from the land of Egypt, thought of recalling the cities

of Pharaoh in the names of the towns in Palestine. There is hardly a

spot in Africa named by the French Huguenot in memory of his land: he

called his farms "Springbok-fontein," "Beeste Kraal," "Jakals-fontein,"

and "Kat-kop."[16] Better to him has seemed a South African jackal or

wild-cat than all the cities of France.

[16] Springbok-Fountain, Cattle Pen, Jackal's-Fountain,

Cat's Head.

Thus to the Huguenot, not only was France the object of his abhorrence,

and Europe a matter of indifference, but the South African land became

from the very moment he landed the object of a direct and absorbing

religious veneration, excluding all other national feelings. And

in very slightly modified form he has transmitted this state of

feeling to his latest descendant. Deep in the hearts of every old

veld-schoen-wearing Boer that you may meet, side by side with an

almost religious indifference to other lands and peoples, lies this

deep, mystical and impersonal affection for South Africa. Not for

the land, as inhabited by human beings, and formed into social and

political organizations of which he is a part; not for the land,

regarded as a social and political entity alone, is it that he feels

this affection. It is for the actual physical country, with its

plains, rocks and skies, that his love and veneration are poured out

(absolutely incomprehensible as this may appear to the money-making

nineteenth-century Englishman). The primitive Boer believes he

possesses this land by a right wholly distinct from that of the

aborigines whom he dispossesses, or the Englishmen who followed him;

a right with which no claim of theirs can ever conflict. His feeling

for South Africa is not in any way analogous to the feeling of the

Johannesburg digger or speculator for the land in which he has "made

his pile," nor even to that of the ordinary colonist for the territory

in which his habitation lies; nor is it quite of the same nature as

the passion of the old-world Swiss for his mountains, nor of the

Norwegian for his fjords. Its only true counterpart is to be found

in the attitude of the Jew towards Palestine--"When I forget thee, O

Jerusalem!" His feeling towards it is a faith, not a calculation. It is

as useless to attempt to influence the Boer by showing him that he will

derive material advantage by giving up the rule of his land to others,

as it is to try and persuade an ardent lover that he gains by sharing

his mistress with one who will contribute to her support. His feeling

for South Africa is not primarily based on utilitarian calculations or

considerations of the material advantages to accrue to him from its

possession; it is the one vein of idealism and romance underlying his

seemingly prosaic and leaden existence. Touch the Boer on the side of

South Africa, and at once, for the moment, he is hero and saint--his

feeling for it a religion.

It has been from the complete failure to grasp this attitude of the

Boer towards South Africa that curious mistakes have been made by

far-seeing politicians and keen diplomatists in dealing with South

African problems; mistakes only to be comprehended when one considers

that curious inability inherent in the so-called "practical intellect"

in all ages to comprehend anything beyond the narrow aims and ambitions

which constitute its own little world. It is this inability which so

often makes the conduct of these shrewd people, when they have to deal

with the wider problems and deeper emotions of human life, like the

conduct of a child who, to remove a speck of dust from the eye, should

insert a needle and stir it about in the living substance.[17]

[17] Let it be remarked that this passage was written in

1892, and printed in England in 1894.

The Huguenot, by implanting this religious passion for South Africa

in the heart of the Boer, and by the fact that he brought with him no

political sympathies with France, helped to sever the Boer from his

parent States; but even these influences while they would account for

his division from his parents' nationalities, would not alone account

for that complete severance from the common social and intellectual

life of Europe, and from all civilized European societies, which

characterizes the Boer of the past and of to-day, and we must seek for

its cause further.

When the Huguenots first arrived at the Cape, they had little to

complain of in the treatment they received at the hands of the Dutch

East India Company--lands were given them side by side with the earlier

emigrants, by whom they were kindly received. But the Government of

the Dutch East India Company, then dominant at the Cape, like that

of all commercial companies, was a despotism, and resembled rather

the dictatorial rule existing on board a troopship than any form of

government we are now accustomed to picture as existing in a young

European settlement. When the Huguenots landed their speech was

French, and the ruling powers disapproved of it, and determined to

exterminate it, and substitute at once the Dutch language. A decree

was passed prohibiting its public use. It might not be used in the

churches, nor taught to the children in the schools. The Huguenots

resented this enactment. Smaller in numbers, but superior in culture

and intelligence, they were unwilling to see their speech forcibly

submerged; and there was a time when they went so far as to talk of

physical resistance. But in the end they were subdued, and within a

generation the French language was extinct. The old grandmother might

still mumble it in her chair in the corner, or sing its nursery rhymes

to her grandchildren in it, but they no longer understood her; law and

arbitrary force had done their work. We are inclined to believe that no

single autocratic action on the part of any South African Government

has ever so deeply influenced the future of South Africa and its people

as this seemingly small proceeding, influencing only a few hundred folk.

To show how this has happened we must somewhat digress.

The language spoken by the Boer of to-day is called "the Taal," i.e.

"the Language." It is not French, nor is it Dutch, nor is it even in

the usual acceptation of the word a dialect of Dutch; but it is a form

of speech based on that language. It is used at the present day all

over South Africa by the Boers and half-castes as their only speech;

it is found in its greatest purity in the Free State, Transvaal, and

frontier districts, where it has been least exposed to scholastic and

foreign influences during the last few years. To analyze fully this

tiny but interesting variety of speech, would take us far beyond our

limits. It differs from the Dutch of the Hollander, not as archaic

forms of speech in Europe often differ from the literary, as the

Italian of the Ligurian peasant from that of the Florentine, or the

Somersetshire or Yorkshire dialects from the language of the London

newspapers; these archaic European dialects not only often represent

the earlier form of the language, but are often richer in varied

idioms and in the power of expressing subtle and complex thoughts than

are their allied literary forms. The relation of the Taal to Dutch is

of a quite different kind. The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed

a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest

scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal

has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost

all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals,

which in Dutch are formed in various and complex ways, the Taal forms

by an almost universal addition of an "e"; and the verbs, which in

Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German,

in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the

verb "to be," instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland

and in analogy with all other European languages, thus runs:--Ik is,

Je is, Hij is, Ons is, Yulle is, Hulle is,--which would answer in

English to: "I is," "thou is," "he is," "we is," "you is," "they is"!

And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are altered out

of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of

Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable.

A very few words are from Malay and native sources; but so sparse is

the vocabulary and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible

in the Taal to express a subtle intellectual emotion, or abstract

conception, or a wide generalization; and a man seeking to render a

scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find

his task impossible. The literary artist who has tried to introduce

into his work of art in any European language a picture of Boer life,

knows how impossible it has been to find any organized dialect which

would correspond to it.[18] In English neither the Scotch nor country

dialects, nor the Irish brogue, nor the pithy inverted forms of city

slang will answer. To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its

form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps

its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities.

Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of

a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern

American States. In the stories of _Brer-Fox_ and _Brer-Rabbit_, as

told by the old Southern slave in _Uncle Remus_, we have one of the

few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages

there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition

of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger

intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the

power of expressing--a thing which can never happen where a people

has _slowly_ shaped its own language--and, as a result, the same

tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the

power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour

of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from

England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or

comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood

by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which

transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest

story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has

not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to

translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the

humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express

a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly

humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh

landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her

other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own

diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so

entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous

Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately

requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her

aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could

not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was

a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent

Dutch!

[18] Though the Scotch of Burns's best poems comes nearer

to it.

So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the

Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to

pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently

occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other

subjects. Between the language of the _Camera Obscura_ and the _Paarl's

Patriot_ there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of

Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]

[19] It must of course be understood that a great deal of

real Dutch of Holland is used in South Africa. The Bible

is written in it, the services of the church are more or

less conducted in it, and students learn to speak it almost

correctly.

In answer to the question, "How did this little speech arise?" it is

sometimes suggested that the original soldiers and sailors who founded

the settlement being largely Frisian and wholly uneducated, never

spoke Dutch at all, but a dialect; and that, being mainly uncultured

persons, and using no literature, their speech easily underwent further

disintegration. On the other hand, it has been said that the Taal has

been formed by the intercourse between the Dutchman and his slaves,

and the aboriginal races of the country; that these people, obliged to

use an imperfect Dutch, taught their broken lingo to their masters'

children, which has so become the language of the Boer.

Something is to be said for both views, more especially for the second.

At the present day the Taal is the only tongue of the many thousands

of Half-castes which have resulted from the union of the Boer with

his slaves; and it is exactly such a broken form of speech as does

arise, when a large body of adults are suddenly obliged to learn and

use a foreign tongue, as was the case with the slaves. But neither of

these theories seems to us wholly to cover the ground. In the Southern

States of America for a hundred years slave nurses brought up English

children, but not the slightest effect on their English speech was

produced, and nowhere in America is a purer English spoken than by

the descendants of the Southern planters. Even allowing that, being

uncultured, the forefathers of the Boer might more easily have let

their speech slip than was the case with the more cultured planters,

it still seems unlikely that a people so rigidly and exceptionally

conservative as the Boer has shown himself to be, even in the smallest

details of daily life, during his two hundred years in South Africa,

should suddenly and entirely have dropped his own pure language and

accepted his speech from the hands of his despised dependents.

We put forward the suggestion with diffidence, perhaps to be corrected

by those who have considered the matter more deeply, but it has

appeared to us that, fully to account for the Taal, it is necessary to

allow at least some place to the influence of the French Huguenot and

the sudden suppression of his French speech.

A considerable body of adult persons, suddenly introduced into a

population whose language they are abruptly and by force compelled to

use as their own if, as in the case of the French Huguenots, they are

socially the equals, and intellectually the superiors, of the people

among whom they settle, and if they at once proceed to intermarry with

them, may, and almost must, powerfully influence and disintegrate the

speech of the majority. The Taal is precisely such a speech as the

adult Huguenots, arbitrarily and suddenly forced to forsake their own

language and to adopt the Dutch, must have spoken. And that they should

have imposed their broken language on their fellow colonists seems far

more probable than that the slave should have done so. In language,

yet more than in other human concerns, imitation is the expression of

an unconscious admiration. The mannerisms, accent, and intonation of

an individual, admired or loved, are almost inevitably caught; those

of the despised unconsciously though carefully avoided. The cultured

woman, labouring from philanthropic motives for ten years in the slums

of a city among the outcast poor, finds her speech become almost more

punctiliously correct through shrinking from the lower forms used about

her; but were the same woman to love and admire a man of an uncultured

class and live ten years with him, her speech would inevitably be

tinged by his. The child follows the speech of its mother; the lover

of the loved.[20]

[20] This view with regard to the possible origin of the

Taal (whether it be of any or of no value) was first

suggested to us by a somewhat curious case which came

under our own observation. A young man from one of the

German-speaking Swiss cantons arrived in South Africa, and

immediately married a Dutch girl. Both parents could speak

a little English. They went immediately to live in a remote

and out of the world spot among the mountains, where they

seldom came into contact with other Europeans. Here their

children were born. Neither of the parents were educated

people. When I came into contact with them a most curious

phenomenon had developed itself; the whole family spoke

a language which was not Dutch nor German nor English,

but a most curious blending of all three, and the words,

from whichever language taken, had exactly the same clipt

form we find in the Taal. There was not one member of the

family who could speak a single sentence correctly in any

of the three languages. They had, in fact, developed a new

language for themselves. No doubt their children learnt

English and Dutch later when they went into the world; but,

had the descendants of that family been preserved distinct

for a couple of generations, a new and astounding variety

of human speech would have been formed. One of the most

remarkable points was that each member of the family spoke

in exactly the same manner.

At least the fact is certain, whatever else may be doubtful, that

within one generation after the arrival of the Huguenot at the Cape the

language spoken by the people was neither Dutch nor French, but that

broken dialect we call the Taal.

If our supposition be correct, and the Taal was indeed partly formed in

the way we have suggested, then that curious affection of the Boer for

his little cramped dialect, which makes it second only to South Africa

as the object of his passionate devotion, becomes comprehensible, and

not only understandable but almost pathetic when we regard it not

as a speech picked up from the group at the kitchen doorway, but as

inherited from the best of his early forbears, and first shaped by the

lips of the young Huguenot mother as she bent over the cradle of her

half Dutch child, striving to shape her speech in the new and father

tongue. If this be so, then the Taal is indeed what the Boer so often

and so vociferously calls it--his "Moedertaal"; and one is bound to

regard his feeling for it as one regards the feeling of a woman for her

mother's old wedding-gown and faded orange blossoms--they may be mouldy

and unfit for present-day use, but her tenderness for them is a matter

for profound sympathy rather than ridicule.

If our supposition be correct and the Huguenot truly helped in the

formation of the Taal, then his influence over the Boer, and through

him over South Africa, has been, as we have said, almost unlimited. For

the Taal has largely helped to make the Boer what he is.

It has been to him what its spinal column is to a vertebrate creature,

that on which its minor peculiarities depend, and the key to its

structure. It has been the prime conditioning element in his growth,

beside which all others become secondary.

Naturalists tell us that on certain isolated mountain peaks, or on

solitary islands, surrounded by deep oceans, there are sometimes found

certain unique forms of plant and animal life, peculiar to that one

spot, and not to be found elsewhere on the earth; and that, further,

there is nothing in the climate or the soil to account for the fact

that this special little plant, or winged insect, or tortoise, should

be found there and nowhere else. The whole fact is a mystery, till

science makes a further discovery. It finds all over the surface of

the earth, the fossilized remains of just such, or analogous plants

or animals, and then the mystery is solved; and it is clear that our

unique species have no particular relation to the spot in which they

are found, nor have they been evolved through its influence. They are

but the survivals of forms of life once universal, which have been

preserved in those situations when the rest of their species perished,

through the action of some isolating medium--the inaccessible height of

the mountain crags or the width of the ocean--which has preserved them

from the forces which have modified or destroyed their race elsewhere.

Such a unique human species is the true South African Boer. Like the

marsupials of Australia, or the mammoth tortoises of the Galapagos

Islands, he is incomprehensible while we regard his peculiarities

as evolved by the material conditions about him; he becomes fully

comprehensible only when we recognize the fact that he is a survival

of the past; that the peculiar faiths, habits, superstitions, and

virtues now peculiar to him were once the common properties of all

European peoples; that he is merely a child of the seventeenth century

surviving on though modified by climate and physical surroundings into

the nineteenth, and that the true isolating medium through which this

remarkable survival has been effected has been mainly the Taal.

If in the struggle for existence between the different forms of speech

in the early days of the Colony, either pure French or pure Dutch had

conquered and become the language of the French-Huguenot settler, if

he had inherited as his birthright any recognized form of literary

European speech, the Boer as we know him could not have existed; and

in the place of this unique and interesting child of the seventeenth

century, wandering about on South African plains when almost all his

compeers in Europe have vanished, we should have had merely an ordinary

inhabitant of the nineteenth century. For when we come to consider it,

it has not been only the nature of his life in South Africa nor his

geographical severance from Europe which has been the cause of his

peculiar mental attitude and social condition, and which divides him

from the large body of the nineteenth century European folk.

That complexus of knowledge and thought, with its resulting modes

of action and feeling, which for the want of a better term we are

accustomed to call "the spirit of the age," and which binds into a

more or less homogeneous whole the life of all European nations, is

created by the action of speech and mainly of opinion ossified and

rendered permanent, portable, in the shape of literature. Even in the

middle ages it was through this agency that the solidarity of European

life was attained. Slow as were the physical means of transport

and difficult as in the absence of printing was the diffusion of

literature, the interchange was enormous. Mainly through the medium

of the Latin tongue, held in common by the cultured of all civilized

European countries, thought and knowledge travelled from land to

land more slowly, but not less surely, than to-day. The ambassador,

the student, and the monk in their travels exchanged thoughts with

the men of foreign countries through its medium, and the religious

meditation poured forth by the monk in his cell in Spain, the romance

shaped by the French poet, the chemical discoveries of the Italian

professor, once committed to Latin manuscript, were the property of

all Europe. In the pocket of the travelling monk or wandering scholar

carefully preserved copies crept from land to land; from the learned

class the knowledge of their contents filtered down to the wealthy,

and from these to the people, till at last in the German cathedrals

were sung the hymns of the Spanish monk, the Dutch chemist perfected

the experiments of the Italian, and the romance of the Frenchman,

translated from Latin into the colloquial tongues, was sung from end to

end of Europe, beside peasant-hearths and baronial castles; and whether

we study those centuries in Italy or England, in France or Spain, their

spirit, though modified in each, is essentially one.

At the present day, though the use of a common literary tongue has

ceased among us, the interchange of thought with its resulting unity

is yet more complete. The printing-press, the electric-telegraph which

gives to language an almost omnipresent voice, and above all, the

habit of translating from one language into another whatever may be of

general interest, are more completely binding all nations throughout

the world where a literary speech prevails, into one body; until, at

the present day, civilized men in the most distant corners of the

earth are in some ways more closely united intellectually than were

the inhabitants of neighbouring villages in the middle ages, or than

savages divided by half a mile of forest are at the present day. The

chemical discovery made to-day by a man of science in his laboratory

and recorded in the pages of the scientific journal, is modifying the

work in a thousand other laboratories throughout Europe before the

end of the week. The picture or ideal of life, painted by the poet

or writer of fiction, once clad in print travels round the globe,

modifying the actions of men and women before the ink with which it

was first written has well dried out; and the news that two workmen

were shot at a strike in Hungary, committed to the telegraph wire,

will, before night--and quicker than the feet of an old crone could

have carried news from house to house in a village--have crossed from

Europe to America and Australia, and before to-morrow half a million

working men and women, separated from each other by oceans, will have

cursed between their teeth. Probably to no man is the part played by

literature in creating this unity in the civilized world so clear as to

the writer himself, with whom it is often a matter not of intellectual

interference, but of ocular demonstration. What he has evolved in a

sleepless night in London or Paris, or as he paced in the starlight

under the Southern Cross, if he commit it to writing and confide it

to the pages of some English review will, within two months, have

passed from end to end of the globe: the Europeanized Japanese will be

reading it in his garden at Tokio; the colonist will have received it

with his weekly mail; it will be on the library tables of England and

America. Even if his thought be thrown into the more permanent form of

the separate volume, it may be months or years, but if it be of value

in itself, it will as surely go round the globe on the current of the

European speech. The Australian will be found reading it at the door

of his house on the solitary sheep-run; the London city clerk, as he

rides through the fog in the omnibus, will take it from his pocket; the

Scotch workman will spend his half-holiday over it; the duchess will

have fingered it in her boudoir; the American girl may have wept over

it, and the educated Hindu have studied it. A little later on if it

have value, it will, through translation, pass the limits of national

speech. The German student will be carrying it in his breast-pocket as

he walks along the Rhine; and the French critic will be examining it

with a view to to-morrow's article; the Russian will be perusing it in

its French dress; and even the polygamous Turk, in his palace on the

Bosphorus, will be scanning its pages between sips of coffee. Within a

few years the writer may see on his table at the same moment a pile of

letters from every corner of the globe, and from men of almost every

race that commands a literature. The thoughts which have visited him

in his solitary night will have brought him into communion, closer

than any of physical contact, with men and women in every corner of

the globe; and as he handles the little pile--dating from a British

Residency at Pequ, a cattle-ranch in California, an unknown village

in Russia--he realizes perhaps with surprise, that even his own

slight thread of thought forms one of those long cords which, passing

from land to land and from man to man, are slowly but surely weaving

humanity into one. Perhaps to the modern writer alone is that "human

solidarity," transcending all bounds of nation and race, for which the

French soldier on the barricades of Paris declared it was necessary

for him to die, not merely an idea, but a solid and practical reality.

His kindred are not only those dwelling in the same house with him,

but that band of men and women all the world over of whatever race or

colour in whom his thought is germinating; for him almost alone at

the present day is the circle of nationality, which for the ordinary

man still shuts in so large a part of his interest and sympathies,

obliterated by a still wider, which knows no distinction of speech,

race, or colour--his readers are his people, and all literary peoples

his fellow-countrymen.

So powerful, indeed, is the unifying effect of this interchange of

thought that to-day the mental life of all countries sharing European

literature may be compared to one body of water in a great inland sea;

divided indeed into bays, gulfs and inlets, but permeated everywhere

by the same currents and forming one common mass. The three large and

almost international forms of speech, English, French and German,

may well be compared to main currents, a particle committed to whose

waves is instantly swept abroad everywhere; yet the smallest form of

literary speech, such as the Dutch or Portuguese, does not shut out the

people using it from the common interchange. Like little bays, divided

from the main body by a low sand-bar, before which the waves of the

outer currents may be delayed for a moment, but which they are sure to

overleap sooner or later, bearing in all that the outer mass contains,

and sweeping out to join the larger body all the deposits peculiar

to the smaller, so into the smallest literary speech is sure to be

borne, sooner or later, by means of translation, all of value that

deposits itself in the larger life and literature of Europe, and all

they have to contribute is borne out into the larger. The moralizings

of a Russian reformer and the visions of the Norwegian playwright, for

a moment confined within the limits of their narrower national tongues,

are yet swept into the world-wide speeches and span the globe, adding

an integral portion to "the spirit of the age," as certainly as though

first couched in a world-wide tongue.

In this common life of literary European peoples, the African Boer has

had, and could have, no part. Behind him, like a bar, two hundred years

ago the Taal rose, higher and higher, and land-locked him in his own

tiny lagoon. All that was common to the great currents of European life

at the time of his severance from them, you will still find to-day in

his tiny pool, if you take a handful of his mental water and analyse

it, but hardly one particle of that which has been added since has

found its way into him. His little speech, not only without literature,

incapable of containing one, and comprehensible only to himself and

his little band of compatriots, shut him off as effectively from the

common growth and development of Europe as a wall of adamant. The

superstitions, the virtues, the ideals of the seventeenth century, you

will find faithfully mirrored in him; the growths, the upheavals, the

dissolutions, the decays which have marked the nineteenth century have

passed by without touching him in his Rip Van Winkle sleep behind his

little Taal.

It is somewhat curious to reflect on all that he has missed. The Europe

he left was a Europe still reddened by the fires that burned witches

and heretics; Newton was a little child playing in Lincolnshire fields;

Descartes had been in his grave two years; it was not twenty since

Galileo had been obliged, before a Christian tribunal, to disclaim the

heresy of the earth's movement; it was not fifty years since Bruno was

burnt for asserting the unity of God and Nature, and Vanini at Toulouse

for empiricism; and Calvin's murder of Servetus still tainted the

spiritual air.

For the Boer, the awakening of human reason in the eighteenth century,

with its stern demand for intellectual tolerance, and its enunciation

of universal brotherhood, never existed. The cry for Liberty, Equality,

and Fraternity, with which later on the heart of Europe leaped forth to

grasp an ideal for which men's hands were not yet quite pure enough,

but which rent the thunder-cloud of despotism brooding over Europe;

the Napoleonic wars and the crash of thrones; the growth of physical

science, re-shaping not only man's physical existence but yet more his

social and ethical life, of these things the Boer behind his little

Taal wall heard and felt nothing.

Even the rise of the commercial system during the last century, which

has spread out its claw till it covers not only Europe, but is digging

its nails into the muscular fibre of all the world, and which has

enthroned in place of all the old ideals, national, religious and

personal, simply one--wealth; and which seems to sit to-day, crowned

over human life as no tyranny has ever done before--of this phase of

modern life the Boer also knows nothing. He still believes there are

things money cannot buy; that a man may have three millions of money

in syndicate shares, and hold command over the labour of ten thousand

workers, and yet be no better than he who goes out every morning in

his leather trousers to tend his own sheep. Still less has the Boer

caught the faintest sound of that deep whisper, which to-day is passing

from end to end of the civilized world, questioning whether this

commercial god be indeed the final god of the race; whether his throne

might not yet fall as others have fallen before: a whisper which may

at any moment break out into the wildest cry that has yet rung round

earth--and humanity, breaking down the idol, may start on its march in

search of a new shrine.

Of these two mighty movements, the one apparent and dominant

everywhere, and the other silently riddling the ground beneath it into

holes, till it sounds hollow beneath the foot--of these matters also

the Boer knows nothing. As he is ignorant of the gracious and generous

developments of the modern world, so he recks nothing of the diseases

which have fastened on to it, or the reactions against them.

Even of those large external events which have marked the march of the

civilized world during the last forty years few reports have reached

him; or but a faint adumbration. The American Civil War of thirty-five

years ago, when the foremost branch of the Anglo-Saxon peoples

decided, amid a torrent of its own blood, what was to be the permanent

attitude of advancing humanity on the greatest question of interhuman

relations--of this he knows nothing. John Brown and Harper's Ferry

are names as unfamiliar to him as Marathon and Thermopylæ; Goethe,

Beethoven, Kant, Darwin, Whitman, Mill, Emerson, and Marx are as

absolutely mere names to him as Jan Dikpens or Jan Bovenlander. Few of

the stars shining over our heads now were in his firmament when he left

Europe, nor was the dark shadow there which broods over us.

When one considers these things, then we understand our African Boer.

There is then nothing puzzling in the fact that he, a pure-blooded

European, descended from some of the most advanced and virile nations

of Europe, and being no poor peasant crushed beneath the heel of

others, but in many cases a wealthy landowner with flocks, herds,

and crowds of dependents beneath him, and in his collective capacity

governing States as large as European countries, should yet, in this

latter half of the nineteenth century, possess on many matters a

faith which has been outgrown by a London or Paris gamin; that he

should hold fanatically that the sun does not move and repeat the

story of Gideon to support his view; and that he often regards scab,

itch, and various skin diseases affecting his stock as pre-ordained

of an almighty intelligence which should not be interfered with by

mere human remedies; that he looks often upon the insurance of public

buildings as a direct insult to Jehovah, who, if he sends a fire

to punish a people, should not be defeated by an insurance of the

building;[21] that his faith in ghosts and witches is unshaken;--all

this becomes comprehensible when we remember that his faiths, social

customs and personal habits, so astonishing in the eyes of the modern

nineteenth-century European, are nothing more than the survivals of the

faiths and customs universal among our forefathers two hundred years

ago; that they in no way originated with, or are peculiar to, the South

African Boer.[22]

[21] This view was propounded and backed by the votes of a

majority in the Transvaal Parliament recently.

[22] It may be truly remarked that among the uncultured in

Europe the same faith in ghosts and witches and even more

appalling superstitions are rife; and this is certainly

the case. But what is peculiar is that this unscientific

attitude is formed in men often of unusual ability and high

practical gifts.

The fact that this survival, and his opposition to the modern spirit,

is not merely the result of the Boer's geographical severance from

Europe, and that it has largely depended on his little language, is

made clearer when we glance at other emigrant European peoples. However

far distant from Europe, in North America, Canada, Australia, or New

Zealand, wherever a European race has settled, if it has not (as in

the case of the Spanish and the Portuguese in their South African and

South American colonies) mingled its blood largely with that of the

aborigines, then that translated branch is found, not only to retain

its connection with European life and growth, but in many cases to

lead in that growth. It is often remarked on as matter for wonder in

these colonies how large is the percentage of individuals taking the

lead in the social, material and intellectual life, who were reared

among circumstances which most widely severed them from the external

and material conditions of modern civilization. But there is no cause

for this wonder. The European emigrant who settles in the backwoods

of a new country, may rear his family in primeval solitude, they may

grow up on the roughest fare and the closest contact with untamed

nature; the man may have no education and little time or aptitude for

imparting to his son culture or learning, but his speech is one of the

earth's great tongues, spoken by one in fifteen or one in twenty of

the inhabitants of the globe, and his son inherits it. The mother or

grandmother may teach the child his letters from an old primer, and,

for the rest, his education may be only that which nature gives to the

wildest of her children. He may grow up without the sight of a city,

and beyond the reach of the touch of luxury; but he has in his hand the

key to all nineteenth-century civilization. Should a chance traveller

pass at intervals of months or years, the boy may listen eagerly to his

conversation; and if he leaves behind him a tattered book or the torn

page of a six months' old newspaper, or if the lad's mother unearth

from the bottom of an old trunk a couple of brown volumes brought by

her mother or grandmother from Europe, the boy can spell them out

and pore over them, and gain a glimpse into the world beyond. If,

at seventeen or eighteen, he tires of the life of the backwood and

desires to see the life beyond, he has only to shoulder his bundle,

and at the end of a hundred or thousand miles he finds himself in a

city. All about him may be strange at first; he is awkward in act, slow

in speech, but there is not a word or a sound in the world about him

that is not modifying him; the talk of the men in the lodging-house,

the arguments of the men in the public-bar, the chatter at the street

corners, the newspapers he takes up, the cheap books he buys for a few

pence, open the modern world to him. In six months' time he may only

be distinguishable from the men about him by his greater vigour or the

more quiet strength which a contact with inanimate nature has left him.

In five years' time, if he have inherited will and intelligence, you

may find him the rising man of business or the self-taught but cultured

student; in ten or fifteen more he may be the learned professor, the

railway king, the foreign ambassador, the president of a state, or the

writer with a world-wide reputation. Given that a man inherits as his

birthright some literary European speech and attains some elementary

knowledge of its letters, and the civilized world is his oyster, the

knife to open which he holds in his hand, if he have the strength to

use it. No isolation among barbarous surroundings can sever a man from

the life of Europe who keeps his hold on the language and literature.

In the heart of Kaffirland to-day you may come across a solitary

German trader's hut; the man who inhabits it has been twenty-five years

severed from Europe; his material surroundings are little better than

those of the barbarians around him; but on the shelf in the corner are

a dozen old books, and in the drawer of the table he has a score of

last year's reviews and papers. You are astonished by the passionate

eagerness with which, as soon as he has lost his shyness, he proceeds

to discuss, or rather to pour out his views on the world's greatest

problems to you; and when he finds you have just returned from Europe,

there is something pathetic in the range and child-like eagerness of

his questions:--"What do they think in Europe, of the possibility of

war between Russia and England?" "Did you see the new French actor who

came out last year?"--whose name you, fresh from Europe have perhaps

not even heard. "Is the Queen looking aged?"--and he draws out a little

shilling guide to the year before last's picture gallery, and gives you

his opinion of the little prints. While you are having your dinner of

Kaffir corn or mealies and mutton he discusses the existing relation

between France and Germany; and he asks your opinion on some detail

connected with the last revolution in South America, of which you are

perhaps obliged to confess you know nothing. He has read of it in all

his papers. Twenty-five years of separation have not tended necessarily

to sever the man from the life of Europe, but have rather sharpened

his interest; and it would sometimes seem as though the denizen of

some solitary outpost of civilization is apt to take a broader and

more impartial view of civilization, as a whole, than he who in some

world-centre of civilization, such as London or Paris, is apt to get

too much dust in his eyes from the life immediately about him to be

able to see far. The solitary white child, who grows up in the mission

house on the banks of the Ganges, or the planter's home in the far

Indies, may discover with astonishment when at last it finds itself in

the heart of that civilization of which it has dreamed and for which

it has panted, that from the old book-shelf with its score of volumes

read and re-read and long pored over, and from the mail-bag arriving

once a month, every scrap of whose news from the great outer world was

carefully stored in childish memory and long dwelt on, it had learnt

most of what London and Paris had to teach it; that what it had sucked

out in its solitude was the true core of civilization; that what was

left for it to consume further was principally the shell; for it would

not be difficult to mention half-a-dozen books in any literary European

language which, read a dozen times and pondered over, would make a man

a true denizen of the nineteenth century in all that it holds of value,

and enable him to reach the forefront of European life. A bee will

make as sweet and as rich honey from one bunch of flowers as though

you should give him a whole garden to choose from; its quality and

sweetness will depend upon the nature of his own little tube--but you

must give him that one bunch.

It is that one bunch that has been denied to the Boer.

For to the young Boer, growing up on an African farm and speaking

nothing but the "Taal," this culture in solitude was impossible. If

travellers passed, they might be Frenchmen, Germans, or Englishmen,

but even their conversation was not comprehensible to him; if they

left behind them book or newspaper, he could not decipher it; and

the most brilliant effusions of an Amsterdam writer could reach him

almost as little as an article in the _Figaro_ or _The Times_. If his

mother turned out of the old wagon-chest volumes brought from Holland

or France by her grandmother, they could awaken no curiosity in him;

they were not in the speech he used daily. The Dutch of Holland was as

little a means of communication between himself and the outer world

as the Greek of Plato is to a modern Greek peasant. If his mother

taught him his letters, he had small use to make of them; even the

great family Bible was in Dutch; and fifty years ago there was not

one frontier Boer in thirty who could read or write, though he knew

many passages of the Bible by heart and could repeat them with the

book open before him.[23] Many could not even do this. If he had

found himself in any great city of Holland or France he would not only

have found himself alone, but an unintelligent barbarian. The Boer

seldom came in contact with even the smart Colonial townsman of Dutch

descent but he shrank from him, and crept back to his own people, who

understood his speech, with more and more of clinging: they were his

humanity, his world; beyond them was nothing.

[23] "I can read," said an intelligent woman in our

presence, "but only the first of John and the fifth of

Matthew." Who shall say how much she lost and how much she

gained!

One is sometimes asked to define exactly what the term "Boer" means.

There is only one scientific definition for it; it signifies a South

African European by descent whose vernacular is the Taal, and who uses

familiarly no literary European language. It does not denote race of

necessity; the Boer may be French, Dutch, German, or of any other

blood--one of the most widely spread Boer families is Portuguese,

and one Scotch in descent--neither does it of any necessity denote

occupation; the word "Boer" means literally "farmer," and practically

the Boer is often a farmer and stockowner; but he may also be a hunter,

trader, the president of a republic, or of any other occupation--he

remains a Boer still while the Taal remains his only familiar speech.

That the Boer himself accepts this definition, though without analysis,

is clear; he will say of a man who has learned and uses habitually a

literary speech, "His father was a Boer, and his brothers are still

Boers," implying that he is one no more; and to call a learned judge or

brilliant barrister, whatever his descent, a Boer, would be, from the

Colonial standpoint, merely absurd. There is an old fairy tale which

tells how an enchantress once muttered a spell against a certain city,

and raised up about it in a moment an invisible wall, which shut it

out from the sight and ken of all passers-by, rendering all beyond its

walls invisible to the men and women within, and the city imperceptible

to those from without. Such a wall has the Taal raised about the

Boer--as long as it remains standing the outer world touches him not,

nor he it; with how much of loss or gain who shall say!

Like those minute creatures, who, at a certain stage of their

existence, form about themselves a hard coating, and in that condition

may lie embedded in the animal tissues in which they are found for

weeks, or years, without undergoing any change or growth; but who, if

at any moment their cyst be ruptured, start at once upon a process of

rapid evolution, developing new organs and functions, and bearing soon

no resemblance to the encysted creature that has been--so the true

old Boer has lain, encysted in his Taal, knowing nothing of change or

modification; yet from the moment he breaks through it, evolution sets

in rapidly; the child of the seventeenth century departs, and the child

of the nineteenth century arrives--and the Boer is no more!

If it be asked whether the Taal, in making possible this survival of

the seventeenth century in the Boer, has been beneficial or otherwise

to South Africa, it must be replied that the question is too complex to

admit of dogmatic answer.

If somewhere in Europe a small mediæval town had been miraculously

preserved up to the present day, and were suddenly discovered in the

nineteenth century, we might find much in it to condemn; its streets

narrow; its houses overhanging, shutting out light and air, its drains

non-existent; but over the doors of the houses we should find hand-made

carving, each line of which was a work of love; we should see in the

fretwork of a lamp-post quaint shapings such as no workman of to-day

sends out; before the glass-stained window of the church we should

stand with awe; and we might be touched to the heart by the quaint

little picture above the church-altar; on every side we should see

the material conditions of a life narrower and slower than our own,

but more peaceful, more at one with itself. Through such a spot the

discerning man would walk, not recklessly, but holding the attitude

habitual to the wise man--that of the learner, not the scoffer.