O DOES CIVILISATION ENERVATE? LIVE SCHREINER, in her admirable picture of
the life of the Boers, in the August number of the Fortnightly Bev iew, goes out of her way to advocate a theory that seems not only very hasty but very far from plausible, that the tendency of civilisation is to emasculate the races
which are subjected to its inflaence. But it would have been well for her, had that been her principal object, to define to herself clearly what she means by civilisation, and what she means by emasculating, and she does neither. She seems to think that civilisation can only show itself in a life that is not in immediate contact with the earth and its natural pro- cesses, that is far from the struggle with the wild life of the animal kingdom, that does not suffer from fierce suns, from the terrors of the storm, from the perpetual threatening of hostile agencies, and that is not shielded by the constant
presence of human allies. She thinks the age of great cities in itself necessarily enervating :—
" As the great individual is seldom found more than three generations removed from ancestors who wrought with their hands and lived in the open air, so the most powerful races seldom sur- vive more than a few centuries of the enervation of an artificial life. As the physical body becomes toneless and weakened, so also the intellectual life grows thin ; and it is as necessary for the nation as for the individual who would recupurate, to return again and again, and lying flat on the bosom of our common mother, to suck direct from the breast of nature the milk of life, which, drawn through long artificial channels, tends to become thin and ceases to nourish. Most great conquering peoples have been within hail of the nomads' encampment ; and all great nations at the time when they have attained their greatness were largely agricultural or pastoral. The city kills." (p. 231.)
But then she goes on to protest that it is not the direct
contact with external nature itself that she regards as so essential to the force and virility of man, but rather the
habits of mind which it engenders, and to declare that until civilisation has eaten away force of will, and strenuousness of habit, and promptitude of action, it does not begin to under.
mine the strength of a race and to promote its decline and fall:- " It is this decay which is promoted by the artificial conditions of life in that high condition of material civilisation, of which vast cities, with their abject squalor, their squandered wealth, and their wide departure from the natural conditions of life, are at once the symptom and the cause ; and it is a vulgar commonplace, that were the city not recruited from the more primitive country, it would be depopulated in six generations. Vast and gorgeous cities have always heralded and accompanied the falls of great peoples ; and the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and the vast fallen cities of India and Greece, are the graves under which a brave, simple, and mighty people were buried while the walls yet stood. It would be almost as rational to inquire in the case of a man habitually over-eating and drinking himself, and who, taking no exercise, dies at fifty of gout and diseased liver, what hour of inaction, or which mouthful of meat or drink it was which produced his death, as to assert that because no detail of a given system of civilisation is directly and instantly destructive to national or individual life, morally and physically, that therefore the whole system is not slowly but surely so." (p. 234.)
But where is the evidence that civilisation, as such, does undermine strength of will, strenuousness of habit, and promptitude of action ? What does civilisation mean ? It means originally the totality of the tendencies that turn men into citizens, into brother citizens who can co-operate for the good of a State, and deny themselves what they would otherwise desire, for the same end. Do great cities always, or even generally, undermine these tendencies ?
Do the severest struggles with external nature promote them ? Olive Schreiner deals only with the life of the South African Boers, and regards their history and discipline as supporting her view, that it is this close contact with physical nature which has made them a conquering and virile race. But what will she say to the far severer life of the Eskimos on the one hand ? And what will she say to the tendencies promoted by the Guilds and Trade- Unions of great cities on the other ? Have the struggles with the polar frosts and snows made of the Eskimos a conquering race ? Have the struggles between capital and labour failed to make of the Dutch ancestors of the Boers a masculine and, for a considerable period at least, a conquering race ? Surely nothing can be less true than that the con- flict with overwhelming physical forces tends to promote that spring and elasticity of type which makes a race formidable. That the Boers are masculine and formidable no one will deny, but it is because they were pitted against difficulties in some moderate proportion to their powers, and not of a kind to exhaust them, that they have become what they are. And surely nothing can be less true than that the life of great cities has never tended to promote the masculine characteristics of a great race in at least an equal, if not even a greater, degree. The growth of the great Guilds and mer- cantile corporate bodies, and again of the Trade-Unions, in modern times, has illustrated in the most impressive manner how the life of great cities may tend to make great races more manly and formidable than they ever could have been without that concentration of civic qualities provided by important centres of social life. What Olive Schreiner really assails in the life of great cities is not their comparative removal from the life of physical nature, but their too successful organisation of the more exciting and enervating pleasures, their elaborate arrangements for spending and gambling and not unfrequently for riotous self-indulgence. So long as you can keep the life of the race strenuous, whether by conflict with external nature, or by conflict with the social perils which threaten States from the inside, so long you have all the discipline essential to growth and grandeur.
Only the difficulties must not be in excess ; otherwise the race which encounters them will gradually sink under them, as the Eskimo and other savage tribes have done. Of course great cities lend themselves to great dissoluteness no less than to great efforts of organised self-denial. But we disbelieve that it is the immigration of rural labour which has supplied our great towns with all their masculine qualities. Many a man who as a village labourer was of small account, has found in the more active fellowship of the town or city what was most needed to turn him into a true man.
The beet test of Olive Schreiner's theory is the comparative manliness of the most civilised and the least civilised elements in modern society. Is it in the least true that " the great individual is seldom found more than three generations removed from ancestors who wrought with their hands and lived in the open air" ? We believe that it is by no means true. That would exclude the most powerful Kings from the category of greatness, for most of them have been removed by far more than three generations from ancestors who worked with their hands and lived in the open air. How would Olive Schreiner show that William the Conqueror or Henry II. or Edward I. or Edward III. or the great Tudors, were removed by only three generations from men who worked with their hands and lived in the open air ? Of course, we do not often know the ancestors on the mother's side of such men as Rajah Brooke or Warren Hastings os Lord Clive, but we should be surprised to hear that Olive Schreiner could prove her assertion as regards any one of them, or indeed as regards Alexander the Great or Julius os Augustus Cmsar, or Gregory VII. or Charlemagne. So far as evidence goes, we believe Olive Schreiner's view to be an utterly unsupported guess.
And as to the tendency of the growth of great cities to enervate nations, there is no proof of it at all unless we identify the life of great cities with the passion for idleness and pleasure and self-indulgence, which sometimes, but by no means universally, accompanies their growth. When you get a large proletariat living, as that of ancient Rome and possibly of Nineveh and Babylon did, on the alms of the rich and powerful, then no doubt you have the conditions of a thoroughly unnatural and unhealthy life, and no one can wonder at the rapid decay of such cities and of the nations which gloried in them. But where the honest working class far outnumber the proletariat, where the middle classes of distributors and manufacturers and professional men are laborious and energetic, and even the class that lives on its accumulated wealth contains a considerable sprinkling of serious and disinterested workers, we do not believe that there is the smallest evidence of any greater danger in the life of the city than in the life of the agricultural village, or the pastoral tribe. Indeed we should regard Olive Scbreiner's picture of the life of the modern Boers as indicating a condition of things more prolific of morbid elements with its almost complete absence of any stirring or active intelligence, than any kind of modern life that is honestly laborious at all. The Boer life is too sleepy, too destitute of stirring thought. or effort, to be altogether natural. It needs at least the old element of danger and necessary vigilance to render it even bracing.
We suppose that Olive Schreiner regards civilisation as tending at least to deprive the educated classes of their nerve and promptitude of purpose. When she says "the city kills," she means, so far as we can judge, for she does not explain herself, that there is in the city too much of bewildering novelty, and too little of organised habit and healthy occupation, to repress and tranquillise the restlessness. of the human mind. But is not that a matter for the judgment of experience, and not for a priori assumption P As a matter of fact, the educated classes whom modern civilisation brings to the top, are in many respects more healthy in mind and more adaptable to the new conditions of national life, than any other classes in the community. Look at the way in which the highly educated German nation has adapted itself both to the necessities of self-defence and to the keen and vigilant outlook needful in modern commerce.. There is no want of discipline and loyalty in the German army, and no want of ingenuity and alertness in German trade. With the Germans at least, education has not weakened the nation, but has made it more capable of a strong and united life. Nor do we think that even in England the temporary restlessness which education has certainly produced, has in any way eaten out the nerve and vigour of the most educated class, though it may have produced a temporary feverishness and uncertainty of purpose in the newly educated strata of society which unfortunately and unnecessarily diminish the confidence of their rulers in their own initiative. But there is surely no sign at all that this temporary diffidence in our rulers is in any respect. a consequence of the development of city life. On the contrary, the centre of gravity in the nation has drifted more and more to the cities. It is the new feeling of fellowship which has grown up there, the new Conservatism which the cities have nourished, that has brought us back to a new determination not to indulge in rash political experi- ments. In our opinion it is in the life of the city that we find the most reasonable and docile political Conservatism, and the most sincere desire for guidance at the hands of those who
have more knowledge and more experience than themselves. Direct contact with physical nature is all very well, but it is not so instructive nor so subduing and disciplining as con- tinuous contact with a sober human nature in considerable masses and great varieties. Nor does it usually give rise to so much originality and so much vigour.
Previous page
