The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

as he learnt to smoke. Had his

education been more severe: had the earliest inclinations been

checked by the fear of ruin and disgrace, he would not have

acquired the most dangerous of all habits. That men should be

subjected to the same discipline as women is therefore to be

wished for: and although the day is far distant, there can be

no doubt that it will come: and the future historian of morals

will record with surprise that in the nineteenth century

society countenanced vices in men which it punished in women

with banishment for life.

 

Since men are in a transitional condition; since Nature

ordains that the existence of the race can only be preserved

by means of gross appetites inherited from our ancestors,

the animals, it is obvious that men should refine them so

far as they are able. Thus the brute business of

eating and drinking is made in civilised life the opportunity

of social intercourse; the family, divided by the duties of the

day, then assemble and converse: men of talent are drawn

together and interchange ideas. Many a poem, many an invention,

many a great enterprise, has been born at the table; loves and

friendships have originated there. In the same manner the

passions are sanctified by marriage. Blended with the pure

affections their coarseness disappears: their violence is

appeased: they become the ministers of conjugal and parental

love.

 

If we place exceptions aside, and look at men in the mass, we

find that, like the animals, they are actively employed from

morning to night in obtaining food for themselves and for their

families. But when they have satisfied their actual wants, they

do not, like the animals, rest at their ease: they continue

their labour. Let us take the life of an ordinary man. He

adopts an occupation at first in order to get his bread; and

then that he may marry and have children; and these also he has

to feed. But that is not all. He soon desires to rise in his

profession, or to acquire such skill in his craft that he may

he praised by his superiors and by his companions. He desires

to make money that he may improve his social position. And

lastly, he begins to love his occupation for itself, whatever

it may be: the poor labourer has this feeling as well as the

poet or the artist. When the pleasures of money and fame have

been exhausted: when nothing remains on earth that can bribe

the mind to turn from its accustomed path, it is labour itself

that is the joy; and aged men who have neither desires, nor

illusions, who are separated from the world, and who are

drawing near to the grave, who believe that with life all is

ended, and that for them there is no hereafter, yet continue to

work with indefatigable zeal. This noble condition of the mind

which thus makes for itself a heaven upon earth can be attained

by those who have courage and resolution. It is merely the

effect of habit: labour is painful to all at first; but if the

student perseveres he will find it more and more easy, until at

last he will find it necessary, to his life. The toils which

once were so hard to endure are now sought and cherished for

themselves: the mind becomes uneasy when its chains are taken

off.

 

The love of esteem is the second stimulant of labour; it

follows the period of necessity; it precedes the period of

habit. It is founded on that feeling of sympathy which unites

the primeval herd, and which is necessary to its life. The man

who distinguishes himself in battle; the man who brings home a

deer, or a fish, or a store of honey, or a bundle of roots is

praised by his comrades; so he is encouraged to fresh

exertions, and so the emulation of others is excited. The

actions of savages are entirely directed by the desire to

exist, and by the desire to obtain the praises of their

fellows. All African travellers have suffered from the rapacity

of chiefs, and yet those same chiefs are the most open-handed

of men. They plunder and beg from the white man his cloth, in

order to give it away; and they give it away in order to obtain

praise. A savage gentleman is always surrounded by a host of

clients, who come every morning to give him the salutation, who

chant his praises and devour him alive. The art of song had its

origin in flattery. Mendicant minstrels wander from town to

town, and from chief to chief, singing the praises of their

patrons and satirising those who have not been generous towards

them. In Africa the accusation of parsimony is a more bitter

taunt than the accusation of cowardice. Commerce first

commenced in necessity. The inland people required salt; the

coast people required vegetables to eat with their fish. But

soon the desire of esteem induced men to contrive, and labour,

and imperil their lives in order to obtain ornaments or

articles of clothing which came from abroad. In Central Africa

it is more fashionable to wear a dirty rag of Manchester cloth,

such as we use for a duster, than their own beautiful aprons of

woven grass. An African chief will often commission a trader to

buy him a handsome saddle, or some curious article of

furniture, on condition that he will not supply it to any one

else, just as connoisseurs will pay a higher price for a work

of art when the mould has been broken.

 

Both in civilised and in savage life the selfish desires of man

are few, and are quickly satisfied. Enormous sums are lavished upon

cookery and wines, but more from ostentation than from true

gourmanderie. The love of display, or the more noble desire to give

pleasure to their friends, has much to do with the enthusiasm of those

who spend fortunes on works of art and objects of virtue; and

there are few amusements which can be enjoyed alone. Nihil est

homini amicum sine homine amico. All the actions of men may

therefore be traced first to the desire of preserving life and

continuing their species; secondly to the desire of esteem; and

thirdly to the effects of habit. In the religious conduct of

man there is nothing which cannot be thus explained. First, men

sacrifice and pray in order to escape sickness and death; or if

they are a little more advanced, that they may not be punished

in a future state. Secondly, they desire to win the esteem and

affections of the gods; they are ambitious of obtaining a

heavenly reputation. And lastly, prayer and praise, discipline

and self-denial, become habits, and give pleasure to the mind.

The rough hair shirt, the hard bed, the cold cell, the meagre

food, the long vigil, the midnight prayer, are delights to the

mind that is inured to suffer; and as other men rejoice that

they have found something which can yield them pleasure, so the

ascetic rejoices that he has found something which can yield

him pain.

 

In the preceding sketch, which is taken from the writings of

others, I have told how a hot cloud vibrating in space, cooled

into a sun rotating on its axis, and revolving round a point,

to us unknown; and how this sun cast off a piece, which went

out like a coal that leaps from the fire, and sailed round the

sun a cinder wrapped in smoke; and how, as it cooled, strange

forces worked within it, varied phenomena appeared upon its

surface; it was covered with a salt sea; the smoke cleared off;

the sunlight played upon the water; gelatinous plants and

animals appeared at first simple in their forms, becoming more

complex as the forces which acted on them increased in

complexity; the earth wrinkled up; the mountains and continents

appeared; rain-water ascended from the sea, and descended from

the sky; lakes and rivers were created; the land was covered

with ferns, and gigantic mosses, and grasses tall as trees;

enormous reptiles crawled upon the earth, frogs as large as

elephants, which croaked like thunder; and the air, which was

still poisonous and cloudy, was cleared by the plants feeding

on the coaly gas; the sun shone brightly; sex was invented;

love was born; flowers bloomed forth, and birds sang; mammoths

and mastodons revelled upon the infinity of pastures the world

became populous; the struggle for life became severe; animals

congregated together; male struggled against male for spouses,

herd struggled against herd for subsistence; a nation of apes,

possessing peculiar intelligence and sociability, were exposed

to peculiar dangers; as a means of resistance, they combined

more closely; as they combined more closely, their language was

improved; as a means of resistance, they threw missiles with

their hands; thus using their hands, they walked chiefly with

their feet; the apes became almost man, half walking, half

crawling through the grim forests, jabbering and gesticulating

in an imitative manner, fighting furiously for their females at

the rutting season, their matted hair begrimed with dirt and

blood, fighting with all nature, even with their own kind, but

remaining true to their own herd; using the hand more and more

as a weapon and a tool, becoming more and more erect;

expressing objects by conventional sounds or words; delighting

more and more to interchange ideas; sharpening stones and

pointing sticks, heading javelins with bone and horn, inventing

snares and traps; then fire was discovered, and, by a series of

accidents, its various uses were revealed; the arts of

agriculture, domestication, and river navigation were acquired:

the tribes migrating from the forests were scattered over the

world; their canoes of hollow trees skimmed the tepid waters of

the Indian Ocean; their coracles of skin dashed through the icy

waves of the Arctic seas; in valleys between mountains, or in

fertile river plains, they nurtured seed-bearing grasses into

grain; over pastoral mountains, or sandy deserts, or broad

grassy steppes, they wandered with their flocks and herds;

these shepherd tribes poured down on the plains, subdued the

inhabitants and reduced them to serfdom; thus the nation was

established, and consisted at first of two great classes — the

rulers and the ruled.

 

The period thus rapidly described, which begins with the animal

globules preying on the plant globules in the primeval sea, and

which ends with the conquest by the carnivorous shepherds of

the vegetable eaters in the river plains, may be termed the

Period of War. Throughout that period mind was developed by

necessity. The lower animals merely strive to live, to procure

females, and to rear their young. It is so ordered by Nature,

that by so striving to live they develop their physical

structure; they obtain faint glimmerings of reason; they think

and deliberate, they sympathise and love; they become Man. In

the same way the primeval men have no other object than to keep

the clan alive. It is so ordered by Nature, that, in striving

to preserve the existence of the clan, they not only acquire

the arts of agriculture, domestication, and navigation; they

not only discover fire, and its uses in cooking, in war, and in

metallurgy; they not only detect the hidden properties of

plants, and apply them to save their own lives from disease,

and to destroy their enemies in battle; they not only learn to

manipulate Nature, and to distribute water by machinery; but

they also, by means of the long life-battle, are developed into

moral beings: they live according to the Golden Rule, in order

that they may exist, or, in other words, they do exist because

they live according to the Golden Rule. They have within them

innate affections, which are as truly weapons as the tiger’s

teeth and the serpent’s fang; which belong, therefore, to the

Period of War.