Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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These two antagonistic influences of an island environment may be seen working simultaneously in the same people, now one, now the other being dominant; or a period of undisturbed seclusion or exclusion may suddenly be followed by one of extensive intercourse, receptivity or expansion. Recall the contrast in the early and later history of the Canaries, Azores, Malta, England, Mauritius and Hawaii, now a lonely, half-inhabited waste, now a busy mart or teeming way-station. Consider the pronounced insular mind of the globe-trotting Englishman, the deep-seated local conservatism characterizing that world-colonizing nation, at once the most provincial and cosmopolitan on earth. Emerson says with truth, "Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable."818 Hating innovation, glorifying their habitudes, always searching for a precedent to justify and countenance each forward step, they have nevertheless led the world's march of progress. Scattered by their colonial and commercial enterprises over every zone, in every clime, subjected to the widest range of modifying environments, they show in their ideals the dominant influence of the home country. The trail of the Oxford education can be followed over the Empire, east to New Zealand and west to Vancouver. Highschool students of Jamaica take Oxford examinations in botany which are based upon English plant life and ignore the Caribbean flora! School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet these are the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation, unsurpassed even by the ancient Egyptians; who, in the snow-wrapped forests of Hudson Bay, are trappers and hunters unequalled by the Indians; who, in the arid grasslands of Australia, pasture their herds like nomad shepherd or American cowboy, and in the Tropics loll like the natives, but somehow manage to do a white man's stint of work.
In Japan, isolation has excluded or reduced to controllable measure every foreign force that might break the continuity of the national development or invade the integrity of the national ideal. Japan has always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently from the whole world; yet everything in Japan bears the stamp of the indigenous. The introduction of foreign culture into the Empire has been a process of selection and profound modification to accord with the national ideals and needs.819 Buddhism, coming from the continent, was Japanized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so that Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental forms of that religion.820 The seventeenth century Catholicism of the Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to Japanese standards of duty and ritual. Modern Japanese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.821 But all the while, Japanese religion has experienced no real change of heart. The core of the national faith is the indigenous Shinto cult, which no later interloper has been permitted to dislodge or seriously to transform; and this has survived, wrapped in the national consciousness, wedded to the national patriotism, lifted above competition. Here is insular conservatism.
Japan's sudden and complete abandonment of a policy of seclusion which had been rigidly maintained for two hundred and fifty years, and her entrance upon a career of widespread intercourse synchronously with one of territorial expansion and extensive emigration, form one of those apparently irreconcilable contradictions constantly springing from the isolation and world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core of that character intact.
It is this marked national individuality, developed by isolation and accompanied often by a precocious civilization, in combination with the opposite fact of the imminent possibility of an expansive unfolding, a brilliant efflorescence followed by a wide dispersal of its seeds of culture and of empire, which has assigned to islands in all times a great historical rôle. Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of civilization. For that their area is too small. But whatever seed ripen in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower. Japan borrowed freely from China and Korea, as England did from continental Europe; but these two island realms have brought Asiatic and European civilization to their highest stage of development. Now the borrowers are making return with generous hand. The islands are reacting upon the continents. Japanese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from Manchuria to Ceylon. English civilization is the standard of Europe. "The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English," says Emerson. "England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes."822
The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,823 Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.824 From this date till the zenith of its development in 1450 B.C., Crete became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and gems.825 By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier pictographic form.826 This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the first system of writing ever practised in Europe.827
Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous; nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was obliterated. Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and the Greek peninsula.828 Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal products of its neighbors. "Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and wild goat, are native to the islands.... Even where a motive was borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way," made tender, dramatic, vital. "In religion, as in art generally, Crete translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as it received."829 The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase, probably an importation.830 All this was achieved by a small insular segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age, before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan speech and the gift of iron. It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean civilization arose. On this island it had a long and brilliant pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean shores.831
A small cup soon overflows. Islands may not keep; they are forced to give, live by giving. Here lies their historical significance. They dispense their gifts of culture in levying upon the resources of other lands. But finally more often than not, the limitation of too small a home area steps in to arrest the national development, which then fades and decays. To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions, owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a highly advantageous location. Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art, government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were exhausted, and its small population was unable to resist the flood of northern invasion. Then the dispenser of gifts had to become an alms-taker from the younger, larger, more resourceful Hellenic world.
The same story of early but short lived preëminence comes from other Aegean islands. Before the rise of Athens, Samos under the great despot Polykrates became "the first of all cities, Hellenic or barbaric," a center of Ionian manners, luxury, art, science and culture, the seat of the first great thalassocracy or sea-power after that of Cretan Minos, a distributing point for commerce and colonies.832 Much the same history and distinction attached to the island of Rhodes long before the first Olympiad,833 and to the little island of Aegina.834 If we turn to the native races of America, we find that the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago are markedly superior to their Tlingit and Tsimshean kinsmen of the nearby Alaskan and British Columbian coast. In their many and varied arts they have freely borrowed from their neighbors; but they have developed these loans with such marvelous skill and independence that they greatly surpass their early masters, and are accredited with possessing the creative genius of all this coast.835 Far away, on the remote southeastern outskirts of the island world of the Pacific, a parallel is presented by little Easter Isle. Once it was densely populated and completely tilled by a people who had achieved singular progress in agriculture, religion, masonry, sculpture in stone and wood carving, even with obsidian tools, and who alone of all the Polynesians had devised a form of hieroglyphical writing.836 Easter Isle to-day shows only abandoned fields, the silent monuments of its huge stone idols,
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