On Being Civilized Too Much

THEBE are certain phrases which people use, feeling that they express something fundamental and radical, although exactly what that something is they seldom take pains to inquire. Such is the phrase “close to nature.” In the most obvious sense, a man is close to nature who prefers the country to the city, sunshine to steam heat, out of doors to indoors ; who loves to buffet wind and weather. and to wander alone in the woods. So, also, a man may be described as close to nature it he deals with natural forces and objects at first-hand, as when he builds his own house, raises his own crops, milks his own cow, breaks his own colts, and constructs and sails his own boat. All these things and many similar things city people hire others to do for them, but country people know how to shift for themselves. A man who can tell the time of day by the sun is to that degree both more instructed and closer to nature than one who has recourse to a watch made by somebody else ; and so of him who by natural signs, such as moss on the treetrunks, can tell the points of the compass without the assistance of a gilded weathercock surmounting a church steeple.

Closeness to nature, in this sense, is wholesome and important to mankind ; nay, it is so important that without it the human race could not long exist. The city, as we are often told, must continually be recruited from the country ; and it has been remarked by President Eliot that the survival of particular families in the United States — families so strong in character as to give them in some measure a natural leadership in the community — depends upon the maintenance of a home in the country. An ideal arrangement would perhaps be one in which every family should retain its country home; one generation tilling the soil, the next leading a professional or mercantile or artisan’s life in town or city, the third returning to the farm, and so on until the line was exhausted. For a generation or two, possibly for several generations, if the circumstances are favorable, a city family may keep its standing ; but commonly, even in the second generation, there is a diminution of force, and in the third generation, if there be one, something as a rule gives out, — the digestion, or the heart, or the liver, or the moral character. The most successful and the ablest professional man whom I know is the son of a New Bedford whaling-captain. There is a continual stream of college-bred country boys pouring into cities like New York and Boston, and ultimately they take chief positions there at the bar, in politics, in medicine, and among the clergy. In short, man can retain his strength only by perpetually renewing his contact with Mother Earth.

But there is another and a more important sense in which a man may be described as close to nature. There are in all of us certain natural impulses, or instincts, which furnish in large measure the springs of human conduct; and these impulses, or instincts, as they may be called with some exaggeration, are apt to be dulled and weakened by civilization. While they are still strong in a man, he may be said to be close to nature, in the essential meaning of that expression. He has a certain spontaneous promptitude of action and of feeling, akin to that which is displayed by all dumb animals. Man is a compound of feeling and intellect. In the savage, feeling predominates, and the intellect plays a very subordinate part. But now take your savage in hand, cut his hair, put trousers on his legs, give him a common school education, an air-tight stove, and a daily newspaper, and presently his intellect will develop, and will exercise more and more control over his feelings. Pursue the process a little further, and soon you will have a creature who is what we call over-sophisticated and effete, — a being in whom the springs of action are, in greater or less degree, paralyzed or perverted by the undue predominance of the intellect. In every age and in every country, in the most civilized nations, and also, I suppose, in the most savage tribes, men will be found who illustrate all stages of this process. In fact, the difference is one between individuals more than between ages or races. Still, every age as well as every nation has a type of its own, which may be close to nature or far from nature. Man is at his best, does the greatest deeds and produces the greatest literature, when there is in him a perfect balance between the feelings and the intellect ; when he is neither an emotional nor an intellectual being, but a happy compound of both. Such was the character of the age which produced Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney. If it were otherwise, if mere intellect could take the place of feeling, if knowledge could have the dynamic force of natural impulse, then indeed we might believe in that most absurd of all dreams, the perfectibility of human nature. For there is no limit to the progress of science and of education. In fact, however, every step in civilization is made at the expense of some savage strength or virtue. It is only now and then, in the history of the world, that a fortunate race strikes the right balance between the barbarism behind it and the sophistication into which it is soon to fall. “ Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific ; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.” ¹

To be close to nature is, then, to preserve certain primeval impulses, or instincts, of which the most impotant are the following: the instinct of pugnacity, the instinct of pity, and the instinct of pride. Nature herself has decided against the man who has lost these primeval impulses, He does not survive, he does not conquer and overspread the earth: and this appears most plainly when the instinct of pugnacity is considered. This instinct we share with the beasts of the field. If a dog has a bone, and a strange dog comes up and tries to take it from him, the result is a fight, which ends in the killing or disabling, or perhaps simply in the intimidation of one animal, so that the other is left to enjoy the bone of contention. In that humble contest we find the principle of most great wars. When the instinct is weakened, when people get too far from nature, they hire others to fight for them, as the Romans did in their decadence ; and when that stage is reached the end is not far off. Nature will not tolerate the suppression of the instinct of pugnacity.

But this instinct is far more beautifully shown in questions of honor than it is in questions of mere property ; and here too we find ourselves at one with the inferior animals. Dogs can insult one another as well as men can ; and they have the same instinct to resent an insult. You will sometimes see two dogs walking around each other on their toes and growling, until presently one flies at the other’s throat, and they fight it out. The bravest man who ever died on the field of honor was actuated by the same impulse ; and though dueling may be a bad and foolish manifestation or exercise of the instinct, still the instinct itself is a good one, and upon its existence depend, in the last analysis, the prosperity and permanence of nations. Before the time of the Civil War in this country, and even after the war had begun, the South thought that they would have an easy victory over the North, because, as the South supposed, the North had lost the instinct of pugnacity. They thought that we were so given over to trading and dickering, to buying and selling, that we could not fight. They thought that we were too far from nature to fight. The event proved that they were greatly in error. But nations have lost the instinct of pugnacity, they have become incapable of fighting ; and when they have reached that stage, they have perished.

It is easy to see how the instinct of pugnacity is or may be weakened in the process of civilization ; but it is not quite so easy to recognize the subtle way in which the instinct of pity, also, is weakened or perverted by the same process. We have all felt the instinct of pity. If we hear the cry of a drowning man, we have an impulse to jump in after him, or at least to throw him a rope. If our neighbor is ill or bereaved, our hearts go out toward him, as we say. Nature speaks in us. Upon this primeval instinct is based all pity, all charity, all benevolence, all self-sacrifice ; and this instinct, too, we share not only with the savage, but also with the very beasts of the field. “ The moral sense,” Darwin remarks, “ is fundamentally identical with the social instincts.” And then he goes on to say : “ The social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals, for the good of the community, will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows and some feeling of sympathy. Such impulses have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong.”In other words, Darwin bases not only benevolence, but the moral sense itself, upon the instinct of pity.

Of course, one does not mean that the instinct of pity is precisely the same in the brute or in the savage that it is in civilized man. There is far more pity among civilized than among savage people. The instinct gains as well as loses from civilization. It must remain a capricious, uncertain thing until, in the process of civilization, it acquires the strength of a principle, of a rule of life, of a conscious duty. This is the first effect of civilization. But the second effect — the effect, that is, which results when the intellect overbalances the feelings— is to dwarf and stifle the healthy instinct of pity; to make man a cold, calculating, and therefore an inefficient though it may be a conscientious person. The point is this : when it is a question of duty toward one’s neighbor, the first impulse, the natural impulse, is a good one,—nature tells us to befriend him. But then reason wakes up, selfish considerations present themselves to the mind, and perhaps the natural impulse is overborne.

Let us suppose that there is an accident in the street, and a child is about to be run over. A man is standing by, who might be described as close to nature. Without a moment’s reflection, he dashes into the street to save the child’s life at the risk of his own. There is no time for reflection ; he cannot stop to think that it is his duty to save the child, or that the Humane Society may award him a medal for it; he has not even time to consider that he may be ashamed of himself afterward if he does not do it. He springs to the child’s aid because he cannot help it; because he has an impulse to do so, just as he would have an impulse to save his own life. But let us suppose that the man who stands by is of a different character, — not so close to nature, although he may be a better man, more conscientious, a more valuable member of society. He too feels the impulse of pity, the instinct to save the child ; but in him this impulse is not so strong ; the selfish considerations that arise in his mind combat with it, and while he is struggling to perform his duty the moment flashes by, the child is run over; all that can now be done is to take the victim to a hospital, and that he will do, even at much personal inconvenience.

I do not intend to assert that the one is exclusively a savage, and the other exclusively a civilized type. Both kinds of men undoubtedly exist in barbarous tribes, both kinds exist in civilization; but the tendency of civilization, or of what we call civilization, is to produce the man who stands still in the moment of peril to another, — the man who is far from nature, who has lost something of primeval instinct. An illustration might be found in the case of General Gordon, whom the English government left to perish in the city of Khartoum. This, indeed, is an apt illustration, because the dangerous situation of Gordon appealed to all three of those main primeval instincts which I have mentioned, namely, the instincts of pity or benevolence, of pugnacity, and of pride. England was moved to go to Gordon’s assistance, first, out of pity for him; secondly, out of anger against his enemies ; and thirdly, out of wounded pride, because it was a British citizen whose life was threatened, The members of the Liberal government felt these impulses, of course, as other Englishmen felt them, but they were precisely in the situation of Rousseau’s philosopher, whose impulse to do a generous act was stifled by the selfish motives which occurred to his mind ; and in this case, also, the selfish dictates of reason got the upper hand of the primeval instinct. Gladstone and his cabinet found many reasons for leaving Gordon to his fate. He had got himself into the scrape, they said, and they were not responsible for the result: if a rescue were attempted, it might not be in time; an expedition would cost a large sum of money, and might involve England in a war, and so on. In short, the government did nothing, until they were compelled at last by popular clamor to do something, and then the expedition under Lord Wolseley was dispatched — but too late.

If now the question of going to Gordon’s rescue or of leaving him in the hands of his enemies had been submitted, not to the Liberal government, but to the hedgers and ditchers of England, to the farmers or sailors, — to any body of men close to nature in the sense that I have indicated, — can it be doubted what the result would have been ? But such men, it might be objected, would be thoughtless ; they would not count the cost. That is precisely their merit, — they would not count the cost even if they had to pay it themselves, in money or in blood. England has become what she is partly by not counting the cost, by venturing upon forlorn hopes, by carving out her own path with what seemed at the time to be a reckless disregard of other nations. It was a different spirit which left Gordon to his fate, and which, later, held in check the army and navy of Great Britain while the Turks butchered the Armenians and ravished their women.

Mr. Watson’s sonnet eloquently describes the degeneracy in this respect of the English government: —

There always has been, and probably there always will be, this strange anomaly, as it seems at first sight; that is, a moral obtuseness in the very class which is supposed to be the most moral, which is perhaps the most conscientious, and which certainly is the best educated. The reason is plain. It is because, in this highly educated, sophisticated class, the intellect has passed beyond its legitimate borders; it has taken the place, in large measure, of those primeval instincts which exist in uneducated men and in children. The oft-quoted saying, “ There is nothing so cruel as an idea,” means,

I suppose, that there is nothing so cruel as a man possessed by an idea. Such a man has cast off the restraints of nature. The natural impulses in him are stifled, and the misleading conclusions of the intellect have taken their place. The sensible people, the well-educated, respectable people of the day are almost sure to be on the wrong side of every great moral question when it first arises. They mean to do right, but they trust to their logical faculties instead of to their instincts ; and the consequence is that they are eager to stone those very reformers of whom, in later years, they become the most ardent admirers. These men are for unrestricted vivisection to-day, just as they were for slavery forty years ago.

In what we call the uneducated part of the community there is a striking unanimity of judgment, which is conspicuously lacking among the clever and educated people. This was strangely shown when the Civil War broke out. At that time, among the leaders of the people, there was an extreme discordance of opinion. Most of them thought that it would be impossible to preserve the Union ; to many it seemed that the Union was not a thing of very great value, — certainly not so valuable as to warrant a civil war for its preservation; not a few considered that the Southern States had a right to secede, and should be permitted to exercise that right; hardly anybody thought that the North could be united in a single, direct policy; and there was only one point upon which all the public men were agreed, namely, that patriotism had died out of the country, and that only low and selfish views prevailed. This comes out very strongly in the correspondence of the time. The leading men of that day, with perhaps some exceptions, wrote to one another in a despairing mood. They had no conception of the mighty force which was soon to be aroused. But it was for the people, not for their leaders, to decide what should be done when the South seceded ; and the decision was made with a wonderful approach to unanimity. The people did not sit down to reason the matter out; still less did they go to war for a theory or as a matter of duty. They went to war from impulse, from the natural, inherited instinct to defend that intangible entity which we call our country, — not the soil, for the soil of the South belonged to the people of the South. But there was an instinctive feeling at the North that a dismembered United States would lose its dignity and its pride, and the idea of consenting to such a dismemberment was not to be tolerated. Men who had never suspected that they were patriots, who had never dreamed of being such, found themselves driven to war by an impulse which they could not resist.

No doubt it will be the same in the future. When any great moral emergency arises, the people will act upon it with substantial unanimity, because they decide such matters, not by balancing arguments, but by trusting to their instincts. On the other hand, popular government would probably be impossible in a nation of clever, well-educated people. If everybody were sophisticated and artificial, if everybody reasoned about everything and took care not to act from natural impulses, harmonious political action would become impossible. We should have at first factions instead of parties, then individuals instead of factions, and then chaos. There is an approach to this condition of things in France to-day.

In Mr. Lecky’s latest book there is a remarkable passage tending to uphold the theory which I maintain ; and it is the more remarkable because the fact which Mr. Lecky states was forced upon his observation, and it does not readily find a place in his political philosophy. He says : “It has been the opinion of some of the ablest and most successful politicians of our time that, by adopting a very low suffrage, it would be possible to penetrate below the region where crotchets and experiments and crude Utopias and habitual restlessness prevail, and to reach the strong settled habits, the enduring tendencies, the deep conservative instincts, of the nation. Such an idea was evidently present in the minds both of Louis Napoleon and of Lord Beaconsfield, and it probably largely influenced the great statesman who based the German Constitution on universal suffrage.” Bismarck himself has said : “ True public opinion is that which is the outcome of certain political, religious, and social convictions, of a very simple kind, deep down in the national life, and to recognize and give effect to this is the task of the true statesman. I might call it the undercurrent of public opinion. Hence it is that I have never reckoned with our parliamentary screamers.”

There is one political party or group in the United States from which, I think, a lesson can be drawn in this matter, namely, the Mugwumps. I have a great respect for them, — the sort of respect that a man naturally has for the party to which he himself belongs, or almost belongs. The Mugwumps, man for man, are about the most conscientious, the most moral, the best educated persons of our day. And yet there has always been a deep distrust of them among the people at large. I do not mean among the politicians ; the politicians hate them because they are irregulars in politics. The people dislike them, in a measure because they resent what they believe (perhaps erroneously) to be an assumption of superiority on the part of the Mugwumps, but in the main, it seems to me, because they have an instinctive feeling that the Mugwumps are governed by principles entirely different from those which govern them, and are deficient in certain respects in which the mass of the people are not deficient. This is exactly the case. The Mugwumps, almost without exception, are the kind of men whom I have endeavored to describe,— the over-sophisticated ; they are persons wdio are far from nature, who distrust their natural impulses, who have substituted the feeble and erratic conclusions of the intellect for the natural promptings of the heart.

We have had recently a striking illustration of this. In the Venezuelan affair the President and his Secretary of State acted not without thought, and yet with an instinctive perception of what the honor and the ultimate welfare of the country demanded. They trusted to that instinctive perception, and the nation responded with remarkable unanimity. Even the bitterest enemies of Mr. Cleveland, in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, supported him, and the people at large, whatever their political opinions, supported their representatives. Mr. Cleveland, every one would admit, is a man close to nature, both in his virtues and in his failings, and it was almost inevitable that in such a matter as this the great bulk of his unsophisticated fellow countrymen should be at one with him. Those who objected to his policy were but a small minority. In the whole country, so far as I know, only five papers of any importance failed to support the President’s position. These were the Boston Herald, the Providence Journal, the Springfield Republican, the New York Evening Post, and the New York World. Setting aside the World, which acted from well-known motives of private hatred, these are all Mugwump papers, or papers leaning in that direction.

Here, then, was a remarkable coincidence. The Venezuelan affair did not in the least touch upon peculiar Mugwump principles ; it was not a matter of civil service reform or of any other reform. Moreover, the position taken by the Mugwump papers was not the result of concerted action on their part; it was a position for which each paper had an obvious predilection from the start, although undoubtedly they bolstered up one another afterward. I assume that these journals were wrong. Some of my readers may refuse to grant the assumption, but at all events this much is clear, that the Mugwumps are not in sympathy with the rest of their countrymen. In some respects, at least, they stand apart from the main current of national life. The difference between them and the great mass of the people is the difference between those who are far from nature and those who are close to nature. The Mugwumps belong to the former class, and in fact they are extreme representatives of it. Their conduct in the Venezuelan affair justified that popular distrust of them which I, for one, had always regarded as a mistake, but which I now perceive was founded upon the vague perception of a real truth.

In literature, even more than in politics, one sees the evil effects of getting far from nature. In a peculiar sense, literature is the business and the amusement of persons who are over-sophisticated. In fact, to take literature seriously is in itself almost a sign of decadence. It is remarkable that the times in which the greatest works have been produced were precisely those in which the least fuss was made over literature or over those who produced it. Shakespeare cut but a small figure in his day, and there were but few critics, essayists, or poetasters in his time. The greatest writers, almost without exception, being themselves close to nature and strong in natural impulses, have had a healthy contempt for their own occupation. Sir Walter Scott and Carlyle are familiar examples of this truth. But when literature is at a low ebb, the talk made about it, and the number of persons who are busy with it in one way and another, are always vastly increased.

There is a primeval or basic taste for literature. That is, it is natural for man even in a savage state, still more in childhood, to like stories in prose or in rhyme. It would be difficult to overestimate the amount of pleasure which childish readers have derived from Robinson Crusoe, for example. Who can forget the exquisite thrill of mingled horror and curiosity which he felt when Crusoe discovered the print of a human foot upon the sands of his uninhabited island ! To develop and refine this natural taste is the object of a literary education, and to lay down rules for gratifying it is the chief function of literary criticism. But there comes a time when readers and critics are so sophisticated, so far from nature, that to all intents and purposes they have lost their taste for literature, and occupy themselves with the rules and principles of literary art, or with the search for some novelty to stimulate their jaded palates.

Pleasure and pain, it should always be remembered, are the only safe guides of criticism. The first, the all-important question which the critic has to ask himself is, Does this work give me pleasure or does it give me pain, or am I indifferent to it ? Criticism is of no value unless the critic has this lively, instinctive taste. Charles Lamb was a superlatively good critic because his tastes were so wholesome and so strong, — strong because they were wholesome. A good thing in literature gave him the most deep and lively pleasure, and to talk about the good thing prolonged the pleasure; so that Lamb’s criticism was delightful for him to write, and it is delightful for us to read. Now, Lamb was one whom it is impossible not to recognize as being close to nature. He had almost the confidence of Sterne in his own impulses and intuitions.

On the other hand, in a sophisticated age and among sophisticated people, works of literature or of the other arts almost cease to give pleasure ; and a new criterion is adopted, which is, Does this thing conform to the rules ? Ought I to like it and approve of it ? I once heard a dramatic critic maintain with vehemence that a certain actress was deserving of the highest praise, and that the public were to blame for not caring much to see her act. “ But,” he was asked, “ does her acting give you any pleasure ? You are going to see her play to-night, for instance : do you look forward to the evening as something delightful to anticipate ? ” “ No,” he was candid enough to answer, “ I can’t say that I do.” “ Why, then,” was the next inquiry, " do you call her a great actress ? ” “ Oh,” was his reply, “ she is a great artist.” That expressed perfectly the academic or sophisticated attitude of those who have got so far from nature that they cease to apply the test of pleasure or of pain. In other words, they endeavor to estimate chiefly by the intellect what nature intended them to estimate chiefly by their feelings.

I remember another occasion — if the reader will pardon me for recalling it — when, in a gathering of literary men, a dispute arose as to who was the greatest living poet in the United States. Some declared for this and some for that contemporary bard, but he who was most positive in his opinion fixed upon —— as the man. For this preference he gave many well-sounding reasons ; but finally one of his opponents put the following question to him: " Can you repeat a single stanza, or a single line, or even a single phrase from -’s poems ? ”

And he was forced to acknowledge that he could not. He had derived no pleasure from ——’s poems, but nevertheless he thought that he must be a great poet because his poetry seemed to fulfill certain conditions that had been established by literary criticism. Such a man is hardly more Competent to be a judge of literature than a tea-taster who had lost the sense of taste would be to fix the grade of teas.

Savages and children have a natural love for good bright colors, such as scarlet and blue ; and their taste in this respect could be justified, if any justification were necessary, on physiological grounds. Everybody knows that these colors tend to raise the spirits, and therefore to improve the health; so much so, in fact, that they have been found efficacious in madhouses, in cases of melancholia. This natural, healthy sense of color may of course be cultivated and trained, so that those who possess it can learn to appreciate the beauty of more delicate shades; and in such persons there will be a happy union of natural taste with cultivation. But among the “ æsthetes ” of twenty years ago there was a marked absence of natural taste for color, which they supplied by a conventional and affected partiality for unlovely and depressing shades.

Nordau, in his famous work on Degeneracy, ascribes the perverted literary tastes of the present day to physical reasons, to weakness or disease either of the brain or of the nervous system. His notion, as I understand it, is that civilization and science will supply all that man can need to make him sane and successful, and that ignorance and disease are the only sources of danger. But history and experience show that there are other sources of danger, and that humanity may become ineffective without being ignorant or diseased: the project of converting man into an intellectual machine, governed solely by science and religion, will not work ; it has been tried by almost every race which ever emerged from barbarism, and it has always failed. The true problem is, not to eradicate the savage in man, but so to train and control him that his strength of feeling, his spontaneousness and promptitude, shall be at the service of man’s higher powers. It is for this reason that religion, which acts upon the feelings, has been, as a factor in civilization, a thousandfold more important than science, which can move only the intellect.

Nordau ascribes all those manifestations of degeneracy with which his book is concerned to a common spirit of lawlessness, an unwillingness to be hampered by morals or precedent or principle, or to submit to any kind of discipline. But all this is true rather of the degenerate authors of whom he treats than of the people who admire or affect to admire them. If we look about us, we do not see much lawlessness or much hysteria among the followers of Christian science or of Ibsen. These people are not immoral, nor ignorant, nor hysterical. On the contrary, they are usually well-todo, well-informed, well-behaved persons, and — especially among the female portion of them — decidedly clever. Their trouble is that they are far from nature, — they have no strong root of opinion in themselves, no absolute standards, no instinctive way of separating the false from the true ; and consequently they are at the mercy of every new fad as it arises. Moreover, being vaguely conscious of their own deficiencies, they have a natural readiness to take hold of any new idea or system which wears to them an aspect of strength. They cannot distinguish between strength and an hysterical appearance of strength, or between what is original and what is merely bizarre. The peculiar literary manifestations of the present day indicate an atrophy, from over-sophistication, of all genuine, natural taste for literature. Such are the chap-books, the yellow-books, and those other similar publications, composed largely by effeminate poets, who derive their inspiration sometimes from their vices and sometimes from their illnesses.

“ You asked me,” writes one of these in a dedication, “ what my aim was in those ' dramatic interludes,’ which, collectively, I called ‘vistas.’ I could not well explain, nor can I do so now. . . . The most intimate, in the spiritual sense, [was written] when, during recovery from a long and nearly fatal illness, Lilith came to me in a vision, and was withheld in words, as soon as I could put pen to paper.” Let any one compare the preface to the Endymion with this kind of thing, and he will see the difference between a man and a manikin.

And yet how little do these degenerate authors matter ! How small is the section of society which even knows of their existence ! Nordau himself mistakes his clinical room for the world. Leave the close air of the office, the library, or the club, and go out into the streets and the highway. Consult the teamster, the farmer, the wood-chopper, the shepherd, or the drover. You will find him as healthy in mind, as free from fads, as strong in natural impulses, as he was in Shakespeare’s time and is in Shakespeare’s plays. From his loins, and not from those of the dilettante, will spring the man of the future.

Henry Childs Merwin.