Part 34

Fourthly, the number among the negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants in America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this fact during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in their own matters were so childish, stupid, and simpleton-like as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species. I do not think it any exaggeration to say that their _c_ is as low as our _e_, which would be a difference of two grades, as before. I have no information as to actual idiocy among the negroes--I mean, of course, of that class of idiocy which is not due to disease.

The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. I possess a few serviceable data about the natural capacity of the Australian, but not sufficient to induce me to invite the reader to consider them.

The average standard of the Lowland Scotch and the English North Country men is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior to that of the ordinary English, because the number of the former who attain to eminence is far greater than the proportionate number of their race would have led us to expect. The same superiority is distinctly shown by a comparison of the well-being of the masses of the population; for the Scotch laborer is much less of a drudge than the Englishman of the Midland counties--he does his work better, and "lives his life" besides. The peasant women of Northumberland work all day in the fields, and are not broken down by the work; on the contrary, they take a pride in their effective labor as girls, and when married they attend well to the comfort of their homes. It is perfectly distressing to me to witness the draggled, drudged, mean look of the mass of individuals, especially of the women, that one meets in the streets of London and other purely English towns. The conditions of their life seem too hard for their constitutions, and to be crushing them into degeneracy.

The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed and in many respects unequaled, and partly because the population that gave birth to the creators of those masterpieces was very small. Of the various Greek sub-races, that of Attica was the ablest, and she was no doubt largely indebted to the following cause for her superiority: Athens opened her arms to immigrants, but not indiscriminately, for her social life was such that none but very able men could take any pleasure in it; on the other hand, she offered attractions such as men of the highest ability and culture could find in no other city. Thus by a system of partly unconscious selection she built up a magnificent breed of human animals, which in the space of one century--viz., between 530 and 430 B. C.--produced the following illustrious persons, fourteen in number:--

_Statesmen and Commanders._--Themistocles (mother an alien), Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon (son of Miltiades), Pericles (son of Xanthippus, the victor at Mycale).

_Literary and Scientific Men._--Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, Plato.

_Poets._--AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.

_Sculptor._--Phidias.

We are able to make a closely approximate estimate of the population that produced these men, because the number of the inhabitants of Attica has been a matter of frequent inquiry, and critics appear at length to be quite agreed in the general results.... The average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own--that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African negro. This estimate, which may seem prodigious to some, is confirmed by the quick intelligence and high culture of the Athenian commonalty, before whom literary works were recited, and works of art exhibited, of a far more severe character than could possibly be appreciated by the average of our race, the calibre of whose intellect is easily gauged by a glance at the contents of a railway book-stall.

We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvelously gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class. In a small sea-bordered country, where emigration and immigration are constantly going on, and where the manners are as dissolute as were those of Greece in the period of which I speak, the purity of a race would necessarily fail. It can be therefore no surprise to us, though it has been a severe misfortune to humanity, that the high Athenian breed decayed and disappeared; for if it had maintained its excellence, and had multiplied and spread over large countries, displacing inferior populations (which it well might have done, for it was exceedingly prolific), it would assuredly have accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree that transcends our powers of imagination.

If we could raise the average standard of our race only one grade, what vast changes would be produced! The number of men of natural gifts equal to those of the eminent men of the present day would be necessarily increased more than tenfold;... but far more important to the progress of civilization would be the increase in the yet higher orders of intellect. We know how intimately the course of events is dependent on the thoughts of a few illustrious men. If the first-rate men in the different groups had never been born, even if those among them who have a place in my appendices on account of their hereditary gifts had never existed, the world would be very different to what it is....

It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations, that the average standard of ability of the present time should be raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the process of natural selection, whenever the changes were sufficiently slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding. The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization, reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected over such wide areas, and with such startling rapidity, as in the case of savage man. In the North-American continent, in the West-Indian islands, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, and Van Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they were incapable of supporting. And we too, the foremost laborers in creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralization, communication, and culture, call for more brains and mental stamina than the average of our race possess. We are in crying want for a greater fund of ability in all stations of life; for neither the classes of statesmen, philosophers, artisans, nor laborers are up to the modern complexity of their several professions. An extended civilization like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary statesmen or philosophers of our present race are capable of dealing with, and it exacts more intelligent work than our ordinary artisans and laborers are capable of performing. Our race is overweighted, and appears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed its powers....

When the severity of the struggle for existence is not too great for the powers of the race, its action is healthy and conservative; otherwise it is deadly, just as we may see exemplified in the scanty, wretched vegetation that leads a precarious existence near the summer snow line of the Alps, and disappears altogether a little higher up. We want as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket to which we are henceforth to be exposed, and as good brains as possible to contrive machinery, for modern life to work more smoothly than at present. We can in some degree raise the nature of man to a level with the new conditions imposed upon his existence; and we can also in some degree modify the conditions to suit his nature. It is clearly right that both these powers should be exerted, with the view of bringing his nature and the conditions of his existence into as close harmony as possible.

In proportion as the world becomes filled with mankind, the relations of society necessarily increase in complexity, and the nomadic disposition found in most barbarians becomes unsuitable to the novel conditions. There is a most unusual unanimity in respect to the causes of incapacity of savages for civilization, among writers on those hunting and migratory nations who are brought into contact with advancing colonization, and perish, as they invariably do, by the contact. They tell us that the labor of such men is neither constant nor steady; that the love of a wandering, independent life prevents their settling anywhere to work, except for a short time, when urged by want and encouraged by kind treatment. Meadows says that the Chinese call the barbarous races on their borders by a phrase which means "hither and thither," "not fixed." And any amount of evidence might be adduced, to show how deeply Bohemian habits of one kind or another were ingrained in the nature of the men who inhabited most parts of the earth, now overspread by the Anglo-Saxon and other civilized races. Luckily there is still room for adventure, and a man who feels the cravings of a roving, adventurous spirit to be too strong for resistance, may yet find a legitimate outlet for it in the colonies, in the army, or on board ship. But such a spirit is, on the whole, an heirloom that brings more impatient restlessness and beating of the wings against cage bars, than persons of more civilized characters can readily comprehend, and it is directly at war with the more modern portion of our moral natures. If a man be purely a nomad, he has only to be nomadic and his instinct is satisfied; but no Englishmen of the nineteenth century are purely nomadic. The most so among them have also inherited many civilized cravings that are necessarily starved when they become wanderers, in the same way as the wandering instincts are starved when they are settled at home. Consequently their nature has opposite wants, which can never be satisfied except by chance, through some very exceptional turn of circumstances. This is a serious calamity; and as the Bohemianism in the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes the happier for mankind. The social requirements of English life are steadily destroying it. No man who only works by fits and starts is able to obtain his living nowadays, for he has not a chance of thriving in competition with steady workmen. If his nature revolts against the monotony of daily labor, he is tempted to the public-house, to intemperance, and it may be to poaching, and to much more serious crime; otherwise he banishes himself from our shores. In the first case, he is unlikely to leave as many children as men of more domestic and marrying habits; and in the second case, his breed is wholly lost to England. By this steady riddance of the Bohemian spirit of our race, the artisan part of our population is slowly becoming bred to its duties, and the primary qualities of the typical modern British workman are already the very opposite of those of the nomad. What they are now was well described by Mr. Chadwick as consisting of "great bodily strength, applied under the command of a steady, persevering will; mental self-contentedness; impassibility to external irrelevant impressions, which carries them through the continued repetition of toilsome labor, 'steady as time.'"

It is curious to remark how unimportant to modern civilization has become the once famous and thoroughbred-looking Norman. The type of his features, which is probably in some degree correlated with his peculiar form of adventurous disposition, is no longer characteristic of our rulers, and is rarely found among celebrities of the present day; it is more often met with among the undistinguished members of highly born families, and especially among the less conspicuous officers of the army. Modern leading men in all paths of eminence, as may easily be seen in a collection of photographs, are of a coarser and more robust breed: less excitable and dashing, but endowed with far more ruggedness and real vigor. Such also is the case as regards the German portion of the Austrian nation....

Much more alien to the genius of an enlightened civilization than the nomadic habit is the impulsive and uncontrolled nature of the savage. A civilized man must bear and forbear; he must keep before his mind the claims of the morrow as clearly as those of the passing minute; of the absent as well as of the present. This is the most trying of the new conditions imposed on man by civilization, and the one that makes it hopeless for any but exceptional natures among savages to live under them. The instinct of a savage is admirably consonant with the needs of savage life; every day he is in danger through transient causes; he lives from hand to mouth, in the hour and for the hour, without care for the past or forethought for the future: but such an instinct is utterly at fault in civilized life. The half-reclaimed savage, being unable to deal with more subjects of consideration than are directly before him, is continually doing acts through mere maladroitness and incapacity, at which he is afterwards deeply grieved and annoyed. The nearer inducements always seem to him, through his uncorrected sense of moral perspective, to be incomparably larger than others of the same actual size but more remote; consequently, when the temptation of the moment has been yielded to and passed away, and its bitter result comes in its turn before the man, he is amazed and remorseful at his past weakness. It seems incredible that he should have done that yesterday which to-day seems so silly, so unjust, and so unkindly. The newly reclaimed barbarian, with the impulsive, unstable nature of the savage, when he also chances to be gifted with a peculiarly generous and affectionate disposition, is of all others the man most oppressed with the sense of sin.

Now, it is a just assertion, and a common theme of moralists of many creeds, that man, such as we find him, is born with an imperfect nature. He has lofty aspirations, but there is a weakness in his disposition which incapacitates him from carrying his nobler purposes into effect. He sees that some particular course of action is his duty, and should be his delight; but his inclinations are fickle and base, and do not conform to his better judgment. The whole moral nature of man is tainted with sin, which prevents him from doing the things he knows to be right.

The explanation I offer to this apparent anomaly seems perfectly satisfactory from a scientific point of view. It is neither more nor less than that the development of our nature, whether under Darwin's law of natural selection or through the effects of changed ancestral habits, has not yet overtaken the development of our moral civilization. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already have become molded into accordance with his very recent advance. We, men of the present centuries, are like animals suddenly transplanted among new conditions of climate and of food: our instincts fail us under the altered circumstances.

My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old civilizations are far less sensible than recent converts from barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The conscience of a negro is aghast at his own wild, impulsive nature, and is easily stirred by a preacher; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.

The sense of original sin would show, according to my theory, not that man was fallen from high estate, but that he was rising in moral culture with more rapidity than the nature of his race could follow. My view is corroborated by the conclusion reached at the end of each of the many independent lines of ethnological research--that the human race were utter savages in the beginning; and that after myriads of years of barbarism, man has but very recently found his way into the paths of morality and civilization.

ARNE GARBORG

(1851-)

Arne Garborg is one of the most potent forces in the new school of Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the foundations of a literature essentially Norse.

The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the paths. Where Bjoernson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a consequence of his books.

Arne Garborg was born at Jaederen, in the southwestern part of Norway, January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived, Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in 1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and indeed sometimes actual want.

He had previously, in Risoer, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school affairs; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book, a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'

The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief propagandist of the new speech.

His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story. The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper, is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives, and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!

Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883), deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked; and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book, again, is to a degree autobiographical; for Garborg, as has been said, is himself peasant, and he has fought the fight and suffered the anguish of the new culture attained with incalculable sacrifice. 'Peasant Students' is undoubtedly his greatest work. Nowhere else has he indicated more clearly his seriousness of purpose, or worked out his theme with more effectiveness. The hero, Daniel Braut, is the representative of the ideal student, a son of the people who shall strive for "poetry and the soul" and introduce the elements of culture among his class. Manual labor is his aversion; and at last, forced by the weakness of his nature and the necessity of his poverty, he goes over to the ranks of philistinism, marries a woman of property, and studies theology. Both books are stories of high ideals and humiliating compromises. The author's pessimism is in the ascendant, and in the end the lower nature conquers.

In 'Mannfolk' (1886) he takes up a different theme, the relation of the sexes, a question which he treats with startling frankness. Garborg is a realist in so far that he prefers to depict life as it is, well knowing that fiction cannot approach truth in point of interest. He bears true testimony of what he sees and knows, but his realism is very far removed from the naturalism of the French school.

Following 'Peasant Students' appeared in 1884 'Forteljinger og Sogar' (Narratives and Tales), a volume of stories dealing sometimes with subjects generally proscribed. Of his other works the most important are the narrative 'Hjaa ho Mor' (With Mama), 'Kolbotnbrev og andre Skildringar' (Kolbotn Letters and Other Sketches: 1890), the novels 'Traette Maend' (Weary Souls: 1891), 'Fred' (Peace: 1893), and the drama 'Uforsonlige' (The Irreconcilables: 1888).