| <21 September 1917>
|
|
|
| "Homo Sapiens," - The Wise Man
| - is the grandiloquent and, at best,
| imperfectly deserved-generic term by which human
| beings are known in the language of Science. Many of
| us, no doubt, would be inclined to substitute
| "fierce" or "bloody" for the adjective "wise." H. G.
| Wells, in his criticisms of modern society, shows a
| distinct preference for the term "muddle-headed." But
| let us hope for the best, and until the claim of man
| to wisdom is hopelessly non-suited, let us retain
| upon the standard of humanity those inspiring words,
| "Homo Sapiens."
| It was not always so. According to the latest
| conclusions of those who know "about it and about"
| the great crucial point of departure in the history
| of the race was the moment when the first Tree Man or
| Tree Ape-Man, walked out from the sheltering bush
| into the open grass-land - the
| Steppes. Whether Tree-man survived as such we need
| not trouble to inquire. True there are pigmy races in
| Central Africa that seem to suggest that he did, but
| the great culture races of the world were all most
| certainly, Steppe-Men. For in the forests belts
| communities were impossible. The tree-apes, today,
| lead solitary lives. But once out in the Steppes man
| must needs form communities. The telling example of
| the deer (vide Kropotkin's
| "Mutual Aid" ) who live in herds
| and appoint sentries to keep watch while the
| remainder of the herd graze, will serve as an
| instance of the growth of the communal spirit.
| It was then in the Steppes, that the typical
| Patriarchal family, of which we possess so perfect a
| picture in the legendary history of the Jews
| (contained in the first five books of the Bible)
| arose. The community travelled the open lands with
| their cattle and camels; they ate the flesh and drank
| the milk of the former. They were carried by the
| latter. Their governmental authority was invested in
| the real or supposed "father of the tribe. These were
| the first biologists, the first astronomers, the
| first philosopher poets, the first law-givers.
| Now, the oldest Steppe Men that History knows, as
| such, were the Steppe Men of Central Eastern Asia.
| Sometime in the first thousand years B.C.
| - no one knows for certain why
| - these people commenced to invade the
| Mediterranean lands. These they found settled and
| progressive civilisations - the
| Egyptian, Syrian, Phonecian and Minoan (with its
| centre in Crete). Who these earlier people were,
| whence they came, we will probably never know. No
| doubt they too, were originally Steppe men. But we do
| know that the era of the new comers was one of chaos
| and when the clouds lifted new communities of
| "glorious mongrels" had crystallised from the matrix,
| and the civilisations of modern Europe are, but the
| lineal descendants of them. But the Steppe kept on
| spawning new races. Huns, Goths, Vandals, and what
| modern anthropology calls the "Alpines" (those Steppe
| men who followed the barren high lands of Central
| Europe) continually swarmed from east to west, and
| although the actual movement is at last for the time,
| at a standstill, the old deep-rooted Steppe instincts
| still surge in the blood of apparently sedentary
| citizens of today.
| So obvious is the instinct that it has been
| dignified with the name of "wanderlust," and is
| regarded as a sort of psychological disease. But
| sometimes, especially when camping-out time comes,
| and I feel the city sensations drop one by one off my
| back, as each step takes me deeper into the
| wastelands - when I feel the warm,
| caressing touch of the summer breeze -
| I wonder which is Health and which Disease.
| So it is that in literature we are now and again
| arrested by the survivals of the Steppe man. How much
| we owe the Steppe for the spirit that impelled
| adventures into the unknown, such as those of Vasco
| da Gama, Columbus, Marco Polo, Franklin, Leichardt,
| must be left to speculation: But the influence is
| unmistakable in such works as Reade's
|
"Cloister and the
| Hearth," which tells of the wanderings of a
| scholarly youth through early Renaissance Europe. His
| varied adventures by the road, his strange bed-fellows
| in medieval inns, his unsavory travelling
| companions are described in a realistic and
| sympathetic manner that actually makes them live
| before us. He meets the artist in painting horrible
| sores upon his person; the pretended monk who sells
| faked relics; the inhuman monster known as a
| "vopper," who drives before him, with a whip, a
| chained woman, declaring her to be mad in order to
| excite the sympathy of passers by from whom he begs
| alms.
| At the same period, or a little later, the rascal
| poet, Francois Villon, was living in Paris. This
| scamp, some of whose works have been translated, and
| deserve to be better known, figures transiently in
| Victor Hugo's
| "Notre Dame," a remarkable and
| entrancing story which introduces us to the city
| counterparts of the road-side companions of the hero
| of the "Cloister
| and the Hearth."
| "Who are the Gypsies?" is a query that naturally
| arises under this head. Many views are put forth
| concerning their origin of which the most probable
| and least picturesque is that they are stragglers
| from a nomadic race of Northern India. But at least
| it is fairly safe to assume that they are a race of
| Steppe men. They have, indeed, lost their true Steppe
| characteristics, but have never become civilised, in
| our sense of the term. For English readers the most
| instructive insight into these curious people may be
| had through the medium of Borrow's
|
"Lavengro"
| and
| "Romany Rye."
| Here again, we meet the same people that charmed and
| horrified us in
| "The Cloister and the Hearth" and
| "Notre
| Dame." We meet them again as late as the dawn
| of the present century in Jack London's biographical
| work, "The
| Road." Still the old Steppe man. True, the
| camel has been replaced by the railway, but does that
| matter? - We follow London from his
| early youth spent as an oyster-pirate, in Oakland,
| California, through his initiation as a road-kid,
| until his final graduation as a
|
| "Comet" and
| "Tramp Royal!" At
| least we leave him buying damaged books from New York
| errand boys, and we realise that he has discreetly
| drawn the curtain over the old "hobo," whilst the
| metamorphosis into the new London -
| the man of letters - is progress. But
| in the meantime we ride with him over thousands of
| miles of railroad - sometimes on the
| platform of a "blind" coach, sometimes on the roofs
| of the carriages, again even on the roads beneath.
| Now and then, when we have been crossing the Rockies
| on a bitter night, we have deigned to work our
| passage by shovelling coal on the engine. Numberless
| times have we been "ditched" now and then "pinched."
| We have travelled with General Kelly in his famous
| overland army - a movement that raised
| "hoboing" to the level of a fine art; and once we
| were unfortunate enough to spend thirty days in the
| hell of the Eyrie Country "Pen."
| This is London's description of his trial:~~
|
|