Part 17 (1/2)
One day in August, when the first snow fell over our little winter world in the far South, I had climbed the hills up to the belt of wildwood that girds the city of Dunedin. The very joy of life was in the air.
Keenly I sensed the larger season,--that of human kins.h.i.+p merged in the centuries. I looked across the hills to mountains I had known; but it was then not the Alps I saw, not the Rockies, the Aeta Roa under the Southern Cross, nor yet the Himalayas nor the snow-packed barriers of the Uriankhai, the unrenowned Turgan group. In truth, I was not seeing impa.s.sable peaks at all, but imprisoned ranges which were themselves trying to outreach their alt.i.tudinal limitations. It was a world consciousness which was mine, and I towered far above the highest peaks, above the world itself. I saw no single group, no political sections nor geographical divisions, the conquest of ridges, the commingling of noises, the concord of peoples. And when men come to this world consciousness they will recognize and accept all, include the barrier and the plain. They will see these great, sheer rugged peaks knifing the floating clouds, yielding to the creeping glaciers, yet one and all, when released sweeping down the valleys as impa.s.sioned rivers, filling the lowest depths of earth, depths deeper than the sea, lower than the deserts. In such moments of world consciousness men will have to step downward from the bottom of the sea and upward from the summit of McKinley. Then barriers will become beacons. Mankind lives at sea-level.
We care little about our neighbors over the ranges. That mental att.i.tude makes barriers real and valleys dark. But when we turn them into beacons we shall climb the barriers in order to look into the valleys of our neighbors and they will become the ladders of heaven and the light unto nations. That is the lesson of the sea.
At present we live at a sea-level, but beneath and behind the barriers, are the peaks of earth. Hence walls of houses are as great barriers as mountains. Hence even thoughts are barriers and ideals become terrible, cold, insurmountable prominences.
But in world consciousness, which is the lesson of the sea, we do not reject anything,--the religions, the political parties, the anti-religions, and the negations,--but we bring them to the level of human understanding by absorption, by taking them in. That is the story of the sea.
The ocean breaks incessantly before us, but only the one majestic wave thrills as it rises and overleaps the rocky barrier. A forest is densely grown, yet only the stately, beautiful tree stirs the forest-lover. The street swarms with human beings all of whom are material for the friend-maker, yet only one of the ma.s.s, in pa.s.sing, steeps the day's experience in the essence of love. But loving that one wave, or tree, or being does not shut us against the source of its becoming; rather does it teach us the possibilities latent in the ma.s.s. That is the moral of the sea.
But what is the sea? How can we know the sea? Is it water, s.p.a.ce, depth? Can we measure it in miles, in the days required to traverse it, in steams.h.i.+p lines, by the turning of the screws, or by the system of the fourth dimension? To me who have been round the greatest sea on earth comes the realization that I have seen only a narrow line of it, and that I can only believe that the rest is what it has been said to be. Yet my faith is founded on my knowledge of the faithfulness of the sea.
The sea, we sometimes say, has its moods, but rather should they be called enthusiasms. It is really not the sea at all to which we refer, but to something which in the vague world of infinitude is in itself a sea whipping the surface of an unfathomable wonder. The sea's moods are not in its breakers, any more than is the surface phenomenon which floors the region between our atmosphere and ether, the story of our earth. We cannot reach down beneath the breakers and learn the secret of the heart of the sea. In ourselves, as in the sea, we obtain a record of that tremendous silence which is the harbinger of all sound, as the heavens are of all color.
One day in New Zealand I witnessed a conflict between the earth and the sea. A tremendous wind swept north-westward, and pressed heavily down upon the sh.o.r.e. It sent the sand scurrying back into the sea. Even the breakers, like the sand, fell back in furious spray like the waves of sea-horses,--back into the ocean. The entire length of the beach for three miles was alive with retreating spray, mingled with the bewildered sand-legions scurrying at my ankles.
One night, on the sh.o.r.es of Otago Harbor, the moon, blasted and blunted by heavy clouds, had started on its journey. In a little cave huddled a cloud of black night. We had spread the faithful embers of our camp fire so they could not touch one another, and wanting touch they died in the darkness. We had put the curse of loneliness upon each of them. The little cave had become only a darker spot on a dark landscape,--a landscape so rough, so rare and rugged, reaching the sea and the western sky of night. So rough, so unformed, so uncompleted. The maker of lands was beating against it impatiently, rus.h.i.+ng it, forming it.
What uncanny projections, what sandy cliffs! For ages the wind and sea have been whipping them into shape. Yet man could remove them with a blast or two. For thousands of miles, all round the rim of the great Pacific, the same process is going on, day and night. While upon land, man has continued working out his mission in the same persistent, unconscious manner.
O Maker of lands' ends, O Sea, when will man be formed? When will the conflicts among men cease? They have tried to curb one another and to subject one another to slavish uses, even and kempt. But still, after ages of whipping and las.h.i.+ng, they are still unfinished as though never to be formed. Are the various little groups which lie so far apart, scattered by some ancient camper, to die for want of the touch of comrade, like those embers in the darkness of that empty cavelet?
Here round the Pacific we dwell, each in his own little hollow. May not this vast, generous ocean become the great experiment station for human commonalty, for distinction without extinction? The dreams that centered in the other great seas--the Mediterranean, the Atlantic--were only partially fulfilled. But here at the point where East is West, it ought to be possible, because of the very obvious differences, to maintain relations without irritating encroachment. There was a time when pa.s.sionate desire justified a man taking a woman from another with the aid of a club. To-day the decent man knows that however much he may love, only mutual consent makes relations.h.i.+p possible. And from the frenzy of untutored souls let those who feel repugnance withdraw till the force of a higher morality makes the rest of the world follow in its wake.
... now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked s.h.i.+ngles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love nor light, Nor cert.i.tude, nor peace, nor help for pain: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
BOOK TWO
DISCUSSION OF NATIVE PROBLEMS--PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
CHAPTER XIII
EXIT THE n.o.bLE SAVAGE
1
To the primitive or simple races of the world marriage, divorce, and supply of only the elemental wants are the most intense problems.
Nourishment and reproduction make up the rounds of life. While the highly developed nations around the Pacific are concerned with the exploitation of the resources of the islands, and with political problems growing out of their reciprocal interests, the natives are struggling with matters that lie nearer the real foundations of life.
For them the question of survival is an immediate and pressing one.
Extinction is facing many of them, absorption by inflowing races is creating altogether new difficulties and relations.h.i.+ps, such as marriage and divorce, while newer conceptions of exchange and trade, the buying and selling of meats and vegetables, are introducing social and moral factors they could not as yet be expected to understand. Nor can we who have thrust ourselves upon them or accepted responsibility for their well-being understand our obligations unless we think of them as human beings, or without visualizing their problems by human examples. Nor can we escape these responsibilities or s.h.i.+rk them. Out of the stuff their lives are made of grow the larger problems, those of the relations.h.i.+p of the great civilizations that touch each other on the Pacific--Asia, Australasia, America.
Threnodies and elegies a-plenty have mourned the pa.s.sing of the Polynesians of the South Seas. The n.o.ble savage whose average height often measured six feet--plus thick callouses--has stalked among us, as a mythical figure, maidens unabashed in their naked loveliness have lured men to the tropics oblivious of home ties. Leisure and unlimited harems in prospect have afforded many a civilized man salacious joys the like of which the white race has not altogether abandoned, but which few have the courage to pursue in the open. The pa.s.sing of these Pacific peoples has in some quarters been hailed as an indication of the viciousness of civilization; their yielding to virtue has been deplored by others. The sentimentalist has clothed them in romance; the cynic has stuck horns in their brows. But whether the romancer is wrong or the missionary devoid of appreciation of nature unadorned, the pa.s.sing of the Polynesian is an admitted danger. Whether it was the vice of the drunken sailor or the clothes of the devout disciple that brought about this downfall shall not here be determined. It will be mine merely to depict in living examples the episodes that indicate their evanescence, and to point to the silent forces of regeneration that are at work,--forces that, having accomplished the virtual decease of some of the finest races in the world, and yet are bringing about their rebirth.
One cannot live in the tropics without romancing. The simplicity, the earnestness of life, devoid of many of the outer signs of avarice so consonant with the individualism of our civilization; the slovenliness unhampered by too many clothes,--these take one by a storm of pleasure.