A Stricter Test
WE have been led to reject the popular assumption that civilizations emerge when environments offer unusually easy conditions of life and to advance an argument in favour of exactly the opposite view. The popular view arises from the fact that a modern observer of such a civilization as the Egyptiac—and in this context the Ancient Greeks were ‘moderns’ like ourselves— takes for granted the land as man has made it, and assumes that it was like that when the pioneers first took it in hand. We have tried to show what the Lower Nile Valley was really like when the pioneers first took it in hand by giving a picture of certain parts of the Upper Nile Valley as they are to-day. But this difference in the geographical site may have prevented our illustration from being entirely convincing, and in the present chapter we propose to drive our point home by citing cases in which a civilization has first succeeded and subsequently failed on the same site, and the country, unlike Egypt, has reverted to its pristine condition.
Central America
One remarkable instance is the present state of the birthplace of the Mayan Civilization. Here we find the ruins of immense and magnificently decorated public buildings which now stand, far away from any present human habitations, in the depth of the tropical forest. The forest, like some sylvan boa-constrictor, has literally swallowed them up and is now devouring them at its leisure, prising the fine-hewn close-laid stones apart with its writhing roots and tendrils. The contrast between the present aspect of the country and the aspect which it must have worn when the Mayan Civilization was in being is so great that it is almost beyond imagination. There must have been a time when these immense public buildings stood in the heart of large and populous cities, and when those cities lay in the midst of wide expanses of cultivated land. The transitoriness of human achievement and the vanity of human wishes are poignantly exposed by the return of the forest, engulfing first the fields and then the houses and finally the palaces and temples themselves. Yet that is not the most significant lesson to be learnt from the present state of Copan or Tikal or Palenque. The ruins speak still more eloquently of the intensity of the struggle with the physical environment which the creators of the Mayan Civilization must have waged in their day. In her very revenge, which reveals her in all her gruesome power, Tropical Nature testifies to the courage and vigour of the men who once, if only for a season, succeeded in putting her to flight and keeping her at bay.
The equally arduous feat of conquering the parched plains of Ceylon for agriculture is commemorated in the breached dams and overgrown floors of the tanks which were once constructed on the wet side of the hill country, on a colossal scale, by the Sinhalese converts to the Indie philosophy of the Hinayana.
‘To realize how such tanks came into being one must know something of the history of Lanka. The idea underlying the system was simple but very great. It was intended by the tank-building kings that none of the rain which fell in such abundance in the mountains should reach the sea without paying tribute to man on the way.
‘In the middle of the southern half of Ceylon is a wide mountain zone, but to the east and north dry plains cover thousands of square miles, and at present are very sparsely populated. In the height of the monsoon, when armies of storm-swept clouds rush on day after day to match their strength against the hills, there is a line drawn by nature that the rains are unable to pass. . . . There are points where the line of demarcation of the two zones, the wet and the dry, is so narrow that within a mile one seems to pass into a new country. . . . The line curves from sea to sea and appears to be stable and unaffected by the operations of man, such as felling forests.’ 1
Yet the missionaries of the Indie Civilization in Ceylon once achieved the tour de force of compelling the monsoon-smitten highlands to give water and life and wealth to the plains which nature had condemned to lie parched and desolate.
‘Hill streams were tapped and their water guided into the giant storage-tanks below, some of them four thousand acres in extent; and, from those, channels ran on to other larger tanks farther from the hills and from them to others still more remote. And below each great tank and each great channel were hundreds of little tanks, each the nucleus of a village, all, in the long run, fed from the wet mountain zone. So gradually the ancient Sinhalese conquered all, or nearly all, of the plains that are now so empty of men.’ 2
The arduousness of the labour involved in holding for a man-made civilization these naturally barren plains is demonstrated by two outstanding features in the landscape of Ceylon to-day: the relapse of that once irrigated and populated tract into its primeval barrenness, and the concentration of the modern tea, coffee and rubber planters in the other half of the island, where the rain falls.
A celebrated and indeed almost hackneyed illustration of our theme is the present state of Petra and Palmyra—a spectacle which has inspired a whole series of essays in the philosophy of history from Volney’s Les Ruines (1791) onwards. To-day these former homes of the Syriac Civilization are in the same state as the former homes of the Mayan Civilization, though the hostile environment which has taken its revenge on them is the Afrasian Steppe instead of the tropical forest. The ruins tell us that these elaborate ;emples and porticoes and tombs must, when they stood intact, have been the ornaments of great cities; and here the evidence of archaeology, which is our sole means of composing a picture of the Mayan Civilization, is reinforced by the written testimony of historical records. We know that the pioneers of the Syriac Civilization who conjured these cities up out of the desert were masters of the magic which Syriac legend ascribes to Moses.
These magicians knew how to bring water out of the dry rock and how to find their way across the untrodden wilderness. In their prime, Petra and Palmyra stood in the midst of irrigated gardens such as still surround Damascus. But Petra and Palmyra did not live then, any more than Damascus lives to-day, exclusively or even principally on the fruits of their narrow-verged oases. Their rich men were not market-gardeners but merchants, who kept oasis in communion with oasis, and continent with continent, by a busy caravan-traffic from point to point across the intervening tracts of steppe and desert. Their present state reveals not only the final victory of the desert over man but the dimensions of the previous victory of man over the desert.
Easter Island
In a different scene we may draw a similar conclusion concerning the origins of the Polynesian Civilization 1 from the present state of Easter Island. At the time of its modern discovery this outlying island in the South-East Pacific was inhabited by two races: a race of flesh and blood, and a race of stone; an apparently primitive population of Polynesian physique and a highly accomplished population of statues. The living inhabitants in that generation possessed neither the art of carving statues such as these nor the science of navigating the thousand miles of open sea that separate Easter Island from the nearest sister island of the Polynesian Archipelago. Before its discovery by European seamen the island had been isolated from the rest of the world for an unknown length of time. Yet its dual population of flesh and stone testifies just as clearly as the ruins of Palmyra or Copan to a vanished past which must have been utterly different from the present.
Those human beings must have been begotten, and those statues carved, by Polynesian navigators who once found their way across the Pacific in flimsy open canoes, without chart or compass. And this voyage can hardly have been an isolated adventure which brought one boat-load of pioneers to Easter Island by a stroke of luck that was not repeated. The statue population is so numerous that it must have taken many generations to produce it. Everything points to a state of affairs in which the navigation across those thousand miles of open sea was carried on regularly over a long period of time. Eventually, for some reason unknown to us, the sea, once traversed victoriously by man, closed round Easter Island, as the desert closed round Palmyra and the forest round Copan. The men of stone, like the statue in Housman’s poem, quitted themselves like stone, but the men of flesh and blood begot in each generation ruder and more incompetent offspring.
The evidence of Easter Island is, of course, in flat contradiction to the popular Western view of the South Sea Islands as an earthly paradise and their inhabitants as children of nature in the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The mistaken idea arises from the assumption that one portion of the Polynesian environment constitutes the whole of it. The physical environment consists, in fact, of water as well as land, water which presents a formidable challenge to any human beings who try to cross it without possessing any better means than such as were at the disposal of the Polynesians. It was by responding boldly and successfully to the challenge of the ‘salt, estranging sea’, by achieving the tour de force of a regular maritime traffic between island and island, that the pioneers won their footing on the specks of dry land which are scattered through the watery wilderness of the Pacific almost as sparsely as the stars are scattered through space.
New England
Before closing this review of reversions to a state of nature, the writer may permit himself to cite two instances—one somewhat out of the way and the other exceedingly obvious—which happen to have come within his own personal observation.
I 1 was once travelling in a rural part of the State of Connecticut in New England when I came across a deserted village—a not uncommon spectacle in those parts, as I was told, yet a spectacle which is nevertheless surprising and disconcerting to a European. For some two centuries, perhaps, Town Hill—such was its name— had stood with its plank-built Georgian church in the middle of the village green, its cottages, its orchards and its cornfields. The church still stood, preserved as an ancient monument; but the houses had vanished, the fruit-trees had gone wild and the cornfields had faded away.
Within the last hundred years those New Englanders had played a part disproportionate to their numbers in wresting from wild nature the whole breadth of the American Continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, yet at the same time they had allowed nature to recapture from them this village in the heart of their homeland, where their forefathers had lived for perhaps two hundred years. The rapidity, the thoroughness, the abandon with which nature had re-asserted her domain over Town Hill as soon as man had relaxed his grip, surely gave the measure of the exertions which man had formerly made to tame that barren soil. Only an energy as intense as the energy which the breaking-in of Town Hill had called into play could have been sufficient for ‘the Winning of the West’. The deserted site explained the miracle of the mushroom cities of Ohio and Illinois and Colorado and California.
The Roman Campagna
The effect produced on me by Town Hill was produced on Livy by the Roman Campagna, when he marvelled that an innumerable company of yeoman warriors should formerly have subsisted in a region which in his day, as in ours, 2 was a wilderness of barren grey fell and feverish green swamp. This latter-day wilderness has reproduced the pristine state of the forbidding landscape which was once transformed by Latin and Volscian pioneers into a cultivated and populous countryside; and the energy generated in the process of breaking-in this narrow plot of dour Italian soil was the energy which afterwards conquered the World from Egypt to Britain.
Having studied the character of certain environments which have actually been the scenes of the geneses of civilizations or of other signal human achievements, and having found that the conditions they offered to man were not easy but rather the opposite, let us pass on to a complementary study. Let us examine certain other environments in which the conditions offered have been easy and study the effect on human life which these environments have produced. In attempting this study we must distinguish between two different situations. The first is one in which people are introduced to an easy environment after having lived in a difficult one. The second is that of people in an easy environment who have never, so far as one knows, been exposed to any other environment since their pre-human ancestors became men. In other words we have to distinguish between the effect of an easy environment on man in process of civilization and on primitive man.
In classical Italy Rome found her antithesis in Capua. The Capuan Campagna was as kindly to man as the Roman Campagna was dour; and, while the Romans went forth from their forbidding country to conquer one neighbour after another, the Capuans stayed at home and allowed one neighbour after another to conquer them. From her last conquerors, the Samnites, Capua was delivered, at her own request, by the intervention of Rome herself; and then, at the most critical moment of the most critical war of Roman history, on the morrow of the battle of Cannae, Capua repaid Rome by opening her gates to Hannibal. Both Rome and Hannibal were of one mind in regarding Capua’s change of sides as the most important result of the battle and perhaps the decisive event of the war. Hannibal repaired to Capua and there took up his winter quarters—whereupon something happened which falsified everybody’s expectations. A winter spent in Capua so demoralized Hannibal’s army that it was never the same instrument of victory again.
The Advice of Artembares
Herodotus has a story which is very much to the point in this context. A certain Artembares and his friends came to Cyrus with the following suggestion:
‘“Now that Zeus has put down Astyages from his seat and has given the dominion to the Persians as a nation and to you, Sire, as an individual, why should we not emigrate from the confined and rocky territory which we at present possess, and occupy a better? There are many near at hand and many more at a distance, of which we have only to take our choice in order to make a greater impression on the world than we make as it is. This is a natural policy for an imperial people, and we shall never have a finer opportunity of realizing it than now, when our empire is established over vast populations and over the entire continent of Asia.”
‘Cyrus, who had listened and had not been impressed, told his petitioners to do as they wished, but he qualified his advice by telling them in the same breath to prepare their minds for exchanging positions with their present subjects. Soft countries, he informed them, invariably breed soft men.’ 1
The Odyssey and the Exodus
If we turn to documents of ancient literature even more celebrated than the History of Herodotus, we find that Odysseus was never in greater danger from the Cyclops and other aggressive antagonists than from the charmers who called him to a life of ease—Circe with her hospitality which ended in the pig-sty; the Lotus-eaters, in whose land, according to a later authority, ‘it was always afternoon’; the Sirens, against whose enchanting voices he stopped his sailors’ ears with wax, after which he bade them strap him to the mast; and Calypso, divinely fairer than Penelope and inhumanly inferior as a helpmeet for a mortal man.
As for the Israelites of the Exodus, the austere writers of the Pentateuch provided no Sirens or Circes to lead them astray, but we read that they were continually hankering after ‘the flesh pots of Egypt’. If they had had their way we may be sure that they would never have produced the Old Testament. Fortunately Moses was of the same school of thought as Cyrus.
The Doasyoulikes
A critic might contend that the examples we have just produced are not very convincing. Of course, he will say, a people transferred from a hard to an easy condition of life will be ‘spoilt’, like a starving man who stuffs himself with a full meal; but those who have enjoyed easy conditions all the time might well be expected to make a good job of it. We must turn, then, to the second of the two situations which we distinguished above—the situation of people in an easy environment who have never, so far as is known, been in any other. In this case the disturbing factor of transition is eliminated, and we are able to study the effect of easy conditions in the absolute. Here is an authentic picture of it from Nyasaland, as seen by a Western observer half a century ago:
‘Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds’ nests in a wood, in terror of one another and of their common foe, the slaver, are small native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells Primeval Man, without clothes, without civilization, without learning, without religion—the genuine child of nature, thoughtless, careless and contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has practically no wants.... The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round him it would be gratuitous to work. His indolence, therefore, as it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise.’ 1
Charles Kingsley, that Victorian exponent of the strenuous life who preferred the north-east wind to the south-west one, wrote a little story called ‘The History of the Great and Famous Nation of the Doasyoulikes, who came away from the country of Hardwork because they wanted to play on the Jews’ Harp all day long’. They paid the penalty by degenerating into gorillas.
It is amusing to observe the differing attitudes towards ‘Lotus-eaters’ displayed by the Hellenic poet and the modern Western moralist. For the Hellenic poet the Lotus-eaters and their Lotus-land are most formidably attractive, a snare of the devil in the path of the civilizing Greek. Kingsley, on the other hand, displays the modern British attitude in regarding his Doasyoulikes with such contemptuous disapproval that he is immune from their attractions; he feels it a positive duty to annex them to the British Empire, not for our good, of course, but for theirs, and to provide them with trousers and Bibles.
Our concern, however, is neither to approve nor to disapprove but to understand. The moral is found in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis; it was only after Adam and Eve had been expelled from their Eden Lotus-land that their descendants set about inventing agriculture, metallurgy and musical instruments.