Here’s to thee, old apple tree,Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow,And whence thou mayst bear apples enow,Hats full, caps full,Bushel, bushel, sacks full,And my pocket full too.[117]
Here’s to thee, old apple tree,Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow,And whence thou mayst bear apples enow,Hats full, caps full,Bushel, bushel, sacks full,And my pocket full too.[117]
Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou mayst bud and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow,
Hats full, caps full,
Bushel, bushel, sacks full,
And my pocket full too.[117]
And similar prayers, as lifeless now as the fossil shells on the shore of some ancient coral sea, lie scattered abundantly in many an English rhyme and ballad, serving to show how the philosophy of one age passes into the nonsense of a later one, and how ideas which constituted a religion for one time may only survive as an amusement for another.
The German proverb, ‘Speak, that I may see thee,’ may be applied as truly to a whole community as to an individual. For proverbs—or, roughly defining, popular sayings—reflect conspicuously the general character of a nation, constituting its actual code of social, political, and moral philosophy. Besides the beauty and wisdom, from which alone many of them derive an imperishable charm, they serve as a kind of literature in miniature, in which the inner life of a nation is more clearly legible than in its more voluminous writings. And in spite of the general resemblance which seems to pervade the proverbial lore of the world, arising partly from the direct interchange of thought inseparable from international commerce of any kind, partly from a uniformity of experience—such, for example, as has impressed on all people the wisdom of caution and truth—there are yet well-marked differences in the proverbs of nations,which as clearly retain the records of their several histories as do their different laws and customs. Remarkable, therefore, as is the substantial similarity of proverbial codes, of which the general characteristic is a high sense of right coupled with a mournful consciousness of human infirmity, they betray often in the very expression of the same idea the individuality of their national birthplace. It is obvious, for instance, that, largely as all modern nations are indebted to a writer like Æsop for the thoughts they share in common, each nation severally will owe more of its wisdom to writers of its own, who, like Shakespeare or Cervantes, have, from greater familiarity with the manners, been more competent to express the feelings, of their different countries. But the way in which good proverbs, like good gold, find acceptance everywhere, and pass readily into the current coinage of different realms, may be illustrated by the fact of the existence, in countries so widely remote as Spain, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, and India, of a saying, second to none in all the essentials of a good proverb, to the effect that ‘when God wills the destruction of an ant, he supplies it with wings.’[118]
An instructive instance of the light thrown on national character by proverbs may be supplied froma comparison of Italian, German, and Persian teaching on the subject of vindictiveness. In communities destitute of social organisation, the ‘vendetta,’ or duty of blood-revenge, probably preceded and led the way to the practice of legal punishment. Originally it was a kind of lynch-law, supplying the default of any legal protection of life; and all nations bear traces in their history of having passed through a stage of growth in which the sacred duty of vengeance was the germ of any idea of a more judicial retribution. Confucius made it a duty for a son to slay his father’s murderer, just as Moses insisted on a strictly retaliatory penalty for bloodshed. The duty of revenge, which if it is yet extinct in Corsica survives with so much interest in the play of ‘The Corsican Brothers,’ to this day, in places like Fiji, still passes from father to son, and from the son to the nearest relation. The longer survival of such feelings in Italy, consequent on the different circumstances of her history, is clearly impressed on the proverbial philosophy of her people, constituting a remarkable contrast to the sentiments of other countries. For the Italian, extolling the sweetness of revenge, declares it a morsel fit for God; and, expressing pity or contempt for the man who either cannot or will not carry out his revenge, counsels patience and the waiting of time and place for its successful execution. In a proverb so terribly expressive that you seem to hear in it the assassin’s gnashingteeth, he will tell you that ‘revenge, though a hundred years old, still has its milk teeth,’ a maxim which stands on no higher a level than the pagan African saying, ‘Hate hath no medicine,’ or than that of Afghanistan, ‘Speak good words to an enemy very softly, gradually destroy him root and branch;’ and which may be fitly compared with the Fijian expression of malice: ‘Let the shell of the oyster perish by reason of years, and to these add a thousand more, still my hatred shall be hot.’ How much purer than the Italian is the German teaching, which declares revenge to be fresh wrong, the conversion of a little right into a great injustice, and sure in its turn to draw revenge after it; or how far nobler still is the more positive sentiment of Persia, that to take revenge for an injury is the sign of a mean spirit; that it is easy to return evil for evil, but that the manly thing is to return good for it!
The contrast conveyed in these proverbs is the more striking, in that Italy might pre-eminently call herself the Catholic, as against Germany the heretical, or Persia the infidel, land. It has been said that every tenth proverb in an Italian collection contains a selfish or cynical maxim; and though the beauty and purity of many Italian sayings counterbalance the baseness of others—those, for instance, on love being as refined as those on revenge are barbarous—it may not be uninteresting to compare generally the proverbsof Italy with those of a land like Persia where the religious history has been so different.
The noblest Italian proverb is to the effect that a hundred years cannot repair a moment’s loss of honour; the basest, perhaps, that bad as it is to be a knave, it is worse to be known as one. To love a friend with all his faults; to associate with the good in order to be good; to work in order to rest; to do right in spite of consequences, and good irrespectively of persons; to do evil never, whatever the benefit—these are among the highest lessons of Italian proverb-lore. That among men of honour a word is a bond, and that conscience is as good as a thousand witnesses; that the best sermon is a good life, and that the gains of begging are dearly bought, are maxims of the same upright tendency. Yet, over against these, are proverbs pervaded by the saddest spirit of universal mistrust, instilling utter disbelief of any sincerity in friendship, and even counselling to selfish or downright wicked conduct. What more melancholy evidence of this than is afforded by the following common sayings?—
He who suspects is seldom to blame.Trust was a good man, Trust-not a better.From those I trust God guard me; from those I mistrust I will guard myself.Who would have many friends let him test but few.Tell your secret to your friend, and he will set his foot on your neck.
He who suspects is seldom to blame.
Trust was a good man, Trust-not a better.
From those I trust God guard me; from those I mistrust I will guard myself.
Who would have many friends let him test but few.
Tell your secret to your friend, and he will set his foot on your neck.
Or, again, what can be thought of such maximsas, that it is expedient to peel a fig for your friend but a peach for your enemy; that the man who esteems none but himself is happy as a king; that public money, like holy water, is the property of all men; or that with art and knavery men may live through half the year, and with knavery and art through the other?
The Persian proverbs seem to breathe a different moral atmosphere from these, being as generous in character as the Italian are cynical, and displaying a free spirit of liberality, trust, independence, above all, of truthfulness, which is unsurpassed in any country of Europe. If in Italy it is common to say that a man who cannot flatter knows not how to talk, in Persia the sentiment prevails that to flatter is worse than to abuse. The Persian, true to the character given of him by Herodotus, holds boldly, that the man who speaks truth is always at ease; that men never suffer from speaking the truth; that it behoves them to speak their minds unreservedly, for that there is no hill in front of the tongue. Add to this the popular sayings, that the accounts of friends are in the heart, and that it is better to be in chains with friends than in the garden with strangers. That it should have become proverbial in Persia, that a man lowers himself by vexing the poor, and loses all claim to greatness by finding fault with his inferiors, proves the purity of a religion which has instilled suchthoughts into the ethics of a nation; nor could any language in Europe produce proverbs characterised by a higher spirit of morality than is revealed in the following selection:—
A high name is better than a high house.The cure for anger is silence.A man must cut out his own garments of reputation.Heaven is at the feet of mothers (i.e.lies in dutiful obedience).It is better to die of want than to beg.The liberal man is the friend of God.Practise liberality, but lay no stress on the obligation.
A high name is better than a high house.
The cure for anger is silence.
A man must cut out his own garments of reputation.
Heaven is at the feet of mothers (i.e.lies in dutiful obedience).
It is better to die of want than to beg.
The liberal man is the friend of God.
Practise liberality, but lay no stress on the obligation.
As another illustration of the way in which a few proverbs may condense centuries of history, may be instanced the recorded experiences of mankind touching priests and priestcraft. With no other evidence than that of proverbs before him, a future historian of Europe might easily detect a marked difference of feeling on this matter between Protestant Germany and the Catholic countries of Europe. Not that the latter are wanting in sayings to the prejudice of the priestly class, but they are not so numerous as in Germany. The French have two proverbs, marked with all the wit and boldness of their genius, one charging anyone who values a clean house not to let into it either a priest or a pigeon; the other declaring that it is human ignorance alone which causes the pot to boil for priests. The Spanish experience also is, that it is best neither to have a good friar for a friend nor a bad one for an enemy,and that it is well to keep awake in a land thickly tenanted by monks. But the Germans go much farther than this. In German estimation the priest is a being who, in company with a woman, may be found at the bottom of all the mischief that goes on in the world, and is as little likely as a woman to forgive you an injury. Like the bites of wolves, those of priests are hard to heal, so that it is best, if you fight with them at all, to beat them to death. If they are ever hot, it is from eating, not from work; for they always take care to bless themselves first, nor do they ever pay any tithes to one another.
The above comparisons suffice to show how differences of national character, and even how the operation of different forms of faith, may reveal themselves in proverbs. Yet such estimates must be formed with caution, in consideration of the wide possibilities of error which are inseparable from so inexhaustible a subject. For not only may the proverb-collector easily attribute to one country alone a saying which belongs equally to, or may even have originated in, another, but his canon of selection is somewhat arbitrary and dependent on his preconceptions of what a proverb really is. ‘To take the ball on the hop,’ for instance, is as genuine an English proverb as ‘to make hay whilst the sun shines,’ which contains the same idea; yet whilst the one might be heard every day, the other might not be heard once ayear, so that it might easily escape notice altogether, or if found be rejected as obsolete. We can consequently, as in other branches of human study, only make use,on trust, of such data as lie at hand, and, whilst fully acknowledging the imperfection of the evidence, strive after an approximation to truth, without hope for its actual attainment.
If now we extend the limits of our comparison, to take in some proverbs of the lower races as well as of the higher, we shall find therein a strong corroboration of the lesson already learnt in any comparison of the superstitions, myths, and manners of different societies; namely, that differences of race, colour, and even structure, sink into insignificance when compared with the intellectual affinities which unite the families of mankind, and that there is, perhaps, no phase of thought nor shade of feeling belonging to the higher culture of the world to which we may not find an antitype or even an equivalent in the lower. If we take some of the proverbs collected from tribes confessedly low in civilisation—those, for instance, of West Africa—and compare them with proverbs still prevalent in Europe, we cannot fail to be struck with the strong likeness between them, as well as impressed with the idea, that many actually existent common sayings may have had their birth in days of the most remote and savage antiquity. The immense number of modern proverbs, drawn from the observation of thenatural, and especially of the animal, world (a number which must be nearly one out of five), coupled with the coincidence that the same fact is perhaps the most striking one in the proverbs collected from West Africa, seems to lend some support to such a theory.
As an introductory instance let us take savage and civilised sentiments about poverty, a belief in the misfortune of which is written clearly in every language of Europe. Italian experience says that poverty has no kin, and that poor men do penance for rich men’s sins; in Germany the poor have to dance as the rich pipe; whilst in Spain and Denmark the evil is expressed more graphically still, it being a matter of observation in the one country that the poor man’s crop is destroyed by hail every year; in the other, that the poor man’s corn always grows thin. And, in the Oji dialect, spoken by about two millions of people, including the Ashantees, Fantees, and others, it is also proverbial that the poor man has no friend, that poverty makes a man a slave, and that hard words are fit for the poor. And as the Dutch have learnt, that ‘poor folks’ wisdom goes for little,’ or the Italians, that ‘the words of the poor go many to the sackful,’ so in Oji exactly the same idea is conveyed in the saying, that ‘when a poor man makes a proverb it does not spread’; in Yoruba, in the saying, that ‘poverty destroys a man’s reputation;’and in Accra in the still cleverer proverb, that ‘a poor man’s pipe does not sound.’[119]
The proverbs of savages are moral and immoral, elevated and base, precisely as are those of more civilised nations. The proverbs of the Yorubas, justly observes the missionary, Mr. Bowen,[120]‘are among the most remarkable of the world;’ and indeed the intellectual powers and moral ideas displayed in West African proverbs generally ought largely to modify our conceptions of their originators, and make us sceptical of that extreme dearth of mental wealth which has so frequently been declared to attend a low standard of material advancement. Their wit, terseness, vividness of illustration, and insight into life, are all alike surprising; and acquaintance with them must suggest caution in any estimate of the mental capacities of savages whose languages may have been less investigated and consequently remain less known. ‘It has always been passing travellers who have drawn the most doleful pictures of so-called savages, and especially have asserted the poverty of their language.’[121]It may well prove that better acquaintance with the languages of tribes, classed at present for various reasons almost outside the humanfamily, may show them to combine, as Humboldt found was the case with the once depreciated Carib language, ‘wealth, grace, strength, and gentleness.’ It was said of the Veddahs once that they were utterly destitute of either religion orlanguage; and the Samojeds were reported to shriek and chatter like apes.
The Basutos of South Africa are savages, yet the following proverbs are current among them:—
A good name makes one sleep well.Stolen goods do not make one grow.Famine dwells in the house of the quarrelsome.The thief catches himself.A lent knife does not come back alone. (i.e.a good deed is never thrown away.)[122]
A good name makes one sleep well.
Stolen goods do not make one grow.
Famine dwells in the house of the quarrelsome.
The thief catches himself.
A lent knife does not come back alone. (i.e.a good deed is never thrown away.)[122]
Compare, for elevation of mind, these Yoruban proverbs with those already noticed as current in Italy:—
He that forgives gains the victory.He who injures another injures himself.Anger benefits no one.We should not treat others with contempt.[123]
He that forgives gains the victory.
He who injures another injures himself.
Anger benefits no one.
We should not treat others with contempt.[123]
On the other hand, ‘If a great man should wrong you, smile on him,’ may be compared with the Arabic advice about dangerous friends, ‘If a serpent love thee, wear him as a necklace;’ or with the Pashtoproverb of the same intention, ‘Though your enemy be a rope of reeds, call him a serpent.’
Here are some more proverbs with whose European equivalents everyone will be familiar:—
On Faultfinding.
If you can pull out, pull out your own grey hairs. (Oji.)Before healing others, heal yourself. (Wolof.)
If you can pull out, pull out your own grey hairs. (Oji.)
Before healing others, heal yourself. (Wolof.)
With which we may compare the Chinese:—
Sweep the snow from your own doors without troubling about the frost on your neighbour’s tiles.
Sweep the snow from your own doors without troubling about the frost on your neighbour’s tiles.
On the Value of Experience.
Nobody is twice a fool. (Accra.)Nobody is twice ashamed. (Accra.)He is a fool whose sheep run away twice. (Oji.)He dreads a slowworm who has been bitten by a serpent. (Oji.)
Nobody is twice a fool. (Accra.)
Nobody is twice ashamed. (Accra.)
He is a fool whose sheep run away twice. (Oji.)
He dreads a slowworm who has been bitten by a serpent. (Oji.)
With which we may compare our own—
It’s a silly fish that’s caught twice with the same bait.
It’s a silly fish that’s caught twice with the same bait.
Or the German—
An old fox is not caught twice in the same trap.
An old fox is not caught twice in the same trap.
To which both Italy and Holland have exactly similar proverbs.
On Perseverance.
Perseverance always triumphs. (Basuto.)The moon does not grow full in a day. (Oji.)Perseverance is everything.Who has patience has all things. (Yoruba.)By going and coming a bird builds its nest. (Oji.)
Perseverance always triumphs. (Basuto.)
The moon does not grow full in a day. (Oji.)
Perseverance is everything.
Who has patience has all things. (Yoruba.)
By going and coming a bird builds its nest. (Oji.)
Which latter may be compared with the Dutch proverb—
By slow degrees a bird builds its nest.
By slow degrees a bird builds its nest.
And all of them with the Chinese—
A mulberry-leaf becomes satin with time.
A mulberry-leaf becomes satin with time.
On the Force of Habit.
The thread follows the needle.Its shell follows the snail wherever it goes. (Yoruba.)As is the sword so is the scabbard. (Oji.)
The thread follows the needle.
Its shell follows the snail wherever it goes. (Yoruba.)
As is the sword so is the scabbard. (Oji.)
To which again China supplies a good parallel in
The growth of the mulberry tree follows its early bent.
The growth of the mulberry tree follows its early bent.
On Causation.
If nothing touches the palm-leaves they do not rustle. (Oji.)Nobody hates another without a cause. (Accra.)A feather does not stick without gum. (A Pashto proverb.)
If nothing touches the palm-leaves they do not rustle. (Oji.)
Nobody hates another without a cause. (Accra.)
A feather does not stick without gum. (A Pashto proverb.)
Again, the Turkish proverb, that curses, like chickens, come home to roost, or the Italian one that, like processions, they come back to their starting-point, is well matched by the Yoruba proverb that ‘ashes fly back in the face of their thrower.’ Or the tendency of travellers to exaggerate or tell lies, impressed as it has been on all human experience, is also confirmed by the Oji proverb, that ‘he who travels alone tells lies.’ And the universal belief in the ultimate exposure of falsehood conveyed in such proverbs as the Arabian, ‘The liar is short-lived;’ the Persian,‘Liars have bad memories;’ or the still more expressive Italian saying, that ‘the liar is sooner caught than a cripple,’ finds itself corroborated by the Wolof proverb, that ‘lies, though many, will be caught by Truth as soon as she rises up.’ Even in Afghanistan, where it is said that no disgrace attaches to lyingper se, and where lying is called an honest man’s wings, while truth can only be spoken by a strong man or a fool, there is also a proverb with the moral, that the career of falsehood is short.[124]
That ‘hope is the pillar of the world,’ that ‘it is the heart which carries one to hell or heaven,’ or that ‘preparation is better than after-thought’—all experiences of the Kanuri, a Moslem tribe, who think it a personal adornment to cut each side of their face in twenty places—shows that there is no necessary connection between general savagery and an absence of moral culture. The natives of New Zealand, with all their barbarity, had in common use a saying which were a desirable maxim for European diplomacy: ‘When you are on friendly terms, settle your disputes in a friendly way; when you are at war, redress your injuries by violence.’[125]Even the Fijians would say that an unimproved day was not to be counted, and that no food was ever cooked by gay clothes andfrivolity.[126]A good Ashantee proverb warns people not to speak ill of their benefactors, by forbidding them to call a forest a shrubbery that has once given them shelter. The proverbs already quoted from Yoruba teach the same lesson, nor would it be difficult to add many more, all proving the existence among savages of a morality identical in its main features with that of the higher group of nations to which we ourselves belong, interpenetrated as it has been for ages with the philosophies and religions of the civilised East.
A similar testimony to the intellectual powers of savages is afforded by their proverbs, though of course the argument is only a suggestive one from tribes whose language has been well studied to others not so well known. That the Soudan negroes are on a higher level of general culture than many savages of other islands or continents is proved by the fact that all known Africans are acquainted with the art of smelting iron and converting it into weapons and utensils; so that they may be said to be living in the iron age, and thus, materially at least, are more advanced than the Botocudos of Brazil, who are still in the age of polished stone implements. From the fact alone that the Yorubas express their contempt for a stupid man by saying that he cannot count nine times nine, we are enabled at once to place themabove tribes whose powers of numeration fall short of such readiness. Hence we should not be justified in expecting to find among Australian or American aborigines proverbs of so high an intellectual order as abound in Africa, of which the following may be selected as samples:—
Were no elephant in the jungle the buffalo would be large;
Were no elephant in the jungle the buffalo would be large;
or—
The dust of the buffalo is lost in that of the elephant.A crab does not bring forth a bird.Two small antelopes beat a big one.Two crocodiles do not live in one hole.A child can crush a snail, but not a tortoise.A razor cannot shave itself.You cannot stop the sun by standing before it.If you like honey, do not fear the bees.When a fish is killed its tail is inserted in its own mouth. (Said of people who reap the reward of their deeds.)
The dust of the buffalo is lost in that of the elephant.
A crab does not bring forth a bird.
Two small antelopes beat a big one.
Two crocodiles do not live in one hole.
A child can crush a snail, but not a tortoise.
A razor cannot shave itself.
You cannot stop the sun by standing before it.
If you like honey, do not fear the bees.
When a fish is killed its tail is inserted in its own mouth. (Said of people who reap the reward of their deeds.)
The Zulus, speaking of the uncertainty of a result, say, ‘It is not known what calf the cow will have;’[127]and when the Fantees tell you to ‘cross the river before you abuse the crocodile,’[128]there is no difficulty in translating their meaning into English. In all these proverbs it is obvious how the facts of every-day life have readily served everywhere as the basis of intellectual advancement, and how similar lessons have everywhere been drawn from the observation of similar occurrences.
Leaving now the analogy between African andEuropean proverb-lore, which the uniformity of moral experiences and the observation of similar laws of nature sufficiently account for, let us endeavour to find among civilised nations any proverbs which, by the figures involved in them or their likeness to savage maxims, seem to bear a distinct impression of a barbaric coinage. One French proverb may almost certainly be so explained. It is, for instance, well known that the lower races very generally account for eclipses of either sun or moon by supposing them to be the victims of the fury or voracity of some ill-disposed animal, whom they try to divert by every horrible noise they can produce, or by any weapon they have learnt to fashion. A typical instance of this was the belief of the Chiquitos of South America that the moon was hunted across the sky by dogs, who tore her in pieces when they caught her, till driven off by the Indian arrows. It has been suggested that the French proverb, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups,’ said in deprecation of a dread of remote danger, is a survival of a similar rude philosophy of nature which is still prevalent in the capital of Turkey, and in the days of St. Augustine was current over Europe.[129]
Another instructive set of proverbs may be adduced to show how the social philosophy current in the savage state may survive in contemporary expressionsof modern Europe. In Africa, where, speaking generally, a man’s wife has no better status in society than that which attaches to his slave or his ox, and a son has been known to wager his own mother against a cow, we cannot be astonished at finding in vogue proverbs strongly depreciatory of the worth of the female sex. Thus a wise Kanuri is cautioned, that if a woman shall speak to him two words, he shall take one and leave the other; nor should he give his heart to a woman, if he would live, for a woman never brings a man into the right way. So, too, Pashto proverbs say contemptuously, that a woman’s wisdom is under her heel, and that she is well only in the house or in the grave. The same feeling is endorsed by the Persians, who declare that both women and dragons are best out of the world, classing the former with horses and swords among their by-words of unfaithfulness.
The literatures of all countries are strongly tinged with sentiments of the same unjust nature. Even the French say that a man of straw is worth a woman of gold, though their proverb, ‘Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,’ is as true as it is a witty variation of the well-known democratic formula. The Italians have made the shrewd observation, that, whilst with men every mortal sin is venial, with women every venial sin is mortal; but no language has anything worse than this, that as both a good horse and a bad horse needthe spur, so both a good woman and a bad woman need the stick.
It is, however, in Germany that the character of women has suffered most from the shafts of that other half of the community, which (it might be complained) has as unfair a monopoly of making proverbs as it has of making laws. The humorous saying, that there are only two good women in the world, one of whom is dead and the other not to be found, contains the key to the common national sentiment. A woman is compared to good fortune in her partiality for fools, and to wine in her power to make them. Like a glass, she is in hourly danger; and, like a priest, she never forgets. Her vengeance is boundless, and her mutability finds its only parallel in nature in the uncertain skies of April. Her affections change every moment, like luck at cards, the favour of princes, or the leaves of a rose; and though you will never find her wanting in words, there is not a needle-point’s difference betwixt her yea and her nay. She only keeps silence where she is ignorant, and it is as fruitless to try to hold a woman at her word as an eel by its tail. Her advice, like corn sown in summer, may perhaps turn out well once in seven years; but wherever there is mischief brewing in the world, rest assured that there is a woman and a priest at the bottom of it. Every daughter of Eve would rather be beautiful than good, and may be caught as surely by gold as a hare by dogs or agentleman by flattery. Even in the house she should be allowed no power, for where a woman rules the devil is chief servant; whilst two women in the same house will agree together like two cats over a mouse or two dogs over a bone.
Spanish experience on this subject coincides with the Teutonic, but without the expenditure of nearly so much spleen, and with several glimpses of a happier experience. What can be worse than this: ‘Beware of a bad woman, nor put any trust in a good one;’ or sadder than this: ‘What is marriage, mother? Spinning, childbirth, and crying, daughter’? Yet the Spanish woman, as hard to know as a melon, as little to be trusted as a magpie, as fickle as the wind or as fortune, as ready to cry as a dog to limp, in labour as patient as a mule, is not so destitute as the German of any redeeming qualities for her failings. The Spaniard is taught to believe that with a good wife he may bear any adversity, and that he should believe nothing against her unless absolutely proved. It is also in remarkable contrast to the experiences of other countries, that in Spain it should have passed into a proverb, that whilst an unmarried man advocates a daily beating for a wife, as soon as he marries he takes care of his own.
Female talkativeness appears also to be a subject of lament all over the world, from our own island, where a woman’s tongue proverbially wags like a lamb’s tail,to the Celestial Empire, where it is likened to a sword, never suffered by its owner to rust. Regard not a woman’s words, says the Hindoo; and the African also is warned against trusting his secrets even to his wife. The Spaniard believes that he has only to tell a woman what he would wish to have published in the market-place; and all languages have sayings to the same effect. The Scotch divine who, before the Session, defended his heresy that women would find no place in heaven, by the text, ‘There was silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour,’ only expressed a sentiment of universal currency over the world.
The proverbs collected from the lower races are still very few, when compared with the immense mass of those from nations with whose literature we are more familiar. It is in the nature of things that missionaries and travellers should have been first struck by, and first given us information about, matters more directly challenging their notice than phrases in common use, for a real knowledge of which the most favourable conditions of a prolonged intimacy are obviously requisite. The large collection of such proverbs from West Africa alone, revealing as they do an elevation of feeling and a clearness of intelligence which other facts of their social life would never have led us to suspect, point at the possibility of such collections elsewhere largely modifying our present views concerning other savage tribes.They at least should teach us caution against accepting the conclusions which some writers have drawn from their study of savage languages, when, from the absence or loss in a dialect of such words as ‘love’ or ‘gratitude,’ they proceed to explain, on the hypothesis of degradation, that rude state of existence which is denoted by the word ‘savage,’ and which there are abundant reasons for supposing was really the primitive germ, out of which all subsequent civilisation has been unfolded. ‘Were,’ says Archbishop Trench, ‘the savage the primitive man, we should then find savage tribes furnished, scantily enough it might be, with the elements of speech, yet, at the same time, with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage—more fearful, perhaps, even than that which is stamped upon his form.’[130]Yet, whatever may be the case with some tribes, who may be shown historically to have fallen from a higher state (and such are the exceptions), at least the languages spoken in Africa bear no such ‘fearful impress of degradation’ as are declared to be traceablein every case, if we may judge of a language by the thoughts which it expresses rather than by the words which it contains.
Lucretius, in his retrospect of prehistoric times, imagines primeval man as unpossessed of any moral law, and is at pains to explain how, as men were once ignorant of the property of either fire to warm or of skins to cover them, so once there was a time when no moral restraints affected the relations between man and man.[131]Across the Atlantic we find the same strain of thought in the myths, common in many different stages of progress, of those culture heroes who had come long ago to teach men the arts and virtues of life, and had left their names to be worshipped by a grateful posterity. The Peruvian legend, that moral law was unknown until the Sun sent two of his children to raise humanity from their animal condition, coincides with the modern hypothesis that the morality of the cave-men resembled verymuch that of the cave-bear; so that it becomes a subject worthy of inquiry whether any human communities ever have lived, or are actually living, with no more idea of moral right and wrong than is necessary for the social harmony of a wolf-pack or a wasp’s nest; whether, in short, what to the Roman was a matter of speculation, or to the American of legend, can fairly become for us one of science.
The Shoshones of North America, some of whom are said to have built absolutely no dwellings, but to have lived in caves and among the rocks, or burrowed like reptiles in the ground; or the Cochinis, who resorted at night for shelter to caverns and holes in the ground, may be taken as the best representatives of the ancient cave-dwellers, and the nearest known approach to communities living in the state presupposed by the legends of most latitudes.[132]Californians generally are said to have had ‘no morals, nor any religion worth calling such;’ yet even the Shoshones knew, like so many other American tribes, how to ratify either a treaty or a bargain by the ceremony of smoking, and used shell-money as an instrument of barter. But some moral notions must enter into the rudest kind of barter, and barter was known to the ancient cave-dwellers of Périgord, just as it is to the lowest contemporary savage tribes.Rock crystal and Atlantic shells, found among the remains of men, tigers, and bears, in the caves of Périgord, could, it is argued, only have got thither by barter; so that the earliest human beings we have record of must have possessed at least so much morality as is necessary for commerce.[133]
As regards existing savages, evidence as to their moral ideas can only be sought in incidental allusion to their customs, penalties, beliefs, or myths, never in chapters expressly devoted to the delineation of their moral character. Not only do such delineations by different writers conflict hopelessly with one another, but inconsistencies abound in the accounts of the same writer, as, for instance, where Cranz describes Greenlanders as mild and peaceable, and a few pages further on as ‘naturally of a murderous disposition.’ The value of Cranz’ evidence is marred by the fact that he writes expressly to rebut the Deistic idea of a natural morality existing by the light of reason and independent of Revelation; and the evidence of other writers, whenever a long residence among savages entitles them to speak with any authority at all, is spoilt by their several temptations to bias. Whether the temptation be to enliven a book of travel, to inculcate the need and enhance the merit of missionary labours, or to illustrate the uniformity of moral perceptionsand the universality of certain moral laws, in any case we are exposed to the error of mistaking for habitual what is really peculiar, and of misunderstanding the indications of facts which are as often anomalous as they are illustrative.
The way, also, in which the love of theory may give rise to unjustifiable credulity or even to absolute misstatement may be exemplified from the common story of the Bushman who spoke with absolute unconcern of having murdered his brother, or of the other Bushman who gave as an instance of his idea of a good action, stealing some one else’s wife, and of a bad one, losing in the same way his own. According to the original authority, the Bushmen who were questioned, to test their intelligence, on a few moral points, and especially on what they considered good actions and what bad, belonged to a kraal of extremely poor, half-starved Bushmen, seemingly ‘the outcasts of the Bushmen race;’ the interpreter, through whom Burchell made his inquiries, said he could not make them understand what he said, and to the specific question about good and bad actionsthey made no reply, the missionary himself adding, as comment, that ‘their not understanding it must have been either pretended stupidity or a wilful misrepresentation by the interpreter.’ This same interpreter is suspected by Burchell, in the very same page, of such misrepresentation, or of actual invention in respect of the story of themurder—a story which, if true, adds the missionary, would have justified him in saying, Here are men who know not right from wrong. Yet both these stories have been quoted to exemplify the state of the moral destitution of the lower races.[134]
The fear of incurring the ill-will of his fellow-beings or of those invisible spirits disposed more or less hostilely towards him and everywhere surrounding him, must have sufficed, even for prehistoric man, to have marked out certain acts as less advisable than others, and so far as wrong. The instinct to repel or revenge personal injuries, and the instinct to appease the unknown forces of nature, neither of which, be it assumed, acted less energetically in the past than the present, must have always contributed to rank certain sets of actions as better to be avoided. Personal or tribal well-being has probably always supplied a sufficiently defined moral standard, sufficiently defended by real or fanciful sanctions. So suggests theory; and in point of fact a savage tribe is as difficult to find as it is to imagine, without a sense of a difference in the quality of actions, arising from a difference in their likely consequences to themselves.
The fear of revenge from a man’s survivors orfrom his ghost would at any time tend to make homicide a prominent act of guilt. The vendetta, sometimes carried out as much against a homicidal tiger or tree as against a man, would scarcely ever be not dreaded by a human murderer; and the associations are obvious and few between homicide as merely an act to be avenged and a crime to be avoided. Even in instances where bloodshed seems to have left but an external stain, affecting the hands not the heart of the murderer, and calling simply for purification by washing, the presence of a feeling of difference may be detected between the killing of a man and the killing of a bear. But the dread of vengeance from a murdered man’s ghost, which is said to have acted as a check on murder among the Sioux Indians, or the dread of such vengeance from the tutelary gods of the deceased, which is said to have acted as a check on cannibalism in Samoa, points to the existence of prudential restraints which are likely not to have been limited in their operation to a tribe in America nor to an island in the Pacific.
But, besides spiritual terrors, secular punishment has a well-defined place among savages, to check the extreme indulgence of hatred or passion. It is doubtful whether any savage tribe is so indifferent to the criminality of murder as to be destitute of customary penal laws to prevent or punish it. These customs vary from the payment of a slight compensation,payable either to the dead man’s family or to the tribal chief, down to actual capital punishment. Among the Northern Californians a few strings of shell-money compounded for the murder of a man, and half a man’s price was paid for a woman; banishment from the tribe being sometimes the penalty, death never.[135]Among the Kutchin tribes human life was valued at forty beaver skins.[136]Even the Veddahs insist upon compensation to survivors. The Tunguse Lapps, with whom homicide was a brave rather than a shameful act, punished nevertheless a murderer with blows, and compelled him to support the dead man’s relations.[137]In some cases a slight penance was the only law against homicide. A Yuma Indian, for instance, who killed a tribesman had perforce to starve for a month on vegetables and water, bathing frequently during the day; whilst a Pima who killed an Apache had to fast for sixteen days, living in the woods, careful meanwhile to keep his eyes from the sight of a blazing fire and his tongue from conversation.[138]
The custom, moreover, of extending to a whole family the guilt of an individual is an additional protection to human life among savages. In the same way as, till lately, English law avenged itself on the suicide who had escaped its jurisdiction, bypunishing the criminal’s relations, savage custom satisfies indignation by taking any member of a family as a substitute for a fugitive criminal. The Thlinkeet Indians, if they cannot kill the actual murderer, kill one of his tribe or family instead.[139]‘An Indian,’ says Kane, ‘in taking revenge for the death of a relative, does not, in all cases, seek the actual offender; as, should the party be one of his own tribe, any relative will do, however distant.’[140]Catlin tells the story how, when a great Sioux warrior, the Little Bear, had been shot by the Dog, the avengers of the former, failing to overtake the Dog, caught and slew his brother instead, notwithstanding that he was a man much esteemed by the tribe.[141]If a Californian criminal escaped to a sacred refuge he was regarded as a coward, in that he diverted to a relation a punishment he deserved himself.[142]In Samoa not only the murderer but all his belongings would fly to another village as a city of refuge, for in Samoan law a plaintiff might seek redress from ‘the brother, son, or other relative of the guilty party.’[143]In Australia wide-spread consternation followed the commission of a crime, especially if the culprit escaped, for the brothers of the criminal held themselves quite as guilty as he was, and only personsunconnected with the family believed themselves safe.[144]In the Fiji Islands a warrior once left his musket in such a position that it went off and killed two persons. The owner of the musket was condemned to death; but, as he fled away, the strangulation of his father instead of him perfectly satisfied the ends of justice.[145]
The Samoans, as far back as it was possible to trace, had had customary laws for the prevention of theft, adultery, assault, and murder, and the penalties for such crimes appeared rather to have grown milder than severer with time. Not only this, but they had penal customs for such wrong acts as rude conduct to strangers, pulling down of fences, spoiling fruit trees, or calling chiefs by opprobrious epithets. It is open to doubt whether other savage tribes had not equally good safeguards for preventing at least those greater social offences, whose immorality furnishes the first principle of even the ethics of civilised communities.
In Fiji the criminality of actions is said to have varied with the social rank of the offender, murder by a chief being accounted less heinous than a petty larceny by a man of low rank. Theft, adultery, witchcraft, violation of atabu, arson, treason, and disrespect to a chief were among the few crimes regarded as serious. With regard to murder, we are told (and thepassage is a favourite one for illustrating the extreme variability of moral sentiment), that to a Fijian shedding of blood was ‘no crime, but a glory,’ and that to be an acknowledged murderer was ‘the object of his restless ambition.’ In a similar strain it has been said, that in New Zealand intentional murder was either very meritorious or of no consequence; the latter if the victim were a slave, the former if he belonged to another tribe. The malicious destruction of a man of the same tribe was, however, rare, thelex talionisalone applying to or checking it;[146]and it is probable that this reservation in favour of native New Zealand should be made for all cases where murder is spoken of as a trivial matter. Whenever murder is spoken of as no crime, reference seems generally made to murder outside the tribe, so that from the circumstances of savage life it resolves itself into an act of ordinary hostility; or if the reference is to murder within the tribe, it is to murder sanctioned by necessity, custom, or superstition. The Carrier Indians, who did not think murders worth confessing when they confessed other crimes of their lives, yet regarded themurder of a fellow-tribesman as something quite senseless, and the man who committed such a deed had to absent himself till he could pay the relatives, since at home he was only safe if a chief lent him therefuge of his tent or of one of his garments.[147]‘A murder,’ says Sproat, ‘if not perpetrated on one of his own tribe, or on a particular friend, is no more to an Indian than the killing of a dog.’ The sutteeism and parenticide, which missionaries describe as murders, are, from the savage point of view, rather acts of mercy, being intimately connected with their ideas of future existence, to which it is neither fair nor scientific to apply the phraseology and associations of Christian morality.[148]
Different tribes have evolved different institutions for the prevention of wrongs, which supplement to a large extent the absence of fixed legal remedies.
In Greenland there was the singing combat, in which anyone aggrieved, dancing to the beat of a drum and accompanied by his partisans, recited at a public meeting a satirical poem, telling ludicrous stories of his adversary, and obliged to listen afterwards to similar abuse of himself, till, after a long succession of charges and retorts, the assembled spectators gave the victory to one of the combatants. These combats, says Cranz, served to remind debtors of the duty of repayment, to brand falsehood and detraction with infamy, to punish fraud and injustice,and above all to overwhelm adultery with contempt. The fear of incurring public disgrace at these combats was, with the fear of retaliation for injury, the only motive to virtue which the writer allows to the natives of Greenland.
In Samoa thieves could be scared from plantations by cocoa-nut leaflets so plaited as to convey an imprecation; and a man who saw an artificial sea-pike suspended from a tree would fear, that, if he accomplished his theft, the next time he went fishing a real sea-pike would dart up and wound him mortally. Images of a similar nature, conveying imprecations of disease, death, lightning, or a plague of rats, seem also to have been effective restraints upon thievish propensities;[149]and in the Tonga Islands fruits and flowers were tabooed, that is, preserved, by plaited representations of a lizard or a shark.[150]It is likely that a similar meaning attached in Africa to certain branches of trees which, stuck into the ground in a particular manner, with bits of broken pottery, were enough to prevent the most determined robber from crossing a threshold.[151]Similartabumarks were seen on some rocks at Tahiti, placed there to prevent people fishing or getting shells from the Queen’s preserves;[152]and it is possible that the origin of alltabucustoms may have lain in the supposed efficacy of symbolical imprecation.
In New Zealand the institution ofmuru, or the legalized enforcement of damages by plunder, extended the idea of sinfulness even to involuntary wrongs or accidental sufferings. Involuntary homicide is said to have involved more serious consequences than murder of malice prepense; and if a man’s child fell into the fire, or his canoe was upset and himself nearly drowned, he was not only cudgelled and robbed, but he would have deemed it a personal slight not to have been so treated.[153]To escape from drowning was indeed a common sin in savage life, for was it not to escape the just wrath of the Water Spirit, and perhaps to turn it upon some one else? In Kamschatka so heinous was the sin of cheating the Water Spirit of his prey, by escape from drowning, that no one would receive such a sinner into his house, speak to him, nor give him food: he became, in short, socially dead. Fijians who escape shipwreck are supposed to be saved in order to be eaten, and Williams tells, how on one occasion fourteen of them who lost their canoe at sea only escaped becoming food for sharks to become food for their friends on shore. If the Koossa Kafirs see a person drowning, or indeed in any danger of his life, they either run away from the spotor pelt the victim with stones as he dies.[154]So also with death by fire: if an Indian falls into the fire or is partially burnt, it is believed that the spirits of his ancestors pushed him into the flames owing to his negligence in supplying them with food.[155]The custom of an African tribe to expel from their community anyone bitten by a zebra or an alligator, or even so much as splashed by the tail of the latter, is evidently related to the same idea.[156]
Again, however much Catlin’s assertion that self-denial, torture, and immolation were constant modes among North American Indians for appealing to the Great Spirit for countenance and forgiveness, may overstate the truth, it is remarkable that not only penance by fasting and self-torture, but the practice of confession, should occur in the lower culture as a mode of moral purification. Confession was common not only in Mexico and Peru, but among widely remote savage tribes, being closely connected with the belief in the power of sin to cause, and of priestcraft to cure, dangerous sickness. The Carrier Indians of North America thought, that the only chance of recovery from sickness lay in a disclosure before a priest of every secret crime committed in life, and that the concealment of a single fact would meet with the punishmentof instantaneous death.[157]The Samoan Islanders believing that all disease was due to the wrath of some deity, would inquire of the village priest the cause of sickness, who would sometimes in such cases command the family to assemble and confess. At this confessional ceremony each member of the family would confess his crimes, and any judgments he might have invoked in anger on the family or the invalid himself; long-concealed crimes being often thus disclosed.[158]In Yucatan, confession, introduced by Cukulcan, the mythical author of their culture, was much resorted to, ‘as death and disease were thought to be direct punishments for sins committed.’ The natives of Cerquin, in Honduras, confessed, not only in sickness, but in immediate danger of any kind, or to procure divine blessings on any important occasion. So far did they carry it, that, if a travelling party met a jaguar or puma, each would commend himself to the gods, confessing loudly his sins, and imploring pardon; if the beast still advanced they would cry out, ‘We have committed as many more sins; do not kill us.’[159]
But over and above the wrong acts from which restraints lie in the revenge of individuals, in punishment by the community, or in artificial restrictions,there is a large class of acts, defended rather by spiritual than secular sanctions, deriving their sinfulness from pure misconceptions of things, and constituting for savages by far the larger part of their field for right and wrong. The consciousness of having trodden in the footstep of a bear would be as painful to a Kamschadal as the consciousness of having stolen, the possible consequences of the former being infinitely more dreadful. Such acts as the experience of primitive times has thus generalized into acts provocative of unpleasant expressions of dissatisfaction from the spiritual world, and so far as sinful, become in the folk-lore of later date acts merely unlucky or ominous. The feeling to this day prevalent in parts of England and Germany, that if you transplant parsley you may cause its guardian spirit to punish you or your relations with death, fairly illustrates how the wrongful acts of bygone times may even in civilised countries continue to be guarded by the very same sanction that gave them potency in the days of savagery.
Of such regulations in restraint of the natural liberty of savage tribes let it suffice to give some instances of sinful acts which derive all their associations of wrong from rude notions concerning the nature of storms, of ancestors, of names, and of animals. It will be seen that in some cases such superstitions act as real checks to real wickedness;though the connection between them seems purely accidental, rather than the result of any intuitive discrimination of the qualities of actions.
As English sailors will refrain from whistling at sea, lest they should provoke a storm, so the Kamschadals account many actions sinful on account of their storm-breeding qualities. For this reason they will never cut snow from off their shoes with a knife out of doors, nor go barefooted outside their huts in winter, nor sharpen an axe or a knife on a journey. The Fuejian natives brought away by Captain Fitzroy felt sure that anything wrong said or done caused bad weather, especially the sin of shooting young ducks. They declared their belief in an omniscient Big Black Man, who had his living among the woods and mountains, and influenced the weather according to men’s conduct; in illustration of which they told a story of a murderer, who ascribed to the anger of this being a storm of wind and snow which followed his crime.[160]In Vancouver’s Island there is a mountain, the sin of mentioning which in passing may cause a storm to overturn the offender’s canoe.[161]
Prominent among the moral checks of savage life is the fear of the anger of the dead. Among savages the supposed wishes of their departed friends, ordeified forefathers, operate as real commands, girt with all the sanction of superstitious terror, and clothing the most fanciful customs with all the obligatory feelings of morality. A New Zealand chief, for instance, would expect his dead ancestors to visit him with disease or other calamity if he let food touch any part of his body, or if he entered a dwelling where food hung from the ceiling.[162]The wide prevalence of the feeling that disease and death are due to the displeasure of the dead, who may return to earth, to reside in some part of a living person’s body, may be illustrated by the Samoan custom of taking valuable presents as a last expression of regard to the dying, or by way of bribing them to forego their incorporeal privilege of post-mortem revenge.[163]On the Gold Coast also friends make presents to the dead of gold, brandy, or cloth, to be buried with them; just as in ancient Mexico all classes of the population would beg of their dead king to accept their offerings of food, robes, or slaves, which they vied in giving him, or as the Mayas would place precious gifts or ornaments near or upon the corpse of a deceased lord of a province. So the Bodos, presenting food at the graves of their relations, would pray, saying, ‘Take and eat ... we come no more to you, come no more to us.’
Proper behaviour with regard to names is one of the most important points of savage decorum. The confusion, amounting almost to identification, between a person and his name is one of the most signal proofs of the power of language over thought. As Catlin’s or Kane’s Indian pictures were thought to detract from the originals something of their existence, giving the painter such power over them that whilst living their bodies would sympathise with every injury done to their pictures, and when dead would not rest in their graves, so the feeling among savages is strong that the knowledge of a person’s name gives to another a fatal control over his destiny. An Indian once asked Kane ‘whether his wish to know his name proceeded from a desire to steal it;’[164]whilst with the Abipones it was positively sinful for anyone to pronounce his own name. Kane could only discover Indians’ names through third parties; and it is curious that the natives of one of the Fiji Islands will never tell their names to an inquirer, if there should be anyone else to answer the question.[165]Hence it is that the highest compliment a savage can pay a person is to exchange names with him, a custom which Cook found prevalent at Tahiti and in the Society Islands, and which was also common in North America.[166]Warriors sometimes take the nameof a slain enemy, from the same motive apparently which, in some instances, is an inducement to eat their flesh, namely, to appropriate their courage. The Lapps change a child’s baptismal name, if it falls ill, rebaptizing it at every illness, as if they thought to deceive the spirit that vexed it by the simple stratagem of analias;[167]and the Californian Shoshones, in changing their names after such feats as scalping an enemy, stealing his horses, or killing a grizzly bear, had, perhaps, some similar idea of avoiding retaliation. Among the Chinook Indians near relations often changed their names, lest the spirits of the dead should be drawn back to earth by often hearing familiar names used.
With these ideas about names it is easy to understand how especial reverence would become attached to the names of kings or dead persons whose power to punish a light use of their appellations might well be deemed exceptional. On accessions to royalty in the Society Islands all words resembling the king’s name were changed, and any person bold enough to continue the use of the superseded terms was put to death, with all his relations.[168]From a similar state of thought the Abipones invented new words for all things whose previous names recalled a dead person’s memory, whilst to mention his name was ‘a nefariousproceeding.’[169]In Dahome the king’s name must be pronounced with bated breath, and it is death to utter it in his presence.[170]The degrees of guilt, attached to the mention of a dead person, arising from a belief in the power of spoken names to call back their owners, vary in sinfulness from its being a positive crime, punishable by fine, to a mere rudeness, to be checked in the young. Among the Northern Californians it was one of the most strenuous laws that whoever mentioned a dead person’s name should be liable to a heavy fine, payable to the relatives.[171]The tribe of Ainos held it a great rudeness to speak of the dead by their names; whilst young Ahts are instantly checked, if they make an unthinking use of the name of a chief that has been relinquished in memory of some event of importance.[172]
Several causes may have led to animal worship. The tendency to call men by qualities or peculiarities in them fancifully recalling those of some animal, and the tendency to apotheosize distinguished ancestors, thus named after the tiger or the bear, may have led to a confusion of thought between the animal and the man, till the divine attributes, once attached to the individual, became transferred to the species ofanimal that survived him in constant existence. Or the same fancy, which sees inspiration in an idiot from his very lack of common reason, may have attributed peculiar wisdom and looked with peculiar awe on the animal world, by very reason of its speechlessness. Then, again, the idea that the bodies of animals may be the depositories of departed human souls may have led to the worship of certain animals: some Californians for this reason refraining from the flesh of large game, because it is animated by the souls of past generations, so that the term ‘eater of venison’ is one of reproach among them. Or the prohibitions of shamans may have produced the result in some cases: the Thlinkeet Indians being found, for this reason, abstinent from whale’s flesh or blubber, whilst both are commonly eaten by surrounding tribes. But, whatever the original causes may have been, tribes are found all over the world beset with a feeling of sinfulness with regard to the injuring, eating, or in any way offending different species of animals; of which, as no extreme instance, may be mentioned the Fijian custom of presenting a string of new nuts, gathered expressly, to a land crab, ‘to prevent the deity leaving with an impression that he was neglected, and visiting his remiss worshippers with drought, dearth, or death.’
Beyond, however, customs or ideas in prevention of acts prejudicial to their real or supposed welfare,savage communities appear to have little idea of any quality in actions rendering them good or bad independently of consequences. Their prayers, their beliefs, and their mythology, alike go to prove this. That they will pray for such temporal blessings as health, food, rain, or victory, but not for such moral gains as the conquest of passion or a truthful disposition, to some extent justifies the inference that moral advancement forms no part of their code of things desirable. Their good and evil spirit or spirits are simply distinguished, where they are distinguished at all, as the causes respectively of things agreeable or disagreeable, as taking sides for or against struggling humanity, so that tribes which pay and sacrifice to the source of evil, to the neglect of that of good, cannot be said not to conform to reason. Their mythology, again, owes its very monotony mainly to the lack of moral interest to relieve and sustain it. As Mr. Grote, arguing from the mythology to the moral feeling of legendary Greece, observes, that such a sentiment as a feeling of moral obligation between man and man was ‘neither operative in the real world nor present to the imaginations of the poets,’ so it may be said not less emphatically of extant savage mythology. The Polynesian idea of a god, it has been well said, is merepowerwithout any reference to goodness. The divine denizens of Avaiki (the Hades of the Hervey Islands), as they marry, quarrel, build, and live justlike mortals, so they murder, drink, thieve, and lie quite in accordance with terrestrial precedents.[173]The unethical nature, however, of savage prayer or mythology is obviously not incompatible with the practical recognition of certain moral distinctions; in the same Hervey Islands, for instance, the greatest possible sin was to kill a fellow-countryman by stealth, instead of in battle.[174]
Ideas, again, relating to a future state and the dependence of future welfare on the mode of life spent on earth, though they would seem to afford some insight into the moral sentiments of those holding them, in default of definition of the good or bad conduct so rewarded or punished, do not really prove much. In the following instances, which offer several shades of variety, there is scarcely any attempt at moral definition, and the native belief has, perhaps, been adulterated by Christian influence. The Good Spirit of the Mandans dwelt in a purgatory of cold and frost, where he punished those who had offended him, before he would admit them to that warmer and happier place, where the Bad Spirit dwelt and sought to seduce the happy occupants.[175]For the Charocs of California were two roads, one strewn with flowers, and leading the good to the bright Western land, the other bristling with thorns and briers, and leadingthe wicked to a place full of serpents. The souls of Chippewyans drifted in a stone canoe to an enchanted island in a large lake; if the good actions of their life predominated they were wafted safely ashore; but if the bad, the canoe sank beneath their weight, leaving the wretches to float for ever, in sight of their lost and nearly won felicity. Wicked Okanagans, again, a Columbian tribe (and by the wicked are here specified murderers and thieves), went to a place where an evil spirit, in human form, with equine ears and tail, belaboured them with a stick.[176]The Fijian belief appears truer to savage thought; for whilst such of their dead as succeeded in reaching Mbula were happy or not, according as they had lived so as to please the gods, mortals subjected to special punishment were persons who had not their ears bored, women who were not tattooed, and men who had not slain an enemy.[177]