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JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, all ignorant savages will laugh when they are told of the advantages of civilized life. Were you to tell men who live without houses, how we pile brick upon brick, and rafter upon rafter, and that after a house is raised to a certain height, a man tumbles off a scaffold, and breaks his neck; he would laugh heartily at our folly in building; but it does not follow that men are better without houses. No, Sir, (holding up a slice of a good loaf), this is better than the bread tree.' Another reason for Johnson's opposition to this repudiation of civilization, and, in fact, to the whole naturalistic movement, was his firm adherence to the humanistic and Christian traditions. In an age when men were beginning to talk about innate goodness, uncorrupted virtue in a state of nature, and to find imaginary examples of this in all the out-of-the-way places of the earth,32 Johnson held strictly to the belief in original sin, and virtue as the result of rigorous self-discipline. 'Pity,' he says, 'is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. F'ity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of the On another occasion, he brings out this fact by

reason. '33

"The method of reasoning on religion, government, or morals by citing the practice of strange peoples in far-away places was a familiar device in the eighteenth century, used extensively by such philosophers as Montesquieu and his imitators. Johnson, however, knew better than to credit any such arguments. When Boswell, in a discussion of women's morals before and after marriage, mentions the supposed custom of some nation in India, Johnson replies, 'Nay, don't give us India. That puts me in mind of Montesquieu, who is really a fellow of genius too in many respects; whenever he wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice of Japan or of some other distant country of which he knows nothing. To support polygamy, he tells you of the island of Formosa, where there are ten women born for one man. He had but to suppose another island, where there are ten men born for one woman, and so make a marriage between them.' Tour of the Hebrides 5. 238.

33

'Life of Johnson 1. 506. Johnson's statement here stands out in striking contrast to Rousseau's theory of pity as natural to man, the basic virtue in the state of nature, etc. Cf. Discours sur L'Origine de L'Inégalité parmi les Hommes.

picturing what his own fate would have been, had he been born among the Indians :34

JOHNSON. A great Traveller observes, that it is said there are no weak or deformed people among the Indians; but he with much sagacity assigns the reason to this, which is, that the hardship of their life as hunters and fishers does not allow weak or diseased children to grow up. Now had I been an Indian, I must have died early; my eyes would not have served me to get food. I indeed now could fish, give me English tackle; but had I been an Indian, I must have starved or they would have knocked me on the head, when they saw I could do nothing.' BOSWELL. 'Perhaps they would have taken care of you: we are told they are fond of oratory, you would have talked to them.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, I should not have lived long enough to be fit to talk; I should have been dead before I was ten years old. Depend upon it, Sir, a savage when he is hungry, will not carry about with him a looby of nine years old, who cannot help himself. They have no affection, Sir.' BoSWELL. 'I believe natural affection, of which we hear so much, is very small.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, natural affection is nothing: but affection from principle and established duty is sometimes wonderfully strong.'

If people no longer seek their happiness in Utopias of the wilderness (and one may surely hope that such is the case), it may perhaps indicate somewhat of a return to the neoclassic good sense, to an increased appreciation of dignity and decorum, and a wise curbing of the romantic imagination in one of its most picturesque, but least wholesome, vagaries. A proposal to live among the savages would doubtless sound not only strange, but very absurd to most persons to-day, a most fantastic solution of the vexing problems of modernism. But whether the twentieth century is so much wiser than the eighteenth will perhaps be most clearly determined by asking how far rational enjoyment is now prized, and how far novelty, in the form of mysterious thrills and sentimental ecstasies, appeals to the popular taste. Lest we condemn the eighteenth century too sweepingly for remoteness from reality in its view of primitive life, let us

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remember that the exotic Utopia was only one of many strange social experiments, popular with the many, but consistently opposed by the great philosophers and moralists. Voltaire, it will be recalled, in the concluding pages of Candide, makes the performance of homely duty the basis of contentment in this life; and Johnson, besides his treatment of this subject in Rasselas, sums up his view of the different degrees and kinds of enjoyment in a passage which Boswell reports as follows:35

I mentioned Hume's notion, that all who are happy are equally happy; a little miss with a new gown at a dancing-school ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher. . . . A small drinking-glass and a large one may be equally full, but the large one holds more than the small.

25 Ibid. 2. 10.

CHAPTER III.

CIVILIZATION AS SEEN BY THE SAVAGE.

But how did the European and his civilization appear to the Indian? This was a matter of great interest to writers of the eighteenth century; not that any one knew or cared what the Indian really thought, but it was a fascinating subject for speculation, and gave opportunity for much clever satire on the vices of civilization, from the point of view of the uncorrupted man of nature. Although the American travelers and historians gave many accounts of the Indian's detestation of the European and his ways, the alleged superiority of the savage seemed to receive far greater support when he was brought to England, and pictured as looking down on all the splendor of wealth and power, amazed at the vice and hypocrisy of fashionable society, longing only to return to his native wilds. In this connection we should examine the accounts, real and fictitious, of the various Indians who actually visited England, in order to discover the kind of interest they aroused, and the impressions they were supposed to have received.

The early voyagers frequently carried some of the natives. back with them, to be shown as objects of curiosity and wonder. Columbus took several back on his first voyage, some of whom died on the trip, while others survived to be presented before the king.2 Sebastian Cabot also, in 1502, presented to Henry VII three of the natives he had taken in

1For an account of the conduct of the early voyagers toward the Indians, their carrying them off, etc., cf. Drake, The Book of the Indians, Bk. 2, chap. 1. I have taken several references from this work, which gives considerable information, but is not at all clear as to the authorities cited.

2

Antonio de Herrera gives some account of this in his Hist. des Indes Occident., ed. 1660. 1. 102.

Newfoundland. An early account of these first Indians to come to England is as follows:3

This yere [1502] were brought unto the king three men taken in the new found ilands by Sebastian Gabato, before named, in anno 1498. These men were clothed in beasts skins, and eate raw flesh, but spake such a language, as no man could understand them, of the which three men, two of them were seene in the kings court at Westminster two yeeres after, clothed like English men, and could not be discerned from Englishmen.

Frobisher also brought back some Esquimaux from his first two expeditions, and George Weymouth five Indians from his trip of exploration along the coast of Maine.* The strangeness of their appearance must have aroused no little interest, some of which is, I think, reflected in contemporary literature. Shakespeare, for example, appears to refer to one of these Indians in Henry VIII, and still more clearly in The Tempest, 'when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." More significant, however, as an indication of

8

John Stow, Annales of England (London, 1592), p. 807.

This is mentioned in Rosier's Relation of Waymouth's Voyage to the Coast of Maine, 1605. He tells how they captured 'five salvages, two canoas, with all their bowes and arrowes' (ed. Burrage, p. 131). Further information concerning the subsequent careers of these 'salvages' is to be found in Fernando Gorges' America painted to the Life (London, 1649). Cf. also Drake, op. cit., Bk. 2, chap. 1.

5

Act 5, Sc. 4, 1. 34.

6

Act II, Sc. 2, 1. 34. There has been much speculation as to whether Shakespeare may have seen a 'dead Indian,' and who the Indian may have been, whether one of the Esquimaux brought over by Frobisher, or some later comer unknown to fame. For a full discussion of the question, the reader is referred to the Variorum edition of the Tempest, p. 128. Halliwell's interesting conjectures are there considered, in which he identifies the Indian in question with one of the Esquimaux brought over by Frobisher (of course the terms Indian and Esquimaux were not clearly distinguished in the time of Shakespeare), and also thinks that drawings of them have been preserved in a manuscript in the library of Canterbury Cathedral.

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