How To Observe Part 2

This accounts for the general's share in the transaction. As for the negroes, the General was also the Deliverer,--an object of worship to people of his colour. Obedience to him was a rule, exalted by every sentiment of grat.i.tude, awe, admiration, pride, and love, into a religion; and a Haytian of that day would no more have thought of resisting a command of Toussaint, than of disputing a thunder-stroke or an earthquake.--What would an unsympathizing observer make of the Paschal supper, as celebrated in the houses of Hebrews throughout the world,--of the care not to break a bone of the lamb,--of the company all standing, the men girded and shod as for a journey, and the youngest child of the household invariably asking what this is all for? What would the observer call it but mummery, if he had no feeling for the awful traditional and religious emotion involved in the symbol?--What would such an one think of the terrified flight of two Spanish n.o.bles from the wrath of their sovereign, incurred by their having saved his beloved queen from being killed by a fall from her horse? What a puzzle is here,--even when all the facts of the case are known;--that the king was looking from a balcony to see his queen mount her Andalusian horse: that the horse reared, plunged, and bolted, throwing the queen, whose foot was entangled in the stirrup: that she was surrounded with gentlemen who stood aloof, because by the law of Spain it was death to any but her little pages to touch the person, and especially the foot of the queen, and her pages were too young to rescue her; that these two gentlemen devoted themselves to save her; and having caught the horse, and extricated the royal foot, fled for their lives from the legal wrath of the king! Whence such a law? From the rule that the queen of Spain has no legs. Whence such a rule? From the meaning that the queen of Spain is a being too lofty to touch the earth. Here we come at last to the sentiment of loyal admiration and veneration which sanctifies the law and the rule, and interprets the incident. To a heartless stranger the whole appears a mere solemn absurdity, fit only to be set aside, as it was apparently by pardon from the king being obtained by the instant intercession of the queen. But in the eyes of every Spaniard the transaction was, in all its parts, as far from absurdity as the danger of the two n.o.bles was real and pressing.--Again, what can a heartless observer understand by the practice, almost universal in the world, of celebrating the naming of children? The Christian parent employs a form by which the infant is admitted as a lamb of Christ's flock: the Chinese father calls his kindred together to witness the conferring first of the surname, and then of "the milk-name,"--some endearing diminutive, to cease with infancy: the Moslem consults an astrologer before giving a name to his child: and the savage selects a name-sake for his infant from among the beasts or birds, with whose characteristic quality he would fain endow his offspring. What a general rule is here, exalted by a universal sentiment into an act of religion! The ceremonial observed in each case is widely different in its aspect to one who sees in it merely a c.u.mbrous way of transacting a matter of convenience, and to another who perceives in it the initiation of a new member into the family of mankind, and a looking forward to,--an attempt to make provision for, the future destiny of an unconscious and helpless being.

Thus it will be through the whole range of the traveller's observation.

If he be full of sympathy, every thing he sees will be instructive, and the most important matters will be the most clearly revealed. If he be unsympathizing, the most important things will be hidden from him, and symbols (in which every society abounds) will be only absurd or trivial forms. The stranger will be wise to conclude, when he sees anything seriously done which appears to him insignificant or ludicrous, that there is more in it than he perceives, from some deficiency of knowledge or feeling of his own.

The other way in which heart is found to answer to heart is too obvious to require to be long dwelt upon. Men not only see according to the light they shed from their own b.r.e.a.s.t.s,--whether it be the sunshine of generosity or the h.e.l.l-flames of bad pa.s.sions,--but they attract to themselves spirits like their own. The very same persons appear very differently to a traveller who calls into exercise all their best qualities, and to one who has an affinity with their worst: but it is a yet more important consideration that actually different elements of society will range themselves round the observer according to the scepticism or faith of his temper, the purity or depravity of his tastes, and the elevation or insignificance of his objects. The Americans, somewhat nettled with the injustice of English travellers'

reports of their country, have jokingly proposed to take lodgings in Wapping for some thorough-bred American vixen, of low tastes and coa.r.s.e manners, and employ her to write an account of English morals and manners from what she might see in a year's abode in the choice locality selected for her. This would be no great exaggeration of the process of observation of foreigners which is perpetually going on.

What should gamesters know of the philanthropists of the society they pa.s.s through? or the profligate, of the real state of domestic life?

What can the moral sceptic report of religious or philosophical confessorship in any nation? or the sordid trader, of the higher kinds of intellectual cultivation? or the dandy, of the extent and administration of charity? It may be said that neither can the philanthropic traveller--the missionary--see otherwise than partially for want of "knowledge of the world;" that persons of sober habits can learn nothing that is going on in the moral depths of society; and the good are actually scoffed at for their absence from many scenes of human life, and their supposed ignorance of many things in human nature. But it is certain that the best part of every man's mind is far more a specimen of himself than the worst; and that the characteristics of a society, in like manner, are to be traced in the wisest and most genial of its pervading ideas and common transactions, instead of those disgraceful ones which are common to all. Swindlers, drunkards, people of low tastes and bad pa.s.sions, are found in every country, and nowhere characterise a nation; while the reverence of man in America, the pursuit of speculative truth in Germany, philanthropic enterprise in France, love of freedom in Switzerland, popular education in China, domestic purity in Norway,--each of these great moral beauties is a star on the forehead of a nation. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united. The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over; and the good the least. It may be taken as a rule that the best qualities of a people, as of an individual, are the most characteristic--(what is really _best_ being tested, not by prejudice, but principle). He has the best chance of ascertaining these best qualities who has them in himself; and he who has them not may as well pretend to give a picture of a metropolitan city by showing a map of its drainage, as report of a nation after an intercourse with its knaves and its profligates. To stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city.

CHAPTER III.

MECHANICAL REQUISITES.

"He travels and expatiates, as the bee From flower to flower, so he from land to land: The manners, customs, policy, of all Pay contribution to the stores he gleans."--_The Task._

"Thy speaking of my tongue, and I thine, most truly falsely, must needs be granted to be much at one."--_King Henry V._

No philosophical or moral fitness will qualify a traveller to observe a people if he does not select a mode of travelling which will enable him to see and converse with a great number and variety of persons. An amba.s.sador has no chance of learning much of the people he visits anywhere but in a new country like America. While he is _en route_, he is too stately in appearance to allow of any familiarity on the part of the people by the road-side. His carriages might almost as well roll through a city of the dead, for anything he will learn from intercourse with the living. The case is not much better when a family or a party of friends travel together on the Continent, committing the business of the expedition to servants, and shrinking from intercourse, on all social occasions, with English shyness or pride.

The behaviour of the English on the Continent has become a matter of very serious consequence to the best informed and best mannered of their countrymen, as it has long been to the natives into whose society they may happen to fall. I have heard gentlemen say that they lose half their pleasure in going abroad, from the coldness and shyness with which the English are treated; a coldness and shyness which they think fully warranted by the conduct of their predecessors in travel. I have heard ladies say that they find great difficulty in becoming acquainted with their neighbours at the tables-d'hote; and that, when they have succeeded, an apology for the reluctance to converse has been offered, in the form of explanation that English travellers generally "appear to dislike being spoken to" so much as to render it a matter of civility to leave them alone. The travelling arrangements of the English seem designed to cut them off from companionship with the people they go to see; and they preclude the possibility of studying morals and manners in a way which is perfectly ludicrous to persons of a more social temperament and habits.

A good deal may be learned on board steam-boats, and in such vehicles as the American stages; and when accommodations of the kind become common, it will be difficult for the sulkiest Englishman to avoid admitting some ideas into his mind from the conversation and actions of the groups around him. When steam-boats ply familiarly on the Indus, and we have the rail-road to Calcutta which people are joking about, and another across the Pampas,--when we make trips to New Zealand, and think little of a run down the west coast of Africa,--places where we shall go for fashion's sake, and cannot go boxed up in a carriage of Long Acre origin,--our countrymen will, perforce, exchange conversation with the persons they meet, and may chance to get rid of the unsociability for which they are notorious, and by which they cast a veil over hearts and faces, and a shadow over their own path, wherever they go.

Meantime, the wisest and happiest traveller is the pedestrian. If gentlemen and ladies want to see pictures, let them post to Florence, and be satisfied with learning what they can from the windows by the way. But if they want to see either scenery or people, let all who have strength and courage go on foot. I prefer this even to horseback. A horse is an anxiety and a trouble. Something is sure to ail it; and one is more anxious about its accommodation than about one's own. The pedestrian traveller is wholly free from care. There is no such freeman on earth as he is for the time. His amount of toil is usually within his own choice,--in any civilized region. He can go on and stop when he likes: if a fit of indolence overtakes him, he can linger for a day or a week in any spot that pleases him. He is not whirled past a beautiful view almost before he has seen it. He is not tantalized by the idea that from this or that point he could see something still finer, if he could but reach it. He can reach almost every point his wishes wander to. The pleasure is indescribable of saying to one's self, "I will go there,"--"I will rest yonder,"--and forthwith accomplishing it. He can sit on a rock in the midst of a rushing stream as often in a day as he likes. He can hunt a waterfall by its sound; a sound which the carriage-wheels prevent other travellers from hearing. He can follow out any tempting glade in any wood. There is no cushion of moss at the foot of an old tree that he may not sit down on if he pleases. He can read for an hour without fear of pa.s.sing by something unnoticed while his eyes are fixed upon his book. His food is welcome, be its quality what it may, while he eats it under the alders in some recess of a brook. He is secure of his sleep, be his chamber ever so sordid; and when his waking eyes rest upon his knapsack, his heart leaps with pleasure as he remembers where he is, and what a day is before him. Even the weather seems to be of less consequence to the pedestrian than to other travellers. A pedestrian journey presupposes abundance of time, so that the traveller can rest in villages on rainy days, and in the shade of a wood during the hours when the sun is too powerful. And if he prefers not waiting for the rain, it is not the evil to him that it would be in cities and in the pursuit of business. The only evil of rain that I know of, to healthy persons in exercise, is that it spoils the clothes; and the clothes of a pedestrian traveller are not usually of a spoilable quality. Rain does not deform the face of things everywhere as it does in a city. It adds a new aspect of beauty occasionally to a wood, to mountains, to lake and ocean scenery. I remember a hale, cheerful pedestrian tourist whom we met frequently among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and whom we remarked as being always the briskest of the company at the hotel table in the evening, and the merriest at breakfast. He had the best of it one day, when we pa.s.sed him in Franconia Defile, after a heavy rain had set in. We were packed in a waggon which seemed likely to fill with water before we got to our destination; and miserable enough we looked, drenched and cold. The traveller was marching on over the rocky road, his book safe in its oil-skin cover, and his clothes-bag similarly protected; his face bright and glowing with exercise, and his summer jacket of linen feeling, as he told us, all the pleasanter for being wet through. As he pa.s.sed each recess of the defile, he looked up perpetually to see the rain come smoking out of the fissures of the rocks; and when he reached the opening by which he was to descend to the plain, he stood still, to watch the bar of dewy yellow light which lay along the western sky where the sun had just set. He looked just as happy on other days. Sometimes we pa.s.sed him lying along on a hill side; sometimes talking with a family at the door of a log-house; sometimes reading as he walked under the shade of the forest. I, for one, often longed to dismiss our waggon or barouche, and to follow his example.

One peculiar advantage of pedestrian travelling is the pleasure of a gradual approach to celebrated or beautiful places. Every turn of the road gains in interest; every object that meets the eye seems to have some initiative meaning; and when the object itself at last appears, nothing can surpa.s.s the delight of flinging one's self on the ground to rest upon the first impression, and to interpose a delicious pause before the final attainment. It is not the same thing to desire your driver to stop when you come to the point of view. The first time that I felt this was on a pedestrian tour in Scotland, when I was at length to see mountains. The imagination of myself and my companion had fixed strongly on Dunkeld, as being a scene of great beauty, and our first resting-place among the mountains. The sensation had been growing all the morning. Men, houses, and trees had seemed to be growing diminutive,--an irresistible impression to the novice in mountain scenery: the road began to follow the windings of the Tay, a sign that the plain was contracting into a pa.s.s. Beside a cistern, on a green bank of this pa.s.s, we had dined; a tract of heath next lay before us, and we traversed it so freshly and merrily as to be quite unaware that we were getting towards the end of our seventeen miles, though still conscious that the spirit of the mountains was upon us. We were deeply engaged in talk, when a winding of the road brought us in full view of the lovely scene which is known to all who have approached Dunkeld by the Perth road. We could scarcely believe that this was _it_, so soon. We turned to our map and guide-book, and found that we were standing on the site of Birnam wood; that Dunsinane hill was in sight, and that it was indeed the old cathedral tower of Dunkeld that rose so grandly among the beeches behind the bridge. We took such a long and fond gaze as I never enjoyed from a carriage window. If it was thus with an object of no more importance or difficulty of attainment than Dunkeld, what must it be to catch the first view of the mysterious temples that

"Stand between the mountains and the sea; Awful memorials, but of whom we know not!"

or to survey from a height, at sunrise, the brook Kedron and the valley of Jehoshaphat!

What is most to our present purpose, however, is the consideration of the facilities afforded by pedestrian travelling for obtaining a knowledge of the people. We all remember Goldsmith's travels with his flute, his sympathies, his cordiality of heart and manner, and his reliance on the hospitality of the country people. Such an one as he is not bound to take up with such specimens as he may meet with by the side of the high road; he can penetrate into the recesses of the country, and drop into the hamlet among the hills, and the homesteads down the lanes, and now and then spend a day with the shepherd in his fold on the downs; he can stop where there is a festival, and solve many a perplexity by carrying over the conversation of one day into the intercourse of the next, with a fresh set of people; he can obtain access to almost every cla.s.s of persons, and learn their own views of their own affairs. His opportunities are inestimable.

If it were a question which could learn most of Morals and Manners by travel,--the gentleman accomplished in philosophy and learning, proceeding in his carriage, with a courier,--or a simple pedestrian tourist, furnished only with the language, and with an open heart and frank manners,--I should have no doubt that the pedestrian would return more familiar with his subject than the other. If the wealthy scholar and philosopher could make himself a citizen of the world for the time, and go forth on foot, careless of luxury, patient of fatigue, and fearless of solitude, he would be not only of the highest order of tourists, but a benefactor to the highest kind of science; and he would become familiarized with what few are acquainted with,--the best pleasures, transient and permanent, of travel. Those who cannot pursue this method will achieve most by laying aside state, conversing with the people they fall in with, and diverging from the high road as much as possible.

Nothing need be said on a matter so obvious as the necessity of understanding the language of the people visited. Some familiarity with it must be attained before anything else can be done. It seems to be unquestioned, however, that a good deal of the unsociability of the English abroad is owing not so much to contempt of their neighbours, as to the natural pride which makes them shrink from attempting what they cannot do well. I am confident that we say much less than we feel about the awkwardness and constraint of our first self-committals to a foreign language. It is impossible but that every one must feel the weight of the penalty of making himself ridiculous at every step, and of presenting a kind of false appearance of himself to every one with whom he converses. A German gentleman in America, who has exactly that right degree of self-respect which enabled him to set strenuously about learning English, of which he did not understand a word, and who mastered it so completely as to lecture in faultless English at the end of two years, astonished a party of friends one day, persuaded as they were that they perfectly knew him, and that the smooth and deliberate flow of his beautiful language was a consequence of the calmness of his temper, and the philosophical character of his mind. A German woman with children came begging to the house while the party were at their dessert. The professor caught her tones when the door of the dining-room was open; he rushed into the hall, presently returned for a dish or two, and emptied the gingerbread, and other material of the dessert, into her lap. The company went out to see, and found the professor transformed; he was talking with a rapidity and vehemence which they had never supposed him capable of; and one of the party told me how sorry she felt, and has felt ever since, to think of the state of involuntary disguise in which he is living among those who would know him best.

Difference of language is undeniably a cause of great suffering and difficulty, magnificent and incalculable as are its uses. It is no exception to the general rule that every great good involves some evil.

Happily, however, the difficulty may be presently so far surmounted as not to interfere with the object of observing Morals and Manners.

Impossible as it may be to attain to an adequate expression of one's self in a foreign tongue, it is easy to most persons to learn to understand it perfectly when spoken by others. During this process, a common and almost unavoidable mistake is to suppose a too solemn and weighty meaning in what is expressed in an unfamiliar language. This arises partly from our having become first acquainted with the language in books; and partly from the meaning having been attained with effort, and seeming, by natural a.s.sociation, worth the pains. The first French dialogues which a child learns, seem more emphatic in their meanings than the same material would in English; and the student of German finds a grandeur in lines of Schiller, and in clauses of Herder's and Krummacher's Parables, which he looks for in vain when he is practised in the language. It is well to bear this in mind on a first entrance into a foreign society, or the traveller may chance to detect himself treasuring up nonsense, and making much of mere trivialities, because they reached him clothed in the mystery of a strange language. He will be like lame Jervas, when he first came up from the mine in which he was born, caressing the weeds he had gathered by the road side, and refusing till the last moment to throw away such wonderful and beautiful things.

The raw traveller not only sees something mysterious, picturesque, or cla.s.sical in every object that meets his eye after pa.s.sing the frontier, from the children's toys to palaces and general festivals, but is apt to discern wisdom and solemnity in everything that is said to him, from the greeting of the landlord to the speculations of the politician. If not guarded against, this natural tendency will more or less vitiate the observer's first impressions, and introduce something of the ludicrous into his record of them.

From the consideration of the requisites for observation in the traveller himself, we now proceed to indicate what he is to observe, in order to inform himself of foreign Morals and Manners.

PART II.

WHAT TO OBSERVE.

"Nous nous en tiendrons aux moeurs, aux habitudes exterieures dont se forme, pour les differentes cla.s.ses de la societe, une sorte de physionomie morale, ou se retracent les moeurs privees." DE JOUY.

It is a perpetual wonder to an inexperienced person that the students of particular cla.s.ses of facts can learn so much as they do from a single branch of inquiry. Tell an uninformed man of the daily results of the study of Fossil Remains, and he will ask how the student can possibly know what was done in the world ages before man was created. It will astonish a thoughtless man to hear the statements about the condition of the English nation which are warranted by the single study of the administration of the Poor Laws, since their origin. Some physiognomists fix their attention on a single feature of the human face, and can pretty accurately interpret the general character of the mind from it: and I believe every portrait painter trusts mainly to one feature for the fidelity of his likenesses, and bestows more study and care on that one than on any other.

A good many features compose the physiognomy of a nation; and scarcely any traveller is qualified to study them all. The same man is rarely enlightened enough to make investigation at once into the religion of a people, into its general moral notions, its domestic and economical state, its political condition, and the facts of its progress;--all which are necessary to a full understanding of its morals and manners.

Few have even attempted an inquiry of this extent. The worst of it is that few dream of undertaking the study of any one feature of society at all. We should by this time have been rich in the knowledge of nations if each intelligent traveller had endeavoured to report of any one department of moral inquiry, however narrow; but, instead of this, the observations offered to us are almost purely desultory. The traveller hears and notes what this and that and the other person says. If three or four agree in their statements on any point, he remains unaware of a doubt, and the matter is settled. If they differ, he is perplexed, does not know whom to believe, and decides, probably, in accordance with prepossessions of his own. The case is almost equally bad, either way.

He will hear only one side of every question if he sees only one cla.s.s of persons,--like the English in America, for instance, who go commonly with letters of introduction from merchants at home to merchants in the maritime cities, and hear nothing but federal politics, and see nothing but aristocratic manners. They come home with notions which they suppose to be indisputable about the great Bank question, the state of parties, and the relations of the General and State governments; and with words in their mouths of whose objectionable character they are unaware,--about the common people, mob government, the encroachment of the poor upon the rich, and so on. Such partial intercourse is fatal to the observations of a traveller; but it is less perplexing and painful at the time than the better process of going from one set of people to another, and hearing what all have to say. No traveller in the United States can learn much of the country without conversing equally with farmers and merchants, with artizans and statesmen, with villagers and planters; but, while discharging this duty, he will be so bewildered with the contrariety of statements and convictions, that he will often shut his note-book in a state of scepticism as to whether there be any truth at all shining steadily behind all this tempest of opinions. Thus it is with the stranger who traverses the streets of Warsaw, and is trusted with the groans of some of the outraged mourners who linger in its dwellings; and then goes to St. Petersburg, and is presented with evidences of the enlightenment of the Czar, of his humanity, his paternal affection for his subjects, and his general superiority to his age. At Warsaw the traveller called him a miscreant; at Petersburg he is required to p.r.o.nounce him a philanthropist. Such must be the uncertainty of judgment when it is based upon the testimony of individuals. To arrive at the facts of the condition of a people through the discourse of individuals, is a hopeless enterprise. The plain truth is--it is beginning at the wrong end.

The grand secret of wise inquiry into Morals and Manners is to begin with the study of THINGS, using the DISCOURSE OF PERSONS as a commentary upon them.

Though the facts sought by travellers relate to Persons, they may most readily be learned from Things. The eloquence of Inst.i.tutions and Records, in which the action of the nation is embodied and perpetuated, is more comprehensive and more faithful than that of any variety of individual voices. The voice of a whole people goes up in the silent workings of an inst.i.tution; the condition of the ma.s.ses is reflected from the surface of a record. The Inst.i.tutions of a nation,--political, religious, or social,--put evidence into the observer's hands as to its capabilities and wants which the study of individuals could not yield in the course of a lifetime. The Records of any society, be they what they may, whether architectural remains, epitaphs, civic registers, national music, or any other of the thousand manifestations of the common mind which may be found among every people, afford more information on Morals in a day than converse with individuals in a year. Thus also must Manners be judged of, since there never was a society yet, not even a nunnery or a Moravian settlement, which did not include a variety of manners. General indications must be looked for, instead of generalizations being framed from the manners of individuals. In cities, do social meetings abound? and what are their purposes and character?

Are they most religious, political, or festive? If religious, have they more the character of Pa.s.sion Week at Rome, or of a camp-meeting in Ohio? If political, do the people meet on wide plains to worship the Sun of the Celestial Empire, as in China; or in town-halls, to remonstrate with their representatives, as in England; or in secret places, to spring mines under the thrones of their rulers, as in Spain? If festive, are they most like an Italian carnival, where everybody laughs; or an Egyptian holiday, when all eyes are solemnly fixed on the whirling Dervishes? Are women there? In what proportions, and under what law of liberty? What are the public amus.e.m.e.nts? There is an intelligible difference between the opera at Milan, and the theatre at Paris, and a bull-fight at Madrid, and a fair at Leipzig, and a review at St.

Petersburg.--In country towns, how is the imitation of the metropolis carried on? Do the provincials emulate most in show, in science, or in the fine arts?--In the villages, what are the popular amus.e.m.e.nts? Do the people meet to drink or to read, to discuss, or play games, or dance?

What are the public houses like? Do the people eat fruit and tell stories? or drink ale and talk politics or call for tea and saunter about? or coffee and play dominoes? or lemonade and laugh at Punch? Do they crowd within four walls, or gather under the elm, or spread themselves abroad over the cricket-field or the yellow sands?--There is as wide a difference among the humbler cla.s.ses of various countries as among their superiors in rank. A Scotch burial is wholly unlike the ceremonies of the funeral pile among the Cingalese; and an interment in the Greek church little resembles either. A conclave of White Boys in Mayo, a.s.sembled in a mud hovel on a heath, to pledge one another to their dreadful oath, is widely different from a similar conclave of Swiss insurgents, met in a pine wood on a steep, on the same kind of errand: and both are as little like as may be to the heroes of the last revolution in Paris, or to the companies of Covenanters that were wont to meet, under a similar pressure of circ.u.mstances, in the defiles of the Scottish mountains.--In the manners of all cla.s.ses, from the highest to the lowest, are forms of manners enforced in action, or dismissed in words? Is there barbarous freedom in the lower, while there is formality in the higher ranks, as in newly settled countries? or have all grown up together to that period of refined civilization when ease has superseded alike the freedom of the Australian peasantry, and the etiquette of the court of Ava?--What are the manners of professional men of the society, from the eminent lawyer or physician of the metropolis down to the village barber? The manners of the great body of the professional men must indicate much of the requisitions of the society they serve.--So, also, must every circ.u.mstance connected with the service of society: its character, whether slavish or free, abject or prosperous, comprehensive or narrow in its uses, must testify to the desires and habits, and therefore to the manners of a community, better than the conversation or deportment of any individual in the society can do. A traveller who bears all this in mind can hardly go wrong. Every thing that he looks upon will instruct him, from an aqueduct to a punch-bowl, from a penitentiary to an aviary, from the apparatus of a university to the furniture of an alehouse or a nursery. When it was found that the chiefs of the Red men could not be impressed with any notion of the civilization of the Whites by all that many white men could say, they were brought into the cities of the Whites. The exhibition of a ship was enough for some. The warriors of the prairies were too proud to utter their astonishment,--too n.o.ble to hint, even to one another, their fear; but the perspiration stood on their brows as they dumbly gazed, and no word of war pa.s.sed their lips from that hour. Another, who could listen with calmness to the tales of boastful traders in the wilderness, was moved from his apathy by seeing a workman in a gla.s.shouse put a handle upon a pitcher. He was transported out of his silence and reserve: he seized and grasped the hand of the workman, crying out that it was now plain that he had had intercourse with the Great Spirit. By the evidence of things these Indians had learned more of the manners of the Whites than had ever been taught them by speech.--Which of us would not learn more of the manners of the Pompeians by a morning's walk among the relics of their abodes and public halls than by many a nightly conference with certain of their ghosts?

The usual scholastic division of Morals is into personal, domestic, and social or political morals. The three kinds are, however, so apt to run into one another,--so practically inseparable,--that the traveller will find the distinction less useful to him than some others which he can either originate or adopt.

It appears to me that the Morals and Manners of a nation may be included in the following departments of inquiry--the Religion of the people; their prevalent Moral Notions; their Domestic State; their Idea of Liberty; and their Progress, actual or in prospect.

CHAPTER I.

RELIGION.

"Dieu nous a dit, Peuples, je vous attends."

DE BERANGER.

Of religion, in its widest sense, (the sense in which the traveller must recognize it,) there are three kinds; not in all cases minutely distinguishable, but bearing different general impress; viz. the Licentious, the Ascetic, and the Moderate. These kinds are not divided from each other by the boundaries of sects. We cannot say that pagan religions come under one head, and Mahomedanism under another, and Christianity under a third. The difference lies not in creeds, but in spirit. Many pagans have been as moderate as any Christians; many Christians as licentious as any pagans; many Mahomedans as licentious, and many as ascetic, as any pagans or Christians. The truer distinction seems to be that the licentious religions of the world worship unspiritualized nature,--material objects and their movements, and the primitive pa.s.sions of man: that the ascetic despises nature, and worships its artificial restraints: and that the moderate worships spiritualized nature,--G.o.d in his works, both in the material universe and in the disciplined human mind, with its regulated affections.

The Licentious religion is always a ritual one. Its G.o.ds are natural phenomena and human pa.s.sions personified; and, when once the power of doing good or harm is attributed to them, the idea of propitiation enters, and a ritual worship begins. Earthquakes, inundations, the chase, love, revenge,--all these agents of evil and good are to be propitiated, and sacrifices and prayers are to be offered to them; in these rites alone religious acts are supposed to be performed. This, however modified, is a low state of religious sentiment. It may show itself among the Hindoos dipping in the Ganges, or among Christians who accept absolution in its grossest sense. In either case its tendency is to render the worshipper satisfied with a low moral state, and to perpetuate his taste for selfish indulgence.

The Ascetic religions are ritual also. The Pharisees of old need but be cited to show why; and there is a set of people in the Society Islands now who seem to be spiritually descended from the ascetic priests of Judaism. The inhabitants of the Society Islands are excluded from many innocent privileges and natural pleasures by the Tabu; and the Pharisees in just the same manner laid burdens upon men's shoulders too heavy to be borne, ordaining irksome ceremonies to be proofs of holiness, and extravagant self-denial to be required by devotion. Spiritual licence has always kept pace with this extravagance of self-denial. Spiritual vices,--pride, vanity, and hypocrisy,--are as fatal to high morals under this state of religious sentiment as sensual indulgence under the other: and it does not matter much to the moral welfare of the people sunk in it, whether they exist under a profession of Christianity, or of Mahomedanism, or of paganism. The morals of those people are low who engage themselves to serve G.o.d by a slothful life in monastic celibacy, no less than those of the Fakirs, who let their nails grow through the backs of their hands, or those of the wretched mothers in the islands of the Pacific, who strangle their infants, and cast them at the feet of their grinning idol.

The Moderate is the least of a ritual religion of the three, and drops such rites as it has in proportion to its advance towards purity.

Religion in its purity is not a pursuit, but a temper; and its expression is not by sacrifices, by prayers in the corners of the streets, by fasts or public exhibitions. The highest manifestations of this order of religion are found in Christian countries; though in others there are individuals, and even orders of men, who understand that the orderly enjoyment of all blessings that Providence has bestowed, and the regulated workings of all human affections, are the truest homage to the Maker of all. As there are Christians whose reliance is upon their ritual worship, and who enter upon a monastic life, so there are Mahomedans and pagans whose high religious aim is self-perfection, sought through the free but disciplined exercise of their whole nature.

The dependence of morals upon the character of the religion is clear. It is clear that among a people whose G.o.ds are supposed to be licentious, whose priests are licentious, and where worship is a.s.sociated with the indulgence of the pa.s.sions, political and domestic morals must be very low. What purity can be expected of a people whose women are demanded in turn for the obscene service of the Buddhist temple; and what humanity from the inhabitants of districts whose dwellings are necessarily closed against the mult.i.tudes flocking to the festivals of Juggernaut,--mult.i.tudes from amidst which thousands annually drop down dead, so that their skeletons strew the road to the abominable temple?--Where asceticism is the character of the religion, the natural and irrepressible exercise of human affections becomes licentiousness, so called; and, of consequence, it soon becomes licentiousness in fact, according to the general rule that a bad name changes that to which it is affixed into a bad quality.--Hannah and Philip grew up in a Moravian settlement; and, Moravians as they were, they loved. The days came when the destiny of each was decided by lot. It was scarcely possible that they should draw a lot to marry each other; yet both secretly hoped to the last. Philip drew a missionary lot, and Hannah another husband. They were allowed to shake hands once before parting. "Good-bye, Hannah!"

"Good-bye, Philip!" was all that was said. If Hannah had gone off with Philip, it would have been called a profligate act; and, if they were sound Moravians, it would in fact have been so: whereas, in a community of really high morals, the profligacy would have been seen to lie in Hannah's marrying a man she did not love.