Post-Prandial Philosophy

9. The Romance of the Clash of Races

The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in any

previous age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth." And with its

expansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now in

the midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as that

which followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to India

by the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly upon

that point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeply

hurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows are

really quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea before

them. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curious

result entailed by this widening of the world upon our literary

productivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes to

look at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberate

notice.

In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparative

cosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction into

literary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races.

This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of our

otherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, it

has been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chief

purveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They have

espied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtaining

that fresh interest which is essential to the success of a work of art.

We were all getting somewhat tired, it must be confessed, of the old

places and the old themes. The insipid loves of Anthony Trollope's

blameless young people were beginning to pall upon us. The jaded palate

of the Anglo-Celtic race pined for something hot, with a touch of fresh

spice in it. It demanded curried fowl and Jamaica peppers. Hence, on the

one hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the younger

countries--Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins and

Howells--who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people:

hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latest

writers--the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, the

Rider Haggards--to go far afield among the lower races or the later

civilisations for the themes of their romances.

Alas, alas, I see breakers before me! Must I pause for a moment in the

flowing current of a paragraph to explain, as in an aside, that I

include Marion Crawford of set purpose among "our own" late writers,

while I count Mary Wilkins and Howells as Transatlantic aliens?

Experience teaches me that I must; else shall I have that annoying

animalcule, the microscopic critic, coming down upon me in print with

his petty objection that "Mr. Crawford is an American." Go to, oh, blind

one! And Whistler also, I suppose, and Sargent, and, perhaps, Ashmead

Bartlett! What! have you read "Sarracinesca" and not learnt that its

author is European to the core? 'Twas for such as you that the Irishman

invented his brilliant retort: "And if I was born in a stable would I be

a horse?"

Not merely, however, do our younger writers go into strange and novel

places for the scenes of their stories; the important point to notice in

the present connection is that, consciously or unconsciously to

themselves, they have perceived the mighty influence of this Clash of

Races, and have chosen the relations of the civilised people with their

savage allies, or enemies, or subjects, as the chief theme of their

handicraft. 'Tis a momentous theme, for it encloses in itself half the

problems of the future. The old battles are now well-nigh fought out;

but new ones are looming ahead for us. The cosmopolitanisation of the

world is introducing into our midst strange elements of discord. A

conglomerate of unwelded ethnical elements usurps the stage of history.

America and South Africa have already their n***o question; California

and Australia have already their Chinese question; Russia is fast

getting her Asiatic, her Mahommedan question. Even France, the most

narrowly European in interest of European countries, has yet her

Algeria, her Tunis, her Tonquin. Spain has Cuba and the Philippines.

Holland has Java. Germany is burdening herself with the unborn troubles

of a Hinterland. And as for England, she staggers on still under the

increasing load of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, the West

Indies, Fiji, New Guinea, North Borneo--all of them rife with endless

race-questions, all pregnant with difficulties.

Who can be surprised that amid this seething turmoil of colours,

instincts, creeds, and languages, art should have fastened upon the

race-problems as her great theme for the moment? And she has fastened

upon them everywhere. France herself has not been able to avoid the

contagion. Pierre Loti is the most typical French representative of this

vagabond spirit; and the question of the peoples naturally envisages

itself to his mind in true Gallic fashion in the "Mariage de Loti" and

in "Madame Chrysanth***" He sees it through a halo of vague sexual

sentimentalism. In England, it was Rider Haggard from the Cape who first

set the mode visibly; and nothing is more noteworthy in all his work

than the fact that the interest mainly centres in the picturesque

juxtaposition and contrast of civilisation and savagery. Once the cue

was given, what more natural than that young Rudyard Kipling, fresh home

from India, brimming over with genius and with knowledge of two

concurrent streams of life that flow on side by side yet never mingle,

should take up his parable in due course, and storm us all by assault

with his light field artillery? Then Robert Louis Stevenson, born a

wandering Scot, with roving Scandinavian and fiery Celtic blood in his

veins, must needs settle down, like a Viking that he is, in far Samoa,

there to charm and thrill us by turns with the romance of Polynesia. The

example was catching. Almost without knowing it, other writers have

turned for subjects to similar fields. "Dr. Isaacs," "Paul Patoff," "By

Proxy," were upon us. Even Hall Caine himself, in some ways a most

insular type of genius, was forced in "The Scapegoat" to carry us off

from Cumberland and Man to Morocco. Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon us

the tragedies of Japan. I have been watching this tendency long myself

with the interested eye of a dealer engaged in the trade, and therefore

anxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and I

notice a constant increase from year to year in the number of short

stories in magazines and newspapers dealing with the romance of the

inferior races. I notice, also, that such stories are increasingly

successful with the public. This shows that, whether the public knows it

or not itself, the question of race is interesting it more and more. It

is gradually growing to understand the magnitude of the change that has

come over civilisation by the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Australasia

within its circle. Even the Queen is learning Hindustani.

There is a famous passage in Green's "Short History of the English

People" which describes in part that strange outburst of national

expansion under Elizabeth, when Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher scoured

the distant seas, and when at home "England became a nest of singing

birds," with Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Marlow. "The old sober

notions of thrift," says the picturesque historian, "melted before the

strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants

gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one

in the Indies." (Read rather to-day at Kimberley, Johannesburg,

Vancouver.) "Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls and

diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was of

gold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the imagination of

the meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New World kindled a burst

of extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and present

which distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the medley

of men's thoughts.... A 'wild man' from the Indies chanted the Queen's

praises at Kenilworth, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the

greetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her

tyrant, 'Sans Pitie.' Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the

spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her

feet." Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, _mutato nomine de te Fabula

narratur_. Yours, yours is this glory!

For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan. It blossoms out daily

into such flowers of fancy as never bloomed before, save then, on

British soil. When men tell you nowadays we have "no great writers

left," believe not the silly parrot cry. Nay, rather, laugh it down for

them. We move in the midst of one of the mightiest epochs earth has ever

seen, an epoch which will live in history hereafter side by side with

the Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Augustus, the Florence of Lorenzo,

the England of Elizabeth. Don't throw away your birthright by ignoring

the fact. Live up to your privileges. Gaze around you and know. Be a

conscious partaker in one of the great ages of humanity.