TWO HAPPY HOURS OF SAVAGERY.

Otago Witness, Issue 1191, 26 September 1874, Page 3

TWO HAPPY HOURS OF SAVAGERY.

The following is from Scnbner's " Old Cabinet " :—

There are moments in the life of every simple and discreet soul when he wants to kill his grandmother. I say grandmother, but merely in a generic sense. The desire is for murder ; and grandmother stands for butcher, baker, candlestick maker, the world at large, or any one in particular. The desire is for something to break the monotony of this weary conventional life ; to forget broadcloth, andremember only thebrute — in aword, to smash things. When a human being puts off his round-about and puts on his coat, he becomes a slave. In his more rational moments he may ackn uvledge that what he loses in freedom he gains in culture ; that though he cannot climb a tree or a lamp-post, he can soar into the infinities ; that if he cannot throw brickbats at windows and tie tin pans to dogs' tails, he can at least edit a uaily nineteenth century newspaper. Still, the time will come when his boyish savagery will reassert itself, when it may be —

' If that hypothesis of theirs be sound' — a more ancient and primeval savagery will in him wake and cry.

This human tendency, or phase of reminiscence, has various developments. The commonest is mere anger — a stupid, every-day, household experience, about which little need be said, and the less said the better. Then there is that mild mania — perplexing to so many of its victims — the sudden-springing desire to jump over the precipice, pitch the baby out of the window, laugh at the funeral, or throw the hymn-book at the head of the parson. And the parson himself ; who shall say that it is not sometimes this same impulse that prompts him at times to throw fire and brimstone at the heads of the good people sitting so patiently beneath him 1 I do confess I have lead nothing lately with such keen relish as the story of the Sandwich Island mob, who, when they heard, outside of the Court House, that Kalakau was elected sovereign of the nation over their favourite, Queen Emma, set up a true Hawaiian yell, fell upon the honourable representatives, both inside and outside of the hall, cut them up, so to speak, into kindling wood, and for two mortal hours raged and ramped, slashed, crashed, screamed, and roared through the buildings like so many lions and hyenas. At the end of two hours the room looked as if it had been the scene of a railroad accident

They do that kind of thing very well in Paiis, but there they mix a little French ingenuity with the destruction, and, besides, the thing there is raisonne. There is some sense in it. The petmleiise has a certain vague apprehension of Nemesis.

But this Hawaiian outburst apparently began and ended in foolishness. It was not a Cause, or even a Movement. It was quelled— my friend, who was there that very day, tells me— by a big U. S. marine, who himself carried a large part of the mob to the lock-up, six at a time — three in eaoh hand. The King was quietly installed very soon after, and the insurrectionists seem to make as loyal subjects as Kalakaua could wish.

You need not tell me that it was a grand hatred for the new king that made them go on like wild beasts. No. They had a better provocation than that. For generation after generation they had been, to use Mrs Muffin's expression, "sat upon " by civilized clothes, civilized customs, civilized governments, civilized laws, civilized properties, and civilization generally. The time had come when those in whom the old blood was hottest could stand it no longer. They arose, and in the names of their ancestors, smashed things. They had two happy hours.

So, while we may have a certain sympathetic understanding of the barbario element in art, literature, and religion, that is very far from being able to endure it there. It is a thing which every man knows how to repress in his own bosom, and he sees* no reason why the poet, for instance, should not do the same when it comes to a matter of artistic expression, if the ordinary civilised man easily conquers any possible desire to run howling and naked through the streets of the small village where he may happen to reside, why should a poet be permitted to send his barbaric yawp over the roofa of the world 1

If in art, savagery is out of place, how much more in religion ? It is not merely in rant that the tendency shows itself, but in that late and unlovely form of city evangelism, which has all the vulgarity of the backwoods ministry, but none of its alleviations. An ignorant, half-savage, but terribly sincere border camp-meeting preacher may season his discourse with such phrase and illustration as are native to himself, and to his rough congregation. But when a preacher, out of whom much of the brute should have been eliminated by contact with the decencies of life, mixes the Gospel with garbage, and spreads the stuff before his hearers, he is a shame and a nuisance. It will not do to hush up protest by saying that he "does good" to the class to whom he appeals. He should not approach the low on the level of their vulgarity. It ia the Jesuit who does ill that good may come. Cleanliness and Christliness are one. Bad taste is bad morals the world over.