Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa - Olive Schreiner - Страница 8

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... And that one of these days that golden place

Shall be reached by the Lemmings yet!...

E. A.

As in describing the physical features of South Africa, we lingered longest over the Karoo, not because it was one of the largest or most important features in the country, but because it was the most characteristically South African; so in describing its people, we shall dwell first and at greatest length on the South African Boer—not because he is the most important nor the most powerful element among our peoples, but because he is the most typically South African. The Bantu and the Englishman may be found elsewhere on the earth's surface in equal or greater perfection; but the Boer, like our plumbagos, our silver-trees, and our kudoos, is peculiar to South Africa. He is the result of an intermingling of races, acted on during two centuries by a peculiar combination of circumstances, and a result has been produced so unique as only to be decipherable through long and sympathetic study.

Our limits will not allow of our entering into an analysis of all those conditions of his early history which have made the Boer what he is to-day. The bare facts are ably and concisely set forth in works readily accessible to all[9]; but the great epic of South Africa which lies beneath them, yet awaits its seer and singer.

For our purpose, it is possible only to note shortly a few of those points in the early conditions of the Boer which bear most strongly on his later development, which have shaped his peculiarities, and made him what he is.

The history of the Boer begins, as is well known, in 1652, when Van Riebeek landed at the Cape with his small handful of soldiers and sailors to found a victualling station under the shades of Table Mountain, for the ships of the Dutch East India Company as they sailed to and from the East Indies.

If one climbs alone on a winter's afternoon to the old Block House on the spur of the Devil's Peak at Cape Town, and lies down on the ruined stone bastion, with the warm sun shining on one's back—as one lies there dreaming; the town and shipping in the bay below, blotted out in a haze of yellow light, leaving only the great curve of the sands on the Blue-Berg Strand, and the far-off mountains that peer out and disappear into the blue; then the noisy little life of the valley slips away from one, and through the mist of two centuries one is almost able to put out one's hand and touch the old, long-buried days, when the first white men built their huts on the shores of Table Bay; when at night the leopards crept down from the mountain and took lambs from the kraals, and lions were shot before the hut-doors; when the Blue-Berg Strand was trodden by elephants, and the Hottentots lit their watch fires on the banks of the Liesbeck; when the great Hout-Bay valley was flecked with antelopes; and the stream which comes down now from the mountain gorge and flows through the valley muddy and dark, was clear and crystal, and widened out into pools where the hippopotami played, and then crept away into the sea through the white sand;—days when the blue mountains were the limit of the world the white men knew, and shut out the mysterious unknown beyond. Basking alone there on one's face in the warm sunshine, so near do those old days seem, that one half expects the lammervanger[10] to spread out its wings and sail out from the cliffs above, and a bush-buck's step to break the stillness in the brushwood; and one is loath to shake one's self and go down into the hot, fretted life of the little city below; where the shop windows glitter with the work of many lands, and where women with little waists and high shoes trip down the pavement; and the Parliament Houses, with their red brick and stucco, stare at one, and on the stoep of the Club in Church Square tall-hatted men lounge and talk over the latest town gossip or retire to the bar for whisky; and where in the side streets are broken pavements, and Malays, and Half-castes, and fish-carts with their shrill whistles; and in the docks coal-dust and shipping, and convicts and sailors; and everywhere are canteens and brothels and churches—all that makes the life of a civilized modern town. It is hard to climb down through the fir-woods and go back to it.[11]

So when one sits to write of African men and things, one would like to linger long over those early days, every detail of which is precious to us now; even how Annitje de Boeren was allowed to sell milk and butter to the early men of the colony; how the handful of folks planted gardens, and traded with the Hottentots for sheep, and made expeditions into the unknown lands of Stellenbosch and Paarl. All the story of how the sapling of white man's life in South Africa first struck its roots into the soil has an interest no story of later growth can hold for us. But for the present we can only notice hurriedly, and in passing, a few of those facts in the condition of the early settlers which seem most to have made the African Boer that which we to-day find him.

The first fact we have to note is that the men Van Riebeek brought with him to found his little settlement were men of different nationalities; largely Frisian or Dutch, but also German, Swedish, and even English. They were also, almost to a man, soldiers and sailors, children of fortune, and not agricultural labourers. A century later, when we find the descendants of these men wanderers across the untrodden plains of South Africa, their flint-locks as their only guard, the motive that drives them forward and on only an unquenchable passion for movement and change, and a fierce rebellion against the limitations with which civilized life hedges about and crushes the life of the individual—then we shall find it useful to remember that in part the original stock from which these men sprang was composed of these free-fighting children of fortune, rovers of the sea and the sword. That power of persistent, patient, physical labour and submission to restraint, that tenacious clinging to one spot of earth on which he has once taken root, which constitutes at once the strength and the weakness of the true agricultural classes in all countries, has always been markedly absent from the character of our South African Boer, and could hardly have been his through inheritance. For Van Riebeek's men were not merely soldiers and sailors forced into service by conscription, but men gathered from all nations by a species of natural selection, their inborn love of a wild and roving life leading them into the service of the Dutch East India Company. Over the shoulders of the men who took their aim at Majuba Hill, and behind the men and women who again and again, on their long and terrible marches through South African deserts, have seen their kindred fall dead at their feet of thirst and want, and have yet moved on, one sees the faces of these old rough forebears looking! The South African Boer becomes fully intelligible only when we remember that the blood of those men runs in him, modified truly and powerfully by other elements, but active in him still.

We come now to a second small point, to be noted as bearing on the development of the Boer.

The commanders of the early settlement gave out to certain of their men portions of land on the peninsula, to be cultivated for their own and the Company's benefit. These men built huts, planted and sowed. Thirty years after Van Riebeek landed there were two hundred and ninety-three white men in the settlement, but only eighty-eight white women, and the men on their little allotments grumbled for want of wives. The directors of the Dutch East India Company conferred, and it was determined to send out from certain orphan asylums in Holland respectable girls to supply this want; and from time to time, ships brought small numbers. The soldiers and the sailors at the Cape welcomed them gladly; they were all speedily married and settled in their homes at the foot of Table Mountain.

It may appear fanciful, but we believe it is not so, to suppose that this small incident throws a sidelight on one of the leading characteristics of the African Boer. For the South African Boer differs from every other emigrant branch of a European people whom we can recall, either in classical or modern times, in this: that having settled in a new land, and not having mixed with the aboriginal inhabitants, nor accepted their language, he has yet severed every intellectual and emotional tie between himself and the parent lands from which he sprang. The Greek, whether he settled in Asia Minor or Sicily, though economically and politically independent, was still a Greek; an uncut cord of intellectual and emotional sympathy still bound him to the mother country; and after two hundred years the inhabitant of Syracuse or Ephesus was still a Greek of the Greeks; bound not only to Greece as a whole, but to that particular state from which he sprang; among the most immortal and typical of Grecian names are those of men not born in the parent home of the race, but in its colonies. The modern Australian, Canadian, Yankee, or even American Spaniard, if of unmixed European blood, turns still to Europe as Home. Political differences may have had to be settled in blood, and commercial interests may divide, but, emotionally and intellectually, the bond which binds a European colonist to the home from which he sprang, and to Europe as a whole, is an operative fact. The Boer has had no great conflict with his parent peoples in Europe; he has not lost his race by mingling it with the barbarous people among whom he settled; yet he is as much severed from the lands of his ancestors and from Europe, as though three thousand instead of two hundred years had elapsed since he left it.

Later on we shall look at certain large and adequate reasons for this remarkable phenomenon; but among the lesser causes which have contributed to it, it seems to us more than probable that the position of these early mothers of the race may have played its small part.

When the ordinary emigrant female bids farewell to Europe to make her home in the new land, whether she leaves a mud cabin in Ireland, a vine-grower's cottage in Germany, or a mansion in England, the moment in which she catches a last glimpse of the land of her youth is one of the emotionally intense of her existence. The life she leaves may have been one of hardship, even of bitterness, and the life she goes to may be one of ease; but binding her to the land behind her are the ties of blood and childish remembrances of home—ties which shape themselves as mightily in the mud-cabin or the back slum of the city as in the palace. She is leaving the one spot on earth where she is an object of interest and importance to her fellows. When she arrives in the new world it is to that home that she sends the record of her marriage—there that she knows the story of her sorrows and her gains will be waited for! In the hour of childbirth it is to the women of her own blood "at home" that her heart turns with yearning; and as years go by "my people" and "my home" gain a colour and size they would never have borne if near at hand. She thinks of them as a denizen of the earth, removed to one of the fixed stars, might think of this old planet, without remembrances of its aches and pains! And as her children grow up, the first stories they hear are not of Colonial things and people, but European—of fields in which little children gather buttercups and daisies, of ice and snow, and the roaring life of cities; and as the little Colonial children play in the hot sun upon the kopjes among stapelias and aloes, they think how beautiful those fields must be, and wonder how the daisy-chains are made, and how primroses smell! and at night in their little hot beds they dream of ice and snow, and fancy they hear the hum of vast cities. Even the names of our European relatives who have played in those fields and lived in those cities have acquired a certain mythological charm for us, and the Aunt this and the Uncle that, of whom our mothers tell us, they are not the commonplace, material uncles and aunts who may live in the next street and be seen every day. They are real, yet invisible, like the actual presence in the Holy Wafer of real flesh and blood, yet removed from sight, like the heroes of a mythological fairy tale! Europe and its life are to us, from our earliest years, the ideal and mysterious, with which we have yet some real and practical tie.

No European who has not grown up in the Colony, being born of pure European parentage, can understand the full force of this Mother tradition.

Like the odour of an unknown plant or flower, it must be experienced to be comprehended. Nor does it die out with the first generation. The mother transmits it to her daughter, and the daughter to her child. It is the echo of this legend which goes so largely to form that curious body of sentiment with which the most commonplace colonist visits Europe for the first time. The most sensitive man, growing up in the original home of his race, does not understand this subtle and delicate emotion; and the most hard-shell man of business among us is not untouched by it when he sets his feet for the first time on the old-race shores.

"And this is England! And this is Europe!" It is as though he woke up in a kind of fairy land! The tile cottages with the moss upon them, the hedgerows, the village greens with the churches, the blue-bells in the woods—he has seen them all before—in a dream. In the roar of the great city curious emotions come to him. As he drives in the omnibus the conductor calls, "Shoreditch!" and he starts and looks out. Above him is the great church tower—

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch!

and again he is one of the group of children holding each others' hands to play at "oranges and lemons" in a Colonial garden. "So that Shoreditch we sang of under the fig-trees was a real place! No doubt the great bells hang up there!"—and for a moment the prosaic back-slum is an inverted childhood's fairy-land.

And there are perhaps few among us who, on our first visit, do not at some time creep away to find ourselves in some spot to which we do not wish our acquaintance to accompany us. It may be a street in a great city, or a village in a German forest, or an English parsonage; but we feel we are bound to it with a tie others may not touch. Perhaps it is only a shop-window at the corner of Finsbury Pavement at which we stand gazing in, because we know that sixty years before a little child with bright eyes and rosy cheeks came here, wrapped up in her furs, and holding her mother's hand, to buy her Christmas doll! And we stand gazing into it till we turn away sharply, fancying the people see what we feel. Or we go to a little country village; no one tells us the way from the station; but we see a church tower and an old elm-tree we have heard of; and as we walk towards them down the village street, we would like to run up to every one we meet, and say, "Oh! don't you see, we are come home again!" We stand at the parsonage gate and look over at the trim lawn, and the ivy on the bow-windows; and we go away. There is a stile where we know a man and a woman once talked on summer evenings, when they did not yet dream that the life they promised to spend together was to be lived out far over the seas, in the strange land which their children's children were to inherit. We wander into the churchyard, and brush the ivy from the gravestones; we stand at last before what we seek—years of European frost and rain have half obliterated the writing on the stones; we trace the letters with our fingers; the names are names we know, and which our kindred in the land across the seas will bear for generations. And so it comes to pass that we still call Europe "home"; though when we go there we may find nothing to bear witness to the fact, but a few broken headstones in a country churchyard—yet the land is ours![12]

This bond, light as air, yet strong as iron, those early mothers of the Boer race could hardly have woven between the hearts of their children and the country they come from. Alone in the world, without relatives who had cared sufficiently for them to save them from the hard mercy of a public asylum, these women must have carried away few of the warm and tender memories happier women bear to plant in the hearts of their children. The bare boards and cold charity of a public institution are not the things of which to whisper stories to little children. The ships that bore these women to South Africa carried them towards the first "Land of Good Hope" that ever dawned on their lives; and the day in which they landed at Table Bay and first trod on African soil, was also the first in which they became individuals, desired and sought after, and not mere numbers in a printed list. In the arms of the rough soldiers and sailors who welcomed them, they found the first home they had known; and the little huts on the banks of the Liesbeek, and the simple boards at which they presided, were the first at which they had been able to look round and see only the faces of those bound to them by kindly ties. To such women it was almost inevitable that, from the moment they landed, South Africa should be "home," and Europe be blotted out: the first generation born of these women and the free, tieless soldiers and sailors with whom they mated, probably looked on South Africa as does their latest descendant to-day. On their lips, when they looked at the valley of Stellenbosch, or the slopes of Table Mountain, the words—Ons Land—meant all they mean on the lips of the Transvaal Boer or the Free State Burgher of to-day,—"Our Land; the one and only land we know of, and care for, wish to know of, have any tie or connection with!"

If it be objected that the number of these women was too small to have permanently influenced the attitude of the Boer race in its relation towards Africa and the home countries, it must be answered, that small as their number was, they were numerous in proportion to the whole stock from which the race rose. For it must always be borne in mind in studying the South African Boer, how very small that stock was. He was produced—as are all suddenly developed, marked and permanent varieties in the human or animal world—by the close interbreeding of a very small number of progenitors.[13] The handful of soldiers and sailors who first landed, a few agriculturists and their families, the band of orphaned girls, and a small body of French exiles, to be referred to later on, constitute the whole parent stock of the Boer people. From this small stock, by a process of breeding in and in, they have developed, there having been practically no addition made to the breed for the last two hundred years; the comparatively large numbers to which they have attained have entirely to be accounted for by the fact of their personal vigour, very early marriages, and prolific rate of increase. Thus the Boer represents rather a clan or family than a nation; and there is probably no true Boer from the Zambesi to the Cape who does not hold a common strain of blood with almost every other Boer he meets. Each Boer has in him, probably, at least a drop of the blood of these women; and their emotional and intellectual peculiarities can hardly have failed to leave their mark, if slight, upon the racial development.

But we must turn now to the most interesting point in the early history of the Boer, and one which alone would fully account for his attitude towards Europe, and for many other of his unique characteristics.

In and about the year 1688, thirty-six years after the first landing of Van Riebeek and his handful of men, there arrived at the Cape a body of French Protestant refugees, numbering in all, men, women and children, somewhat under two hundred souls. These people, driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were offered an asylum in South Africa by the Dutch Government, which they accepted. They were not an ordinary body of emigrants, but represented almost to a man and a woman that golden minority which is so remorselessly winnowed from the dross of the conforming majority by all forms of persecution directed against intellectual and spiritual independence. Mere agriculturists, vine-dressers and mechanics, with but a small sprinkling of persons belonging to the professional classes, these men yet constitute an aristocracy—ennobled, not through the fiat of any monarch, but selected by that law deep-lying in the nature of things, which has ordained that where men shall be found having the force to stand alone, and suffer for abstract conviction, there also shall be found the individuality, virility and power which founds great peoples and marks dominant races.

The fate of the South African Boer was safe from the moment these men came to mingle their blood with his; as the fate of the North American States was safe when the Mayflower had crossed with its load of dissentient Englishmen; as the fate of the Spanish colonies would have been safe, had Spain, in place of cauterizing her growing points in the bonfires of the squares of Toledo and Madrid, simply nipped them off from the parent tree and transplanted them alive in her colonies in the New World, there to beget a newer and stronger Spain. One is sometimes astonished at certain qualities found in the South African Boer, till one recalls the fact that a strain of this uncompromising, self-guiding blood runs in his veins; making him, what often in his lowest and poorest conditions he yet remains—an aristocrat!

On the arrival of these men at the Cape, the Dutch East India Company portioned them out lands to cultivate, mainly in the lovely valleys of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek, and Drakenstein. At the time of their arrival they formed probably about one-sixth of the whole population. How rapidly they increased and how large is the share their blood holds in the Boer race may be noted if one run one's eye over the list of the occupants of any district or village inhabited by Boers, and marks how great the number of French names which will occur. There are districts in the Western Province of the Colony in which these names largely predominate over those of Dutch or German origin; and even in the Free State and Transvaal, they are numerous to an extent which their original numbers would not have led us to expect. Of our most noted of Cape families, many bear these names; the De Villiers, the Jouberts, the Du Toits, the Naudès—and if other names, such as the Reitzes, Van Aarts, Hofmeyrs or Krugers, are not less widely known, it will generally be found on analysis that the proportion of French blood even in these families is as large as in those whose patronymics are purely French. There is probably not a Boer in South Africa at the present day whose blood is not richly touched by that of the Huguenot.

But it was not only or mainly by bringing to the formation of the new race this strong and select strain of blood that the Huguenot influenced the Boer, and through him the future of South Africa. It is he who has rendered permanent and complete the severance from Europe to which we have referred.

When the ordinary settler leaves Europe he goes out more or less under the ægis of his mother country, and for a time at least, wherever he may settle, he still feels her flag wave over him; if wronged, it is to the representative of his mother land that he turns; if he settles in an uncivilized country, it is as the forerunner of those of his people who shall follow him that he takes possession of it. Should he go to a territory already colonized by another European race, he may lose himself more quickly in the existing organization. But still, for generations, the Irishman, Scotsman, German or Italian often feels a certain bond between himself and his parent land; and Europe as a whole holds a large place in his consideration.

Not infrequently his national feeling is intensified by transplantation. Nowhere on the surface of the globe were toasts to the health of the Queen and the Royal Family, and to the success of old England, more heartily drunk than by the British settlers of 1820, when they ate their first Christmas dinner, beneath the blazing South African sun, under the kunee trees of Lower Albany. To these men, as to the English colonists all the world over, the strength and dignity of their position lay in the fact that they, a minute portion of the great English nation, had come to this new land to implant themselves, a branch from the old stock, which should in time take root and grow to be a giant worthy of its parent tree. They felt themselves the ambassadors of a great people, the bearers of a flag which waved over every quarter of the globe; the representatives of a power which they believed to be the most beneficent and powerful on earth.[14] So these men named their little villages and their districts after the men and places of the old country—"East London," "Port Alfred," "King William's Town," "Queen's Town," "Lower Albany"—and their farms bore often the names of the homes in England from which they came. Socially, religiously, and more especially politically, they strove to reproduce, line by line, as accurately as circumstances would permit, the national life they had left. "So-and-so things are done at home." That settled, as it still to-day to a large extent settles, all argument. To-day the third generation of these men has arrived at adult years; but consciousness of national identity with the parent people is hardly dimmed. The young English African who has never been in Europe may boast that South Africa is the finest country on earth, and swagger of its skies, and wild, free life or, ridiculously enough, boast of the civilization which it has attained; he may resent bitterly any interference with what he considers his material rights on the part of the "Home Government." But turn to the same man and ask him what his nationality may be, suggest that he may possibly be of any other race than his own, and you will not twice repeat your question—

For in spite of all temptation

To belong to another nation,

He remains an Englishman!

Deep in the heart of every English-speaking colonist is a chord which responds to the name of the parent people as to no other; and the depth of the emotion is curiously exemplified in the most insignificant matters. That seemingly imbecile passion which causes Colonials to drag down and retain as mementos the curtains of a bed on which a British princeling has slept; the comic manner in which the average colonist will gravely inquire of you on your return from Europe whether you have "seen the Queen," and their solemnity in all matters pertaining to ancient and almost worn-out English institutions, all have in them an element radically different from that which would animate the average home Englishman, were he to act in a like manner; an element not to be found in the sycophant crowds which loll open-mouthed about St. James's on the afternoon of a Drawing-room; and which is radically distinct from the servility which bows before mere wealth and success. The colonist is perhaps rather more inclined than others to criticize mercilessly the princeling or dignitary sent out from home (and does so very freely after his arrival, when his gilt has worn off him); but behind the individual man lies something of which he is the representative, and it is this which causes him to have for the colonist a quite peculiar value. The enthusiasm he awakens is an enthusiasm for an emblem, not a man; for the representative of English nationality, not for the ruler. The difference between the feeling of an Englishman in the colony and the Englishman at home, with regard to all the insignia and emblems of the common national life, forces itself strongly on the notice of one who visits England for the first time. There is an absence of the element of passion and romance in the "Man at Home's" way of viewing these things; the difference between these attitudes being best compared by likening it to the difference between the feelings of two men, one of whom remains in the house of his parents and possesses it, the other of whom leaves it for ever. If outside the house windows grows a great lilac tree, it is simply a material part of the house he inhabits to the man who possesses it. As long as the branches shade the window, or do not damage the walls, he regards it with passive approval; when they begin to obstruct the view, and the roots interfere with the foundations, he has not the slightest remorse in lopping off the branches, or, if need be, uprooting the whole tree; the whole house is still his, the tree he regards from the utilitarian standpoint. On the other hand, to the man who has left the home of his childhood and gone to a foreign land—if one should by any chance send him a sprig from the old tree that grew before the windows, he would wrap it up and carry it about buried in his breast—the small sprig is an emblem to him of the old home which once was his, and to which he is still bound by ties of affection, though severed for ever by space. It would be as irrelevant to accuse the one man of insensibility because he did not weep over the chopped-down branches, as to accuse the other of emotional weakness because he grew tender over his sprig. The Englishman in England needs no visible emblem of that national life in the centre of which he is imbedded, and of which he forms an integral part. To the Englishman separated from that life by wide space and material interests, the smallest representative of the old nation has a powerful emotional value. It is to him what the lock of his mistress's hair is to an absent lover; he treasures it and kisses it to assure himself of her existence. If she were present he would probably notice the lock little. The princeling is our lock of hair, the Union Jack our sprig of lilac.

Even in the seemingly childish deference to manners and fashions imported from home, along with less exalted motives, this idealizing instinct plays its part. Nowhere on earth's surface are English-speaking men so consciously Anglo-Saxon as in the new lands they have planted. You may forget in England that you are an Englishman; you can never forget it in Africa.

The colonist will oppose England if he fancies she interferes with the material interests of the land he inhabits, as the married man takes the part of his wife, should he fancy his own mother seeks to over-dominate her. The wife is the bearer of his children, the minister to his material comforts; but deep in his heart there is a sense in which the mother has a place the wife will never fill. If his wife die he may soon find another, and her hold will be lost and her place taken; but his relation towards his mother is ineradicable; more changeless because more purely ideal and immaterial. She is the one woman he will never allow man or woman to speak slightingly of while he lives. He may quarrel with her himself, may even wound her, but he will allow no other man to touch her by word or in deed.

If to-morrow England lay prostrate, as France lay in 1871, with the heel of the foreigner on her throat, there are sixty millions of English-speaking men and women all the world over who would leap to their feet. They would swear never to lie down again till they had seen her freed. Women would urge on sons and husbands and forego all luxury, and men would leave their homes and cross the seas, if in so doing there was hope of aiding her. It will never be known what colonial Englishmen feel for the national nest till a time comes when it may be in need of them.

Our dearest bluid to do her guid

We'd give it her and a' that!

For it may be more than questioned whether even brother Jonathan, in spite of the back score against her and the large admixture of foreign blood in his veins, would sit still to see the foreigner crush the nesting-place of his people; to see the cradle of his tongue, the land of Chaucer and Shakespeare trampled down by men who know not their speech. And the Irish-Englishman all the world over, forgetting six centuries of contumely would, with the magnanimity of his generous race, stand shoulder to shoulder with his English brother, as he stood and died beside him in every country under the sun. Blood is thicker than water—and language binds closer than blood.

The England of to-day may disregard this emotional attitude towards herself and her colonists, and by persistent indifference and coldness may kill it, as a father by neglect may alienate the heart of his son, and turn to stone what was once throbbing flesh. And it is fully possible that as England of the past, when her government was conducted by an ignorant, monarchical aristocracy, despised her colonies because they were small democracies, and alienated them by ruthlessly using them for her own purposes; so the England of to-day, becoming rapidly a democracy may, through the supine indifference and self-centred narrowness inherent in the nature of over-worked uncultivated masses, kill out for ever the possibilities which might arise from the full recognition and cultivation of this emotion. But the fact remains that to-day this bond exists; the English-speaking colonist is bound to the birthplace of his speech; and little obtrusive as this passion may be, it is yet one of the most pregnant social phenomena of the modern world, one capable of modifying the future, not only of Anglo-Saxon peoples, but of the human race.[15]

We ask no forgiveness for thus digressing, for until the attitude of other European colonists towards their home lands has been fully grasped, the very exceptional position of the Boer, and the effect of his attitude on himself and South Africa, and the importance of the Huguenot influence in producing this attitude, cannot be understood.

So complete has been the Boer's severance from his fatherlands in Europe, both France and Holland, that for him they practically do not exist. For two hundred years their social and political life has rolled on unrecked of by him; Paris and The Hague are no nearer to his heart than Madrid or Vienna. He will swear more lustily at you if you call him a Frenchman or a Hollander than should you call him an Englishman or a German; and we have known primitive Boers who have vigorously denied that they had even originally descended from either Hollanders or Frenchmen.

The Huguenot has caused this severance in two ways.

Firstly, through the fact of his being a religious exile, and an exile of a peculiar type.

The exiled Englishmen who founded the Northern States of America, though they might wipe the dust off their feet against the land they left, did not cut that land wholly out of their affections and sympathies. A Government party, dominant for the moment, had made it impossible for them to continue their own form of worship in peace; but in the land they left, half their countrymen were bound to them by the closest ties of spiritual and intellectual sympathy, and were a party so strong as soon to become dominant. It was not England and its people who expelled them, but a step-motherly Government. Therefore they founded "New England" and clung to the old.

The Huguenot ancestor of the Boer left a country in which not only the Government, but the body of his fellows were at deadly variance with him; in which his religion was an exotic and his mental attitude alien from that of the main body of the people.

To these men, when they shook off the dust of their feet against her, France became the visible embodiment of the powers of evil; her rule was the rule of Agag, whom the Lord should yet hew in pieces; her people were the children of Satan, given over to believe a lie, and her fields were the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which in judgment the Almighty would yet rain down fire and brimstone; a righteous Lot fled from them in horror with all that he had. To these homeless fugitives the Europe that they had left was as the "house of bondage." The ships which bore them to South Africa were the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord their God, in which He bore His chosen to the Land of His Promise. As the Huguenot paced the deck of his ship and saw the strange stars of the Southern Hemisphere come out above him, like Abraham of old he read in them the promise of his covenant-keeping God:—"To thee and to thy seed shall the land be given and they shall inherit it. Look up and see the stars of heaven if thou canst count them: so shall thy seed be for multitude; like sand, like fine sand on the sea-shore. And when thou comest to the land that I shall give thee, thou shalt drive out the heathen from before thee."

And as he entered Table Bay, and for the first time the superb front of Table Mountain broke upon him, he saw in it his first token from his covenant-keeping God—"The land that I shall give thee!"

And the beautiful valleys of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek and the Paarl, in which he settled, were to him no mere terrestrial territories on which to plant and sow; they were the direct gifts of his God; the answers to prayers; the fulfilment of a divine covenant; a fief which he held, not through the fiat of any earthly sovereign, but directly from the hand of the Lord his God. The vines and fig-trees which he planted, and under which he sat, were not merely the result of his labour; they were the trees which aforetime he had seen in visions when he wandered a homeless stranger in Europe—"The land that I shall give thee!" To this man France was dead from the moment he set his foot on South African soil, and South Africa became his. Unlike the Englishman, the Huguenot no more thought of perpetuating the memory of France in "New Parises" and "New Orleanses" than the Jew, when he had escaped from the land of Egypt, thought of recalling the cities of Pharaoh in the names of the towns in Palestine. There is hardly a spot in Africa named by the French Huguenot in memory of his land: he called his farms "Springbok-fontein," "Beeste Kraal," "Jakals-fontein," and "Kat-kop."[16] Better to him has seemed a South African jackal or wild-cat than all the cities of France.

Thus to the Huguenot, not only was France the object of his abhorrence, and Europe a matter of indifference, but the South African land became from the very moment he landed the object of a direct and absorbing religious veneration, excluding all other national feelings. And in very slightly modified form he has transmitted this state of feeling to his latest descendant. Deep in the hearts of every old veld-schoen-wearing Boer that you may meet, side by side with an almost religious indifference to other lands and peoples, lies this deep, mystical and impersonal affection for South Africa. Not for the land, as inhabited by human beings, and formed into social and political organizations of which he is a part; not for the land, regarded as a social and political entity alone, is it that he feels this affection. It is for the actual physical country, with its plains, rocks and skies, that his love and veneration are poured out (absolutely incomprehensible as this may appear to the money-making nineteenth-century Englishman). The primitive Boer believes he possesses this land by a right wholly distinct from that of the aborigines whom he dispossesses, or the Englishmen who followed him; a right with which no claim of theirs can ever conflict. His feeling for South Africa is not in any way analogous to the feeling of the Johannesburg digger or speculator for the land in which he has "made his pile," nor even to that of the ordinary colonist for the territory in which his habitation lies; nor is it quite of the same nature as the passion of the old-world Swiss for his mountains, nor of the Norwegian for his fjords. Its only true counterpart is to be found in the attitude of the Jew towards Palestine—"When I forget thee, O Jerusalem!" His feeling towards it is a faith, not a calculation. It is as useless to attempt to influence the Boer by showing him that he will derive material advantage by giving up the rule of his land to others, as it is to try and persuade an ardent lover that he gains by sharing his mistress with one who will contribute to her support. His feeling for South Africa is not primarily based on utilitarian calculations or considerations of the material advantages to accrue to him from its possession; it is the one vein of idealism and romance underlying his seemingly prosaic and leaden existence. Touch the Boer on the side of South Africa, and at once, for the moment, he is hero and saint—his feeling for it a religion.

It has been from the complete failure to grasp this attitude of the Boer towards South Africa that curious mistakes have been made by far-seeing politicians and keen diplomatists in dealing with South African problems; mistakes only to be comprehended when one considers that curious inability inherent in the so-called "practical intellect" in all ages to comprehend anything beyond the narrow aims and ambitions which constitute its own little world. It is this inability which so often makes the conduct of these shrewd people, when they have to deal with the wider problems and deeper emotions of human life, like the conduct of a child who, to remove a speck of dust from the eye, should insert a needle and stir it about in the living substance.[17]

The Huguenot, by implanting this religious passion for South Africa in the heart of the Boer, and by the fact that he brought with him no political sympathies with France, helped to sever the Boer from his parent States; but even these influences while they would account for his division from his parents' nationalities, would not alone account for that complete severance from the common social and intellectual life of Europe, and from all civilized European societies, which characterizes the Boer of the past and of to-day, and we must seek for its cause further.

When the Huguenots first arrived at the Cape, they had little to complain of in the treatment they received at the hands of the Dutch East India Company—lands were given them side by side with the earlier emigrants, by whom they were kindly received. But the Government of the Dutch East India Company, then dominant at the Cape, like that of all commercial companies, was a despotism, and resembled rather the dictatorial rule existing on board a troopship than any form of government we are now accustomed to picture as existing in a young European settlement. When the Huguenots landed their speech was French, and the ruling powers disapproved of it, and determined to exterminate it, and substitute at once the Dutch language. A decree was passed prohibiting its public use. It might not be used in the churches, nor taught to the children in the schools. The Huguenots resented this enactment. Smaller in numbers, but superior in culture and intelligence, they were unwilling to see their speech forcibly submerged; and there was a time when they went so far as to talk of physical resistance. But in the end they were subdued, and within a generation the French language was extinct. The old grandmother might still mumble it in her chair in the corner, or sing its nursery rhymes to her grandchildren in it, but they no longer understood her; law and arbitrary force had done their work. We are inclined to believe that no single autocratic action on the part of any South African Government has ever so deeply influenced the future of South Africa and its people as this seemingly small proceeding, influencing only a few hundred folk.

To show how this has happened we must somewhat digress.

The language spoken by the Boer of to-day is called "the Taal," i.e. "the Language." It is not French, nor is it Dutch, nor is it even in the usual acceptation of the word a dialect of Dutch; but it is a form of speech based on that language. It is used at the present day all over South Africa by the Boers and half-castes as their only speech; it is found in its greatest purity in the Free State, Transvaal, and frontier districts, where it has been least exposed to scholastic and foreign influences during the last few years. To analyze fully this tiny but interesting variety of speech, would take us far beyond our limits. It differs from the Dutch of the Hollander, not as archaic forms of speech in Europe often differ from the literary, as the Italian of the Ligurian peasant from that of the Florentine, or the Somersetshire or Yorkshire dialects from the language of the London newspapers; these archaic European dialects not only often represent the earlier form of the language, but are often richer in varied idioms and in the power of expressing subtle and complex thoughts than are their allied literary forms. The relation of the Taal to Dutch is of a quite different kind. The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals, which in Dutch are formed in various and complex ways, the Taal forms by an almost universal addition of an "e"; and the verbs, which in Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German, in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the verb "to be," instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland and in analogy with all other European languages, thus runs:—Ik is, Je is, Hij is, Ons is, Yulle is, Hulle is,—which would answer in English to: "I is," "thou is," "he is," "we is," "you is," "they is"! And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are altered out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A very few words are from Malay and native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle intellectual emotion, or abstract conception, or a wide generalization; and a man seeking to render a scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find his task impossible. The literary artist who has tried to introduce into his work of art in any European language a picture of Boer life, knows how impossible it has been to find any organized dialect which would correspond to it.[18] In English neither the Scotch nor country dialects, nor the Irish brogue, nor the pithy inverted forms of city slang will answer. To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities. Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern American States. In the stories of Brer-Fox and Brer-Rabbit, as told by the old Southern slave in Uncle Remus, we have one of the few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the power of expressing—a thing which can never happen where a people has slowly shaped its own language—and, as a result, the same tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent Dutch!

So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other subjects. Between the language of the Camera Obscura and the Paarl's Patriot there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]

In answer to the question, "How did this little speech arise?" it is sometimes suggested that the original soldiers and sailors who founded the settlement being largely Frisian and wholly uneducated, never spoke Dutch at all, but a dialect; and that, being mainly uncultured persons, and using no literature, their speech easily underwent further disintegration. On the other hand, it has been said that the Taal has been formed by the intercourse between the Dutchman and his slaves, and the aboriginal races of the country; that these people, obliged to use an imperfect Dutch, taught their broken lingo to their masters' children, which has so become the language of the Boer.

Something is to be said for both views, more especially for the second. At the present day the Taal is the only tongue of the many thousands of Half-castes which have resulted from the union of the Boer with his slaves; and it is exactly such a broken form of speech as does arise, when a large body of adults are suddenly obliged to learn and use a foreign tongue, as was the case with the slaves. But neither of these theories seems to us wholly to cover the ground. In the Southern States of America for a hundred years slave nurses brought up English children, but not the slightest effect on their English speech was produced, and nowhere in America is a purer English spoken than by the descendants of the Southern planters. Even allowing that, being uncultured, the forefathers of the Boer might more easily have let their speech slip than was the case with the more cultured planters, it still seems unlikely that a people so rigidly and exceptionally conservative as the Boer has shown himself to be, even in the smallest details of daily life, during his two hundred years in South Africa, should suddenly and entirely have dropped his own pure language and accepted his speech from the hands of his despised dependents.

We put forward the suggestion with diffidence, perhaps to be corrected by those who have considered the matter more deeply, but it has appeared to us that, fully to account for the Taal, it is necessary to allow at least some place to the influence of the French Huguenot and the sudden suppression of his French speech.

A considerable body of adult persons, suddenly introduced into a population whose language they are abruptly and by force compelled to use as their own if, as in the case of the French Huguenots, they are socially the equals, and intellectually the superiors, of the people among whom they settle, and if they at once proceed to intermarry with them, may, and almost must, powerfully influence and disintegrate the speech of the majority. The Taal is precisely such a speech as the adult Huguenots, arbitrarily and suddenly forced to forsake their own language and to adopt the Dutch, must have spoken. And that they should have imposed their broken language on their fellow colonists seems far more probable than that the slave should have done so. In language, yet more than in other human concerns, imitation is the expression of an unconscious admiration. The mannerisms, accent, and intonation of an individual, admired or loved, are almost inevitably caught; those of the despised unconsciously though carefully avoided. The cultured woman, labouring from philanthropic motives for ten years in the slums of a city among the outcast poor, finds her speech become almost more punctiliously correct through shrinking from the lower forms used about her; but were the same woman to love and admire a man of an uncultured class and live ten years with him, her speech would inevitably be tinged by his. The child follows the speech of its mother; the lover of the loved.[20]

At least the fact is certain, whatever else may be doubtful, that within one generation after the arrival of the Huguenot at the Cape the language spoken by the people was neither Dutch nor French, but that broken dialect we call the Taal.

If our supposition be correct, and the Taal was indeed partly formed in the way we have suggested, then that curious affection of the Boer for his little cramped dialect, which makes it second only to South Africa as the object of his passionate devotion, becomes comprehensible, and not only understandable but almost pathetic when we regard it not as a speech picked up from the group at the kitchen doorway, but as inherited from the best of his early forbears, and first shaped by the lips of the young Huguenot mother as she bent over the cradle of her half Dutch child, striving to shape her speech in the new and father tongue. If this be so, then the Taal is indeed what the Boer so often and so vociferously calls it—his "Moedertaal"; and one is bound to regard his feeling for it as one regards the feeling of a woman for her mother's old wedding-gown and faded orange blossoms—they may be mouldy and unfit for present-day use, but her tenderness for them is a matter for profound sympathy rather than ridicule.

If our supposition be correct and the Huguenot truly helped in the formation of the Taal, then his influence over the Boer, and through him over South Africa, has been, as we have said, almost unlimited. For the Taal has largely helped to make the Boer what he is.

It has been to him what its spinal column is to a vertebrate creature, that on which its minor peculiarities depend, and the key to its structure. It has been the prime conditioning element in his growth, beside which all others become secondary.

Naturalists tell us that on certain isolated mountain peaks, or on solitary islands, surrounded by deep oceans, there are sometimes found certain unique forms of plant and animal life, peculiar to that one spot, and not to be found elsewhere on the earth; and that, further, there is nothing in the climate or the soil to account for the fact that this special little plant, or winged insect, or tortoise, should be found there and nowhere else. The whole fact is a mystery, till science makes a further discovery. It finds all over the surface of the earth, the fossilized remains of just such, or analogous plants or animals, and then the mystery is solved; and it is clear that our unique species have no particular relation to the spot in which they are found, nor have they been evolved through its influence. They are but the survivals of forms of life once universal, which have been preserved in those situations when the rest of their species perished, through the action of some isolating medium—the inaccessible height of the mountain crags or the width of the ocean—which has preserved them from the forces which have modified or destroyed their race elsewhere. Such a unique human species is the true South African Boer. Like the marsupials of Australia, or the mammoth tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, he is incomprehensible while we regard his peculiarities as evolved by the material conditions about him; he becomes fully comprehensible only when we recognize the fact that he is a survival of the past; that the peculiar faiths, habits, superstitions, and virtues now peculiar to him were once the common properties of all European peoples; that he is merely a child of the seventeenth century surviving on though modified by climate and physical surroundings into the nineteenth, and that the true isolating medium through which this remarkable survival has been effected has been mainly the Taal.

If in the struggle for existence between the different forms of speech in the early days of the Colony, either pure French or pure Dutch had conquered and become the language of the French-Huguenot settler, if he had inherited as his birthright any recognized form of literary European speech, the Boer as we know him could not have existed; and in the place of this unique and interesting child of the seventeenth century, wandering about on South African plains when almost all his compeers in Europe have vanished, we should have had merely an ordinary inhabitant of the nineteenth century. For when we come to consider it, it has not been only the nature of his life in South Africa nor his geographical severance from Europe which has been the cause of his peculiar mental attitude and social condition, and which divides him from the large body of the nineteenth century European folk.

That complexus of knowledge and thought, with its resulting modes of action and feeling, which for the want of a better term we are accustomed to call "the spirit of the age," and which binds into a more or less homogeneous whole the life of all European nations, is created by the action of speech and mainly of opinion ossified and rendered permanent, portable, in the shape of literature. Even in the middle ages it was through this agency that the solidarity of European life was attained. Slow as were the physical means of transport and difficult as in the absence of printing was the diffusion of literature, the interchange was enormous. Mainly through the medium of the Latin tongue, held in common by the cultured of all civilized European countries, thought and knowledge travelled from land to land more slowly, but not less surely, than to-day. The ambassador, the student, and the monk in their travels exchanged thoughts with the men of foreign countries through its medium, and the religious meditation poured forth by the monk in his cell in Spain, the romance shaped by the French poet, the chemical discoveries of the Italian professor, once committed to Latin manuscript, were the property of all Europe. In the pocket of the travelling monk or wandering scholar carefully preserved copies crept from land to land; from the learned class the knowledge of their contents filtered down to the wealthy, and from these to the people, till at last in the German cathedrals were sung the hymns of the Spanish monk, the Dutch chemist perfected the experiments of the Italian, and the romance of the Frenchman, translated from Latin into the colloquial tongues, was sung from end to end of Europe, beside peasant-hearths and baronial castles; and whether we study those centuries in Italy or England, in France or Spain, their spirit, though modified in each, is essentially one.

At the present day, though the use of a common literary tongue has ceased among us, the interchange of thought with its resulting unity is yet more complete. The printing-press, the electric-telegraph which gives to language an almost omnipresent voice, and above all, the habit of translating from one language into another whatever may be of general interest, are more completely binding all nations throughout the world where a literary speech prevails, into one body; until, at the present day, civilized men in the most distant corners of the earth are in some ways more closely united intellectually than were the inhabitants of neighbouring villages in the middle ages, or than savages divided by half a mile of forest are at the present day. The chemical discovery made to-day by a man of science in his laboratory and recorded in the pages of the scientific journal, is modifying the work in a thousand other laboratories throughout Europe before the end of the week. The picture or ideal of life, painted by the poet or writer of fiction, once clad in print travels round the globe, modifying the actions of men and women before the ink with which it was first written has well dried out; and the news that two workmen were shot at a strike in Hungary, committed to the telegraph wire, will, before night—and quicker than the feet of an old crone could have carried news from house to house in a village—have crossed from Europe to America and Australia, and before to-morrow half a million working men and women, separated from each other by oceans, will have cursed between their teeth. Probably to no man is the part played by literature in creating this unity in the civilized world so clear as to the writer himself, with whom it is often a matter not of intellectual interference, but of ocular demonstration. What he has evolved in a sleepless night in London or Paris, or as he paced in the starlight under the Southern Cross, if he commit it to writing and confide it to the pages of some English review will, within two months, have passed from end to end of the globe: the Europeanized Japanese will be reading it in his garden at Tokio; the colonist will have received it with his weekly mail; it will be on the library tables of England and America. Even if his thought be thrown into the more permanent form of the separate volume, it may be months or years, but if it be of value in itself, it will as surely go round the globe on the current of the European speech. The Australian will be found reading it at the door of his house on the solitary sheep-run; the London city clerk, as he rides through the fog in the omnibus, will take it from his pocket; the Scotch workman will spend his half-holiday over it; the duchess will have fingered it in her boudoir; the American girl may have wept over it, and the educated Hindu have studied it. A little later on if it have value, it will, through translation, pass the limits of national speech. The German student will be carrying it in his breast-pocket as he walks along the Rhine; and the French critic will be examining it with a view to to-morrow's article; the Russian will be perusing it in its French dress; and even the polygamous Turk, in his palace on the Bosphorus, will be scanning its pages between sips of coffee. Within a few years the writer may see on his table at the same moment a pile of letters from every corner of the globe, and from men of almost every race that commands a literature. The thoughts which have visited him in his solitary night will have brought him into communion, closer than any of physical contact, with men and women in every corner of the globe; and as he handles the little pile—dating from a British Residency at Pequ, a cattle-ranch in California, an unknown village in Russia—he realizes perhaps with surprise, that even his own slight thread of thought forms one of those long cords which, passing from land to land and from man to man, are slowly but surely weaving humanity into one. Perhaps to the modern writer alone is that "human solidarity," transcending all bounds of nation and race, for which the French soldier on the barricades of Paris declared it was necessary for him to die, not merely an idea, but a solid and practical reality. His kindred are not only those dwelling in the same house with him, but that band of men and women all the world over of whatever race or colour in whom his thought is germinating; for him almost alone at the present day is the circle of nationality, which for the ordinary man still shuts in so large a part of his interest and sympathies, obliterated by a still wider, which knows no distinction of speech, race, or colour—his readers are his people, and all literary peoples his fellow-countrymen.

So powerful, indeed, is the unifying effect of this interchange of thought that to-day the mental life of all countries sharing European literature may be compared to one body of water in a great inland sea; divided indeed into bays, gulfs and inlets, but permeated everywhere by the same currents and forming one common mass. The three large and almost international forms of speech, English, French and German, may well be compared to main currents, a particle committed to whose waves is instantly swept abroad everywhere; yet the smallest form of literary speech, such as the Dutch or Portuguese, does not shut out the people using it from the common interchange. Like little bays, divided from the main body by a low sand-bar, before which the waves of the outer currents may be delayed for a moment, but which they are sure to overleap sooner or later, bearing in all that the outer mass contains, and sweeping out to join the larger body all the deposits peculiar to the smaller, so into the smallest literary speech is sure to be borne, sooner or later, by means of translation, all of value that deposits itself in the larger life and literature of Europe, and all they have to contribute is borne out into the larger. The moralizings of a Russian reformer and the visions of the Norwegian playwright, for a moment confined within the limits of their narrower national tongues, are yet swept into the world-wide speeches and span the globe, adding an integral portion to "the spirit of the age," as certainly as though first couched in a world-wide tongue.

In this common life of literary European peoples, the African Boer has had, and could have, no part. Behind him, like a bar, two hundred years ago the Taal rose, higher and higher, and land-locked him in his own tiny lagoon. All that was common to the great currents of European life at the time of his severance from them, you will still find to-day in his tiny pool, if you take a handful of his mental water and analyse it, but hardly one particle of that which has been added since has found its way into him. His little speech, not only without literature, incapable of containing one, and comprehensible only to himself and his little band of compatriots, shut him off as effectively from the common growth and development of Europe as a wall of adamant. The superstitions, the virtues, the ideals of the seventeenth century, you will find faithfully mirrored in him; the growths, the upheavals, the dissolutions, the decays which have marked the nineteenth century have passed by without touching him in his Rip Van Winkle sleep behind his little Taal.

It is somewhat curious to reflect on all that he has missed. The Europe he left was a Europe still reddened by the fires that burned witches and heretics; Newton was a little child playing in Lincolnshire fields; Descartes had been in his grave two years; it was not twenty since Galileo had been obliged, before a Christian tribunal, to disclaim the heresy of the earth's movement; it was not fifty years since Bruno was burnt for asserting the unity of God and Nature, and Vanini at Toulouse for empiricism; and Calvin's murder of Servetus still tainted the spiritual air.

For the Boer, the awakening of human reason in the eighteenth century, with its stern demand for intellectual tolerance, and its enunciation of universal brotherhood, never existed. The cry for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, with which later on the heart of Europe leaped forth to grasp an ideal for which men's hands were not yet quite pure enough, but which rent the thunder-cloud of despotism brooding over Europe; the Napoleonic wars and the crash of thrones; the growth of physical science, re-shaping not only man's physical existence but yet more his social and ethical life, of these things the Boer behind his little Taal wall heard and felt nothing.

Even the rise of the commercial system during the last century, which has spread out its claw till it covers not only Europe, but is digging its nails into the muscular fibre of all the world, and which has enthroned in place of all the old ideals, national, religious and personal, simply one—wealth; and which seems to sit to-day, crowned over human life as no tyranny has ever done before—of this phase of modern life the Boer also knows nothing. He still believes there are things money cannot buy; that a man may have three millions of money in syndicate shares, and hold command over the labour of ten thousand workers, and yet be no better than he who goes out every morning in his leather trousers to tend his own sheep. Still less has the Boer caught the faintest sound of that deep whisper, which to-day is passing from end to end of the civilized world, questioning whether this commercial god be indeed the final god of the race; whether his throne might not yet fall as others have fallen before: a whisper which may at any moment break out into the wildest cry that has yet rung round earth—and humanity, breaking down the idol, may start on its march in search of a new shrine.

Of these two mighty movements, the one apparent and dominant everywhere, and the other silently riddling the ground beneath it into holes, till it sounds hollow beneath the foot—of these matters also the Boer knows nothing. As he is ignorant of the gracious and generous developments of the modern world, so he recks nothing of the diseases which have fastened on to it, or the reactions against them.

Even of those large external events which have marked the march of the civilized world during the last forty years few reports have reached him; or but a faint adumbration. The American Civil War of thirty-five years ago, when the foremost branch of the Anglo-Saxon peoples decided, amid a torrent of its own blood, what was to be the permanent attitude of advancing humanity on the greatest question of interhuman relations—of this he knows nothing. John Brown and Harper's Ferry are names as unfamiliar to him as Marathon and Thermopylæ; Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, Darwin, Whitman, Mill, Emerson, and Marx are as absolutely mere names to him as Jan Dikpens or Jan Bovenlander. Few of the stars shining over our heads now were in his firmament when he left Europe, nor was the dark shadow there which broods over us.

When one considers these things, then we understand our African Boer. There is then nothing puzzling in the fact that he, a pure-blooded European, descended from some of the most advanced and virile nations of Europe, and being no poor peasant crushed beneath the heel of others, but in many cases a wealthy landowner with flocks, herds, and crowds of dependents beneath him, and in his collective capacity governing States as large as European countries, should yet, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, possess on many matters a faith which has been outgrown by a London or Paris gamin; that he should hold fanatically that the sun does not move and repeat the story of Gideon to support his view; and that he often regards scab, itch, and various skin diseases affecting his stock as pre-ordained of an almighty intelligence which should not be interfered with by mere human remedies; that he looks often upon the insurance of public buildings as a direct insult to Jehovah, who, if he sends a fire to punish a people, should not be defeated by an insurance of the building;[21] that his faith in ghosts and witches is unshaken;—all this becomes comprehensible when we remember that his faiths, social customs and personal habits, so astonishing in the eyes of the modern nineteenth-century European, are nothing more than the survivals of the faiths and customs universal among our forefathers two hundred years ago; that they in no way originated with, or are peculiar to, the South African Boer.[22]

The fact that this survival, and his opposition to the modern spirit, is not merely the result of the Boer's geographical severance from Europe, and that it has largely depended on his little language, is made clearer when we glance at other emigrant European peoples. However far distant from Europe, in North America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, wherever a European race has settled, if it has not (as in the case of the Spanish and the Portuguese in their South African and South American colonies) mingled its blood largely with that of the aborigines, then that translated branch is found, not only to retain its connection with European life and growth, but in many cases to lead in that growth. It is often remarked on as matter for wonder in these colonies how large is the percentage of individuals taking the lead in the social, material and intellectual life, who were reared among circumstances which most widely severed them from the external and material conditions of modern civilization. But there is no cause for this wonder. The European emigrant who settles in the backwoods of a new country, may rear his family in primeval solitude, they may grow up on the roughest fare and the closest contact with untamed nature; the man may have no education and little time or aptitude for imparting to his son culture or learning, but his speech is one of the earth's great tongues, spoken by one in fifteen or one in twenty of the inhabitants of the globe, and his son inherits it. The mother or grandmother may teach the child his letters from an old primer, and, for the rest, his education may be only that which nature gives to the wildest of her children. He may grow up without the sight of a city, and beyond the reach of the touch of luxury; but he has in his hand the key to all nineteenth-century civilization. Should a chance traveller pass at intervals of months or years, the boy may listen eagerly to his conversation; and if he leaves behind him a tattered book or the torn page of a six months' old newspaper, or if the lad's mother unearth from the bottom of an old trunk a couple of brown volumes brought by her mother or grandmother from Europe, the boy can spell them out and pore over them, and gain a glimpse into the world beyond. If, at seventeen or eighteen, he tires of the life of the backwood and desires to see the life beyond, he has only to shoulder his bundle, and at the end of a hundred or thousand miles he finds himself in a city. All about him may be strange at first; he is awkward in act, slow in speech, but there is not a word or a sound in the world about him that is not modifying him; the talk of the men in the lodging-house, the arguments of the men in the public-bar, the chatter at the street corners, the newspapers he takes up, the cheap books he buys for a few pence, open the modern world to him. In six months' time he may only be distinguishable from the men about him by his greater vigour or the more quiet strength which a contact with inanimate nature has left him. In five years' time, if he have inherited will and intelligence, you may find him the rising man of business or the self-taught but cultured student; in ten or fifteen more he may be the learned professor, the railway king, the foreign ambassador, the president of a state, or the writer with a world-wide reputation. Given that a man inherits as his birthright some literary European speech and attains some elementary knowledge of its letters, and the civilized world is his oyster, the knife to open which he holds in his hand, if he have the strength to use it. No isolation among barbarous surroundings can sever a man from the life of Europe who keeps his hold on the language and literature. In the heart of Kaffirland to-day you may come across a solitary German trader's hut; the man who inhabits it has been twenty-five years severed from Europe; his material surroundings are little better than those of the barbarians around him; but on the shelf in the corner are a dozen old books, and in the drawer of the table he has a score of last year's reviews and papers. You are astonished by the passionate eagerness with which, as soon as he has lost his shyness, he proceeds to discuss, or rather to pour out his views on the world's greatest problems to you; and when he finds you have just returned from Europe, there is something pathetic in the range and child-like eagerness of his questions:—"What do they think in Europe, of the possibility of war between Russia and England?" "Did you see the new French actor who came out last year?"—whose name you, fresh from Europe have perhaps not even heard. "Is the Queen looking aged?"—and he draws out a little shilling guide to the year before last's picture gallery, and gives you his opinion of the little prints. While you are having your dinner of Kaffir corn or mealies and mutton he discusses the existing relation between France and Germany; and he asks your opinion on some detail connected with the last revolution in South America, of which you are perhaps obliged to confess you know nothing. He has read of it in all his papers. Twenty-five years of separation have not tended necessarily to sever the man from the life of Europe, but have rather sharpened his interest; and it would sometimes seem as though the denizen of some solitary outpost of civilization is apt to take a broader and more impartial view of civilization, as a whole, than he who in some world-centre of civilization, such as London or Paris, is apt to get too much dust in his eyes from the life immediately about him to be able to see far. The solitary white child, who grows up in the mission house on the banks of the Ganges, or the planter's home in the far Indies, may discover with astonishment when at last it finds itself in the heart of that civilization of which it has dreamed and for which it has panted, that from the old book-shelf with its score of volumes read and re-read and long pored over, and from the mail-bag arriving once a month, every scrap of whose news from the great outer world was carefully stored in childish memory and long dwelt on, it had learnt most of what London and Paris had to teach it; that what it had sucked out in its solitude was the true core of civilization; that what was left for it to consume further was principally the shell; for it would not be difficult to mention half-a-dozen books in any literary European language which, read a dozen times and pondered over, would make a man a true denizen of the nineteenth century in all that it holds of value, and enable him to reach the forefront of European life. A bee will make as sweet and as rich honey from one bunch of flowers as though you should give him a whole garden to choose from; its quality and sweetness will depend upon the nature of his own little tube—but you must give him that one bunch.

It is that one bunch that has been denied to the Boer.

For to the young Boer, growing up on an African farm and speaking nothing but the "Taal," this culture in solitude was impossible. If travellers passed, they might be Frenchmen, Germans, or Englishmen, but even their conversation was not comprehensible to him; if they left behind them book or newspaper, he could not decipher it; and the most brilliant effusions of an Amsterdam writer could reach him almost as little as an article in the Figaro or The Times. If his mother turned out of the old wagon-chest volumes brought from Holland or France by her grandmother, they could awaken no curiosity in him; they were not in the speech he used daily. The Dutch of Holland was as little a means of communication between himself and the outer world as the Greek of Plato is to a modern Greek peasant. If his mother taught him his letters, he had small use to make of them; even the great family Bible was in Dutch; and fifty years ago there was not one frontier Boer in thirty who could read or write, though he knew many passages of the Bible by heart and could repeat them with the book open before him.[23] Many could not even do this. If he had found himself in any great city of Holland or France he would not only have found himself alone, but an unintelligent barbarian. The Boer seldom came in contact with even the smart Colonial townsman of Dutch descent but he shrank from him, and crept back to his own people, who understood his speech, with more and more of clinging: they were his humanity, his world; beyond them was nothing.

One is sometimes asked to define exactly what the term "Boer" means. There is only one scientific definition for it; it signifies a South African European by descent whose vernacular is the Taal, and who uses familiarly no literary European language. It does not denote race of necessity; the Boer may be French, Dutch, German, or of any other blood—one of the most widely spread Boer families is Portuguese, and one Scotch in descent—neither does it of any necessity denote occupation; the word "Boer" means literally "farmer," and practically the Boer is often a farmer and stockowner; but he may also be a hunter, trader, the president of a republic, or of any other occupation—he remains a Boer still while the Taal remains his only familiar speech.

That the Boer himself accepts this definition, though without analysis, is clear; he will say of a man who has learned and uses habitually a literary speech, "His father was a Boer, and his brothers are still Boers," implying that he is one no more; and to call a learned judge or brilliant barrister, whatever his descent, a Boer, would be, from the Colonial standpoint, merely absurd. There is an old fairy tale which tells how an enchantress once muttered a spell against a certain city, and raised up about it in a moment an invisible wall, which shut it out from the sight and ken of all passers-by, rendering all beyond its walls invisible to the men and women within, and the city imperceptible to those from without. Such a wall has the Taal raised about the Boer—as long as it remains standing the outer world touches him not, nor he it; with how much of loss or gain who shall say!

Like those minute creatures, who, at a certain stage of their existence, form about themselves a hard coating, and in that condition may lie embedded in the animal tissues in which they are found for weeks, or years, without undergoing any change or growth; but who, if at any moment their cyst be ruptured, start at once upon a process of rapid evolution, developing new organs and functions, and bearing soon no resemblance to the encysted creature that has been—so the true old Boer has lain, encysted in his Taal, knowing nothing of change or modification; yet from the moment he breaks through it, evolution sets in rapidly; the child of the seventeenth century departs, and the child of the nineteenth century arrives—and the Boer is no more!

If it be asked whether the Taal, in making possible this survival of the seventeenth century in the Boer, has been beneficial or otherwise to South Africa, it must be replied that the question is too complex to admit of dogmatic answer.

If somewhere in Europe a small mediæval town had been miraculously preserved up to the present day, and were suddenly discovered in the nineteenth century, we might find much in it to condemn; its streets narrow; its houses overhanging, shutting out light and air, its drains non-existent; but over the doors of the houses we should find hand-made carving, each line of which was a work of love; we should see in the fretwork of a lamp-post quaint shapings such as no workman of to-day sends out; before the glass-stained window of the church we should stand with awe; and we might be touched to the heart by the quaint little picture above the church-altar; on every side we should see the material conditions of a life narrower and slower than our own, but more peaceful, more at one with itself. Through such a spot the discerning man would walk, not recklessly, but holding the attitude habitual to the wise man—that of the learner, not the scoffer.