but a feint to save the pain of uttering | bors to make an audience, an impromptu that one word, and that the meeting will never be! Should possibilities be worse to bear than certainties?" So all who love him, and who know the painful dislike he had to that word, are thankful that he was spared the agony of that last, long farewell.

supper had to be arranged for, and the day was one of continual bustle and excitement, and the rehearsals were the greatest fun imaginable. A dear old friend volunteered to undertake the music, and he played delightfully all through the acting. These charades made one of the pleasantest and most successful of New Year's evenings spent at Gad's Hill. But there were not only grown-up guests invited to the pretty, cheerful home. In letter to a friend Charles Dickens writes: "Another generation begins to peep above the table. I once used to think what a horrible thing it was to be a grandfather. Finding that the calamity falls upon me without my perceiving any other change in myself, I bear it like a man." But as he so disliked the name of grandfather as applied to himself, those grandchildren were taught by him to call him "Venerables." And to this day some of them still speak of him by this self-invented name.

Almost the pleasantest times at Gad's Hill were the winter gatherings for Christmas and the New Year, when the house was more than full, and the bachelors of the party had to be "put up" in the vil-a lage. At these times Charles Dickens was at his gayest and brightest, and the days passed cheerily and merrily away. He was great at games, and many of the evenings were spent in playing at yes and no, proverbs, Russian scandal, crambo, dumb crambo—in this he was most exquisitely funny and a game of memory, which he particularly liked.

have been all taught to know his likeness, and taught to know his books by the pic. tures in them, as soon as they can be taught anything, and whose baby hands lay bright flowers upon the stone in Westminster Abbey, every June 9 and every Christmas Eve. For in remembrance of his love for all that is gay in color, none but the brightest flowers, and also some of the gorgeous American leaves, sent by a friend for the purpose, are laid upon the grave, making that one spot in the midst of the vast and solemn building bright and beautiful.

The New Year was always welcomed with all honors. Just before twelve o'clock everybody would assemble in the hall, and he would open the door and Now there is another and younger famstand in the entrance, watch in handily who never knew "Venerables," but how many of his friends must remember him thus, and think lovingly of the pic ture! -as he waited, with a half-smile on his attentive face, for the bells to chime out the New Year. Then his voice would break the silence: with A Happy New Year to us all." For many minutes there would be much embracing, hand-shaking, and good wishing; and the servants would all come up and get a hearty shake of the hand from the beloved "master." Then hot spiced wine would be distributed, and good-health drunk all round. Sometimes there would be a country dance, in which the host delighted, and in which he insisted upon every one joining, and he never allowed the dancing and real dancing it was too to flag for an instant, but kept it up until even he was tired and out of breath, and had at last to clap his hands, and bring it to an end. His thorough enjoyment was most charming to witness, and seemed to infect every one present.

One New Year's Day at breakfast, he proposed that we should act some charades, in dumb show, that evening. This proposal being met with enthusiasm, the idea was put into train at once. The different parts were assigned, dresses were discussed, "properties were col lected, and rehearsing went on the whole day long. As the home visitors were all to take part in the charades, invitations had to be sent to the more intimate neigh

In a letter to Plorn before his departure for Australia, Charles Dickens writes: "I hope you will always be able to say in after life, that you had a kind father." And to this hope, each one of his chil dren can answer with a loving, grateful heart, that so it was.

From The Nineteenth Century. THE SAVAGE.

THERE are people in the world who are very fond of asking what they call pointblank questions. They generally profess to hate all shilly-shallying, and they are at no pains to hide their suspicion that any one who declines to say yes or no to any question which they choose to ask has either his intellect clouded by metaphysics

or has not the courage of his opinions. | the case, will probably always remain so. The idea that it is often more difficult to ask a sensible question than to answer it, and that a question, however pointed it may sound, may for all that be so blunt and vague that no accurate and honest thinker would care or dare to answer it, never enters their mind; while the thought that there are realms of knowledge where indefinite language is more appropriate, and in reality more exact and more truthful than the most definite phraseology, is scouted as mere fencing and intellectual cowardice.

If we want to prove that man began as a child, what evidence can we produce? If we appeal to history, history is impossible before the invention of language; and what language could the primitive child have spoken, what life could it have lived, without a father and without a mother? If we give up history and appeal to our inner consciousness, our reason, nay, our very imagination, collapses when ap proaching the problem how such a child could have been born, how such a child could have been nourished, reared, and protected from wild animals and other dangers. We feel we have come to the end of our tether, and are running our head against a very old, but a very solid, wall.

One of those point-blank questions which has been addressed to ine by several reviewers of my books is this, "Tell us, do you hold that man began as a savage or not?" To say that man began as a savage, and that the most savage and de- Has Kant then written in vain; and is graded races now existing present us with it still supposed that our senses or our the primeval type of man, seems to be the reason can ever reach transcendent shibboleth of a certain school of thought, truths? Has the lesson to be taught a school with which on many points again and again that both our senses and sympathize, so long as it keeps to an ac- our reason have their limits; that we are curate and independent inquiry into facts, indeed tethered, and that it is no proof of and to an outspoken statement of its dis-intellectual strength or suppleness to try coveries, regardless of all consequences, to stand on our own shoulders? We are but from which I totally dissent as soon as it tries to make facts subservient to theories. I am told that my own utter ances on this subject have been ambiguous. Now even granting this, I could never understand why a certain hesitation in answering so difficult a question should rouse such angry feelings, till it began to dawn on me that those who do not unre servedly admit that man began as a sav age are supposed to hold that man was created a perfect and almost angelic being. This would amount to denying the gospel of the day, that man was the offspring of a brute, and hence, I suppose, the anath

ema.

Now I may say this, that though I have hesitated to affirm that man began as a savage, whatever that may mean, I have been even more careful not to commit myself to the opinion that man began as an angel, or as a child, or as a perfect rational being. I strongly object to such alternatives as that if man did not begin as a savage he must have begun as a child. It would be dreadful if, because there is no sufficient evidence to enable us to form a decided opinion on any given subject, we were to be driven into a corner by such alternatives, instead of preserving our freedom of judgment until we have the complete evidence before us.

But in our case the evidence is as yet extremely scanty, and, from the nature of

so made that neither can our senses perceive nor can our reason conceive the real beginning and end of anything, whether in space or in time. And yet we imagine we can form a definite conception of the true beginning of mankind.

Then what remains? There remains the humbler and yet far nobler task of studying the earliest records of man's life on earth: to go back as far as literature, language, and tools will allow us, and for the time to consider that as primitive which, whether as a tool, or as a word, or as a proverb, or as a prayer, is the last we can reach, and seems at the same time so simple, so rational, so intelligible, as to require no further antecedents. That is the true work of the historian, and of the philosopher too; and there is plenty of work left for both of them before they dive into the whirlpool of their inner consciousness to find there the primordial savage.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven into a corner by such a question as "Did man begin as a savage or as a child?" we have a perfect right to ask the question, What is meant by these two words, savage and child?

Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of savage, and to draw a sharp line between a savage and a nonsavage? Has any one ever attempted to define the meaning of child, if used in op

position to savage or brute? Have we been told whether by child is meant a suckling without a mother, or a boy who can speak and count and reason without a father? Lastly, are savage and child really terms that mutually exclude each other? May not a savage be a child, and may not a child be a savage?

How, then, is any one who has given serious thought to the problem of the origin of mankind to answer such a question as "Tell me, do you hold that man began as a savage or as a child?"

tion than they established. The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop; and some of the Maori poems and proverbs may rightly claim a place by the side of English popular poems and proverbs. Nothing is gained if it is said that a savage is the opposite of a civilized When we read some of the more recent man. Civilization is the product of the works on anthropology, the primordial uninterrupted work of many generations; savage seems to be not unlike one of and if savage meant no more than an unthose hideous india-rubber dolls that can civilized man, it is no great discovery to be squeezed into every possible shape, say that the first man must have been a and made to utter every possible noise. savage. No doubt he could not have been There was a time when the savage was acquainted even with what we consider held up to the civilized man as the inhabi- the fundamental elements of civilization, tant of a lost paradise — a being of in- such as the arts of reading, writing, and nocence, simplicity, purity, and nobility. arithmetic. His dress must have been Rousseau ascribed to his son of nature all very scanty, his food very primitive, his the perfection which he looked for in vain dwelling very uncomfortable, his family in Paris and London. At present, when life very unrestrained. And yet, for all so many philosophers are on the look-out that, he might have been very far removed for the missing link between man and from the brute; nay, he might have been beast, the savage, even if he has estaba perfect man, doing his duty in that state lished his right to the name of man, can- of life into which it pleased God to call not be painted black enough. He must him. be at least a man who maltreats his women, murders his children, kills and eats his fellow-creatures, and commits crimes from which even animals would shrink.

This devil-savage, however, of the present anthropologist is as much a wild creation of scientific fancy as the angel-savage of former philosophers. The true science of man has no room for such speculations. | Sometimes the history of a name can take the place of its definition, but this is hardly so in our case. The Greeks spoke of barbarians rather than of savages, and the Romans followed their example, though they might possibly have called the national heroes and sages of Germany and Britain not only barbari but feri — that is, savages not very far removed from fera, or wild beasts. Our own word sav. age, and the French sauvage, meant orig inally a man who lived in the woods, a silvaticus. It was first applied to all who remained outside the cities, who were not cives, or civilized, and who in Christian times were also called heathen- that is, dwellers on the heath.

But all this does not help us much. Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilizaVOL. XLIX. 2519

LIVING AGE.

Civilization, as it is well known, is as vague a term as savagery. When Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, the representative of Greek civilization, stood before the naked philosophers of India, who were iλóßio, dwellers in the forest, can we hesi tate to say which of the two was the true savage and which the sage? To the New Zealander who has been brought into contact with European civilization, his former so-called savage life seems to have gained little by recent improvements. A grand Maori chief, reputed to have been one of the strongest men in his youth, thus speaks of the old days: †

In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory; we lived in pas placed high upon the mountains. The men looked: and the young people cultivated the fields. to war as their only occupation, and the women We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the Pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds

Charles Hawley, Addresses before the Cayuga County Historical Society, 1883-84, p. 31.

↑ The King Country; or, Explorations in New Zea

land, by T. H. Kerry; see Nicholls in the Academy, Aug. 23, 1884, p. 113.

This is the view which a so-called sav. age takes of the benefits of European It is the fashion to quote against these civilization as contrasted with the content-favorable statements cases of cruelty comment and happiness in which his fore- mitted by the Red Indians or the New fathers had passed through this life. Let Zealanders in their wars among themus now hear what a highly educated American, a scholar and a philosopher, Mr. Morgan, says of the character of the Iroquois, who are often quoted as speci

mens, which might have been considera | are brought forward as distinctive of a bly increased, that we shall make no step savage, they can always be met by counin advance if we continue to use the word ter instances, showing that each definition savage so vaguely as it has been hitherto would either include races whom no one used. To think is difficult, but it becomes dares to call savage or exclude races utterly impossible if we use debased or whom no one dares to call civilized. It false coin. I have been considered too used to be imagined that the use of letters inquisitive for venturing to ask anthropol was the principal circumstance that disogists what they meant by a fetish, but I tinguishes a civilized people from a herd must expose myself once more to the of savages incapable of knowledge or resame reproach by venturing to ask them flection. Without that artificial help, to to state plainly what they mean by a sav-quote the words of Gibbon, "the human age. memory soon dissipates or corrupts the Whatever other benefits a study of the ideas committed to her charge, and the science of language may confer, there is nobler faculties of the mind, no longer one which cannot be valued too highly-supplied with models or with materials, namely, that it makes us not only look at words, but through words. If we are told that a savage means an uncivilized man, then, to say that the first man was a savage is saying either nothing or what is self-evident. Civilization consists in the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of men, and to say that the first generation of men was uncivilized is therefore pure tautology. We are far too tolerant' with respect to such tautologies. How many people, for instance, have been led to imagine that such a phrase as the survival of the fittest contains the solution of the problem of the survival of certain species and the extinction of others? To the student of language the survival of the fittest is a mere tautology, meaning the survival of the fittest to survive, which is the statement of a fact, but no solution of it.

It is easy to say that the meaning of savage has been explained and defined by almost every writer on anthropology. I know these explanations and definitions, but not one of them can be considered as answering the requirements of a scientific definition.

Some anthropologists say that savage means wild and cruel. But in that case no nation would be without its savages. Others say that savages are people who wear little or no clothing. But in that case the greatest philosophers, the gymnosophists of India, would have to be classed as savages. If it means people without a settled form of government, without laws and without a religion, then, go where you like, you will not find such a race. Again, if people who have no cities and no central government are to be called savages, then the Jews would have been savages, the Hindus, the Arabs, the ancient Germans, and other of the most important races in the history of the world. In fact, whatever characteristics

gradually forget their powers, the judg ment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular." Such arguments might pass in the days of Gibuon, but after the new light that has been thrown on the ancient history of some of the principal nations of the world they are no longer tenable.

No one would call the ancient Brahmans savages, and yet writing was unknown to them before the third century B.C. Homer, quite apart from his blindness, was certainly unacquainted with writing for literary purposes. The ancient inhabitants of Germany, as described by Tacitus, were equally ignorant of the art of writing as a vehicle of literature; yet for all that we could not say, with Gibbon, that with them the nobler faculties of the mind had lost their powers, the judgment had become feeble, and the imagination languid.

And as we find that the use of letters is by no means an indispensable element of true civilization, we should arrive at the same conclusion in examining almost every discovery which has been pointed out as a sine quâ non of civilized life. Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilized life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilized to-day may be called barbarous to-morrow. Races who abstain from eating the flesh of animals are apt to look on carnivorous people as savages; people who abstain from intoxicating drinks naturally despise a nation in which drunkenness is prevalent. What should we say if we entered a town in which the streets were neither paved nor lighted, and in which the windows were without glass; where we saw no carriages in any of the thoroughfares, and where, inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen might be seen eating without forks and