II

"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?"--WHITMAN.   "We find ourselves to-day in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to the most optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us, indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the various races of man have to pass through… . "While History tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy condition. In other words, the development of human society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in the process we call Civilisation; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested."--EDWARD CARPENTER, Civilisation: its Cause and Cure.

O’MALLEY himself is an individuality that invites consideration

from the ruck of commonplace men. Of mingled Irish, Scotch, and

English blood, the first predominated, and the Celtic element in him

was strong. A man of vigorous health, careless of gain, a wanderer,

and by his own choice something of an outcast, he led to the end the

existence of a rolling stone. He lived from hand to mouth, never quite

growing up. It seemed, indeed, that he never could grow up in the

accepted sense of the term, for his motto was the reverse of nil

admirari, and he found himself in a state of perpetual astonishment at

the mystery of things. He was for ever deciphering the huge horoscope

of Life, yet getting no further than the House of Wonder, on whose

cusp surely he had been born. Civilization, he loved to say, had

blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision.

An ardent lover of wild out-door life, he knew at times a high,

passionate searching for things of the spirit, when the outer world

fell away like dross and he seemed to pass into a state resembling

ecstasy. Never in cities or among his fellow-men, struggling and

herded, did these times come to him, but when he was abroad with the

winds and stars in desolate places. Then, sometimes, he would be rapt

away, caught up to see the tail-end of the great procession of the

gods that had come near. He surprised Eternity in a running Moment.

For the moods of Nature flamed through him—in him—like

presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with

meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea

with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy

peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a

splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused

probably by a spiritual remoteness from their mood.

The Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature’s moods

were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these

singular states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide the

gateways of his deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his

smaller self into her own enormous and enveloping personality.

He possessed a full experience, and at times a keen judgment, of

modern life; while underneath, all the time, lay the moving sea of

curiously wild primitive instincts. An insatiable longing for the

wilderness was in his blood, a craving vehement, unappeasable. Yet for

something far greater than the wilderness alone—the wilderness was

merely a symbol, a first step, indication of a way of escape. The

hurry and invention of modern life were to him a fever and a torment.

He loathed the million tricks of civilization. At the same time, being

a man of some discrimination at least, he rarely let himself go

completely. Of these wilder, simpler instincts he was afraid. They

might flood all else. If he yielded entirely, something he dreaded,

without being able to define, would happen; the structure of his being

would suffer a nameless violence, so that he would have to break with

the world. These cravings stood for that loot of the soul which he

must deny himself. Complete surrender would involve somehow a

disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it

the loss of personal identity.

When the feeling of revolt became sometimes so urgent in him that

it threatened to become unmanageable, he would go out into solitude,

calling it to heel; but this attempt to restore order, while easing

his nature, was never radical; the accumulation merely increased on

the rebound; the yearnings grew and multiplied, and the point of

saturation was often dangerously near. “Some day,” his friends would

say, “there’ll be a bursting of the dam.” And, though their meaning

might be variously interpreted, they spoke the truth.