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Updated: May 3, 2025
The over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot wait for wealth to be amassed by infinitesimal gains, and we are in haste to SPECULATE upon the powers of nature, as we do upon objects of bargain and sale in our trafficking one with another.
But as we from the west suffer not a little from over-civilization and artifice, it is grateful to repose the eyes and the aesthetic sense in a land where there still remains something of the antique simplicity and picturesque uncouthness, and the winter in Scheria remains one of the grateful memories of a wandering life.
In Theocritus and Sannazzaro this objective point is supplied by the delight of escape from the over-civilization of the city; in Petrarch and Mantuan, by their allegorical intention; in Sacchetti and Lorenzo, by the contrast of town and country, with all its delicate humour; in Boccaccio and Poliziano, by the opening it gave for golden dreams of exquisite beauty or sensuous delight; in Tasso, by the desire of that freedom in love and life which sentimental philosophers have always associated with a return to nature.
Not a vice which is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of over-civilization," but originated before man was man. To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed position, settled duties and rights.
For authority she had as little reverence as a savage; yet she was not a savage, for she represented instead the perfect product of over-civilization. The world was bounded for her by her own personality. She was supremely interested in what she thought, felt, or imagined, and beyond the limits of her individuality, she was frankly bored by existence.
"I ask for nothing better," replied the gladiator, and withdrew, without any word or gesture of salutation, in truth, despising the Roman in his heart as deeply for what he deemed his over-craftiness and over-civilization, as the more polished Greek did, for what on his side he considered the utter absence of both.
Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two phases of society, a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements.
Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride old John, you'll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red-tape one. Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut, I fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches.
Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two phases of society, a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements.
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