Denis Diderot - Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville

I Judgment on the Voyage of Bougainville

A.: That superb starry vault, under which we came back yesterday, and which seemed to promise a fine day, has not kept its word.
B.: And what do you know about it?
A.: The fog is so thick that it forbids us even the sight of the neighbouring trees.
B.: True. But suppose this fog, which only remains in the lower part of the atmosphere because it is considerably charged with damp, falls back on the earth ?
A.: And suppose on the contrary it traverses the sponge, gains the upper region where the air is thinner and (as the chemists say) resists saturation.
B.: We must wait and see.
A.: And what are you doing while you wait?
B.: Reading.
A.: Always that voyage of Bougainville?
B.: Yes.
A.: I do not understand the man at all. The study of mathematics, which presupposes a sedentary life, filled his early years. Now he passes suddenly from a life of meditation and retirement to the active, painful, wandering and distracted profession of a traveller.
B.: Not at all. His vessel is only a floating house. After all, the navigator travels enormous distances, shut up and motionless in quite a narrow space. He makes the tour of the globe on a plank as you and I make the tour of the universe on your floor.
A.: There is another apparent subject for surprise, the contradiction between the character of the man and his undertaking. Bougainville is fond of the amusements society can offer. He likes women, theatres, good food. He gives himself over to the whirl of the world, with as good grace as to the inconstancy of the elements upon which he has been tossed. He is good-natured and light-hearted; a typical Frenchman, ballasted on one side with a treatise of differential and integral calculus, and on the other with a voyage round the globe.
B.: He is like everybody else. He distracts himself after concentration and concentrates after distraction.
A.: And what do you think of his Voyage ?
B.: As far as I can judge from a quite superficial reading, I should say it was specially helpful in three ways. It affords us a better knowledge of our old home and its inhabitants; greater security on the seas he traversed sounding-lead in hand, and greater accuracy in our geographical charts. Bougainville started with the necessary knowledge, and the qualities suitable to that knowledge: philosophy, courage, truth, a power of rapid summing-up, which seizes on things and shortens the necessary period of observation: circumspection, patience; the desire to see, to clear his mind, to be instructed, knowledge of the calculus, mechanics, geometry, astronomy, and an adequate tincture of natural history.
A.: And what about his style ?
B.: No nonsense about it. The tone of the thing is simplicity and clearness, especially when one is familiar with the language of sailors.
A.: Was his journey a long one ?
B.: I have traced it on this globe. You see this line of red points
A.: Which starts from Nantes ?
B.: Yes, and runs to the Straits of Magellan, enters the Pacific, winds between the islands forming that immense archipelago which stretches from the Philippines to New Holland, skirts Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope, continues into the Atlantic, follows the coast of Africa, and joins up one of its extremities to that from which the navigator embarked.
A.: He suffered a deal of hardship.
B.: Every navigator exposes himself, and willingly, to peril of air, fire, earth and water. But that after having wandered months together between sea and heaven, death and life: after being struck by tempests, threatened with death by wreck, illness, shortage of food and water, a poor wretch should arrive with his ship smashed, and fall expiring with fatigue and misery at the feet of a brazen monster who refuses him the most urgent remedies or mercilessly makes him wait, that indeed is hard.
A.: It is a crime that ought to be punished.
B.: One of those calamities on which the traveller has not counted.
A.: And should not have to count. I thought the European powers sent to govern their possessions overseas only honourable natures, benevolent men, souls filled with humanity and capable of sympathy.
B.: That is the last thing they care about!
A.: There are some curious things in this Voyage of Bougainville
B.: Plenty.
A.: Does he not assert that wild animals come up to men, and birds come to settle on them, before they have learned the danger that springs from such familiarity ?
B.: Others have said that before him.
A.: How does he explain the fact that some animals inhabit islands separated from the main land by terrifying stretches of sea ? Who brought the wolf there, or the fox, the dog, the stag, the snake ?
B.: He explains nothing. He merely states the fact.
A.:. And you, how do you explain it ?
B.: Who knows the first history of our globe ? How many stretches of land, now isolated, were once joined up ? The only phenomenon about which one could form some conjecture is the direction taken by the mass of waters which has separated them:
A.: And how so ?
B.: From the general lines followed by the erosion. Some day we will amuse ourselves with this study, if you care to. And now, look at that island called The Lancers [Also called Akiaki, a tiny island in the Low Archipelago, N.E. from New Zealand.]. Everyone who observes its position on the globe wonders who placed men there: what ties formally bound them to the rest of their species: what happens to them as they multiply on an area not more than two miles in diameter.
A.: They kill and eat each other. And here, perhaps we see a first period of cannibalism which would be very ancient and quite natural, insular in origin.
B.: Or multiplication of the species is limited by some superstitious law: there the infant is crushed in the body of its mother, who is trampled under foot by a priestess.
A.: Or the man expires with his throat cut, under the knife of the priest: or men have recourse to the castration of males.
B.: And the infibulation of females. From this springs many a custom of a strange inevitable cruelty, of which the cause is lost in the night of time and becomes a matter of torture to philosophers. One thing has been consistently observed. Supernatural and divine institutions strengthen themselves and become eternal, by becoming transformed in the long run into civil and national laws, while civil and national institutions become consecrated, and degenerate into supernatural and divine precepts.
A.: That is one of the gloomiest of all vicious circles.
B.: One strand the more to add to the cord that binds us.
A.: Was he not in Paraguay just at the moment when the Jesuits were expelled ?
B.: Yes.
A.: What does he say about it ?
B.: Less than he might. But enough to tell me that these cruel Spartans in the black jacket used their Indian slaves as the Lacedemonians did their helots: condemned them to continual toil: made them drink their own sweat; and allowed them no right of property: kept them in degraded superstition; exacted from them profound veneration: strode among them whip in hand, and struck without distinction of age or sex. A hundred years more and their expulsion would have been impossible or entailed a long war between the monks and their sovereign, whose authority they had bit by bit thrown off.
A.: And those Patagonians about whom Doctor Maby and La Condamine of the Academy have made such a to-do ?
B.: Very good fellows who come up and hug you, crying Chaoua. Strong, vigorous, and yet rarely more than six foot high: with nothing gigantic about them, but their corpulence, the size of their heads, and the thickness of their limbs. Man is born with love for the marvellous and exaggerates everything round him. How should he then keep his sense of proportion about things, when he has, so to speak, to justify his journey and the trouble he has taken in going so far to see them ?
A.: And what does he think of the savage ?
B.: Apparently the cruel character sometimes observed in him is due to his daily war of defence against the animal creation. He is always innocent and gentle where nothing troubles his repose and security. All wars originate in a common claim to the same piece of property. Civilized man has a common claim along with another civilized man to the possession of a field, where they already occupy the two ends. And this field becomes a subject of dispute between them.
A.: And the tiger has a common claim, along with the savage man, to the possession of a forest. This is the first claim and the cause of the earliest of wars. Have you seen the Tahitien whom Bougainville took on board and brought back here?
B.: Yes. He was called Aotourou. He took the first piece of land he saw for the home of the travellers. Either they had lied to him about the length of the journey, or else he was deceived quite naturally by the apparently small distance between the shores of the sea, by which he dwelt, to the spot where the sky seemed to merge in the horizon, and knew nothing about the real measurement of the earth. The holding of women in common was a custom so well established in his mind that he threw himself on the first European woman he met, and very seriously intended to show her the courtesy of Tahiti. He grew bored with us. As the Tahitien alphabet has neither b, c, d, f, g, x, y nor z he could never learn to speak our language. It offered his rigid organs too many strange articulations and new sounds. He never stopped sighing after his own country, and I am not surprised at it. The voyage of Bougainville is the only one to give me the taste for a country other than my own. Till I had read it, I had always thought that one was nowhere so contented as at home; a state of mind which held good, I thought, for each inhabitant of the globe; and which sprang quite naturally from the charm of the soil, and the comforts which gather round the conveniences one enjoys and is not equally sure of finding elsewhere.
A.: What! Do you not think that the inhabitants of Paris are as sure that corn grows in the Roman Campagna as in the fields of the Beauce ?
B.: No, I do not. Bougainville sent back Aotourou, after providing for his expenses and the safety of his journey.
A.: O Aotourou! How happy wilt thou be to see once more thy father, thy mother, thy brothers, thy sisters, thy mistresses, thy compatriots! What wilt thou tell them of us?
B.: Very little, and that they will not believe.
A.: Why very little?
B.: Because he has taken in very little, and because he will find in his own language no terms corresponding to that little of which he has gathered some notion.
A.: And why will they not believe him?
B.: Because after comparing their own customs to ours, they will rather think Aotourou a liar than believe we are so mad.
A.: Really ?
B.: No doubt of it. Savage life is so simple and our societies are such complicated mechanisms. The Tahitien is near the origin of the world, the European near its old age. The interval which separates him and us is greater than that between the child at birth and the tottering old man. He understands nothing of our laws and customs or only sees in them impediments disguised in a hundred forms, impediments which can excite only the indignation and contempt of a being in whom the sentiment of liberty is the deepest of all.
A.: Do you want to weave a fable round Tahiti?
B.: This is no fable: and you would have no doubt as to the sincerity of Bougainville if you knew the supplement to his voyage.
A.: And where is this supplement to be found?
B.: There, on that table.
A.: Will you trust me with it?
B.: No. But we can run through it together if you like.
A.: Certainly, I like. See, the fog is falling again and the blue of the sky is beginning to appear. It seems my fate to be in the wrong with you about the smallest things. I must be very good-natured to overlook such an unfailing superiority as yours.
B. Come, come, read. Skip the preamble, which is unimportant, and, go straight on to the farewell addressed by the chief of the island to our travellers. That will give you some idea of these people's eloquence.
A.: How did Bougainville understand these farewells pronounced in a language he did not know?
B.: You will see. It is an old man talking.

II The Old Man's Farewell

He was the father of a large family. On the arrival of the Europeans, he cast looks of disdain at them, showing neither astonishment, fright, nor curiosity. [The presence of this old man and his attitude to the Europeans are mentioned by Bougainville.] They came up to him: he turned his back on them and retired into his cabin. His silence and his anxiety revealed his thoughts too well. He groaned within himself over the happy days of his country, now for ever eclipsed. On the departure of Bougainville, as the inhabitants rushed in a crowd on to the beach, attached themselves to his clothing, hugged his comrades in their arms and wept, this old man advanced, severe in mien, and said: "Weep, luckless Tahitiens weep, but for the arrival not for the departure of these ambitious and wicked men. One day you will know them better. One day they will return, holding in one hand the morsel of wood you see attached to this man's belt, in the other, the iron which hangs from that man's side: they will return to throw you into chains, to cut your throats, or to subject you to their extravagance and vices: one day you will serve under them, as corrupted, as vile, as luckless as they. One consolation I have. My life is drawing to its close. And the calamity I announce to you, shall not see. O Tahitiens, my friends, there is one method which might save you from your tragic future. But I would rather die than advise it. Let them withdraw and live." Then addressing Bougainville, he added :

"And thou, chief of the brigands who obey thee, quickly push off thy vessel from our shore. We are innocent; we are happy: and thou canst not but spoil our happiness. We follow the pure instinct of nature: thou hast sought to efface its character from our souls. Here all things belong to all men. Thou hast preached some strange distinction between thine and mine. Our daughters and our wives were held in common by us all: thou hast shared this privilege with us, and thou hast come and inflamed them with frenzies unknown before. They have lost their reason in thy arms. Thou hast become ferocious in theirs. They have come to hate each other. You have slaughtered each other for them: they have come back stained with your blood. We are free: and see thou hast planted in our earth the title of our future slavery. Thou art neither god nor demon. Who art thou then to make slaves? Orou! thou who understandest the language of these men, tell us all as thou hast told me, what they have written on this metal blade! This country is ours. This country is thine! And why? Because thou hast set foot there? If a Tahitien disembarked one day upon your shores, and graved upon one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees: This country belongs to the inhabitants of Tahiti, what wouldst thou think of such a proceeding? Thou art the stronger! But what of that? When someone took from you one of those rubbishy trifles with which your hut is filled, thou didst cry out and take thy revenge. Yet at that moment thou wast projecting in the depth of thy heart the theft of a whole country. Thou art not a slave. Thou wouldst suffer death rather than become one, yet us thou wouldst enslave. Thinkest thou then that the Tahitien cannot defend his liberty and die? He, whom thou wishest to seize like an animal, the Tahitien, is thy brother. You are both children of nature. What right hast thou over him that he has not over thee? Thou art come. Did we fall upon thee? Did we pillage thy ship? Did we seize thee and expose thee to the arrows of our enemies? Did we yoke thee to our animals toiling in the fields? No. We have respected our image in thee. Leave us our customs. They are wiser and more honourable than thine. We have no wish to barter what thou callest our ignorance against thy useless knowledge. We possess all that is necessary and good for us. Do we deserve contempt because we have not known how to fabricate for ourselves wants in superfluity? When we are hungry we have enough to eat; when we are cold the means to clothe ourselves. Thou hast entered our cabins. What, in thy opinion, is lacking? Pursue as long as thou wilt what thou callest the commodities of life. But permit sensible beings to stop, when by continuing their painful labour they will gain but imaginary good. If thou persuadest us to cross the narrow limit of necessity, when shall we stop working? What time will be left over for enjoying ourselves? We have reduced to the smallest possible the sum of our annual and daily toil, because to us nothing seems better than repose. Go back to thine own country to trouble and torment thyself as much as thou wilt. Trouble us neither with thy artificial needs, nor thy imaginary virtues. Look at these men: how straight, healthy, and robust they are! Look at these women. How straight, healthy, fresh and fair they are. Take this bow. It is mine. Call to help thee, one, two, three, four of thy comrades and try to bend it. I bend it myself alone. I plough the earth. I climb the mountain. I pierce the forest. I cover a league of the plain in less than an hour. Thy young companions can scarcely follow me, and I am ninety years old and more. Woe to this island! Woe to all Tahitiens present and to come for the day of this thy visit! We only know one illness that to which man, animal and plant have been condemned, old age: and thou hast brought to us another. Thou hast infected our blood. Perhaps we shall have to exterminate with our own hands, our daughters, our wives, our children: the men who have approached thy women: the women who have approached thy men. Our fields will be damp with the impure blood which has passed from thy veins into ours: else our children will be condemned to nourish and perpetuate the ill thou hast given to their fathers and mothers and to transmit it for ever to their descendants. Wretch! thou wilt be guilty of the ravages that follow thy fatal embraces or of the murders we shall commit to check the poison! Thou speakest of crimes! Knowest thou a greater than thine own? What with thee is the punishment for the man who kills his neighbour? Death by iron. And what for the coward who poisons him? Death by fire. Compare thy crime to this latter one, and tell us, poisoner of nations, the punishment thou deservest. A moment ago the young Tahitien maiden abandoned herself with transport to the embraces of the Tahitien boy: she waited with impatience till her mother (authorized by her reaching the nubile age), raised her veil and bared her throat. She was proud to excite the desires or to fix the amorous gaze of the stranger, her parents or her brother. She accepted fearlessly and shamelessly, in our presence, midst a circle of innocent Tahitiens, to the sound of flutes, between the dances, the caresses of him her young heart and the secret voice of her senses had chosen. The idea of crime and the danger of disease have come with thee amongst us. Our pleasures, formerly so sweet, are accompanied by remorse and terror. That man in black, next you, who listens to me, has spoken to our boys. I know not what he has said to our girls. But our boys hesitate: our girls blush. Plunge if thou wilt into the dark forest with the perverse partner of thy pleasures, but allow the good and simple Tahitiens to reproduce without shame, in the face of heaven and the open day. What sentiment more honourable and greater couldst thou find to replace the one we have breathed into them and which animates their lives? They think the moment has come to enrich the nation and the family with a new citizen and they glory in it. They eat to live and grow. They grow to multiply, they find there neither vice nor shame. Listen to the succession of thy crimes. Scarcely hadst thou appeared among them, but they turn thieves. Scarcely hadst thou descended on our soil, but it smoked blood. That Tahitien who ran to meet thee, who greeted thee, who received thee crying Taio, friend, friend: you killed him. And why, did you kill him? Because he had been seduced by the glitter of thy little serpents' eggs. He gave thee his fruits: he offered thee his wife and daughter: he yielded thee his cabin. And thou hast killed him for a handful of these grains, which he took from thee without asking . And this people? At the sound of thy deadly firearms, terror seized them and they fled into the mountain. But understand they would have speedily come down again. Without me you may be sure you would all have perished in an instant. Why have I calmed, why have I restrained them? Why do I restrain them even now? I do not know. For thou deservest no sentiment of pity. Thou hast a ferocious soul which never felt it. Thou didst walk, thou and thine, in our island: thou hast been respected: thou hast enjoyed everything: thou hast found in thy way neither barrier nor refusal: thou wast invited in: thou sattest down: there was laid out before thee the abundance of the country. Didst thou wish for our young girls? Save for these, who have not yet the privilege of showing face and throat, their mothers presented thee them all quite naked. Thine the tender victim of hostly duty. For her and for thee the ground hast been scattered with leaves and flowers: the musicians have tuned their instruments: nothing has troubled the sweetness nor hindered the liberty of her caresses or thine. The hymn was chanted, the hymn which exhorted thee to be a man and our child to be a woman, a woman yielding and voluptuous. There was dancing round your bed, and it is on leaving the arms of this woman, after feeling on her breast the sweetest rapture, that thou hast killed her brother, her friend, her father perhaps. Thou hast done worse still. Look this way. See this enclosure stiff with arms: these arms which had only menaced our enemies, they are turned against our own children: see the wretched companions of our pleasures: see their sadness. See the grief of their fathers: the despair of their mothers. In that place they have been condemned to perish by our hands or by the ills that thou hast done them. Withdraw unless thy cruel eyes take pleasure in spectacles of death: withdraw, go, and may the guilty seas which have spared thee in thy voyage gain their own absolution and avenge us by swallowing thee up before thy return. And you, Tahitiens, return to your cabins every one of you and let these unworthy strangers hear on their departure but the moaning wave, and see but the foam whose fury whitens a deserted beach."

He had scarcely finished, but the crowd of inhabitants had disappeared. A vast silence reigned over all the island. Nothing was heard but the shrill whistle of the winds and the dull noise of the water along all the coast. One might have thought that air and water, responsive to the old man s voice, were happy to obey him.

B.:Well, what do you think of it?
A.: A vehement discourse. But for all its somewhat abrupt and savage style I seem to detect in it European ideas and turns of speech.
B.: You must realize that it is translated from Tahitien into Spanish, and from Spanish into French. The old man had gone at night to this Orou, whom he questioned and in whose hut the use of the Spanish tongue had been preserved from time immemorial. Orou had written out the old man's speech in Spanish and Bougainville had a copy of it in his hand, while the Tahitien spoke it.
A.: So far I see only too well why Bougainville suppressed this fragment. But that is not everything, and I am very curious about the rest.
B.: The sequel will not interest you so much perhaps. A.: No matter. B.: It is a conversation between the ship's chaplain and a native of the island.
A.: Orou?
B.: The same. When Bougainville's vessel approached Tahiti, an infinite number of hollowed trees were thrown on the water. In a moment his ship was surrounded by them. Wherever he looked, he perceived demonstrations of surprise and kindness. Wood was thrown and arms extended to him. Men attached themselves to cords and climbed up the planks. His launch was full of them. The cried towards the beach and their cries were answered. The natives of the island came running up. Now everyone is on shore. They seize the crew and divide them out. Each took his own choice into his hut. The men hugged them by the waist: the women stroked their cheeks with their hands. Put yourself in the crew's position. Witness with your mind's eye this scene of hospitality and give me your opinion of the human race.
A.: A delightful one.
B.: I nearly forgot to mention a curious incident. This scene of benevolence and humanity was suddenly interrupted by the cries of a man calling out for help, the servant of one of Bougainville's officers. Some of our Tahitiens had thrown themselves at him, stretched him on the ground, taken his clothes off, and were preparing to show him the final courtesy.
A.: What! these simple people, these good worth savages?
B.: You are quite wrong. This servant was a woman disguised as a man, a fact that was never discovered by a single member of the crew during the whole period of their long voyage. But the Tahitiens divined her sex at the first glance. She came from Burgundy and was called Barre, neither pretty nor ugly, and twenty-six years old. She had never left her village and her first notion of a journey was to go round the world. She always showed good sense and courage.
A.: These slender mechanisms sometimes encase very strong souls.

III Conversation of the Chaplain and Orou

B.: In the division which the Tahitiens made of Bougainville's crew, the chaplain fell to the lot of Orou. They were about the same age, thirty-five to thirty-six. Just then Orou had at home only his wife and three daughters, Asto, Palli and Thia. These undressed him, washed his face, hands and feet, and served him a healthy and frugal meal. When he was about to go to bed, Orou, who had gone away with his family, reappeared, presented his wife and three daughters quite naked and said:

Thou hast had supper, thou art young and in good health. Sleep alone, and thou wilt sleep badly. Man needs a companion by his side at night. Here is my wife, here are my daughters. Take your choice. But you would oblige me by fixing for preference on my youngest daughter, who has not yet had a child.
" The mother added: "Alas!Alas! But it is no good complaining. Poor Thia, it is not her fault."
The chaplain replied that his religion, his calling, good morals and honourability forbade him to accept these offers.
Orou replied: "I do not know what thou meanest by religion, but I cannot think well of it, if it forbids thee to enjoy an innocent pleasure, to which nature, the sovereign mistress, invites us all -- to give existence to one like thee: to render a service that father mother and children ask of thee; to make a fitting return to a host who has welcomed thee warmly and to enrich a nation, by increase, with one subject the more. I do not know what thou meanest by thy calling. But thy first duty is to be a man and grateful. I dare not suggest that thou carry away into thy country the morals of Orou. But Orou, thy host and friend, beseeches thee to lend thyself to the morals of Tahiti. Are the morals of Tahiti better or worse than yours? It is a question that can be easily settled. Has the country of thy birth more children than it can feed? In that case thy morals are neither better nor worse than ours. Can it feed more than it has? Then our morals are better than thine. As for the honourability thou objectest against me, I understand thee. I admit my fault and hope to be forgiven. I do not ask thee to damage thy health. If thou art tired, thou must rest. But I hope thou wilt not continue to sadden us. See the care thou hast spread on all these faces. They fear thou hast remarked in them some faults which have made thee disdain them. But even so, would not the pleasure of honouring one of my daughters, among her companions and sisters, and doing a good action, make up for this? Be generous."
THE CHAPLAIN: It is not that: they are all four equally beautiful: but my religion! but my calling!
OROU: They belong to me and I offer them to thee. They are their own and they give themselves to thee. Whatever may be the purity of conscience which the thing religion and the thing calling prescribe, thou canst accept them without scruple. I do not abuse my authority; thou mayest be certain I know and respect the rights of men.

Here the candid chaplain admits that never had Providence enforced him to so formidable a temptation. He was young: he was excited: he was tormented. He diverted his eyes from the charming suppliants: but always brought them back again. He raised his hands and his eyes to heaven. Thia, the youngest, embraced his knees, and said:

"Stranger, afflict not my father, afflict not my mother; afflict not me. Honour me in the hut and among my people. Raise me to the rank of my sisters, who laugh at me. Asto, the eldest, has three children already, Palli, the second, two, and Thia none at all. Stranger, honest stranger, do not rebuff me: make me a mother: give me a child whom one day I may lead by the hand, beside me, in Tahiti; who may be seen, in nine months' time, hanging from my breast: one of whom I may be proud and take with me as part of my dowry, when I pass from my father's cabin to another's. Perhaps I shall have more luck with thee than with our young Tahitiens. Grant me this favour and I will never forget thee: I will bless thee all my life. I will write thy name on my arm and on that of thy son. We will pronounce it unceasingly with joy. And when thou shalt quit this shore, my wishes shall go along with thee over the sea, till thou art arrived in thine own country."

The frank chaplain adds that she clasped his hands and gazed on him with the most touching and expressive looks: that she wept: that her father, mother, and sisters withdrew: that he remained alone with her and after repeating "But my religion, but my calling" he found himself next day lying beside this girl, who overwhelmed him with caresses and invited father, mother, and sisters, when they approached the bed, to join their gratitude to hers. Asto and Palli, who had gone away, returned with the food of the country, drink and fruit. They embraced their sister and offered up their vows for her. They breakfasted together and then Orou, who remained alone with the chaplain, said:

"I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?" The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman. OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone. OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion. CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another? CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws. CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."
CHAPLAIN: What steps do you take for looking after your sons and daughters during adolescence?
OROU: That is the chief object of domestic education and the most important point of public morals. Our boys, until the age of twenty-two, two or three ears after the age of puberty, remain covered with a long tunic, their waist encircled by a small chain. Before they are nubile, our girls would never dare go out without a white veil. Taking off the chain or raising the veil are faults rarely committed because our children are early taught the bad results that will ensue. But as soon as the male has reached his full strength, his symptoms of virility are continuous, and we are sure about the frequent effusion and the quality of the seminal fluid: the moment the girls become pale and listless, are sufficiently mature to conceive desires and to inspire and satisfy them usefully, the father removes the chain from his son, and cuts the nail of the middle finger of his right hand. The mother lifts up her daughter's veil. Now the one can solicit a woman and be solicited. The other can walk publicly with her face uncovered and her throat bare to accept or refuse a man's caresses. We merely indicate first to the boy the girl he should prefer and vice versa. In the case of a girl, the evening before, the young men assemble round the hut, and the air resounds all night with song and the noise of instruments. At daybreak she is led by her father and mother into an enclosure where there is dancing, displays of jumping, wrestling and racing. The male is exhibited naked before her, from every angle and in every attitude. In the case of boys, the girls pay them the honours and labour of the feast and expose to their regard the naked woman without reserve or secret. The rest of the ceremony finishes on a bed of leaves as thou sawest on thy arrival amongst us. At nightfall the girl returns to her parent's cabin or passes into the cabin of him she has chosen and remains there as long as she will. CHAPLAIN: So this festival may or may not be a marriage-day?
OROU: Exactly.

A.: What is that I see there in the margin?
B.: It is a note in which the worthy chaplain says that the precepts of the parents on the choice of the boys and girls were full of very subtle and useful observations: but he has suppressed this part of the enquiry as it would have appeared unpardonably licentious to people as corrupt and superficial as ourselves. He added, however, that he regretted having had to cut down these details, as we might have observed from their study, first the point a nation, which concentrates in a single object, can reach in its researches, without the help of physics or anatomy, and secondly the differing ideas of beauty in people, who associate the human form with a moment's gratification and those who regard it rather from the aspect of utility and permanence. In Europe, in order to be beautiful, a woman must have a brilliant complexion, a broad forehead, large eyes, refined and delicate features, a slender waist, a small mouth, small hands, a small foot. Here practically none of these qualities are considered. The woman on whom glances fix and who is pursued by lovers is the one who holds out the promise of a large family (the woman of Cardinal D'Ossat), at once active, intelligent, brave, healthy and robust. There is practically nothing in common between the Venus of Athens and that of Tahiti. One is the gallant, the other the fruitful Venus. A Tahitien woman once said with contempt to another native "You are beautiful, but your children are ugly. I am ugly, but my children are beautiful, and I am the one the men prefer"

After this note by the chaplain, Orou continues:

OROU: The happiest moment for a girl and her parents is when her pregnancy is remarked. She gets up: she runs around: she throws her arms round the neck of her mother and father: with transports of joy she announces and they learn the event. "Mamma, dear Papa. Kiss me! I am pregnant!" "Is it true?" "Quite true." "And by whom?" "By So and so."
CHAPLAIN: How can she tell who the father is?
OROU: How not? Our loves last as long as our marriages. At the least from moon to moon.
CHAPLAIN: And is this rule scrupulously observed?
OROU: You shall judge. First of all, the space of time between two moons is not a long one. But when two fathers have a well-founded claim to the paternity of a child, it does not belong to its mother any longer.
CHAPLAIN: To whom does it belong then?
OROU: To the one of the two claimants she prefers. This is the beginning and the end of her privileges and a child being in itself an object of value and a source of wealth, thou wilt understand that with us loose women are rare and young men keep away from them.
CHAPLAIN: So you, too, have your loose women. I am glad to hear it.
OROU: We have even more than one kind: but you are taking me away from my subject. When one of our girls is with child, if the father is a handsome young man, well-built, brave, intelligent and hard- working, the hope that the child will inherit his father's virtues only adds to the general happiness. Our child is only ashamed if she has made a bad choice. Thou must understand the importance we attach to health, beauty, strength, industry, courage: thou must understand how, without our interference, the prerogatives of blood are forcibly perpetuated amongst us. Thou who hast journeyed in different countries, tell me, hast thou remarked in any of them as many handsome men or lovely women as in Tahiti? Look at me! What is thy opinion of me? Well, there are here ten thousand men taller and as strong, but not one braver than me: and so the mothers often indicate me to their daughters.
CHAPLAIN: But how many children come to thee of all those thou hast had outside thy cabin?
OROU: The fourth, be it male or female. We have established among ourselves a circulation of men, women and children, or rather arms of all ages and capacities, which is far more important than your merchandise, which is only the product of them.
CHAPLAIN: I understand. But what are those black veils I sometimes see?
OROU: The mask of barrenness, either a fault of birth or the consequence of advanced age. She who drops this veil and mingles with men is a loose woman, and the man who raises the veil and approaches a sterile woman is a libertine.
CHAPLAIN: Have you punishments for these libertines?
OROU: Only the punishment of disapproval.
CHAPLAIN: Can a father sleep with his daughter, a mother with her son, a brother with his sister, a husband with another man's wife?
OROU: Why not?
CHAPLAIN: We may tolerate fornication. But incest! But adultery!
OROU: What do you mean by these words fornication, incest, adultery?
CHAPLAIN: Crimes, terrible crimes, for any one of which men are burnt in my country.
OROU: I do not mind if people are burnt in thy country or not. But thou shalt not judge the morals of Europe by those of Tahiti nor those of Tahiti by thine own. We need a surer rule: and what shall that rule be? Do you know any other except the general good and private usefulness? Now tell me what there is contrary to our two ends of human action in thy crime incest? Thou art mistaken, my friend, if you thinkest all is said once a law is published, an ignominious word invented or a torture decreed. Answer me then, what meanest thou by incest?
CHAPLAIN: But an incest . .
OROU: An incest? Is it so long ago that thy great workman without head, hands and tools made the world?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Did he make the whole human race at once?
CHAPLAIN: No, he only made a woman and a man.
OROU: Did they have children.
CHAPLAIN: Certainly.
OROU: Suppose these two first parents had only had daughters, and their mother died the first, or that they only had sons, and the woman lost her husband.
CHAPLAIN: That is a difficult question. But say what thou wilt, incest is an abominable crime. And now let us talk of something else.
OROU: Thou art pleased to say so. For myself, I express no opinion until thou tellest exactly what this abominable crime of incest is.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. I admit that perhaps incest does not go against nature. But is not the fact that it is a menace to the political order sufficient? What would become of the safety of the chief and the tranquillity of the state if a whole nation composed of several million persons found itself revolving round fifty heads of families?
OROU: The worst that could happen would be that instead of one big society there would be fifty small ones, more happiness and one crime the less.
CHAPLAIN: I suppose, however, that even here a son does not often sleep with his mother.
OROU: Not unless he has a great deal of respect for her, and a tenderness which makes him overlook difference of age and prefer a woman of forty to a girl of nineteen.
CHAPLAIN: And the union of fathers and daughters?
OROU: Are hardly more common, unless the daughter be ugly and in small demand. If the father loves her, he sets to work to prepare her a dowry of children.
CHAPLAIN: All this leads me to think that those whom nature has not favoured cannot be very happy in Tahiti.
OROU: Which shows thou hast no very high opinion of our young men's generosity. CHAPLAIN: As to the union of brother and sister. I suppose that is quite common.
OROU: And highly approved.
CHAPLAIN: From what thou sayest, this passion, the source of so many crimes and ills in our country must seem quite innocent to you.
OROU: Stranger, thou art without judgment and memory. Judgment, for whenever a thing is forbidden, one is naturally tempted to do it and one does it, and memory, for thou dost not remember what I told thee. We have dissolute old women who go out by night without their black veil and receive men when nothing can come of their connection. If they are recognized or caught they are punished with banishment to the north of the island as slaves: and we have precocious girls who remove their white veil without their parents' knowledge (and we have for them an enclosure in the hut): also we have young men who lay aside their chains before the time prescribed by nature and the law (and we reprimand their parents): we have women for whom the time of pregnancy is too long; unscrupulous women and girls who throw off their grey veils. But to tell the truth, we attach no great importance to any of these faults: thou canst have no notion how much the idea of private and public wealth, which is associated in our minds with the idea of population, purifies our morals in this matter.
CHAPLAIN: But are not disorders occasioned by the passion of two men for the same woman or of two women or girls for the same man?
OROU: I have not seen half a dozen examples. The man's or woman's choice finishes everything. Violence on the part of the man would be a serious fault. But a public complaint would be necessary, and it is almost unheard of for a woman or a girl to complain. All I have observed is that our women have less pity for ugly men than our young fellows for ill-favoured women. And that we do not mind.
CHAPLAIN: So I see you hardly know what jealousy is. But marital tenderness, motherly love, these two sentiments, so powerful and so sweet, must be fairly weak here if not quite unknown.
OROU: We have made up for them with another one, far more general, energetic and lasting, self interest. Put thy hand upon thy conscience: leave out this fanfaronade of virtue which is for ever on the lips of thyself and thy comrades and which resides not in the bottom of their hearts. Tell me, if in any country in the world there exists a father, who save for the shame that restrains him, would not rather lose his son, a husband, who would not rather lose his wife than his fortune and his worldly comfort. And be sure that wherever man is attached to the preservation of one like him, as he is to his bed, his health, his repose, his cabin, his fruits, his fields, he will do his utmost for him. It is here that tears damp the couch of the suffering child ; it is here that mothers are nursed in sickness: it is here that we prize a fruitful wife, a nubile daughter, an adolescent boy. It is here that we are busy with their establishment, because their preservation is always an increase, their loss a diminution of wealth.
CHAPLAIN: I am afraid this savage is right. The wretched peasant of our country, who overworks his wife to spare his horse, allows his children to perish without assisting them, and calls in the doctor for his ox.
OROU: I do not quite understand what thou hast just said: but on thy return to thy admirably regulated country, try to introduce this motive, and then people will appreciate the value of the child who is born and the importance of population. Wouldst thou have me reveal thee a secret? Let it go no further. You all arrive. We abandon you our wives and daughters: you are astonished. You show a gratitude that makes us laugh. You thank us when we are levying on thee and thy compatriots the heaviest of all impositions. We have not asked thee for money. We have not hurled ourselves on thy merchandise. We have despised thy goods. But our wives and daughters have come to squeeze out the blood from thy veins. When thou goest away, thou wilt have left us children behind thee. In thy opinion is not this tribute on thy person and on thy substance better than any other? If thou wouldst realise its worth, remember that thou hast two hundred leagues of coastline to traverse and that every twenty miles thou wilt be subject to the same tax. We have vast fields lying fallow. We have no arms to exploit them and we have asked thee for them. We have calamitous epidemics to make good and we have employed thee to repair the gaps they will leave. We have hostile neighbours to fight and need of soldiers; so we have asked thee to provide them. Our wives and daughters are too numerous for the men and we have associated thee in our task. Among our wives and daughters are some from whom we cannot breed and these we exposed first to your embraces. We have to pay a debt in men to a tyrannical neighbour: thou and thy comrades will meet the bill. And in five or six years we shall send them your sons, if they be not as good as ours. We are more robust and healthy than you ; but we perceived you surpassed us in intelligence and immediately we decided that some of our fairest wives and daughters should gather in the seed of a race which is better than our own. It is an experiment we have made which may well be profitable. We have extracted from thee and thine the only advantage possible. And, believe me, savages as we are, we also know how to calculate. Go wherever thou wilt, and man will always be as subtle as thyself. He will never give thee anything save that which he does not want, and he will always ask for something useful from thee. If he gives thee a piece of gold for a piece of iron, it is that he cares nothing for gold and values iron. But now tell me why art thou not clothed like the others? What signifies that long cassock, which envelops thee from head to foot, and that pointed sack that thou lettest fall over thy shoulders or pullest over thy ears?
CHAPLAIN: The reason is, that such as I am, I am one of a society of men, called in my country monks. The most sacred of their vows is to have no dealings with women and not to have any children.
OROU: What do you do then?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing.
OROU: And thy magistrates tolerate this, the worst of all forms of idleness?
CHAPLAIN: More than that, they respect and make others respect it.
OROU: First, I had thought that nature, an accident or some cruel act had deprived you of the power to produce one in your image. And by pity, they preferred letting you live to killing you. But, monk, my daughter told me thou wert a man and a man as robust as any in Tahiti: further she had hopes thy repeated caresses would not be fruitless. Now that I understand why thou calledst out yesterday evening "But my religion, but my calling," perhaps thou wilt tell me the reason for the favour and respect that the magistrates allow thee.
CHAPLAIN: I do not know.
OROU: But at least thou knowest why, being a man, thou hast willingly condemned thyself not to be one.
CHAPLAIN: That would be too long and difficult to explain.
OROU: And is the monk always faithful to this vow of barrenness?
CHAPLAIN: No .
OROU: I was sure not. Have you also female monks?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: And are they as virtuous as the males?
CHAPLAIN: They are more hedged in. They wither with grief and perish of boredom.
OROU: And so the injury done to nature is avenged! What an unhappy country ! If everything is arranged on the same basis, you are far more barbarous than us.
The worthy chaplain tells us he spent the rest of the day touring the island and visiting the cabins. In the evening after supper father and mother besought him to sleep with their second daughter, and Palli presented herself in the same undress as Thia. Several times during the night he cried out "But my religion, but my calling," and the third night he was stirred by the same remorse with the eldest, Asto. The fourth night, as in honour bound, he consecrated to the wife of his host.

IV Continuation of the Dialogue

A.: I respect this polite chaplain.
B.: And I rather the morals of the Tahitiens and the speech of Orou.
A.: Though a trifle European in style.
B.: Undoubtedly.

At this point the worthy chaplain regrets the shortness of his stay in Tahiti, and the difficulty of getting to know better the customs of a people sufficiently wise to stop of their own accord at mediocrity or lucky enough to enjoy a climate whose fertility guaranteed them a prolonged laziness, active enough to be beyond the absolute needs of life and indolent enough for their innocence, repose and felicity to have nothing to fear from a too rapid advance in knowledge. There nothing was condemned by public opinion or law save what was condemned by nature. Village work and harvesting were done in common. The meaning attached to the word propertywas very restricted: the passion of love, by its reduction to a simple physical appetite, produced none of the disorders it does with us. The whole island presented the picture of a single large family and each cabin seemed more like different rooms in one of our big houses. He ended up by protesting that the Tahitiens will always be present in his memory, that he had been tempted to throw his clothes into the ship and pass the rest of his life among them; and that he is afraid of repenting more than once of not having done so.

A.: For all his eulogium, what conclusions can be usefully drawn from the morals and strange customs of an uncivilized people?
B.: I see that as soon as certain physical causes, as, for instance, the necessity of defeating an ungrateful soil, have brought out the intellectuality in man, this impulse carries him far beyond his goal, and once the limits of need passed, he is carried out into the boundless ocean of his phantasies from which he is never pulled back. May the lucky Tahitien stop where he is! For except in this distant nook of the globe, I perceive there never have been any morals and perhaps never will be anywhere.
A.: What do you mean, then, by morals?
B.: I mean general submission to, and conduct consequent on, laws good or bad. If the laws are good, morals are good. If the laws are bad, morals are bad. And if the laws, be they good or bad, are not observed, which is the worst of all social conditions, there are no morals at all. Then how do you wish laws to be observed when they are contradictory? Run through the history of the centuries, of nations both ancient and modern, and you will find man in subjection to three codes, the natural code, the civil code, the religious code, and bound to infringe these three codes in turn, as they never agree. So it happens, as Orou guessed about ours, that in no country is there a natural man, a citizen or a pious person.
A.: From which you will doubtless conclude that if we base morals on the eternal relations subsisting between men, perhaps the religious law becomes unnecessary and the civil need only be the enunciation of the natural law.
B.: Certainly unless we would multiply wicked men instead of making good ones.
A.: Or, if we must keep all three, the two last should be strict copies of the first, which we carry graved on the bottom of our hearts, and which will always be the stronger.
B.: That is not accurate. All we bring with us at birth is an organism like that of others, the same needs, a delight in the same pleasures, and a common aversion from the same sins. This is what makes up man as he is and should be the basis of a morality suited to him.
A.: That is far from easy.
B.: It is, in fact, so difficult that I would gladly believe the most savage nation in the world, the Tahitien, who has observed most strictly the natural law, to be nearer a satisfactory system of law than any civilized people.
A.: Because it is easier for the Tahitien to rid himself of his excessive rusticity than for us to turn back on our paces and reform our abuses.
B.: Especially those that relate to the union of the sexes.
A.: Perhaps. But let us begin at the beginning. Let us question nature frankly, and listen: without partiality to the answer she will make on this point.
B.: Agreed.
A.: Is marriage natural?
B.: If you mean by marriage the preference a female accords to one man above all the rest, or which one male accords to one female above all the rest, a mutual preference as a result of which there is formed a more or less lasting union, which perpetuates the species by the reproduction of individuals, yes, then marriage is natural.
A.: I agree with you. For this preference is observed not only in the human species but in other kinds of animal, as is witnessed by that large band of males who pursue the same female at springtime in the country, and only one of which gains the title of husband. What about gallantry?
B.: If you mean by gallantry that variety of forceful or subtle devices inspired in either male or female by passion, which aims at obtaining the preference leading to the sweetest, the most important and the most widespread of pleasures, then gallantry is natural.
A.: I agree with you. It is attested by that diversity of prettinesses practised by the male to please the female, and by the female to stimulate the passion and fix the inclination of the male. And coquetry?
B.: A lie, which consists in simulating a passion one does not feel and in promising a preference one will not grant. The male coquette plays with the female, the female coquette with the male, a treacherous game, entailing at times disastrous consequences, a ridiculous trickery for which deceiver and deceived are equally punished by the loss of the most precious moments of their lives.
A.: So according to you coquetry is not natural.
B.: I do not say that.
A.: And constancy
B.: I cannot improve on the words of Orou to the chaplain ; it is the poor vanity of two children, who do not know themselves and are blinded by the intoxication of a moment to the instability of all around them.
A.: And fidelity, that rare phenomenon?
B.: With us generally the obstinacy and self torture of honest men and women: nothing in Tahiti.
A.: And jealousy?
B.: The passion of a needy miserly animal in fear of want: an unjust feeling in men; the consequence of our bad morals, and of the right of property extended to a feeling, thinking, wishing, free being.
A.: So, according to you, jealousy is not natural.
B.: I do not say that. All vices and virtues are equally natural.
A.: The jealous man is gloomy.
B.: Like the tyrant, because he knows his fault.
A.: And modesty
B.: You are engaging me in a course of lectures on the code of gallantry. Man would rather not be either interrupted or distracted in the course of his pleasures. Those of love are followed by a weakness, which abandons him to the mercy of his enemy. That is all that can be natural in modesty. The rest is due to institutions.
A.: The chaplain remarks in the third morsel, which I have not read you at all, that the Tahitien does not blush at those involuntary movements which are excited in him beside his wife and among his daughters: and that his daughters, when spectators of them, are sometimes much moved, never embarrassed. As soon as women became male property and the furtive enjoyment of a girl was considered a theft, we find the phrases modesty, restraint, propriety came into being, quite imaginary virtues and vices. In a word, society wished to raise up barriers between the two sexes which should prevent their inviting each other to violate the laws imposed on them, barriers which often produced the opposite effect by heating the imagination and stimulating desire. When I see trees planted round our great houses and a neckpiece which reveals part of a woman's neck, I seem to recognize a secret return towards the forest and an appeal to the first liberty of our former home. The Tahitien would say to us, "Why do you cover yourself up? What are you ashamed of? Are you doing wrong by yielding to the most august of natural impulses? Man, show yourself frankly, please. Woman, if this man suits you, receive him with equal frankness."
B.: There is no need to be angry. We may begin as civilized men: we nearly always finish as Tahitiens.
A.: But there is need. These conventional preliminaries take up half the time of a man of genius.
B.: But what does it matter as long as this pernicious impulse of the human spirit, against which you were crying out just now, is today considerably weakened? One of our present-day philosophers, asked why men courted women, not women men, answered it was natural to ask the person who could always give.
B.: That reasoning has always appeared to me more specious than solid. Nature, indecent if you will, inclines one sex without distinction towards the other. And when man is in the brutal savage state, which can be imagined, though it perhaps exists nowhere --
A.: Not even in Tahiti?
B.: No, the distance separating a man from a woman would be crossed by the most amorous. If they hang back, if they run away, if they pursue, if they avoid each other, if they attack, if they defend themselves, it is because passion, progressing at different rates, does not reside in them with equal force. So it happens that pleasure increases, is consumed and dies in the one, when it has hardly begun to operate in the other, and both parties are discontented. That is the faithful picture of what would occur between two young, free, and perfectly innocent beings. But when a woman has learnt by experience or education the more or less painful consequences of one sweet moment, her heart trembles at a man's approach. A man's heart does not tremble. His senses command and he obeys. A woman's senses explain and she fears to listen. It is the man's business to divert her from her fear, to intoxicate her and seduce her. Man retains all his natural impulse towards woman. The natural impulse of a woman towards a man varies, as a mathematician would say, directly as passion and inversely as fear, a ratio which is complicated by a multitude of diverse elements in our societies, elements which nearly all go to increase cowardice in one sex and length of pursuit in the other. It is a kind of tactic in which the resources of defence and the means of attack have developed on parallel lines. We have sanctified the resistance of the woman: we have attached disgrace to the violence of the man. Violence would be only a slight offence in Tahiti. It becomes a crime in our towns.
A.: But how has it come about that this act, so solemn in its object, and to which nature invites us by the most pressing of attractions, the greatest, the sweetest, and the most innocent of pleasures, has grown to be the most fruitful source of all our depravity and evil?
B.: Orou explained it a dozen times to the chaplain. Listen to him again and try to remember it.
By the tyranny of man, who has turned the possession of a woman into a right of property.
By manners and customs, which have overweighted the conjugal union with conditions.
By civil laws, which have subjected marriage to an infinity of formalities.
By the nature of our society, in which difference of rank and fortune have introduced the proper and improper.
By a strange contradiction, common to all existing societies, by which the birth of a child, which was always regarded as an increase of wealth for the nation, is now more often and more certainly an increase of poverty for the family.
By the political views of sovereigns, who have related everything to their own interest and safety.
By religious institutions, which have attached the names of vice and virtue to actions not susceptible to moral treatment.
How far we are from nature and happiness! The empire of nature cannot be destroyed. However much you handicap it with obstacles it will endure. Write as much as you please on tables of bronze (to use the expression of the wise Marcus Aurelius), that the pleasurable friction of two intestines is a crime, the heart of man will still be torn between the threats on your inscriptions and the violence of its own leanings. This untutored heart will not cease to cry out, and a hundred times in the course of life your terrifying inscriptions will disappear before our eyes. Engrave upon marble: Thou shalt not eat the dodo or the gryphon: thou shalt only know thy wife: thou shalt not be the husband of thy sister; and do not forget to increase the punishment to suit the strangeness of the discipline. You will become cruel yourselves, but you will not succeed in changing my nature.
A.: How short the code of nations would be if it conformed rigidly to the law of nature. How many errors and vices man would be spared!
B.: Would you like an abridged account of almost all our wretchedness? Here it is. There existed a natural man. There was introduced into this man an artificial man: and a civil war, enduring the whole of life, arose in the cavern. Sometimes the natural man is the stronger, sometimes he is struck down by the moral and artificial man. In either case the poor monster is pulled about, pinched with tweezers, tortured, stretched on the wheel, ceaselessly groaning, ceaselessly unhappy, either because a false enthusiasm for glory transports and intoxicates him or because a false humiliation curbs and depresses him. But still there are some exceptional circumstances which restore man to his first simplicity.
A.: Wretchedness and sickness, two great exorcisers.
B.: You have named them right. And then what happens to all our conventional virtues! In wretchedness a man has no remorse, in sickness no woman is modest.
A.: I have observed it.
B.: There is another phenomenon which will not have escaped you either. The return of the moral, artificial man follows step by step the progress from the state of sickness to that of convalescence and from the state of convalescence to that of health. The moment the illness is over, the internal struggles begin again and the intruder is nearly always vanquished.
A.: That is true. I have myself experienced that the natural man, when convalescent, enjoys a vigour fatal to the artificial moral man. But finally tell me, ought we to civilize man or abandon him to instinct?
B.: Must I answer you straight?
A.: Yes.
B.: If you aspire to be a tyrant, civilize him. Poison him as best you can with a morality contrary to nature. Put every kind of hindrance in his path. Embarrass his movements with a thousand obstacles. Attach terrifying spectres to him. Perpetuate the war in the cavern and see to it that the natural man is always enchained there under the foot of the moral artificial man. Do you wish him to be happy and free? Then do not meddle in his affairs. There will be quite enough unforeseen accidents to lead him to knowledge and depravity. One thing you may always be sure of. These wise law-givers have moulded and fashioned you to what you are not in your interests but in their own. I appeal to all political, civil, and religious institutions. Look below the surface. And unless I am very much mistaken you will find the human race from century to century bent beneath the yoke it pleased a handful of rascals to impose on it. Mistrust the man who comes to bring order. Order is always a means of getting control of other people by embarrassing them: and the Calabrians are almost the only people who have not been tricked by the flattery of law-givers
A.: And you like this anarchy in Calabria?
B.: I appeal to experience, and dare swear their barbarism is less vicious than our urbanity. How many small meannesses go to equal the atrocity of a few great crimes about which so much pother is made? I regard uncivilized men as a multitude of scattered and isolated springs. Naturally if two of these springs crashed together, one or other or both would break. To obviate their inconvenience, an individual of profound wisdom and sublime genius collected these springs and made a machine with them. And in this machine called Society all the springs were made to act and react on each other and wear themselves out unceasingly. And more were smashed in a day in a state of legislation than in a year in the anarchy of nature. But what a noise! What ruin! What an enormous destruction of small springs when two, three or four of these huge machines crashed violently into each other.
A.: So you would prefer a state of brutal savage nature?
B.: Really I cannot say. But this I know. Townsmen have several times been seen to strip themselves and return to the forest. The woodsman has never put on clothes and come to the town.
A.: It has often occurred to me that the total of good and bad was variable for each individual, but that the happiness or unhappiness of any animal species had its limit which could not be crossed, and that our efforts perhaps finally resulted in an equal quantity of drawbacks and advantages, as if we were harassing ourselves to increase the two sides of an equation, between which an eternal and necessary equality subsisted. However, I have no doubt that the average life of the civilized man is longer than that of the savage.
B.: But supposing the duration of a machine is no true measure of the exhaustion it endures, what then?
A.: I see that on the whole you would be inclined to believe men get more wicked and miserable the more they are civilized.
B.: I shall not visit all the countries of the universe. I merely warn you that you will find the lot of man happy only in Tahiti, and tolerable in but one corner of Europe. In the second case the governors, being suspicious and jealous of their security, are busy keeping man in what you call brutishness.
A.: At Venice, perhaps?
B.: Why not? You will not deny, at any rate, that nowhere is there less acquired knowledge, less artificial morality, and less imaginary vice and virtue.
A.: I never expected a eulogium of that government from you.
B.: I am not making one. I indicate to you a kind of compensation for servitude and one which all travellers have felt and praised.
A.: A poor compensation.
B.: Perhaps. The Greeks proscribed the man who added a chord to the lyre of Mercury.
A.: And that ordinance was a scathing satire on their first lawgivers. It is the first chord that must be cut.
B.: You have grasped my meaning. Whenever there is a lyre there are chords. As soon as natural appetites are sophisticated, you may count on bad women.
A.: Like the Reymer.
B.: And atrocious men.
A.: Like Gardeil .*
B.: And other people unfortunate for no reason.
A.: Like Tanie,* Mlle de La Chaux, the Chevalier Desroches,* and Mme de la Carliere.* [For all these unfortunate persons see Diderot: Ceci n'est pas un conte]. Certainly it would be ridiculous to look in Tahiti for examples of the depravity of the two first, and of the misfortunes of the last three. What is to be done then? Shall we return to nature? Shall we submit to laws?
B.: We will preach against insensate laws until they are reformed. And meanwhile we will submit to them. He who of his own authority infringes a bad law authorizes everyone else to infringe a good one. It is less inconvenient to be mad among madmen than to be wise all alone. Let us say to ourselves, let us cry out continually that shame, punishment, and disgrace have been attached to things innocent in themselves. But let us not do those things: for shame, punishment, and disgrace are the greatest of all evils. Imitate the worthy chaplain. Be a monk in France, a savage in Tahiti.
A.: Take on the dress of the country one is going to and keep that of the country where one is.
B.: And above all be honest and scrupulously sincere with fragile beings, who cannot make us happy without abandoning the most precious advantages our forms of society can offer. And that thick fog, what has happened to it?
A.: It has fallen.
B.: So we shall still be able, after dinner, to go out or to stay at home, as we wish.
A.: That will depend, I think, rather on the ladies than on ourselves.
B.: Always the ladies ! We cannot take a step without their running into us.,
A.: Suppose we read them the conversation of Orou and the chaplain?
B.: What do you think they would say?
A.: I have no idea.
B.: And what would they think?
A.: Very likely the opposite of what they said.