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Title: The man in the street: Papers on American topics

Author: Meredith Nicholson

Release date: January 1, 2023 [eBook #69677]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Charles Scribner's Sons

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by Cornell University Digital Collections)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN THE STREET: PAPERS ON AMERICAN TOPICS ***





_BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON_

  THE MAN IN THE STREET
  BLACKSHEEP! BLACKSHEEP!
  LADY LARKSPUR
  THE MADNESS OF MAY
  THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY

_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_




_THE MAN IN THE STREET_




  _THE
  MAN IN THE STREET_

  _PAPERS ON AMERICAN TOPICS_

  _BY
  MEREDITH NICHOLSON_

  _NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1921_




  _Copyright, 1921, by
  Charles Scribner’s Sons_

  Published September, 1921

  COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1920 BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY CO.
  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE YALE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION, INC.
  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE NEW YORK EVENING POST, INC.

  THE SCRIBNER PRESS




  _To
  CORNELIA_




_FOREWORD_


My right to speak for the man in the street, the average American,
is, I am aware, open to serious question. Possibly there are amiable
persons who, if urged to pass judgment, would appraise me a trifle
higher than the average; others, I am painfully aware, would rate
me much lower. The point is, of course, one about which I am not
entitled to an opinion. I offer no apology for the apparent unrelated
character of the subjects herein discussed, for to my mind the volume
has a certain cohesion. In that part of America with which I am most
familiar, literature, politics, religion, and the changing social scene
are all of a piece. We disport ourselves in one field as blithely as in
another. Within a few blocks of this room, on the fifteenth floor of
an office-building in the centre of my home town, I can find men and
women quite competent to answer questions pertaining to any branch of
philosophy or the arts. I called a lawyer friend on the telephone only
yesterday and hummed a few bars of music that he might aid me with the
correct designation of one of Beethoven’s symphonies. In perplexity
over an elusive quotation I can, with all confidence, plant myself on
the post-office steps and some one will come along with the answer. I
do not mention these matters boastfully, but merely to illustrate the
happy conditions of life in the delectable province in which I was born.

The papers here collected first appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_,
except “Let Main Street Alone!” which was published in the New York
_Evening Post_, “The Cheerful Breakfast Table,” which is reprinted
from the _Yale Review_, and “The Poor Old English Language,” which
is reproduced from _Scribner’s Magazine_. The political articles are
sufficiently explained by their dates. They are reprinted without
alteration in the hope that some later student of the periods
scrutinized may find them of interest.

                                                                   M. N.

  INDIANAPOLIS,
    July, 1921.




_CONTENTS_


                                               PAGE

  _Let Main Street Alone!_                        1

  _James Whitcomb Riley_                         26

  _The Cheerful Breakfast Table_                 65

  _The Boulevard of Rogues_                      92

  _The Open Season for American Novelists_      106

  _The Church for Honest Sinners_               139

  _The Second-Rate Man in Politics_             150

  _The Lady of Landor Lane_                     190

  _How, Then, Should Smith Vote?_               223

  _The Poor Old English Language_               263




LET MAIN STREET ALONE!


I

CERTAIN questions lie dormant for long periods and then, often with no
apparent provocation, assume an acute phase and cry insistently for
attention. The failure of the church to adjust itself to the needs of
the age; the shiftlessness of the new generation; the weaknesses of our
educational system--these and like matters are susceptible of endless
debate. Into this general classification we may gaily sweep the query
as to whether a small town is as promising a habitat for an aspiring
soul as a large city. When we have wearied of defending or opposing the
continuance of the direct primary, or have found ourselves suddenly
conscious that the attempt to decide whether immortality is desirable
is unprofitable, we may address ourselves valiantly to a discussion of
the advantages of the provinces over those of the seething metropolis,
or take the other way round, as pleases our humor. Without the
recurring stimulus of such contentions as these we should probably
be driven to the peddling of petty gossip or sink into a state of
intellectual coma.

There are encouraging signs that we of this Republic are much less
impatient under criticism than we used to be, or possibly we are
becoming more callous. Still I think it may be said honestly that we
have reached a point where we are measurably disposed to see American
life steadily and see it whole. It is the seeing it whole that is the
continuing difficulty. We have been reminded frequently that our life
is so varied that the great American novel must inevitably be the work
of many hands, it being impossible for one writer to present more
than one phase or describe more than one geographical section. This
is “old stuff,” and nothing that need keep us awake o’ nights. One of
these days some daring hand capable of wielding a broad brush will
paint a big picture, but meanwhile we are not so badly served by those
fictionists who turn up their little spadefuls of earth and clap a
microscope upon it. Such novels as _Miss Lulu Bett_ and _Main Street_
or such a play as Mr. Frank Craven’s _The First Year_, to take recent
examples, encourage the hope that after all we are not afraid to look
at ourselves when the mirror is held before us by a steady hand.

A serious novel that cuts close to the quick can hardly fail to
disclose one of our most amusing weaknesses--our deeply ingrained local
pride that makes us extremely sensitive to criticism in any form of
our own bailiwick. The nation may be assailed and we are philosophical
about it; but if our home town is peppered with bird shot by some
impious huntsman we are at once ready for battle. We do like to brag of
our own particular Main Street! It is in the blood of the provincial
American to think himself more happily situated and of a higher type
than the citizens of any other province. In journeys across the
continent, I have sometimes thought that there must be a definite line
where bragging begins. I should fix it somewhere west of Pittsburgh,
attaining its maximum of innocent complacency in Indiana, diminishing
through Iowa and Nebraska, though ranging high in Kansas and Colorado
and there gathering fresh power for a dash to the coast, where stout
Cortez and all his men would indeed look at each other with a mild
surmise to hear the children of the Pacific boast of their landscape
and their climate, and the kindly fruits of their soil.

When I travel beyond my State’s boundaries I more or less consciously
look for proof of Indiana’s superiority. Where I fail to find it I
am not without my explanations and excuses. If I should be kidnapped
and set down blindfolded in the midst of Ohio on a rainy night, I
should know, I am sure, that I was on alien soil. I frequently cross
Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and never without a sense of a change of
atmosphere in passing from one to the other. Kansas, from territorial
days, has been much more strenuously advertised than Nebraska. The very
name Kansas is richer in its connotations. To think of it is to recall
instantly the days of border warfare; John Brown of Osawatomie, the New
England infusion, the Civil War soldiers who established themselves on
the free soil after Appomattox; grasshoppers and the days of famine;
populism and the Sockless Socrates of Medicine Lodge, the brilliant,
satiric Ingalls, Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_, William Allen White
of Emporia, and _A Certain Rich Man_, down to and including the present
governor, the Honorable Henry J. Allen, beyond question the most
beguiling man to sit at meat with in all America.


II

A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of
my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s
_Main Street_ as an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a
score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she
declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana
towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them
have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned
pioneers of the old American stocks; and an impressive number of the
first settlers--I named half a dozen--experienced the same dismay and
disgust, and were inspired by the same noble ambition to make the
world over that Mr. Lewis has noted in Carol Kennicott’s case.”

Not one but many of my neighbors, and friends and acquaintances in
other towns, have lately honored me with their views on provincial life
with Mr. Lewis’s novel as a text. Most of them admit that Minnesota
may be like that, but by all the gods at once things are not so in
“my State” or “my town.” This is a habit of thought, a state of mind.
There is, I think, something very delightful about it. To encounter
it is to be refreshed and uplifted. It is like meeting a stranger who
isn’t ashamed to boast of his wife’s cooking. On east and west journeys
across the region of the tall corn one must be churlish indeed to
repel the man who is keen to enlighten the ignorant as to the happy
circumstances of his life. After an hour I experience a pleasurable
sense of intimacy with his neighbors. If, when his town is reached, I
step out upon the platform with the returning Ulysses, there may be
time enough to shake hands with his wife and children, and I catch a
glimpse of his son in the waiting motor--(that boy, I’d have you know,
took all the honors of his class at our State university)--and it is
with real sorrow that I confess my inability to stop off for a day or
two to inspect the grain-elevator and the new brickyard and partake of
a chicken dinner at the country club--the snappiest in all this part of
the State! Main Street is proud of itself, and any newcomer who assumes
a critical attitude or is swollen with a desire to retouch the lily is
doomed to a chilly reception.

My joy in _Main Street_, the book, is marred by what I am constrained
to think is a questionable assertion in the foreword, namely: “The
town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main
Street is the continuation of Main Street everywhere. The story would
be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and
not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina
Hills.” Now I should say that there are very marked differences
between Gopher Prairie and towns of approximately the same size that
have drawn upon different strains of foreign or American stock. Mr.
Lewis depicts character with a sure stroke, and he communicates the
sense of atmosphere admirably. There are paragraphs and single
lines that arrest the attention and invite re-reading, so sharply do
they bite into the consciousness. One pays him a reader’s highest
tribute--“That’s true; I’ve known just such people.” But I should
modify his claim to universality in deference to the differences in
local history so clearly written upon our maps and the dissimilar
backgrounds of young America that are not the less interesting or
important because the tracings upon them are so thin.

Human nature, we are frequently assured, is the same the world over,
but I don’t believe it can be maintained successfully that all small
towns are alike. All manner of things contribute to the making of a
community. A college town is unlike an industrial or a farming centre
of the same size. A Scandinavian influence in a community is quite
different from a German or an Irish or a Scotch influence. There are
places in the heart of America where, in the formative period, the
Scotch-Irish exerted a very marked influence indeed in giving tone and
direction to the community life, and the observer is sensible of this a
hundred years afterward. There are varied shadings traceable to early
dominating religious forces; Catholicism, Methodism, Presbyterianism,
and Episcopalianism each imparting a coloring of its own to the social
fabric. No more fascinating field is open to the student than that
offered by the elements that have contributed to the building of
American communities as, for example, where there has been a strong
foreign infusion or such a blend as that of New Englanders with folk
of a Southern strain. Those who are curious in such matters will find
a considerable literature ready to their hand. Hardly any one at all
conversant with American life but will think instantly of groups
of men and women who in some small centre were able, by reason of
their foresight and courage, to lay a debt upon posterity, or of an
individual who has waged battle alone for public betterment.

The trouble with Mr. Lewis’s Carol Kennicott was that she really had
nothing to offer Gopher Prairie that sensible self-respecting people
anywhere would have welcomed. A superficial creature, she was without
true vision in any direction. Plenty of men and women vastly her
superior in cultivation and blessed with a far finer sensitiveness to
the things of the spirit have in countless cases faced rude conditions,
squalor even, cheerfully and hopefully, and in time they have succeeded
in doing something to make the world a better place to live in. This
is not to say that Carol is not true to type; there is the type, but
I am not persuaded that its existence proves anything except that
there are always fools and foolish people in the world. Carol would
have been a failure anywhere. She deserved to fail in Gopher Prairie,
which does not strike me, after all, as so hateful a place as she found
it to be. She nowhere impinges upon my sympathy. I have known her by
various names in larger and lovelier communities than Gopher Prairie,
and wherever she exists she is a bore, and at times an unmitigated
nuisance. My heart warms, not to her, but to the people in Main Street
she despised. They didn’t need her uplifting hand! They were far more
valuable members of society than she proved herself to be, for they
worked honestly at their jobs and had, I am confident, a pretty fair
idea of their rights and duties, their privileges and immunities, as
children of democracy.

Nothing in America is more reassuring than the fact that some one is
always wailing in the market-place. When we’ve got something and don’t
like it, we wait for some one to tell us how to get rid of it. Plunging
into prohibition, we at once become tolerant of the bootlegger. There’s
no point of rest. We are fickle, capricious, and pine for change. In
the course of time we score for civilization, but the gains, broadly
considered, are small and painfully won. Happiest are they who keep
sawing wood and don’t expect too much! There are always the zealous
laborers, the fit though few, who incur suspicion, awaken antagonism,
and suffer defeat, to pave the way for those who will reap the harvest
of their sowing. There are a hundred million of us and it’s too much to
ask that we all chase the same rainbow. There are diversities of gifts,
but all, we hope, animated by the same spirit.


III

The Main Streets I know do not strike me as a fit subject for
commiseration. I refuse to be sorry for them. I am increasingly
impressed by their intelligence, their praiseworthy curiosity as
to things of good report, their sturdy optimism, their unshakable
ambition to excel other Main Streets. There is, to be sure, a type of
village with a few stores, a blacksmith-shop, and a gasolene station,
that seems to express the ultimate in torpor. Settlements of this
sort may be found in every State, and the older the State the more
complete seems to be their inertia. But where five thousand people
are assembled--or better, when we deal with a metropolis of ten or
twelve thousand souls--we are at once conscious of a pulse that
keeps time with the world’s heart-beat. There are compensations for
those who abide in such places. In such towns, it is quite possible,
if you are an amiable being, to know well-nigh every one. The main
thoroughfare is a place of fascinations, the stage for a continuing
drama. Carrier delivery destroys the old joy of meeting all the folks
at the post-office, but most of the citizens, male and female, find
some excuse for a daily visit to Main Street. They are bound together
by dear and close ties. You’ve got to know your neighbors whether you
want to or not, and it’s well for the health of your soul to know them
and be of use to them when you can.

I should regard it as a calamity to be deprived of the felicity of my
occasional visits to a particular centre of enlightenment and cheer
that I have in mind. An hour’s journey on the trolley brings me to
the court-house. After one such visit the stranger needn’t trouble
to enroll himself at the inn; some one is bound to offer to put him
up. There is a dramatic club in that town that produces good plays
with remarkable skill and effectiveness. The club is an old one as
such things go, and it fixes the social standard for the community.
The auditorium of the Masonic Temple serves well as a theatre, and
our admiration for the club is enhanced by the disclosure that the
members design the scenery and also include in their membership capable
directors. After the play one may dance for an hour or two, though the
cessation of the music does not mean that you are expected to go to
bed. Very likely some one will furnish forth a supper and there will be
people “asked in” to contribute to your entertainment.

There are in this community men and women who rank with the best
talkers I have ever heard. Their neighbors are proud of them and
produce them on occasion to represent the culture, the wit and humor,
of the town. Two women of this place are most discerning students
of character. They tell stories with a masterly touch, and with the
economy of words, the whimsical comment, the pauses and the unforeseen
climaxes that distinguished the storytelling of Twain and Riley. The
inhabitants make jokes about their Main Street. They poke fun at
themselves as being hicks and rubes, living far from the great centres
of thought, while discussing the newest books and finding, I fancy, a
mischievous pleasure in casually telling you something which you, as
a resident of the near-by capital with its three hundred and twenty
thousand people, ought to have known before.

The value of a local literature, where it is honest, is that it
preserves a record of change. It is a safe prediction that some later
chronicler of Gopher Prairie will present a very different community
from that revealed in _Main Street_. Casting about for an instance of
a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be
forgiven if I fall back upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early,
if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of
many Indianians to flout the _Hoosier Schoolmaster_ as a libel upon
a State that struts and boasts of its culture and refuses to believe
that it ever numbered ignorant or vulgar people among its inhabitants.
Eggleston’s case is, however, well-supported by testimony that would
pass muster under the rules of evidence in any fair court of criticism.
Riley, coming later, found kindlier conditions, and sketched countless
types of the farm and the country town, and made painstaking studies
of the common speech. His observations began with a new epoch--the
return of the soldiers from the Civil War. The veracity of his work
is not to be questioned; his contribution to the social history of
his own Hoosier people is of the highest value. Just as Eggleston and
Riley left records of their respective generations, so Mr. Tarkington,
arriving opportunely to preserve unbroken the apostolic succession,
depicts his own day with the effect of contributing a third panel in a
series of historical paintings. Thanks to our provincial literature,
we may view many other sections through the eyes of novelists; as,
the Maine of Miss Jewett, the Tennessee of Miss Murfree, the Kentucky
of James Lane Allen, the Virginia of Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, and
Miss Glasgow, the Louisiana of Mr. Cable. (I am sorry for the new
generation that doesn’t know the charm of _Old Creole Days_ and _Madame
Delphine_!) No doubt scores of motorists traversing Minnesota will
hereafter see in every small town a Gopher Prairie, and peer at the
doctors’ signs in the hope of catching the name of Kennicott!

An idealism persistently struggling to implant itself in the young
soil always has been manifest in the West, and the record of it is
very marked in the Mississippi Valley States. Emerson had a fine
appreciation of this. He left Concord frequently to brave the winter
storms in what was then pretty rough country, to deliver his message
and to observe the people. His philosophy seems to have been equal to
his hardships. “My chief adventure,” he wrote in his journal of one
such pilgrimage, “was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight
miles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and
the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at
twelve.” Nor did small audiences disturb him. “Here is America in
the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to
lectures, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”

There is, really, something about corn--tall corn, that whispers on
summer nights in what George Ade calls the black dirt country. There
is something finely spiritual about corn that grows like a forest in
Kansas and Nebraska. And Democracy is like unto it--the plowing, and
the sowing, and the tending to keep the weeds out. We can’t scratch a
single acre and say all the soil’s bad;--it may be wonderfully rich in
the next township!

It is the way of nature to be perverse and to fashion the good and
great out of the least promising clay. Country men and small-town men
have preponderated in our national counsels and all things considered
they haven’t done so badly. Greatness has a way of unfolding itself;
it remains true that the fault is in ourselves, and not in our stars,
that we are underlings. Out of one small town in Missouri came the two
men who, just now, hold respectively the rank of general and admiral
of our army and navy. And there is a trustworthy strength in elemental
natures--in what Whitman called “powerful uneducated persons.” Ancestry
and environment are not negligible factors, yet if Lincoln had been
born in New York and Roosevelt in a Kentucky log cabin, both would have
reached the White House. In the common phrase, you can’t keep a good
man down. The distinguishing achievement of Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_ is
not merely his superb realization of a great character, but the sense
so happily communicated, of a wisdom deep-planted in the general heart
of man. It isn’t all just luck, the workings of our democracy. If
there’s any manifestation on earth of a divine ordering of things, it
is here in America. Considering that most of the hundred million trudge
along away back in the line where the music of the band reaches them
only faintly, the army keeps step pretty well.


IV

“Myself when young did eagerly frequent” lecture-halls and the abodes
of the high-minded and the high-intentioned who were zealous in the
cause of culture. This was in those years when Matthew Arnold’s
criticisms of America and democracy in general were still much
discussed. Thirty years ago it really seemed that culture was not
only desirable but readily attainable for America. We cherished happy
illusions as to the vast possibilities of education: there should
be no Main Street without its reverence for the best thought and
noblest action of all time. But those of us who are able to ponder
“the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” in
the spirit of that period must reflect, a little ruefully, that the
new schemes and devices of education to which we pointed with pride
have not turned the trick. The machinery of enlightenment has, of
course, greatly multiplied. The flag waves on innumerable schoolhouses;
literature, art, music are nowhere friendless. The women of America
make war ceaselessly upon philistinism, and no one attentive to their
labors can question their sincerity or their intelligence. But these
are all matters as to which many hear the call but comparatively few
prostrate themselves at the mercy-seat. Culture, in the sense in which
we used the word, was not so easily to be conferred or imposed upon
great bodies of humanity; the percentage of the mass who are seriously
interested in the finest and noblest action of mankind has not
perceptibly increased.

Odd as these statements look, now that I have set them down, I hasten
to add that they stir in me no deep and poignant sorrow. My feeling
about the business is akin to that of a traveller who has missed a
train but consoles himself with the reflection that by changing his
route a trifle he will in due course reach his destination without
serious delay, and at the same time enjoy a view of unfamiliar scenery.

Between what Main Street wants and cries for and what Main Street
really needs there is a considerable margin for speculation. I shall
say at once that I am far less concerned than I used to be as to the
diffusion of culture in the Main Streets of all creation. Culture is a
term much soiled by ignoble use and all but relegated to the vocabulary
of cant. We cannot “wish” Plato upon resisting and hostile Main
Streets; we are even finding that Isaiah and St. Paul are not so potent
to conjure with as formerly. The church is not so generally the social
centre of small communities as it was a little while ago. Far too many
of us are less fearful of future torment than of a boost in the price
of gasolene. The motor may be making pantheists of us: I don’t know.
Hedonism in some form may be the next phase; here, again, I have no
opinion.


V

Mr. St. John Ervine complains that we of the provinces lack
individuality; that we have been so smoothed out and conform so
strictly to the prevailing styles of apparel that the people in one
town look exactly like those in the next. This observation may be due
in some measure to the alien’s preconceived ideas of what the hapless
wights who live west of the Hudson ought to look like, but there is
much truth in the remark of this amiable friend from overseas. Even
the Indians I have lately seen look quite comfortable in white man’s
garb. To a great extent the ready-to-wear industry has standardized
our raiment, so that to the unsophisticated masculine eye at least the
women of Main Street are indistinguishable from their sisters in the
large cities. There is less slouch among the men than there used to be.
Mr. Howells said many years ago that in travelling Westward the polish
gradually dimmed on the shoes of the native; but the shine-parlors of
the sons of Romulus and Achilles have changed all that.

I lean to the idea that it is not well for us all to be tuned to one
key. I like to think that the farm folk and country-town people of
Georgia and Kansas, Oklahoma and Maine are thinking independently of
each other about weighty matters, and that the solidarity of the nation
is only the more strikingly demonstrated when, finding themselves
stirred (sometimes tardily) by the national consciousness, they act
sensibly and with unity and concord. But the interurban trolley and
the low-priced motor have dealt a blow to the old smug complacency and
indifference. There is less tobacco-juice on the chins of our rural
fellow citizens; the native flavor, the raciness and the tang so highly
prized by students of local color have in many sections ceased to be.
We may yet be confronted by the necessity of preserving specimens of
the provincial native in social and ethnological museums.

I should like to believe that the present with its bewildering changes
is only a corridor leading, politically and spiritually, toward
something more splendid than we have known. We can only hope that this
is true, and meanwhile adjust ourselves to the idea that a good many
things once prized are gone forever. I am not sure but that a town is
better advertised by enlightened sanitary ordinances duly enforced than
by the number of its citizens who are acquainted with the writings
of Walter Pater. A little while ago I should have looked upon such a
thought as blasphemy.

The other evening, in a small college town, I passed under the windows
of a hall where a fraternity dance was in progress. I dare say the
young gentlemen of the society knew no more of the Greek alphabet than
the three letters inscribed over the door of their clubhouse. But this
does not trouble me as in “the olden golden glory of the days gone
by.” We do not know but that in some far day a prowling New Zealander,
turning up a banjo and a trap-drum amid the ruins of some American
college, will account them nobler instruments than the lyre and lute.

Evolution brought us down chattering from the trees, and we have no
right to assume that we are reverting to the arboreal state. This is
no time to lose confidence in democracy; it is too soon to chant the
recessional of the race. Much too insistently we have sought to reform,
to improve, to plant the seeds of culture, to create moral perfection
by act of Congress. If Main Street knows what America is all about, and
bathes itself and is kind and considerate of its neighbors, why not
leave the rest on the knees of the gods?

What really matters as to Main Street is that it shall be happy. We
can’t, merely by taking thought, lift its people to higher levels of
aspiration. Main Street is neither blind nor deaf; it knows well enough
what is going on in the world; it is not to be jostled or pushed by
condescending outsiders eager to bestow sweetness and light upon it.
It is not unaware of the desirability of such things; and in its own
fashion and at the proper time it will go after them. Meanwhile if it
is cheerful and hopeful and continues to vote with reasonable sanity
the rest of the world needn’t despair of it. After all, it’s only the
remnant of Israel that can be saved. Let Main Street alone!




JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY


I

ON a day in July, 1916, thirty-five thousand people passed under
the dome of the Indiana capitol to look for the last time upon the
face of James Whitcomb Riley. The best-loved citizen of the Hoosier
commonwealth was dead, and laborers and mechanics in their working
clothes, professional and business men, women in great numbers, and
a host of children paid their tribute of respect to one whose sole
claim upon their interest lay in his power to voice their feelings of
happiness and grief in terms within the common understanding. The very
general expressions of sorrow and affection evoked by the announcement
of the poet’s death encourage the belief that the lines that formed
on the capitol steps might have been augmented endlessly by additions
drawn from every part of America. I frankly confess that, having
enjoyed his friendship through many years, I am disqualified from
passing judgment upon his writings, into much of which I inevitably
read a significance that may not be apparent to those capable of
appraising them with critical detachment. But Riley’s personality was
quite as interesting as his work, and I shall attempt to give some
hint of the man as I knew him, with special reference to his whims and
oddities.

My acquaintance with him dates from a memorable morning when he called
on me in a law office where I copied legal documents, ran errands,
and scribbled verses. At this time he was a regular contributor to
the Sunday edition of the Indianapolis _Journal_--a newspaper of
unusual literary quality, most hospitable to fledgling bards, who were
permitted to shine in the reflected light of Riley’s growing fame. Some
verses of mine having been copied by a Cincinnati paper, Riley asked
about me at the _Journal_ office and sought me out, paper in hand, to
speak a word of encouragement. He was the most interesting, as he was
the most amusing and the most lovable man I have known. No one was
quite like Riley, and the ways in which he suggests other men merely
call attention to the fact that he was, after all, wholly different: he
was Riley!

He was the best-known figure in our capital; this was true, indeed, of
the entire commonwealth that he sang into fame. He was below medium
height, neatly and compactly built; fair and of ruddy complexion. He
had been a tow-headed boy, and while his hair thinned in later years,
any white that crept into it was scarcely perceptible. A broad flexible
mouth and a big nose were the distinguishing features of a remarkably
mobile face. He was very near-sighted, and the rubber-rimmed glasses he
invariably wore served to obscure his noticeably large blue eyes. He
was a compound of Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish, but the Celt in him was
dominant: there were fairies in his blood.

In his days of health he carried himself alertly and gave an impression
of smartness. He was in all ways neat and orderly; there was no
slouch about him and no Byronic affectations. He was always curious
as to the origin of any garment or piece of haberdashery displayed
by his intimates, but strangely secretive as to the source of his
own supplies. He affected obscure tailors, probably because they
were likelier to pay heed to his idiosyncrasies than more fashionable
ones. He once deplored to me the lack of attention bestowed upon the
waistcoat by sartorial artists. This was a garment he held of the
highest importance in man’s adornment. Hopkinson Smith, he averred, was
the only man he had ever seen who displayed a satisfactory taste and
was capable of realizing the finest effects in this particular.

He inspired affection by reason of his gentleness and inherent
kindliness and sweetness. The idea that he was a convivial person,
delighting in boon companions and prolonged sessions at table, has no
basis in fact. He was a domestic, even a cloistral being; he disliked
noise and large companies; he hated familiarity, and would quote
approvingly what Lowell said somewhere about the annoyance of being
clapped on the back. Riley’s best friends never laid hands on him; I
have seen strangers or new acquaintances do so to their discomfiture.

No background of poverty or early hardship can be provided for this
“poet of the people.” His father was a lawyer, an orator well known
in central Indiana, and Riley’s boyhood was spent in comfortable
circumstances. The curtailment of his schooling was not enforced by
necessity, but was due to his impatience of restraint and inability
to adjust his own interests to the prevailing curriculum. He spent
some time in his father’s office at Greenfield, reading general
literature, not law, and experimenting with verse. He served an
apprenticeship as a house painter, and acquired the art of “marbling”
and “graining”--long-abandoned embellishments of domestic architecture.
Then, with four other young men, he began touring Indiana, painting
signs, and, from all accounts, adding greatly to the gaiety of life
in the communities visited. To advertise their presence, Riley would
recite in the market-place, or join with his comrades in giving musical
entertainments. Or, pretending to be blind, he would laboriously climb
up on a scaffolding and before the amazed spectators execute a sign in
his best style. There was a time when he seemed anxious to forget his
early experiences as a wandering sign-painter and entertainer with
a patent-medicine van, but in his last years he spoke of them quite
frankly.

He had a natural talent for drawing; in fact, in his younger days he
dabbled in most of the arts. He discoursed to me at length on one
occasion of musical instruments, about all of which he seemed to have
much curious lore. He had been able to play more or less successfully
upon the violin, the banjo, the guitar, and (his humor bubbling) the
snare and bass drum! “There’s nothing,” he said, “so much fun as
thumping a bass drum,” an instrument on which he had performed in the
Greenfield band. “To throw your legs over the tail of a band wagon and
thump away--there’s nothing like it!” As usual when the reminiscent
mood was upon him, he broadened the field of the discussion to include
strange characters he had known among rural musicians, and these were
of endless variety. He had known a man who was passionately fond of
the bass drum and who played solos upon it--“Sacred music”! Sometimes
the neighbors would borrow the drum, and he pictured the man’s chagrin
when after a hard day’s work he went home and found his favorite
instrument gone.

Riley acquired various mechanical devices for creating music and
devoted himself to them with childish delight. In one of his gay moods
he would instruct a visitor in the art of pumping his player-piano,
and, having inserted a favorite “roll,” would dance about the room
snapping his fingers in time to the music.


II

Riley’s reading was marked by the casualness that was part of his
nature. He liked small books that fitted comfortably into the hand, and
he brought to the mere opening of a volume and the cutting of leaves
a deliberation eloquent of all respect for the contents. Always a man
of surprises, in nothing was he more surprising than in the wide range
of his reading. It was never safe to assume that he was unacquainted
with some book which might appear to be foreign to his tastes. His
literary judgments were sound, though his prejudices (always amusing
and frequently unaccountable) occasionally led him astray.

While his study of literature had followed the haphazard course
inevitable in one so uninfluenced by formal schooling, it may fairly
be said that he knew all that it was important for him to know of
books. He was of those for whom life and letters are of one piece and
inseparable. In a broad sense he was a humanist. What he missed in
literature he acquired from life. Shakespeare he had absorbed early;
Herrick, Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow were deep-planted in his
memory. His excursions into history had been the slightest; biographies
and essays interested him much more, and he was constantly on the
lookout for new poets. No new volume of verse, no striking poem in a
periodical escaped his watchful eye.

He professed to believe that Mrs. Browning was a poet greatly superior
to her husband. Nevertheless he had read Robert Browning with some
attention, for on one or two occasions he burlesqued successfully that
poet’s mannerisms. For some reason he manifested a marked antipathy to
Poe. And in this connection it may be of interest to mention that he
was born (October 7, 1849) the day Poe died! But for Riley’s cordial
dislike of Poe I might be tempted to speculate upon this coincidence as
suggesting a relinquishment of the singing robes by one poet in favor
of another. Riley had, undoubtedly, at some time felt Poe’s spell, for
there are unmistakable traces of Poe’s influence in some of his earlier
work. Indeed, his first wide advertisement came through an imitation of
Poe--a poem called “Leonanie”--palmed off as having been found written
in an old schoolbook that had been Poe’s property. Riley long resented
any reference to this hoax, though it was a harmless enough prank--the
device of a newspaper friend to prove that public neglect of Riley
was not based upon any lack of merit in his writings. It was probably
Poe’s sombreness that Riley did not like, or possibly his personal
characteristics. Still, he would close any discussion of Poe’s merits
as a writer by declaring that “The Raven” was clearly inspired by Mrs.
Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” This is hardly susceptible of
proof, and Elizabeth Barrett’s gracious acceptance of the compliment
of Poe’s dedication of his volume containing “The Raven” may or may not
be conclusive as to her own judgment in the matter.

Whitman had no attraction for Riley; he thought him something of
a charlatan. He greatly admired Stevenson and kept near at hand a
rare photograph of the Scot which Mrs. Stevenson had given him. He
had recognized Kipling’s genius early, and his meeting with that
writer in New York many years ago was one of the pleasantest and most
satisfactory of all his literary encounters.

The contentions between Realism and Romanticism that occasionally
enliven our periodical literature never roused his interest; his
sympathies were with the conservatives and he preferred gardens that
contained familiar and firmly planted literary landmarks. He knew his
Dickens thoroughly, and his lifelong attention to “character” was due
no doubt in some measure to his study of Dickens’s portraits of the
quaint and humorous. He always confessed gratefully his indebtedness
to Longfellow, and once, when we were speaking of the older poet, he
remarked that Mark Twain and Bret Harte were other writers to whom
he owed much. Harte’s obligations to both Dickens and Longfellow
are, of course, obvious and Harte’s use of dialect in verse probably
strengthened Riley’s confidence in the Hoosier speech as a medium when
he began to find himself.

His humor--both as expressed in his writings, and as we knew it who
lived neighbor to him--was of the same _genre_ as Mark Twain’s. And it
is not surprising that Mark Twain and Riley should have met on grounds
of common sympathy and understanding. What the Mississippi was to the
Missourian, the Old National Road that bisected Greenfield was to
Riley. The larger adventure of life that made Clemens a cosmopolitan
did not appeal to Riley, with his intense loyalty to the State of his
birth and the city that for thirty-eight years was his home.

It gave him the greatest pleasure to send his friends books that he
thought would interest them. Among those he sent me are Professor
Woodberry’s selections from Aubrey de Vere, whose “Bard Ethell” Riley
thought a fine performance; Bradford Torrey’s _Friends on the Shelf_
and, a few weeks before his death, a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s poems
in which he had written a substitute for one of the lines. If in these
gifts he chose some volume already known to the recipient, it was well
to conceal the fact, for it was essential to the perfect course of his
friendships that he be taken on his own terms, and no one would have
had the heart to spoil his pleasure in a “discovery.”

He was most generous toward all aspirants in his own field, though
for years these were prone to take advantage of his good nature
by inflicting books and manuscripts upon him. I once committed
the indiscretion of uttering a volume of verse, and observed with
trepidation a considerable number of copies on the counter of the
bookstore where we did much loafing together. A few days later I was
surprised and for a moment highly edified to find the stock greatly
depleted. On cautious inquiry I found that it was Riley alone who
had been the investor--to the extent of seventy-five copies, which
he distributed widely among literary acquaintances. In the case of
another friend who published a book without large expectations of
public favor, Riley secretly purchased a hundred and scattered them
broadcast. These instances are typical: he would do a kind thing
furtively and evince the deepest embarrassment when detected.

It is always a matter for speculation as to just what effect a
college training would have upon men of Riley’s type, who, missing
the inscribed portals, nevertheless find their way into the house of
literature. I give my opinion for what it may be worth, that he would
have been injured rather than benefited by an ampler education. He
was chiefly concerned with human nature, and it was his fortune to
know profoundly those definite phases and contrasts of life that were
susceptible of interpretation in the art of which he was sufficiently
the master. Of the general trend of society and social movements
he was as unconscious as though he lived on another planet. I am
disposed to think that he profited by his ignorance of such things,
which left him to the peaceful contemplation of the simple phenomena
of life that had early attracted him. Nothing seriously disturbed
his inveterate provincial habit of thought. He manifested Thoreau’s
indifference--without the Yankee’s scorn--for the world beyond his
dooryard. “I can see,” he once wrote me, “when you talk of your return
and the prospective housewarming of the new home, that your family’s
united heart is right here in old Indianapolis--high Heaven’s sole and
only understudy.” And this represented his very sincere feeling about
“our” town; no other was comparable to it!


III

He did his writing at night, a fact which accounted for the spacious
leisure in which his days were enveloped. He usually had a poem pretty
thoroughly fixed in his mind before he sought paper, but the actual
writing was often a laborious process; and it was his habit, while a
poem was in preparation, to carry the manuscript in his pocket for
convenience of reference. The elisions required by dialect and his own
notions of punctuation--here he was a law unto himself--brought him
into frequent collision with the lords of the proof desk; but no one,
I think, ever successfully debated with him any point of folk speech.
I once ventured to suggest that his use of the phrase “durin’ the
army,” as a rustic veteran’s way of referring to the Civil War, was not
general, but probably peculiar to the individual he had heard use it.
He stoutly defended his phrase and was ready at once with witnesses in
support of it as a familiar usage of Indiana veterans.

In the matter of our Hoosier folk speech he was an authority, though
the subject did not interest him comparatively or scientifically. He
complained to me bitterly of an editor who had directed his attention
to apparent inconsistencies of dialect in the proof of a poem. Riley
held, and rightly, that the dialect of the Hoosier is not fixed and
unalterable, but varies in certain cases, and that words are often
pronounced differently in the same sentence. Eggleston’s Hoosier is
an earlier type than Riley’s, belonging to the dark years when our
illiteracy staggered into high percentages. And Eggleston wrote
of southern Indiana, where the “poor white” strain of the South
had been most marked. Riley not only spoke for a later period, but
his acquaintance was with communities that enjoyed a better social
background; the schoolhouse and the rural “literary” were always
prominent in his perspective.

He had preserved his youth as a place apart and unalterable, peopled
with folk who lived as he had known them in his enchanted boyhood.
Scenes and characters of that period he was able to revisualize at
will. When his homing fancy took wing, it was to bear him back to the
little town’s dooryards, set with mignonette, old-fashioned roses,
and borders of hollyhocks, or countryward to the streams that wound
their way through fields of wheat and corn. Riley kept his place at
innumerable firesides in this dream existence, hearing the veterans of
the Civil War spin their yarns, or farmers discuss crop prospects, or
the whispers of children awed by the “woo” of the wind in the chimney.
If Pan crossed his vision (he drew little upon mythology) it was to
sit under a sycamore above a “ripple” in the creek and beat time
rapturously with his goat hoof to the music of a Hoosier lad’s willow
whistle.

The country lore that Riley had collected and stored in youth was
inexhaustible; it never seemed necessary for him to replenish his
pitcher at the fountains of original inspiration. I have read somewhere
a sketch of him in which he was depicted as walking with Wordsworthian
calm through lonely fields, but nothing could be more absurd. Fondly
as he sang of green fields and running brooks, he cultivated their
acquaintance very little after he established his home at Indianapolis.
Lamb could not have loved city streets more than he. Much as Bret Harte
wrote of California after years of absence, so Riley drew throughout
his life from scenes familiar to his boyhood and young manhood, and
with undiminished sympathy and vigor.

His knowledge of rural life was intimate, though he knew the farm only
as a country-town boy may know it, through association with farm boys
and holidays spent in visits to country cousins. Once at the harvest
season, as we were crossing Indiana in a train, he began discoursing
on apples. He repeated Bryant’s poem “The Planting of the Apple Tree,”
as a prelude, and, looking out over the Hoosier Hesperides, began
mentioning the varieties of apples he had known and commenting on their
qualities. When I expressed surprise at the number, he said that with a
little time he thought he could recall a hundred kinds, and he did in
fact name more than fifty before we were interrupted.

The whimsicalities and comicalities and the heart-breaking tragedies
of childhood he interpreted with rare fidelity. His wide popularity as
a poet of childhood was due to a special genius for understanding the
child mind. Yet he was very shy in the presence of children, and though
he kept track of the youngsters in the houses of his friends, and could
establish himself on good terms with them, he seemed uncomfortable when
suddenly confronted by a strange child. This was due in some measure to
the proneness of parents to exhibit their offspring that he might hear
them “recite” his own poems, or in the hope of eliciting some verses
commemorative of Johnny’s or Mary’s precocity. His children were
country-town and farm children whom he had known and lived among and
unconsciously studied and appraised for the use he later made of them.
Here, again, he drew upon impressions fixed in his own boyhood, and to
this gallery of types he never, I think, added materially. Much of his
verse for children is autobiographical, representing his own attitude
of mind as an imaginative, capricious child. Some of his best character
studies are to be found among his juvenile pieces. In “That-Air
Young-Un,” for example, he enters into the heart of an abnormal boy who

  “Come home onc’t and said ’at he
  Knowed what the snake-feeders thought
  When they grit their wings; and knowed
  Turkle-talk, when bubbles riz
  Over where the old roots growed
  Where he th’owed them pets o’ his--
  Little turripuns he caught
  In the County Ditch and packed
  In his pockets days and days!”

The only poem he ever contributed to the _Atlantic_ was “Old Glory,”
and I recall that he held it for a considerable period, retouching it,
and finally reading it at a club dinner to test it thoroughly by his
own standards, which were those of the ear as well as the eye. When I
asked him why he had not printed it he said he was keeping it “to boil
the dialect out of it.” On the other hand, “The Poet of the Future,”
one of his best pieces, was produced in an evening. He was little given
to displaying his poems in advance of publication, and this was one
of the few that he ever showed me in manuscript. It had been a real
inspiration; the writing of it had given him the keenest pleasure,
and the glow of success was still upon him when we met the following
morning. He wrote much occasional and personal verse which added
nothing to his reputation--a fact of which he was perfectly aware--and
there is a wide disparity between his best and his poorest. He wrote
prose with difficulty; he said he could write a column of verse much
more quickly than he could produce a like amount of prose.

His manuscripts and letters were works of art, so careful was he of
his handwriting--a small, clear script as legible as engraving, and
with quaint effects of capitalization. In his younger days he indulged
in a large correspondence, chiefly with other writers. His letters
were marked by the good-will and cordiality, the racy humor and the
self-mockery of his familiar talk. “Your reference”--this is a typical
beginning--“to your vernal surroundings and cloistered seclusion from
the world stress and tumult of the fevered town comes to me in veriest
truth

  “‘With a Sabbath sound as of doves
          In quiet neighborhoods,’

as that grand poet Oliver W. Longfellow so tersely puts it in his
inimitable way.” He addressed his correspondents by names specially
designed for them, and would sign himself by any one of a dozen droll
pseudonyms.


IV

Riley’s talent as a reader (he disliked the term recitationist) was
hardly second to his creative genius. As an actor--in such parts, for
example, as those made familiar by Jefferson--he could not have failed
to win high rank. His art, apparently the simplest, was the result of
the most careful study and experiment; facial play, gesture, shadings
of the voice, all contributed to the completeness of his portrayals.
So vivid were his impersonations and so readily did he communicate
the sense of atmosphere, that one seemed to be witnessing a series of
dramas with a well-set stage and a diversity of players. He possessed
in a large degree the magnetism that is the birthright of great actors;
there was something very appealing and winning in his slight figure as
he came upon the platform. His diffidence (partly assumed and partly
sincere) at the welcoming applause, the first sound of his voice as he
tested it with the few introductory sentences he never omitted--these
spoken haltingly as he removed and disposed of his glasses--all tended
to pique curiosity and win the house to the tranquillity his delicate
art demanded. He said that it was possible to offend an audience by too
great an appearance of cock-sureness; a speaker did well to manifest a
certain timidity when he walked upon the stage, and he deprecated the
manner of a certain lecturer and reader, who always began by chaffing
his hearers. Riley’s programmes consisted of poems of sentiment and
pathos, such as “Good-bye, Jim” and “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” varied
with humorous stories in prose or verse which he told with inimitable
skill and without a trace of buffoonery. Mark Twain wrote, in “How to
Tell a Story,” that the wounded-soldier anecdote which Riley told for
years was, as Riley gave it, the funniest thing he ever listened to.

In his travels Riley usually appeared with another reader. Richard
Malcolm Johnston, Eugene Field, and Robert J. Burdette were at various
times associated with him, but he is probably more generally known
for his joint appearances with the late Edgar W. (“Bill”) Nye. He had
for Nye the warmest affection, and in the last ten years of his life
would recount with the greatest zest incidents of their adventures on
the road--Nye’s practical jokes, his droll comments upon the people
they met, the discomforts of transportation, and the horrors of hotel
cookery. Riley’s admiration for his old comrade was so great that I
sometimes suspected that he attributed to Nye the authorship of some of
his own stories in sheer excess of devotion to Nye’s memory.

His first reception into the inner literary circle was in 1887, when
he participated in the authors’ readings given in New York to further
the propaganda of the Copyright League. Lowell presided on these
occasions, and others who contributed to the exercises were Mark Twain,
George W. Cable, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry C.
Bunner, George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, and Frank R.
Stockton. It was, I believe, Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, then of the
_Century Magazine_ (which had just enlisted Riley as a contributor),
who was responsible for this recognition of the Hoosier. Nothing did
more to establish Riley as a serious contestant for literary honors
than his success on this occasion. He was greeted so cordially--from
contemporaneous accounts he “ran away with the show”--that on Lowell’s
urgent invitation he appeared at a second reading.

Riley’s intimate friendships with other writers were comparatively
few, due largely to his home-keeping habit, but there were some
for whom, without ever seeing much of them, he had a liking that
approached affection. Mark Twain was one of these; Mr. Howells and
Joel Chandler Harris were others. He saw Longfellow on the occasion of
his first visit to Boston. Riley had sent him several of his poems,
which Longfellow had acknowledged in an encouraging letter; but it was
not the way of Riley to knock at any strange door, and General “Dan”
Macaulay, once mayor of Indianapolis, a confident believer in the
young Hoosier’s future, took charge of the pilgrimage. Longfellow had
been ill, but he appeared unexpectedly just as a servant was turning
the visitors away. He was wholly kind and gracious, and “shook hands
five times,” Riley said, when they parted. The slightest details of
that call--it was shortly before Longfellow’s death--were ineffaceably
written in Riley’s memory--even the lavender trousers which, he
insisted, Longfellow wore!

Save for the years of lyceum work and the last three winters of his
life spent happily in Florida, Riley’s absences from home were
remarkably infrequent. He derived no pleasure from the hurried
travelling made necessary by his long tours as a reader; he was
without the knack of amusing himself in strange places, and the social
exactions of such journeys he found very irksome. Even in his active
years, before paralysis crippled him, his range of activities was most
circumscribed. The Lockerbie Street in which he lived so comfortably,
tucked away though it is from the noisier currents of traffic, lies,
nevertheless, within sound of the court-house bell, and he followed
for years a strict routine which he varied rarely and only with the
greatest apprehension as to the possible consequences.

It was a mark of our highest consideration and esteem to produce
Riley at entertainments given in honor of distinguished visitors,
but this was never effected without considerable plotting. (I have
heard that in Atlanta “Uncle Remus” was even a greater problem to
his fellow citizens!) Riley’s innate modesty, always to be reckoned
with, was likely to smother his companionableness in the presence of
ultra-literary personages. His respect for scholarship, for literary
sophistication, made him reluctant to meet those who, he imagined,
breathed a divine ether to which he was unacclimated. At a small dinner
in honor of Henry James he maintained a strict silence until one of the
other guests, in an effort to “draw out” the novelist, spoke of Thomas
Hardy and the felicity of his titles, mentioning _Under the Greenwood
Tree_ and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_. Riley, for the first time addressing
the table, remarked quietly of the second of these, “It’s an odd thing
about eyes, that they usually come in sets!”--a comment which did not,
as I remember, strike Mr. James as being funny.

Riley always seemed a little bewildered by his success, and it was far
from his nature to trade upon it. He was at pains to escape from any
company where he found himself the centre of attraction. He resented
being “shown off” (to use his own phrase) like “a white mouse with
pink eyes.” He cited as proof that he was never intended for a social
career the unhappy frustration of his attempt to escort his first
sweetheart to a party. Dressed with the greatest care, he knocked at
the beloved’s door. Her father eyed him critically and demanded: “What
you want, Jimmy?”

“Come to take Bessie to the party.”

“Humph! Bessie ain’t goin’ to no party; Bessie’s got the measles!”


V

In so far as Riley was a critic of life and conduct, humor was his
readiest means of expression. Whimsical turns of speech colored his
familiar talk, and he could so utter a single word--always with quiet
inadvertence--as to create a roar of laughter. Apart from the commoner
type of anecdotal humor, he was most amusing in his pursuit of fancies
of the Stocktonesque order. I imagine that he and John Holmes of Old
Cambridge would have understood each other perfectly; all the Holmes
stories I ever heard--particularly the one about Methuselah and the
shoe-laces, preserved by Colonel Higginson--are very similar to yarns
invented by Riley.

To catch his eye in a company or at a public gathering was always
dangerous, for if he was bored or some tedious matter was forward, he
would seek relief by appealing to a friend with a slight lifting of the
brows, or a telepathic reference to some similar situation in the past.
As he walked the streets with a companion his comments upon people and
trifling incidents of street traffic were often in his best humorous
vein. With his intimates he had a fashion of taking up without prelude
subjects that had been dropped weeks before. He was greatly given to
assuming characters and assigning parts to his friends in the little
comedies he was always creating. For years his favorite rôle was that
of a rural preacher of a type that had doubtless aroused his animosity
in youth. He built up a real impression of this character--a cadaverous
person of Gargantuan appetite, clad in a long black alpaca coat, who
arrived at farmhouses at meal-times and depleted the larder, while the
children of the household, awaiting the second table in trepidation,
gloomily viewed the havoc through the windows. One or another of us
would be Brother Hotchkiss, or Brother Brookwarble, and we were
expected to respond in his own key of bromidic pietism. This device,
continually elaborated, was not wholly foolishness on his part, but an
expression of his deep-seated contempt for cant and hypocrisy, which he
regarded as the most grievous of sins.

When he described some “character” he had known, it was with an amount
of minute detail that made the person stand forth as a veritable being.
Questions from the listener would be welcomed, as evidence of sympathy
with the recital and interest in the individual under discussion.
As I journeyed homeward with him once from Philadelphia, he began
limning for two companions a young lawyer he had known years before at
Greenfield. He carried this far into the night, and at the breakfast
table was ready with other anecdotes of this extraordinary individual.
When the train reached Indianapolis the sketch, vivid and amusing,
seemed susceptible of indefinite expansion.

In nothing was he more diverting than in the superstitions he affected.
No life could have been freer from annoyances and care than his, and
yet he encouraged the belief that he was pursued by a “hoodoo.” This
was the most harmless of delusions, and his nearest friends encouraged
the idea for the enjoyment they found in his intense satisfaction
whenever any untoward event--never anything important--actually befell
him. The bizarre, the fantastic, had a mild fascination for him; he
read occult meanings into unusual incidents of every kind. When Alfred
Tennyson Dickens visited Indianapolis I went with him to call on Riley.
A few days later Mr. Dickens died suddenly in New York, and soon
afterward I received a note that he had written me in the last hour of
his life. Riley was so deeply impressed by this that he was unable to
free his mind of it for several days. It was an astounding thing, he
said, to receive a letter from a dead man. For a time he found comfort
in the idea that I shared the malevolent manifestations to which he
fancied himself subject. We were talking in the street one day when
a brick fell from a building and struck the sidewalk at our feet. He
was drawing on a glove and quite characteristically did not start or
manifest any anxiety as to his safety. He lifted his head guardedly and
with a casual air said: “I see they’re still after you” (referring to
the fact that a few weeks earlier a sign had fallen on me in Denver).
Then, holding out his hands, he added mournfully: “They’re after me,
too!” The gloves--a pair brought him from London by a friend--were both
lefts.

A number of years ago he gave me his own copy of the _Oxford Book of
English Verse_--an anthology of which he was very fond. In it was
pasted a book-plate that had previously escaped me. It depicted an old
scholar in knee-breeches and three-cornered hat, with an armful of
books. When asked about the plate, Riley explained that a friend had
given it to him, but that he had never used it because, on counting the
books, there seemed to be thirteen of them. However, some one having
convinced him that the number was really twelve, the evil omen was
happily dispelled.

Politics interested him not at all, except as to the personal
characteristics of men prominent in that field. He voted only once, so
he often told me, and that was at the behest of a friend who was a
candidate for some local office. Finding later that in his ignorance of
the proper manner of preparing a ballot he had voted for his friend’s
opponent, he registered a vow, to which he held strictly, never to
vote again. My own occasional dabblings in politics caused him real
distress, and once, when I had playfully poked into a hornet’s nest, he
sought me out immediately to warn me of the dire consequences of such
temerity. “They’ll burn your barn,” he declared; “they’ll kidnap your
children!”

His incompetence--real or pretended--in many directions was one of the
most delightful things about him. Even in the commonest transactions
of life he was rather helpless--the sort of person one instinctively
assists and protects. His deficiencies of orientation were a joke among
his friends, and though he insisted that he couldn’t find his way
anywhere, I’m disposed to think that this was part of the make-believe
in which he delighted. When he intrusted himself to another’s
leading he was always pleased if the guide proved as incapable as
himself. Lockerbie Street is a little hard to find, even for lifelong
Indianapolitans, and for a caller to confess his difficulties in
reaching it was sure to add to the warmth of his welcome.

Riley had no patience for research, and cheerfully turned over to
friends his inquiries of every sort. Indeed he committed to others
with comical light-heartedness all matters likely to prove vexatious
or disagreeable. He was chronically in search of something that might
or might not exist. He complained for years of the loss of a trunk
containing letters from Longfellow, Mark Twain, and others, though his
ideas as to its genesis and subsequent history were altogether hazy.

He was a past master of the art of postponement, but when anything
struck him as urgent he found no peace until he had disposed of it.
He once summoned two friends, at what was usually for him a forbidden
hour of the morning, to repair forthwith to the photographer’s, that
the three might have their pictures taken, his excuse being that one or
another might die suddenly, leaving the desired “group” unrealized--a
permanent sorrow to the survivors.

His portrait by Sargent shows him at his happiest, but for some reason
he never appeared to care for it greatly. There was, I believe, some
vague feeling on his part that one of the hands was imperfect--a little
too sketchy, perhaps. He would speak cordially of Sargent and describe
his method of work with characteristic attention to detail; but when
his opinion of the portrait was solicited, he would answer evasively or
change the subject.

He clung tenaciously to a few haunts, one of these being for many years
the office of the _Journal_, to which he contributed the poems in
dialect that won his first recognition. The back room of the business
office was a favorite loafing place for a number of prominent citizens
who were responsive to Riley’s humor. They maintained there something
akin to a country-store forum of which Riley was the bright particular
star. A notable figure of those days in our capital was Myron Reed,
a Presbyterian minister of singular gifts, who had been a captain
of cavalry in the Civil War. Reed and William P. Fishback, a lawyer
of distinction, also of the company, were among the first Americans
to “discover” Matthew Arnold. Riley’s only excursion abroad was in
company with Reed and Fishback, and surely no more remarkable trio
ever crossed the Atlantic. It is eloquent of the breadth of Riley’s
sympathies that he appreciated and enjoyed the society of men whose
interests and activities were so wholly different from his own. They
made the usual pious pilgrimages, but the one incident that pleased
Riley most was a supper in the Beefsteak Room adjoining Irving’s
theatre, at which Coquelin also was a guest. The theatre always had a
fascination for Riley, and this occasion and the reception accorded
his reading of some of his poems marked one of the high levels of his
career. Mr. Fishback reported that Coquelin remarked to Irving of
Riley’s recitations, that the American had by nature what they had been
twenty years acquiring.

In keeping with the diffidence already referred to was his dread
of making awkward or unfortunate remarks, and it was like him to
exaggerate greatly his sins of this character. He illustrated Irving’s
fine nobility by an incident offered also as an instance of his own
habit of blundering. Riley had known for years an English comedian
attached to a stock company at Indianapolis, and he mentioned this
actor to Irving and described a bit of “business” he employed in the
part of First Clown in the graveyard scene in “Hamlet.” Irving not only
professed to remember the man, but confirmed in generous terms Riley’s
estimate of his performance as the grave-digger. When Riley learned
later that what he had believed to be the unique practice of his friend
had been the unbroken usage of the stage from the time of Shakespeare,
he was inconsolable, and his blunder was a sore point with him to the
end of his days.

Though his mail was enormous, he was always solicitous that no letter
should escape. For a time it pleased him to receive mail at three
points of delivery--his house, his publisher’s, and the office of a
trust company where a desk was reserved for him. The advantage of this
was that it helped to fill in the day and to minimize the disparity
between his own preoccupations and the more exacting employments of his
friends. Once read, the letters were likely to be forgotten, but this
did not lessen his joy in receiving them. He was the meek slave of
autograph-hunters, and at the holiday season he might be found daily
inscribing books that poured in remorselessly from every part of the
country.


VI

The cheery optimism, tolerance, and mercy that are the burden of his
verse summed up his religion. He told me once that he was a Methodist;
at least, he had become a member of that body in his youth, and he
was not aware, as he put it, that they had ever “fired” him. For a
time he was deeply interested in Spiritualism and attended séances;
but I imagine that he derived no consolation from these sources, as
he never mentioned the subject in later years. Though he never probed
far into such matters, speculations as to immortality always appealed
to him, and he often reiterated his confidence that we shall meet and
recognize, somewhere in the beyond, those who are dear to us on earth.
His sympathy for bereaved friends was marked by the tenderest feeling.
“It’s all right,” he would say bravely, and he did believe, sincerely,
in a benign Providence that makes things “right.”

Here was a life singularly blessed in all its circumstances and in the
abundant realization of its hopes and aims. Few poets of any period
have received so generous an expression of public regard and affection
as fell to Riley’s lot. The very simplicity of his message and the
melodious forms in which it was delivered won him the wide hearing that
he enjoyed and that seems likely to be his continuing reward far into
the future. Yale wrote him upon her rolls as a Master of Arts, the
University of Pennsylvania made him a Doctor of Letters. The American
Academy of Arts and Letters bestowed upon him its gold medal in the
department of poetry; his last birthdays were observed in many parts of
the country. Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends were his happy
portion, and he left the world richer for the faith and hope and honest
mirth that he brought to it.




THE CHEERFUL BREAKFAST TABLE

  “A good, honest, wholesome, hungry breakfast.”

                                --_The Compleat Angler._


“ONE fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis
came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a
certain club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament.” This has
always seemed to me the noblest possible opening for a tale. The zest
of a fine morning in London, the deliberation of a gentleman taking his
ease in his club and fortifying himself against the day’s events with a
satisfying breakfast, are communicated to the reader in a manner that
at once inspires confidence and arouses the liveliest expectations. I
shall not go the length of saying that all novels should begin with
breakfast, but where the disclosures are to be of moment, and we are to
be urged upon adventures calculated to tax our emotions or our staying
powers, a breakfast table serves admirably as a point of departure. We
thus begin the imaginary day where the natural day begins, and we form
the acquaintance of the characters at an hour when human nature is most
satisfactorily and profitably studied.

It is only a superstition that night alone affords the proper
atmosphere for romance, and that the curtain must fall upon the first
scene with the dead face of the king’s messenger upturned to the moon
and the landlord bawling from an upper window to know what it’s all
about. Morning is the beginning of all things. Its hours breathe life
and hope. “Pistols and coffee!” The phrase whets the appetite both for
the encounter and the cheering cup. The duel, to be sure, is no longer
in favor, and it is not for me to lament its passing; but I mention it
as an affair of dewy mornings, indelibly associated with hours when the
hand is steady and courage runs high.

It may be said with all assurance that breakfast has fallen into sad
neglect, due to the haste and rush of modern life--the commuter’s
anxiety touching the 8.27, the city man’s fear that he may not be able
to absorb the day’s news before his car is at the door. Breakfast has
become a negligible item of the day’s schedule. An increasing number
of American citizens are unfit to be seen at the breakfast hour; and
a man, woman, or child who cannot present a cheery countenance at
breakfast is living an unhealthy life upon the brink of disaster. A
hasty visit to the table, the gulping of coffee, the vicious snapping
of teeth upon food scarcely looked at, and a wild rush to keep the
first appointment noted on the calendar, is the poorest possible
preparation for a day of honest work. The man who follows this practice
is a terror to his business associates. Reports that “the boss isn’t
feeling well this morning” pass about the office, with a disturbance of
the morale that does not make for the efficiency of the establishment.
The wife who reaches the table dishevelled and fretful, under
compulsion of her conscience, with the idea that the lord of the house
should not be permitted to fare forth without her benediction, would do
better to keep her bed. If the eggs are overdone or the coffee is cold
and flavorless, her panicky entrance at the last moment will not save
the situation. A growl from behind the screening newspaper is a poor
return for her wifely self-denial, but she deserves it. There is guilt
upon her soul; if she had not insisted on taking the Smiths to supper
after the theatre the night before, he would have got the amount of
sleep essential to his well-being and the curtaining paper would not be
camouflaging a face to which the good-by kiss at the front door is an
affront, not a caress.

“Have the children come down yet?” the lone breakfaster growlingly
demands. The maid replies indifferently that the children have
severally and separately partaken of their porridge and departed. Her
manner of imparting this information signifies rebellion against a
system which makes necessary the repeated offering of breakfast to
persons who accept only that they may complain of it. No happier is the
matutinal meal in humbler establishments where the wife prepares and
serves the food, and buttons up Susie’s clothes or sews a button on
Johnny’s jacket while the kettle boils. If the husband met a bootlegger
in the alley the previous night it is the wife’s disagreeable duty to
rouse him from his protracted slumbers; and if, when she has produced
him at the table, he is displeased with the menu, his resentment,
unchecked by those restraints presupposed of a higher culture, is
manifested in the playful distribution of the tableware in the general
direction of wife and offspring. The family cluster fearfully at the
door as the head of the house, with surly resignation, departs for
the scene of his daily servitude with the smoke of his pipe trailing
behind him, animated by no love for the human race but only by a firm
resolution not to lift his hand until the last echoes of the whistle
have died away.

It is foreign to my purpose to indict a whole profession, much less
the medical fraternity, which is so sadly harassed by a generation
of Americans who demand in pills and serums what its progenitors
found in the plough handle and the axe, and yet I cannot refrain from
laying at the doors of the doctors some burden of responsibility for
the destruction of the breakfast table. The astute and diplomatic
physician, perfectly aware that he is dealing with an outraged
stomach and that the internal discomfort is due to overindulgence, is
nevertheless anxious to impose the slightest tax upon the patient’s
self-denial. Breakfast, he reflects, is no great shakes anyhow, and he
suggests that it be curtailed, or prescribes creamless coffee or offers
some other hint equally banal. This is wholly satisfactory to Jones,
who says with a sigh of relief that he never cared much for breakfast,
and that he can very easily do without it.

About twenty-five years ago some one started a boom for the
breakfastless day as conducive to longevity. I know persons who have
clung stubbornly to this absurdity. The despicable habit contributes to
domestic unsociability and is, I am convinced by my own experiments,
detrimental to health. The chief business of the world is transacted
in the morning hours, and I am reluctant to believe that it is most
successfully done on empty stomachs. Fasting as a spiritual discipline
is, of course, quite another thing; but fasting by a tired business
man under medical compulsion can hardly be lifted to the plane of
things spiritual. To delete breakfast from the day’s programme is
sheer cowardice, a confession of invalidism which is well calculated
to reduce the powers of resistance. The man who begins the day with a
proscription that sets him apart from his neighbors may venture into
the open jauntily, persuading himself that his abstinence proves his
superior qualities; but in his heart, to say nothing of his stomach,
he knows that he has been guilty of a sneaking evasion. If he were
a normal, healthy being, he would not be skulking out of the house
breakfastless. Early rising, a prompt response to the breakfast-bell,
a joyous breaking of the night’s fast is a rite not to be despised in
civilized homes.

Old age rises early and calls for breakfast and the day’s news.
Grandfather is entitled to his breakfast at any hour he demands it. He
is at an age when every hour stolen from the night is fairly plucked
from oblivion, and to offer him breakfast in bed as more convenient
to the household, or with a well-meant intention of easing the day
for him, is merely to wound his feelings. There is something finely
appealing in the thought of a veteran campaigner in the army of life
who doesn’t wait for the bugle to sound reveille, but kindles his fire
and eats his ration before his young comrades are awake.

The failure of breakfast, its growing ill repute and disfavor are not,
however, wholly attributable to the imperfections of our social or
economic system. There is no more reason why the homes of the humble
should be illumined by a happy breakfast table than that the morning
scene in abodes of comfort and luxury should express cheer and a
confident faith in human destiny. Snobbishness must not enter into this
matter of breakfast reform; rich and poor alike must be persuaded that
the morning meal is deserving of all respect, that it is the first act
of the day’s drama, not to be performed in a slipshod fashion to spoil
the rest of the play. It is the first chapter of a story, and every one
who has dallied with the art of fiction knows that not merely the first
chapter but the first line must stir the reader’s imagination.

Morning has been much sung by the poets, some of them no doubt wooing
the lyre in bed. A bard to my taste, Benjamin S. Parker, an Indiana
pioneer and poet who had lived in a log cabin and was, I am persuaded,
an early and light-hearted breakfaster, wrote many verses on which the
dew sparkles:

  “I had a dream of other days,--
    In golden luxury waved the wheat;
  In tangled greenness shook the maize;
    The squirrels ran with nimble feet,
  And in and out among the trees
    The hangbird darted like a flame;
  The catbird piped his melodies,
    Purloining every warbler’s fame:
  And then I heard triumphal song,
    ’Tis morning and the days are long.”

I hope not to imperil my case for the cheerful breakfast table by
asserting too much in support of it, but I shall not hesitate to
say that the contemptuous disregard in which breakfast is now held
by thousands of Americans is indisputably a cause of the low state
to which the family tie has fallen. It is a common complaint of
retrospective elderly persons that the family life, as our grandparents
knew it, has been destroyed by the haste and worry incident to modern
conditions. Breakfast--a leisurely, jolly affair as I would have
it, with every member of the household present on the stroke of the
gong--is unequalled as a unifying force. The plea that everybody is in
a hurry in the morning is no excuse; if there is any hour when haste is
unprofitable it is that first morning hour.

It is impossible to estimate at this writing the effect of the
daylight-saving movement upon breakfast and civilization. To add an
hour to the work-day is resented by sluggards who, hearing seven chime,
reflect that it is really only six, and that a little self-indulgence
is wholly pardonable. However, it is to be hoped that the change, where
accepted in good spirit, may bring many to a realization of the cheer
and inspiration to be derived from early rising.

A day should not be “jumped into,” but approached tranquilly and with
respect and enlivened by every element of joy that can be communicated
to it. At noon we are in the midst of conflict; at nightfall we have
won or lost battles; but in the morning “all is possible and all
unknown.” If we have slept like honest folk, and are not afraid of a
dash of cold water, we meet the day blithely and with high expectation.
If the day dawn brightly, there is good reason for sharing its promise
with those who live under the same roof; if it be dark and rain beats
upon the pane, even greater is the need of family communion, that every
member may be strengthened for valiant wrestling with the day’s tasks.

The disorder of the week-day breakfast in most households is
intensified on Sunday morning, when we are all prone to a very liberal
interpretation of the meaning of a day of rest. There was a time not
so long ago when a very large proportion of the American people rose
on Sunday morning with no other thought but to go to church. Children
went to Sunday-school, not infrequently convoyed by their parents. I
hold no brief for the stern inhibitions of the monstrous Puritan Sunday
which hung over childhood like a gray, smothering cloud. Every one has
flung a brick at Protestantism for its failures of reconstruction and
readjustment to modern needs, and I am not without my own shame in this
particular. The restoration of breakfast to its rightful place would
do much to put a household in a frame of mind for the contemplation of
the infinite. Here, at least, we are unembarrassed by the urgency of
the tasks of every day; here, for once in the week, at an hour that may
very properly be set forward, a well-managed family may meet at table
and infuse into the gathering the spirit of cheerful yesterdays and
confident to-morrows.

No better opportunity is afforded for a friendly exchange of
confidences, for the utterance of words of encouragement and hope and
cheer. Tommy, if he has been dealt with firmly in this particular on
earlier occasions, will not revive the old and bothersome question of
whether he shall or shall not go to Sunday-school. If he is a stranger
to that institution by reason of parental incompetence or apostasy,
the hour is not a suitable one for mama to make timid suggestions as
to the importance of biblical instruction. Nor will eighteen-year-old
Madeline renew her demand for a new party dress when this matter was
disposed of definitely Saturday night. Nor will the father, unless he
be of the stuff of which brutes are made, open a debate with his wife
as to whether he shall accompany her to church or go to the club for a
luxurious hour with the barber. A well-ordered household will not begin
the week by wrangling on a morning that should, of all mornings, be
consecrated to serenity and peace.

Great numbers of American households are dominated by that marvel
of the age, the Sunday newspaper. For this prodigious expression of
journalistic enterprise I have only the warmest admiration, but I
should certainly exclude it from the breakfast table as provocative
of discord and subversive of discipline. Amusing as the “funny page”
may be, its color scheme does not blend well either with soft-boiled
eggs or marmalade. Madeline’s appetite for news of the social world
may wait a little, and as there is no possibility of buying or selling
on the Sabbath-day, the gentleman at the head of the table may as
well curb his curiosity about the conclusions of the weekly market
review. Fragments of Sunday newspapers scattered about a breakfast
table are not decorative. They encourage bad manners and selfishness.
A newspaper is an impudent intrusion at the table at any time, but
on Sunday its presence is a crime. On an occasion, the late William
Graham Sumner was a guest in my house. Like the alert, clear-thinking
philosopher he was, he rose early and read the morning paper before
breakfast. He read it standing, and finding him erect by a window with
the journal spread wide for greater ease in scanning it quickly, I
begged him to be seated. “No,” he answered; “always read a newspaper
standing; you won’t waste time on it that way.”

With equal firmness I should exclude the morning mail from the table.
The arrival of the post is in itself an infringement upon domestic
privacy, and the reading of letters is deadly to that conversation
which alone can make the table tolerable at any meal. Good news can
wait; bad news is better delayed until the mind and body are primed
to deal with it. If the son has been “canned” at school, or if the
daughter has overstepped her allowance, or if some absent member of the
family is ill, nothing can be done about it at the breakfast table.
On the first day of the month, the dumping of bills on the table, to
the accompaniment of expostulations, regrets, and perhaps tears, should
be forbidden. Few homes are so controlled by affection and generous
impulses as to make possible the distribution of bills at a breakfast
table without poisoning the day. A tradesman with the slightest feeling
of delicacy will never mail a bill to be delivered on the morning of
the first day of the month. Anywhere from the third or fourth to the
twentieth, and so timed as to be delivered in the afternoon--such
would be my suggestion to the worthy merchant. The head of the house
knows, at dinner time, the worst that the day has for him; if fortune
has smiled, he is likely to be merciful; if fate has thrown the dice
against him, he will be humble. And besides, a discreet wife, receiving
an account that has hung over her head ever since she made that sad,
rash purchase, has, if the bill arrive in the afternoon post, a chance
to conceal the odious thing until such time as the domestic atmosphere
is clear and bright. Attempts to sneak the dressmaker’s bill under the
coffee-pot are fraught with peril; such concealments are unworthy of
American womanhood. Let the hour or half-hour at the breakfast table be
kept free of the taint of bargain and sale, a quiet vestibule of the
day, barred against importunate creditors.

As against the tendency, so destructive of good health and mental and
moral efficiency, to slight breakfast, the food manufacturers have set
themselves with praiseworthy determination to preserve and dignify the
meal. One has but to peruse the advertising pages of the periodicals
to learn of the many tempting preparations that are offered to grace
the breakfast table. The obtuse, inured to hasty snatches, nibbles,
and sips, are assisted to a proper appreciation of these preparations
by the most enchanting illustrations. The art of publicity has spent
itself lavishly to lure the world to an orderly and contemplative
breakfast with an infinite variety of cereals that have been subjected
to processes which make them a boon to mankind. When I hear of an
addition to the long list, I fly at once to the grocer to obtain one
of the crisp packages, and hurry home to deposit it with the cook
for early experiment. The adventurous sense is roused not only by the
seductive advertisement but by the neatness of the container, the ears
of corn or the wheat sheaf so vividly depicted on the wrapper, or the
contagious smile of a radiant child brandishing a spoon and demanding
more.

Only a slouchy and unimaginative housewife will repeat monotonously
a breakfast schedule. A wise rotation, a continual surprise in the
food offered, does much to brighten the table. The damnable iteration
of ham and eggs has cracked the pillars of many a happy home. There
should be no ground for cavil; the various items should not only be
well-chosen, but each dish should be fashioned as for a feast of high
ceremony. Gluttony is a grievous sin; breakfast, I repeat, should be a
spiritual repast. If fruit is all that the soul craves, well enough;
but let it be of paradisiacal perfection. If coffee and a roll satisfy
the stomach’s craving, let the one be clear and not so bitter as to
keep the imbiber’s heart protesting all day, and the other hot enough
to melt butter and of ethereal lightness. The egg is the most sinned
against of all foods. It would seem that no one could or would wantonly
ruin an egg, a thing so useful, so inoffensive; and yet the proper
cooking of an egg is one of the most difficult of all culinary arts.
Millions of eggs are ruined every year in American kitchens. Better
that the whole annual output should be cast into the sea than that one
egg should offend the eye and the palate of the expectant breakfaster.

It grieves me to be obliged to confess that in hotels and on
dining-cars, particularly west of Pittsburgh, many of my fellow
citizens are weak before the temptation of hot cakes, drenched
in syrup. I have visited homes where the griddle is an implement
frequently invoked through the winter months, and I have at times,
in my own house, met the buckwheat cake and the syrup jug and meekly
fallen before their combined assault; but the sight of a man eating hot
cakes on a flying train, after a night in a sleeper, fills me with a
sense of desolation. Verily it is not alone the drama that the tired
business man has brought to low estate!

Sausage and buckwheat cakes have never appealed to me as an inevitable
combination like ham and eggs. Beefsteak and onions at the breakfast
hour are only for those who expect to devote the remainder of the day
to crime or wood-chopping. The scent in itself is not the incense for
rosy-fingered morn; and steak at breakfast, particularly in these
times of perpendicular prices, speaks for vulgar display rather than
generosity.

The history of breakfast, the many forms that it has known, the
customs of various tribes and nations, assist little in any attempt to
re-establish the meal in public confidence. Plato may have done his
loftiest thinking on an empty stomach; I incline to the belief that
Sophocles was at all times a light breakfaster; Horace must regret
that he passed into the Elysian Fields without knowing the refreshing
qualities of a grapefruit. If my post-mortem terminal were less
problematical, I should like to carry him a grapefruit--a specimen
not chilled to death in cold storage--and divide it with him, perhaps
adding a splash of Falernian for memory’s sake. But the habits of the
good and great of olden times are not of the slightest importance
to us of twentieth-century America. Still, not to ignore wholly the
familiar literary associations suggested by my subject, Samuel Rogers
and his weakness for entertaining at breakfast shall have honorable
mention. Rogers’s breakfasts, one of his contemporaries hinted, were a
cunning test of the fitness of the guests to be promoted to the host’s
dinner table--a process I should have reversed, on the theory that the
qualifications for breakfast guests are far more exacting than those
for a dinner company. We have testimony that Rogers’s breakfasts,
informal and with every one at ease, were much more successful than his
dinners. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Moore, Southey and Macaulay,
the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell were fellows to make a
lively breakfast table. At one of these functions Coleridge talked for
three hours on poetry, an occasion on which, we may assume, the variety
or quality of the food didn’t matter greatly.

Breakfast as a social medium has never flourished in America, chiefly
because of our lack of leisure. Where recognized at all it is thrown
into the middle of the day where it becomes an anomaly, an impudent
intrusion. A breakfast that is a luncheon is not a breakfast, but a
concession to the Philistines. Once, with considerable difficulty,
I persuaded a lady of my acquaintance to undertake to popularize
breakfast by asking a company, few and fit, for eight o’clock. The
first party was delightful, and the second, moved along to nine, was
equally successful. But the hostess was so pleased with her success
that she increased the number of guests to a dozen and then to fifteen,
and advanced the hour to noon, with the result that the felicity of the
earlier hours was lost. One must have a concrete programme to be of
service in these reforms, and I shall say quite fearlessly that a round
table set for six is the ideal arrangement.

A breakfast must be planned with greatest care. It should never be
resorted to as a means of paying social debts, but arranged with
the utmost independence. Where a wife is a desirable guest and the
husband is not, there is no reason why a plate should be wasted. On
the other hand, I should as rigidly exclude the wife who is socially
a non-conductor. The talk at a breakfast table must be spirited, and
it will not be otherwise if the company is well chosen. It’s an absurd
idea that candle-light is essential to sociability and that wit will
not sparkle in the early morning. Some of the best talk I ever listened
to has been at breakfast tables, where the guests conversed freely
under the inspiration of a mounting sun. Doctor Holmes clearly believed
the breakfast hour appropriate for the disclosure of the sprightliest
philosophy.

An American novelist once explained that he did his writing in the
afternoon because he couldn’t make love in the morning. Not make love
in the morning! The thought is barbarous. Morning is of sentiment
all compact. Morning to the lover who possesses a soul is washed
with Olympian dews. The world is all before him where to choose and
his heart is his only guide. Love is not love that fears the morning
light.... There was a house by the sea, whence a girl used to dart
forth every morning for a run over the rocks. We used to watch her
from our windows, admiring the lightness of her step, her unconscious
grace as she was silhouetted on some high point of the shore against
the blue of sea and sky. It was to think of him, her lover, in the free
sanctuary of the new, clean day that she ran that morning race with
her own spirits. And he, perhaps knowing that she was thus preparing
herself for their first meeting, would fly after her, and they would
come running back, hand in hand, and appear with glowing cheeks and
shining eyes at the breakfast table, to communicate to the rest of us
the joy of youth.

There are houses in which participation in the family breakfast is
frankly denied to the guest, who is informed that by pressing a button
in his room coffee will appear at any hour that pleases his fancy.
Let us consider this a little. The ideal guest is rare; the number of
persons one really enjoys having about, free to penetrate the domestic
arcana, is small indeed. This I say who am not an inhospitable soul.
That a master and mistress should keep the morning free is, however, no
sign of unfriendliness; the shoving of breakfast into a room does not
argue necessarily for churlishness, and I have never so interpreted
it. A hostess has her own affairs to look after, and the despatch of
trays up-stairs enables her to guard her morning from invasion. Still,
in a country house, a guest is entitled to a fair shot at the morning.
The day is happier when the household assembles at a fixed hour not to
be trifled with by a lazy and inconsiderate guest.

Moreover, we are entitled to know what our fellows look like in the
morning hours. I have spoken of lovers, and there is no sterner test of
the affections than a breakfast-table inspection. Is a yawn unbecoming?
We have a right to know with what manner of yawn we are to spend our
lives. Is it painful to listen to the crunching of toast in the mouth
of the adored? Is the wit laggard in the morning hours when it should
be at its nimblest? These are grave matters not lightly to be brushed
aside. At breakfast the blemish in the damask cheek publishes itself
shamelessly; an evil temper that is subdued by candle-light will betray
itself over the morning coffee. At breakfast we are what we are,
and not what we may make ourselves for good or ill before the stars
twinkle.

I protest against breakfast in bed as not only unsocial but unbecoming
in the children of democracy. I have never succumbed to this temptation
without experiencing a feeling of humiliation and cowardice. A proper
punishment for such self-indulgence is inflicted by the stray crumbs
that lodge between the sheets unless one be highly skilled in the
handling of breakfast trays. Crumbs in bed! Procrustes missed a chance
here. The presence of emptied dishes in a bedroom is disheartening in
itself; the sight of them brings to a sensitive soul a conviction of
incompetence and defeat. You cannot evade their significance; they are
the wreck of a battle lost before you have buckled on your armor or
fired an arrow at the foe. My experiments have been chiefly in hotels,
where I have shrunk from appearing in a vast hall built for banqueting
and wholly unsuitable for breakfasting; but better suffer this gloomy
isolating experience than huddle between covers and balance a tray on
stubborn knees that rebel at the indignity.

The club breakfast is an infamous device designed to relieve the
mind of what should be the pleasant privilege of selection. I am
uninformed as to who invented this iniquity of numbered alternatives,
but I unhesitatingly pronounce him an enemy of mankind. Already too
many forces are operating to beat down the imagination. I charge this
monstrosity upon the propagandists of realism; certainly no romanticist
in the full possession of his powers would tolerate a thing so deadly
to the play of fancy. I want neither the No. 7 nor the No. 9 prescribed
on the card; and the waiter’s index finger wabbling down the margin
in an attempt to assist me is an affront, an impudence. Breakfast
should be an affair between man and his own soul; a business for the
initiative, not the referendum.

Breakfast out of doors is the ideal arrangement, or in winter under
an ample screen of glass. My own taste is for a perspective of sea
or lake; but a lusty young river at the elbow is not to be despised.
The camper, of course, has always the best of it; a breakfast of
fresh-caught trout with an Indian for company serves to quicken such
vestiges of the primitive as remain in us. But we do not, if we are
wise, wait for ideal conditions. It is a part of the great game of
life to make the best of what we have, particularly in a day that finds
the world spinning madly “down the ringing grooves of change.”

The breakfast table must be made a safe place for humanity, an
inspirational centre of democracy. A land whose people drowsily turn
over for another nap at eight o’clock, or languidly ring for coffee at
eleven, is doomed to destruction. Of such laziness is unpreparedness
born--the vanguard of the enemy already howling at the postern; treason
rampant in the citadel; wailing in the court. Breakfast, a sensible
meal at a seasonable hour; sausage or beefsteak if you are capable of
such atrocities; or only a juicy orange if your appetite be dainty; but
breakfast, a cheerful breakfast with family or friends, no matter how
great the day’s pressure. This, partaken of in a mood of kindliness and
tolerance toward all the world, is a definite accomplishment. By so
much we are victors, and whether the gulfs wash us down or we sight the
happy isles we have set sail with flags flying and to the stirring roll
of drums.




THE BOULEVARD OF ROGUES


NOTHING was ever funnier than Barton’s election to the city council.
However, it occurs to me that if I’m going to speak of it at all, I may
as well tell the whole story.

At the University Club, where a dozen of us have met for luncheon every
business day for many years, Barton’s ideas on the subject of municipal
reform were always received in the most contumelious fashion. We shared
his rage that things were as they were, but as practical business
men we knew that there was no remedy. A city, Barton held, should be
conducted like any other corporation. Its affairs are so various, and
touch so intimately the comfort and security of all of us, that it
is imperative that they be administered by servants of indubitable
character and special training. He would point out that a citizen’s
rights and privileges are similar to those of a stockholder, and that
taxes are in effect assessments to which we submit only in the belief
that the sums demanded are necessary to the wise handling of the
public business; that we should be as anxious for dividends in the form
of efficient and economical service as we are for cash dividends in
other corporations.

There is nothing foolish or unreasonable in these notions; but most of
us are not as ingenious as Barton, or as resourceful as he in finding
means of realizing them.

Barton is a lawyer and something of a cynic. I have never known a man
whose command of irony equalled his. He usually employed it, however,
with perfect good nature, and it was impossible to ruffle him. In the
court-room I have seen him the target for attacks by a formidable array
of opposing counsel, and have heard him answer an hour’s argument in an
incisive reply compressed into ten minutes. His suggestions touching
municipal reforms were dismissed as impractical, which was absurd, for
Barton is essentially a practical man, as his professional successes
clearly proved before he was thirty. He maintained that one capable
man, working alone, could revolutionize a city’s government if he set
about it in the right spirit; and he manifested the greatest scorn for
“movements,” committees of one hundred, and that sort of thing. He had
no great confidence in the mass of mankind or in the soundness of the
majority. His ideas were, we thought, often fantastic, but it could
never be said that he lacked the courage of his convictions. He once
assembled round a mahogany table the presidents of the six principal
banks and trust companies in our town and laid before them a plan by
which, through the smothering of the city’s credit, a particularly
vicious administration might be brought to terms. The city finances
were in a bad way, and, as the result of a policy of wastefulness
and short-sightedness, the administration was constantly seeking
temporary loans, which the local banks were expected to carry. Barton
dissected the municipal budget before the financiers, and proposed
that, as another temporary accommodation was about to be asked, they
put the screws on the mayor and demand that he immediately force the
resignations of all his important appointees and replace them with men
to be designated by three citizens to be named by the bankers. Barton
had carefully formulated the whole matter, and he presented it with his
usual clarity and effectiveness; but rivalry between the banks for the
city’s business, and fear of incurring the displeasure of some of their
individual depositors who were closely allied with the bosses of the
bipartisan machine, caused the scheme to be rejected. Our lunch-table
strategy board was highly amused by Barton’s failure, which was just
what we had predicted.

Barton accepted his defeat with equanimity and spoke kindly of the
bankers as good men but deficient in courage. But in the primaries the
following spring he got himself nominated for city councilman. No one
knew just how he had accomplished this. Of course, as things go in our
American cities, no one qualified for membership in a university club
is eligible for any municipal office, and no man of our acquaintance
had ever before offered himself for a position so utterly without honor
or dignity. Even more amazing than Barton’s nomination was Barton’s
election. Our councilmen are elected at large, and we had assumed
that any strength he might develop in the more prosperous residential
districts would be overbalanced by losses in industrial neighborhoods.

The results proved to be quite otherwise. Barton ran his own campaign.
He made no speeches, but spent the better part of two months personally
appealing to mechanics and laborers, usually in their homes or on their
door-steps. He was at pains to keep out of the newspapers, and his own
party organization (he is a Republican) gave him only the most grudging
support.

We joked him a good deal about his election to an office that promised
nothing to a man of his type but annoyance and humiliation. His
associates in the council were machine men, who had no knowledge
whatever of enlightened methods of conducting cities. The very
terminology in which municipal government is discussed by the informed
was as strange to them as Sanskrit. His Republican colleagues
cheerfully ignored him, and shut him out of their caucuses; the
Democrats resented his appearance in the council chamber as an
unwarranted intrusion--“almost an indelicacy,” to use Barton’s own
phrase.

The biggest joke of all was Barton’s appointment to the chairmanship
of the Committee on Municipal Art. That this was the only recognition
his associates accorded to the keenest lawyer in the State--a man
possessing a broad knowledge of municipal methods, gathered in every
part of the world--was ludicrous, it must be confessed; but Barton was
not in the least disturbed, and continued to suffer our chaff with his
usual good humor.

Barton is a secretive person, but we learned later that he had meekly
asked the president of the council to give him this appointment. And
it was conferred upon him chiefly because no one else wanted it, there
being, obviously, “nothing in” municipal art discernible to the bleared
eye of the average councilman.

About that time old Sam Follonsby died, bequeathing half a million
dollars--twice as much as anybody knew he had--to be spent on fountains
and statues in the city parks and along the boulevards.

The many attempts of the administration to divert the money to other
uses; the efforts of the mayor to throw the estate into the hands of
a trust company in which he had friends--these matters need not be
recited here.

Suffice it to say that Barton was equal to all the demands made upon
his legal genius. When the estate was settled at the end of a year,
Barton had won every point. Follonsby’s money was definitely set
aside by the court as a special fund for the objects specified by the
testator, and Barton, as the chairman of the Committee on Municipal
Art, had so tied it up in a legal mesh of his own ingenious contriving
that it was, to all intents and purposes, subject only to his personal
check.

It was now that Barton, long irritated by the indifference of our
people to the imperative need of municipal reform, devised a plan
for arousing the apathetic electorate. A philosopher, as well as
a connoisseur in the fine arts, he had concluded that our whole
idea of erecting statues to the good and noble serves no purpose in
stirring patriotic impulses in the bosoms of beholders. There were
plenty of statues and not a few tablets in our town commemorating
great-souled men, but they suffered sadly from public neglect. And
it must be confessed that the average statue, no matter how splendid
the achievements of its subject, is little regarded and serves only
passively as a reminder of public duty. With what has seemed to me a
sublime cynicism, Barton proceeded to spend Follonsby’s money in a
manner at once novel and arresting. He commissioned one of the most
distinguished sculptors in the country to design a statue; and at the
end of his second year in the council (he had been elected for four
years), it was set up on the new boulevard that parallels the river.

His choice of a subject had never been made known, so that curiosity
was greatly excited on the day of the unveiling. Barton had brought
the governor of an adjoining State, who was just then much in the
public eye as a fighter of grafters, to deliver the oration. It was a
speech with a sting to it, but our people had long been hardened to
such lashings. The mayor spoke in praise of the civic spirit which had
impelled Follonsby to make so large a bequest to the public; and then,
before five thousand persons, a little schoolgirl pulled the cord, and
the statue, a splendid creation in bronze, was exposed to the amazed
populace.

I shall not undertake to depict the horror and chagrin of the assembled
citizens when they beheld, instead of the statue of Follonsby, which
they were prepared to see, or a symbolic representation of the
city itself as a flower-crowned maiden, the familiar pudgy figure,
reproduced with the most cruel fidelity, of Mike O’Grady, known as
“Silent Mike,” a big bipartisan boss who had for years dominated
municipal affairs, and who had but lately gone to his reward. The
inscription in itself was an ironic master-stroke:

                     To
              Michael P. O’Grady
    Protector of Saloons, Friend of Crooks
      For Ten Years a City Councilman
  Dominating the Affairs of the Municipality
          This Statue is Erected
       By Grateful Fellow-Citizens
   In Recognition of his Public Services

The effect of this was tremendously disturbing, as may be imagined.
Every newspaper in America printed a picture of the O’Grady statue;
our rival cities made merry over it at our expense. The Chamber of
Commerce, incensed at the affront to the city’s good name, passed
resolutions condemning Barton in the bitterest terms; the local press
howled; a mass-meeting was held in our biggest hall to voice public
indignation. But amid the clamor Barton remained calm, pointing to
the stipulation in Follonsby’s will that his money should be spent
in memorials of men who had enjoyed most fully the confidence of the
people. And as O’Grady had been permitted for years to run the town
about as he liked, with only feeble protests and occasional futile
efforts to get rid of him, Barton was able to defend himself against
all comers.

Six months later Barton set up on the same boulevard a handsome tablet
commemorating the services of a mayor whose venality had brought the
city to the verge of bankruptcy, and who, when his term of office
expired, had betaken himself to parts unknown. This was greeted with
another outburst of rage, much to Barton’s delight. After a brief
interval another tablet was placed on one of the river bridges. The
building of that particular bridge had been attended with much scandal,
and the names of the councilmanic committee who were responsible for it
were set forth over these figures:

  Cost to the People     $249,950.00
  Cost to the Council     131,272.81
                          ----------
    Graft                $118,677.19

The figures were exact and a matter of record. An impudent prosecuting
attorney who had broken with the machine had laid them before the
public some time earlier; but his efforts to convict the culprits
had been frustrated by a judge of the criminal court who took orders
from the bosses. Barton broke his rule against talking through the
newspapers by issuing a caustic statement imploring the infuriated
councilmen to sue him for libel as they threatened to do.

The city was beginning to feel the edge of Barton’s little ironies. At
the club we all realized that he was animated by a definite and high
purpose in thus flaunting in enduring bronze the shame of the city.

“It is to such men as these,” said Barton, referring to the gentlemen
he had favored with his statue and tablets, “that we confide all
our affairs. For years we have stupidly allowed a band of outlaws
to run our town. They spend our money; they manage in their own way
large affairs that concern all of us; they sneer at all the forces
of decency; they have made serfs of us. These scoundrels are our
creatures, and we encourage and foster them; they represent us and our
ideals, and it’s only fitting that we should publish their merits to
the world.”

While Barton was fighting half a dozen injunction suits brought to
thwart the further expenditure of Follonsby’s money for memorials of
men of notorious misfeasance or malfeasance, another city election
rolled round. By this time there had been a revulsion of feeling. The
people began to see that after all there might be a way of escape. Even
the newspapers that had most bitterly assailed Barton declared that
he was just the man for the mayoralty, and he was fairly driven into
office at the head of a non-partisan municipal ticket.

The Boulevard of Rogues we called it for a time. But after Barton had
been in the mayor’s office a year he dumped the O’Grady statue into the
river, destroyed the tablets, and returned to the Follonsby Fund out
of his own pocket the money he had paid for them. Three noble statues
of honest patriots now adorn the boulevard, and half a dozen beautiful
fountains have been distributed among the parks.

The Barton plan is, I submit, worthy of all emulation. If every
boss-ridden, machine-managed American city could once visualize its
shame and folly as Barton compelled us to do, there would be less
complaint about the general failure of local government. There is,
when you come to think of it, nothing so preposterous in the idea
of perpetuating in outward and visible forms the public servants we
humbly permit to misgovern us. Nothing could be better calculated to
quicken the civic impulse in the lethargic citizen than the enforced
contemplation of a line of statues erected to rascals who have
prospered at the expense of the community.

I’m a little sorry, though, that Barton never carried out one of his
plans, which looked to the planting in the centre of a down-town park
of a symbolic figure of the city, felicitously expressed by a barroom
loafer dozing on a whiskey barrel. I should have liked it, and Barton
confessed to me the other day that he was a good deal grieved himself
that he had not pulled it off!




THE OPEN SEASON FOR AMERICAN NOVELISTS

[1915]


I

THIS is the open season for American novelists. The wardens are in
hiding and any one with a blunderbuss and a horn of powder is entitled
to all the game he can kill. The trouble was started by Mr. Edward
Garnett, a poacher from abroad, who crawled under the fence and wrought
great havoc before he was detected. His invasion roused the envy
of scores of native hunters, and at their behest all laws for game
protection have been suspended, to satisfy the general craving for
slaughter. Mr. Owen Wister on his bronco leads the field, a daring and
orgulous knight, sincerely jealous for the good name of the ranges. The
fact that I was once beguiled by an alluring title into purchasing one
of his books in the fond hope that it would prove to be a gay romance
about a lady, only to find that the heroine was, in fact, a cake, does
not alter my amiable feelings toward him. I made a pious pilgrimage
to the habitat of that cake and invested in numerous replicas for
distribution all the way from Colorado to Maine, accompanied by copies
of the novel that so adroitly advertised it--a generosity which I have
refrained from mentioning to Mr. Wister or his publisher to this day.

Mr. Wister’s personal experiences have touched our oldest and newest
civilization, and it is not for me to quarrel with him. Nor should
I be saddling Rosinante for a trot over the fearsome range had he
not taken a pot shot at poor old Democracy, that venerable offender
against the world’s peace and dignity. To drive Mr. Bryan and Mr.
Harold Bell Wright into a lonely cleft of the foot-hills and rope and
tie them together seems to me an act of inhumanity unworthy of a good
sportsman. As I am unfamiliar with Mr. Wright’s writings, I can only
express my admiration for Mr. Wister’s temerity in approaching them
close enough to apply the branding-iron. Mr. Bryan as the protagonist
of Democracy may not be dismissed so easily. To be sure, he has never
profited by any ballot of mine, but he has at times laid the lash with
a sure hand on shoulders that needed chastisement. However, it is the
free and unlimited printing of novels that here concerns us, not the
consecration of silver.

Democracy is not so bad as its novels, nor, for that matter, is a
constitutional monarchy. The taste of many an American has been debased
by English fiction. At the risk of appearing ungracious, I fling in
Mr. Garnett’s teeth an armful of the writings of Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs.
Barclay, and Marie Corelli. The slightest regard for the literary
standards of a young and struggling republic should prompt the mother
country to keep her trash at home. It is our most grievous sin that
we have merely begun to manufacture our own rubbish, in a commendable
spirit of building up home industries. In my youth I was prone to
indulge in pirated reprints of engrossing tales of adorable curates’
nieces who were forever playing Cinderella at hunt balls, and breaking
all the hearts in the county. They were dukes’ daughters, really,
changed in the cradle--Trollope, with a dash of bitters; but their
effect upon me I believe to have been baneful.

A lawyer of my acquaintance used to remark in opening a conference with
opposing counsel: “I am merely thinking aloud; I don’t want to be bound
by anything I say.” It is a good deal in this spirit that I intrude
upon the field of carnage, fortified with a white flag and a Red Cross
badge. The gentle condescension of foreign critics we shall overlook as
lacking in novelty; moreover, Mr. Lowell disposed of that attitude once
and for all time.

If anything more serious is to be required in this engagement than
these casual shots from my pop-gun I hastily tender my proxy to Mr.
Howells. And I am saying (in a husky aside) that if in England,
our sadly myopic stepmother, any one now living has served letters
with anything like the high-minded devotion of Mr. Howells, or with
achievements comparable to his for variety, sincerity, and distinction,
I shall be glad to pay postage for his name.

We must not call names or make faces, but address ourselves cheerfully
to the business at hand. The American novel is, beyond question, in
a bad way. Something is radically wrong with it. The short story,
too, is under fire. Professor Canby would clap a Russian blouse on it
and restore its first fine careless rapture. He makes out a good case
and I cheerfully support his cause, with, however, a reservation that
we try the effect of American overalls and jumper before committing
ourselves fully to Slavic vestments. In my anxiety to be of service to
the friends of American fiction, I am willing to act as pall-bearer
or officiating minister, or even as corpse, with proper guaranties of
decent burial.


II

Our slow advance in artistic achievement has been defended on the plea
that we have no background, no perspective, and that our absorption
in business affairs leaves no time for that serene contemplation of
life that is essential to the highest attainments. To omit the obvious
baccalaureate bromide that we are inheritors of the lore of all the
ages, it may be suggested that our deficiencies in the creative arts
are overbalanced by the prodigious labors of a people who have lived
a great drama in founding and maintaining a new social and political
order within little more than a century.

Philosophers intent upon determining the causes of our failure to
contribute more importantly to all the arts have suggested that our
creative genius has been diverted into commercial and industrial
channels; that Bell and Edison have stolen and imprisoned the
Promethean fire, while the altars of the arts have been left cold.
Instead of sending mankind whirling over hill and dale at a price
within the reach of all, Mr. Henry Ford might have been our enlaurelled
Thackeray if only he had been born beneath a dancing star instead of
under the fiery wheels of Ezekiel’s vision.

The preachiness of our novels, of which critics complain with some
bitterness, may be reprehensible, but it is not inexplicable. We are
a people bred upon the Bible; it was the only book carried into the
wilderness; it still has a considerable following among us, and all
reports of our depravity are greatly exaggerated. We are inured to much
preaching. We tolerate where we do not admire Mr. Bryan, because he is
the last of the circuit-riders, a tireless assailant of the devil and
all his works.

I am aware of growls from the Tory benches as I timidly venture the
suggestion--fully conscious of its impiety--that existing cosmopolitan
standards may not always with justice be applied to our literary
performances. The late Colonel Higginson once supported this position
with what strikes me as an excellent illustration. “When,” he wrote,
“a vivacious Londoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts to deal with that
profound imaginative creation, Arthur Dimmesdale in _The Scarlet
Letter_, he fails to comprehend him from an obvious and perhaps
natural want of acquaintance with the whole environment of the man. To
Mr. Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Lovelace, a dissenting
clergyman caught in a shabby intrigue. But if this clever writer had
known the Puritan clergy as we know them, the high priests of a Jewish
theocracy, with the whole work of God in a strange land resting on
their shoulders, he would have comprehended the awful tragedy in this
tortured soul.”

In the same way the exalted place held by Emerson in the affections of
those of us who are the fortunate inheritors of the Emerson tradition
can hardly be appreciated by foreign critics to whom his writings
seem curiously formless and his reasoning absurdly tangential. He may
not have been a great philosopher, but he was a great philosopher for
America. There were English critics who complained bitterly of Mark
Twain’s lack of “form,” and yet I can imagine that his books might
have lost the tang and zest we find in them if they had conformed to
Old-World standards.

On the other hand, the English in which our novels are written must
be defended by abler pens than mine. Just why American prose is so
slouchy, so lacking in distinction, touches questions that are not for
this writing. I shall not even “think aloud” about them! And yet, so
great is my anxiety to be of service and to bring as much gaiety to the
field as possible, that I shall venture one remark: that perhaps the
demand on the part of students in our colleges to be taught to write
short stories, novels, and dramas--and the demand is insistent--has
obscured the importance of mastering a sound prose before any attempt
is made to employ it creatively. It certainly cannot be complained
that the literary impulse is lacking, when publishers, editors, and
theatrical producers are invited to inspect thousands of manuscripts
every year. The editor of a popular magazine declares that there are
only fifteen American writers who are capable of producing a “good”
short story; and this, too, at a time when short fiction is in greater
demand than ever before, and at prices that would cause Poe and De
Maupassant to turn in their graves. A publisher said recently that
he had examined twenty novels from one writer, not one of which he
considered worth publishing.

Many, indeed, are called but few are chosen, and some reason must be
found for the low level of our fiction where the output is so great.
The fault is not due to unfavorable atmospheric conditions, but to
timidity on the part of writers in seizing upon the obvious American
material. Sidney Lanier remarked of Poe that he was a great poet, but
that he did not know enough--meaning that life in its broad aspects
had not touched him. A lack of “information,” of understanding and
vision, is, I should say, the fundamental weakness of the American
novel. To see life steadily and whole is a large order, and prone as we
are to skim light-heartedly the bright surfaces, we are not easily to
be persuaded to creep to the rough edges and peer into the depths. We
have not always been anxious to welcome a “physician of the iron age”
capable of reading “each wound, each weakness clear,” and saying “thou
ailest here and here”! It is not “competent” for the artist to plead
the unattractiveness of his material at the bar of letters; it is his
business to make the best of what he finds ready to his hand. It is
because we are attempting to adjust humanity to new ideals of liberty
that we offer to ourselves, if not to the rest of the world, a pageant
of ceaseless interest and variety.

It may be that we are too much at ease in our Zion for a deeper
probing of life than our fiction has found it agreeable to make. And
yet we are a far soberer people than we were when Mr. Matthew Arnold
complained of our lack of intellectual seriousness. The majority has
proved its soundness in a number of instances since he wrote of us.
We are less impatient of self-scrutiny. Our newly awakened social
consciousness finds expression in many books of real significance, and
it is inevitable that our fiction shall reflect this new sobriety.

Unfortunately, since the passing of our New England Olympians,
literature as a vocation has had little real dignity among us; we
have had remarkably few novelists who have settled themselves to the
business of writing with any high or serious aim. Hawthorne as a
brooding spirit has had no successor among our fictionists. Our work
has been chiefly tentative, and all too often the experiments have
been made with an eye on the publisher’s barometer. Literary gossip is
heavy with reports of record-breaking rapidity of composition. A writer
who can dictate is the envy of an adoring circle; another who “never
revises” arouses even more poignant despair. The laborious Balzac
tearing his proofs to pieces seems only a dingy and pitiable figure.
Nobody knows the difference, and what’s a well-turned sentence more or
less? I saw recently a newspaper editorial commenting derisively on a
novelist’s confession that he was capable of only a thousand words a
day, the point being that the average newspaper writer triples this
output without fatigue. Newcomers in the field can hardly fail to be
impressed by these rumors of novels knocked off in a month or three
months, for which astonishing sums have been paid by generous magazine
editors. We shall have better fiction as soon as ambitious writers
realize that novel-writing is a high calling, and that success is to be
won only by those who are willing to serve seven and yet seven other
years in the hope of winning “the crown of time.”

In his happy characterization of Turgenieff and his relation to the
younger French school of realists, Mr. James speaks of the “great
back-garden of his Slav imagination and his Germanic culture, into
which the door constantly stood open, and the grandsons of Balzac
were not, I think, particularly free to accompany him.” I am further
indebted to Mr. James for certain words uttered by M. Renan of the big
Russian: “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature
had been more or less generous; it was in some sort the conscience
of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years;
infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths
of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a
whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries,
speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”

I make no apology for thrusting my tin dipper again into Mr. James’s
bubbling well for an anecdote of Flaubert, derived from Edmond de
Goncourt. Flaubert was missed one fine afternoon in a house where he
and De Goncourt were guests, and was found to have undressed and gone
to bed to _think_!

I shall not give comfort to the enemy by any admission that our
novelists lack culture in the sense that Turgenieff and the great
French masters possessed it. A matter of which I may complain with more
propriety is their lack of “information” (and I hope this term is
sufficiently delicate) touching the tasks and aims of America. We have
been deluged with “big” novels that are “big” only in the publishers’
advertisements. New York has lately been the scene of many novels,
but the New York adumbrated in most of them is only the metropolis as
exposed to the awed gaze of provincial tourists from the rubber-neck
wagon. Sex, lately discovered for exploitation, has resulted only in
“arrangements” of garbage in pink and yellow, lightly sprinkled with
musk.

As Rosinante stumbles over the range I am disposed to offer a few
suggestions for the benefit of those who may ask where, then, lies the
material about which our novelists are so deficient in “information.”
No strong hand has yet been laid upon our industrial life. It has been
pecked at and trifled with, but never treated with breadth or fulness.
Here we have probably the most striking social contrasts the world has
ever seen; racial mixtures of bewildering complexity, the whole flung
against impressive backgrounds and lighted from a thousand angles.
Pennsylvania is only slightly “spotted” on the literary map, and yet
between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, nearly every possible phase and
condition of life is represented. Great passions are at work in the
fiery aisles of the steel mills that would have kindled Dostoiefsky’s
imagination. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night marks
a limitless field for the earnest fictionist. A Balzac would find
innumerable subjects awaiting him in the streets of Wilkesbarre!

At this point I must bemoan the ill-fortune that has carried so many
American fiction writers to foreign shores. If Hawthorne had never
seen Italy, but had clung to Salem, I am disposed to think American
literature would be the richer. If fate had not borne Mr. Howells to
Venice, but had posted him on the Ohio during the mighty struggle of
the ’60’s, and if Mr. James had been stationed at Chicago, close to the
deep currents of national feeling, what a monumental library of vital
fiction they might have given us! If Mrs. Wharton’s splendid gifts had
been consecrated to the service of Pittsburgh rather than New York and
Paris, how much greater might be our debt to her!

Business in itself is not interesting; business as it reacts upon
character is immensely interesting. Mineral paint has proved to be an
excellent preservative for _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, which remains
our best novel of business. But if paint may be turned to account, why
not cotton, wool, and the rest of the trade catalogue, every item with
its own distinct genesis? In _The Turmoil_ Mr. Tarkington staged, under
a fitting canopy of factory smoke, a significant drama of the conflict
between idealism and materialism.

Turning to our preoccupation with politics, we find another field
that is all but fallow. Few novels of any real dignity may be
tendered as exhibits in this department, and these are in a sense
local--the comprehensive, the deeply searching, has yet to be done.
Mr. Churchill’s _Coniston_, and Mr. Brand Whitlock’s _The Thirteenth
District_ are the happiest experiments I recall, though possibly
there are others of equal importance. Yet politics is not only a
matter of constant discussion in every quarter, but through and by
politics many thousands solve the problem of existence. Alone of
great national capitals Washington has never been made the scene
of a novel of distinction. Years ago we had Mrs. Burnett’s _Through
One Administration_, but it failed to establish itself as a classic.
George Meredith would have found much in Washington life upon which to
exercise his ironic powers.

With all our romantic longings it is little short of amazing that we
are not more fecund in schemes for romantic drama and fiction. The
stage, not to say the market, waits; but the settings are dingy from
much use and the characters in threadbare costumes strut forth to speak
old familiar lines. Again, there is an old superstition that we are a
humorous people, and yet humor is curiously absent from recent fiction.
“O. Henry” knew the way to the fountain of laughter, but contented
himself with the shorter form; _Huckleberry Finn_ seems destined to
stand as our nearest approach to a novel of typical humor. We have had
David Harums and Mrs. Wiggses a-plenty--kindly philosophers, often
drawn with skill--but the results are character sketches, not novels.


III

It is impossible in a general view of our fiction to dissociate the
novel from the short story, which, in a way, has sapped its vitality.
An astonishing number of short stories have shown a grasp of the
movement, energy, and color of American life, but writers who have
succeeded in this field have seemed incapable of longer flight. And
the originality possessed by a great number of short-story writers
seems to be shared only meagrely by those who experiment with the
novel. When some venturesome Martian explores the Library of Congress
it may be that in the short-story division he will find the surest key
to what American life has been. There are few American novels of any
period that can tip the scale against the twenty best American short
stories, chosen for sincerity and workmanship. It would seem that our
creative talent is facile and true in miniature studies, but shrinks
from an ampler canvas and a broader brush. Frank Norris’s _The Pit_ and
_The Octopus_ continue to command respect from the fact that he had a
panoramic sense that led him to exercise his fine talents upon a great
and important theme.

We have had, to be sure, many examples of the business and political
novel, but practically all of them have been struck from the same
die. A “big” politician or a “big” man of business, his daughter, and
a lover who brazenly sets himself up to correct the morals of the
powerful parent, is a popular device. Young love must suffer, but it
must not meet with frustration. In these experiments (if anything so
rigidly prescribed may be said to contain any element of experiment)
a little realism is sweetened with much romance. In the same way the
quasi-historical novel for years followed a stereotyped formula: the
lover was preferably a Northern spy within the Southern lines; the
heroine, a daughter of the traditional aristocratic Southern family.
Her shuddersome ride to seek General Lee’s pardon for the unfortunate
officer condemned to be shot at daybreak was as inevitable as measles.
The geography might be reversed occasionally to give a Northern girl
a chance, but in any event her brother’s animosity toward the hero
was always a pleasing factor. Another ancient formula lately revived
with slight variations gives us a shaggy, elemental man brought by
shipwreck or other means into contact with gentle womanhood. In his
play _The Great Divide_ William Vaughn Moody invested this device with
dignity and power, but it would be interesting to see what trick might
be performed with the same cards if the transformed hero should finally
take his departure for the bright boulevards, while the heroine seized
his bow and arrow and turned joyfully to the wilderness.

When our writers cease their futile experimenting and imitating,
and wake up to the possibilities of American material we shall have
fewer complaints of the impotence of the American novel. We are just
a little impatient of the holding of the mirror up to nature, but
nevertheless we do not like to be fooled all the time. And no one is
quicker than an American to “get down to brass tacks,” when he realizes
that he must come to it. Realism is the natural medium through which a
democracy may “register” (to borrow a term from the screen-drama) its
changing emotions, its hopes and failures. We are willing to take our
recreations in imaginary kingdoms, but we are blessed with a healthy
curiosity as to what really is happening among our teeming millions,
and are not so blind as our foreign critics and the croakers at home
would have us think as to what we do and feel and believe. But the
realists must play the game straight. They must paint the wart on the
sitter’s nose--though he refuse to pay for the portrait! Half-hearted
dallying and sidling and compromising are not getting us anywhere.
The flimsiest romance is preferable to dishonest realism. It is the
meretricious stuff in the guise of realism that we are all anxious to
delete from the catalogues.

Having thus, I hope, appeased the realists, who are an exacting
phalanx, difficult to satisfy, I feel that it is only right, just, and
proper to rally for a moment the scampering hosts of the romanticists.
It is deplorable that Realism should be so roused to bloodthirstiness
by any intrusion upon the landscape of Romanticism’s dainty frocks
and fluttering ribbons. Before Realism was, Romance ruled in many
kingdoms. If Romance had not been, Realism would not be. Let the
Cossacks keep to their side of the river and behave like gentlemen!
Others have said it who spoke with authority, and I shall not scruple
to repeat that the story for the story’s sake is a perfectly decent,
honorable, and praiseworthy thing. It is as old as human nature, and
the desire for it will not perish till man has been recreated. Neither
much argument about it, nor the limning against the gray Russian
sky-line of the august figures of Dostoiefsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenieff
will change the faith of the many who seek in fiction cheer and
recreation.

Again, I beg, let us preserve a good temper as we ponder these matters.
More and more we shall have true realism; but more and more let us
hope for the true romance. Stevenson’s familiar contributions to the
discussion are in the best vein of the cause he espouses; and although
a New York newspaper referred to him the other day as the “Caledonian
_poseur_,” his lantern-bearers continue to signal merrily from the
heights and are not to be confused with Realism’s switch targets in
the railroad yards in the valley. The lords of the high pale brow
in classrooms and on the critical dais are much too contemptuous of
Romance. Romance we must have, to the end of time, no matter how nobly
Realism may achieve. With our predisposition as a healthy-minded and
cheerful people toward tales of the night-rider and the scratch of the
whip butt on the inn door, it is unfair to slap Romance on the wrist
and post her off to bed like a naughty stepchild. Even the stern brow
of the realist must relax at times.

Many people of discernment found pleasure in our Richard Carvels,
Janice Merediths, and Hugh Wynnes. Miss Johnston’s _To Have and
to Hold_ and _Lewis Rand_ are books one may enjoy without shame.
The stickler for style need not be scornful of Mrs. Catherwood’s
_Lazarre_ and _The Romance of Dollard_. Out of Chicago came Mr. Henry
Fuller’s charming exotic, _The Chevalier of Piensieri-Vani_. _Monsieur
Beaucaire_ and Miss Sherwood’s _Daphne_ proved a while ago that all the
cherries have not been shaken from the tree--only the trees in these
cases, unfortunately, were not American. Surely one of these days a
new Peter Pan will fly over an American greenwood. I should bless the
hand that pressed upon me for reading to-night so diverting a skit as
Mr. Vielé’s _The Inn of the Silver Moon_. I shall not even pause to
argue with those who are plucking my coat-tails and whispering that
these are mere trifles, too frivolous to be mentioned when the novel is
the regular order of the conference. I am looking along the shelf for
Stockton, the fanciful and whimsical. How pleasant it would be to meet
Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine again, or to lodge for a day at another
Squirrel Inn. And yet (O fame, thou fickle one!) when I asked a young
lady the other day if she knew Stockton, she replied with emphasis that
she did not; that “that old quaint stuff doesn’t go any more!”

Having handed Realism a ticket to Pittsburgh with generous stop-over
privileges, I regret that I am unable to point Romance to any such
promising terminus. But the realm of Romance is extra-territorial;
Realism alone demands the surveyor’s certificate and abstracts of
title. An Irish poet once assured me that fairies are to be found
everywhere, and surely somewhere between Moosehead Lake and Puget Sound
some lad is piping lustily on a new silver whistle where the deer come
down to drink.


IV

It is the fashion to attribute to the automobile and the motion-picture
all social phenomena not otherwise accounted for. The former has
undoubtedly increased our national restlessness, and it has robbed the
evening lamp of its cosey bookish intimacy. The screen-drama makes
possible the “reading” of a story with the minimum amount of effort.
A generation bred on the “movies” will be impatient of the tedious
methods of writers who cannot transform character by a click of the
camera, but require at least four hundred pages to turn the trick. It
is doubtful whether any of the quasi-historical novels that flourished
fifteen and twenty years ago and broke a succession of best-selling
records would meet with anything approximating the same amiable
reception if launched to-day. A trained scenario-writer, unembarrassed
by literary standards and intent upon nothing but action, can beat the
melodramatic novelist at his own game every time. A copyright novel of
adventure cannot compete with the same story at ten cents or a quarter
as presented in the epileptic drama, where it lays no burden upon the
beholder’s visualizing sense. The resources of the screen for creating
thrills are inexhaustible; it draws upon the heavens above, the earth
beneath, and the waters under the earth; and as nothing that can be
pictured can be untrue--or so the confiding “movie” patron, unfamiliar
with the tricks of the business, believes--the screen has also the
great advantage of plausibility.

The silent drama may therefore exercise a beneficent influence, if it
shall prove to have shunted into a new channel of publication great
numbers of stories whose justification between covers was always
debatable. Already many novels of this type have been resurrected by
the industrious screen producers. If, after the long list has been
exhausted, we shall be spared the “novelization” of screen scenarios
in the fashion of the novelized play, we shall be rid of some of the
débris that has handicapped the novelists who have meekly asked to be
taken seriously.

The fiction magazines also have cut into the sale of ephemeral novels.
For the price of one novel the uncritical reader may fortify himself
with enough reading matter to keep him diverted for a month. Nowadays
the hurrying citizen approaches the magazine counter in much the same
spirit in which he attacks the help-yourself lunch-trough--grabs
what he likes and retires for hurried consumption. It must, however,
be said for the much-execrated magazine editors that with all their
faults and defaults they are at least alive to the importance and value
of American material. They discovered O. Henry, now recognized as a
writer of significance. I should like to scribble a marginal note at
this point to the effect that writers who are praised for style, those
who are able to employ _otiose_, _meticulous_, and _ineluctable_ with
awe-inspiring inadvertence in tales of morbid introspection, are not
usually those who are deeply learned in the ways and manners of that
considerable body of our people who are obliged to work for a living.
We must avoid snobbishness in our speculations as to the available
ingredients from which American fiction must be made. Baseball players,
vaudeville and motion-picture performers, ladies employed as commercial
travellers, and Potash and Perlmutter, are all legitimate subjects for
the fictionist, and our millions undoubtedly prefer just now to view
them humorously or romantically.


V

In our righteous awakening to the serious plight to which our fiction
has come it is not necessary, nor is it becoming, to point the slow
unmoving finger of scorn at those benighted but well-meaning folk
who in times past did what they could toward fashioning an American
literature. We all see their errors now; we deplore their stupidity,
we wish they had been quite different; but why drag their bones from
the grave for defilement? Cooper and Irving meant well; there are still
misguided souls who find pleasure in them. It was not Hawthorne’s fault
that he so bungled _The Scarlet Letter_, nor Poe’s that he frittered
away his time inventing the detective story. Our deep contrition must
not betray us into hardness of heart toward those unconscious sinners,
who cooled their tea in the saucer and never heard of a samovar!

There are American novelists whose portraits I refuse to turn to the
wall. Marion Crawford had very definite ideas, which he set forth
in a most entertaining essay, as to what the novel should be, and
he followed his formula with happy results. His _Saracinesca_ still
seems to me a fine romance. There was some marrow in the bones of E.
W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_. I can remember when Miss Woolson
was highly regarded as a writer, and when Miss Howard’s amusing _One
Summer_ seemed not an ignoble thing. F. J. Stimson, Thomas Nelson
Page, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Miss Murfree, Mary Hallock Foote, T.
B. Aldrich, T. R. Sullivan, H. C. Bunner, Robert Grant, and Harold
Frederic all labored sincerely for the cause of American fiction. F.
Hopkinson Smith told a good story and told it like a gentleman. Mr.
Cable’s right to a place in the front rank of American novelists is
not, I believe, questioned in any survey; if _The Grandissimes_ and
_Old Creole Days_ had been written in France, he would probably be
pointed to as an author well worthy of American emulation.

No doubt this list might be considerably expanded, as I am drawing
from memory, and merely suggesting writers whose performances in most
instances synchronize with my first reading of American novels. I
do not believe we are helping our case materially by ignoring these
writers as though they were a lot of poor relations whenever a foreign
critic turns his condescending gaze in our direction.


VI

It is a hopeful sign that we now produce one or two, or maybe three,
good novels a year. The number is bound to increase as our young
writers of ambition realize that technic and facility are not the only
essentials of success, but that they must burrow into life--honeycomb
it until their explorations carry them to the core of it. There
are novels that are half good; some are disfigured by wabbly
characterizations; or the patience necessary to a proper development
of the theme is lacking. However, sincerity and an appreciation of the
highest function of the novel as a medium for interpreting life are not
so rare as the critics would have us believe.

I have never subscribed to the idea that the sun of American literature
rises in Indiana and sets in Kansas. We have had much provincial
fiction, and the monotony of our output would be happily varied by
attempts at something of national scope. It is not to disparage the
small picture that I suggest for experiment the broadly panoramic--“A
Hugo flare against the night”--but because the novel as we practise it
seems so pitifully small in contrast with the available material. I am
aware, of course, that a hundred pages are as good as a thousand if the
breath of life is in them. Flaubert, says Mr. James, _made_ things big.

We must escape from this carving of cherry stones, this contentment
with the day of littleness, this use of the novel as a plaything
where it pretends to be something else. And it occurs to me at this
juncture that I might have saved myself a considerable expenditure of
ink by stating in the first place that what the American novel really
needs is a Walt Whitman to fling a barbaric yawp from the crest of the
Alleghanies and proclaim a new freedom. For what I have been trying
to say comes down to this: that we shall not greatly serve ourselves
or the world’s literature by attempts to Russianize, or Gallicize,
or Anglicize our fiction, but that we must strive more earnestly to
Americanize it--to make it express with all the art we may command the
life we are living and that pretty tangible something that we call the
American spirit.

The bright angels of letters never appear in answer to prayer; they
come out of nowhere and knock at unwatched gates. But the wailing of
jeremiads before the high altar is not calculated to soften the hearts
of the gods who hand down genius from the skies. It is related that a
clerk in the patent office asked to be assigned to a post in some other
department on the ground that practically everything had been invented
and he wanted to change before he lost his job. That was in 1833.

Courage, comrade! The songs have not all been written nor the tales all
told.




THE CHURCH FOR HONEST SINNERS


THE young man who greeted me cheerfully in the lobby of the hotel in
Warburton, my native town, and handed me a card setting forth the
hours of services at St. John’s Church, evidently assumed that I was
a commercial traveller. I was in no wise offended by his mistake, as
I sincerely admire the heralds of prosperity and sit with them at
meat whenever possible. I am a neurologist by profession, but write
occasionally, and was engaged just then in gathering material for a
magazine article on occupational diseases. A friend in the Department
of Labor had suggested Warburton as a likely hunting-ground, as
children employed there in a match-factory were constantly being
poisoned, and a paint-factory also was working dire injury to its
employees.

“I’m afraid,” I replied to the engaging young representative of St.
John’s Men’s League, “that my religious views wouldn’t be tolerated at
St. John’s. But I thank you, just the same.”

I had been baptized in St. John’s and remembered it well from my youth.
On my way up-town from the station I had noted its handsome new edifice
of impeccable Gothic.

“We have the best music in town, and our minister is a live wire.
He knows how to preach to men--he’s cut big slices out of the other
churches.”

“Gives the anxious sinner a clean bill of health, does he?”

“Well, most of the leading citizens go there now,” he answered,
politely ignoring my uncalled-for irony. “Men who never went to church
before; the men who do things in Warburton. Our minister’s the best
preacher in the diocese. His subject this morning is ‘The Prodigal
Son.’”

I felt guiltily that the topic might have been chosen providentially to
mark my return, and it occurred to me that this might be a good chance
to see Warburton in its best bib and tucker. However, having planned
to spend the morning in the slum which the town had acquired with its
prosperity, I hardened my heart against the young solicitor, in spite
of his unobtrusive and courteous manner of extending the invitation.

“You represent a saint’s church,” I remarked, glancing at the card.
“I travel a good deal and I haven’t found a church specially designed
for sinners like me. I’m uncomfortable among the saints. I’m not
quarrelling with your church or its name, but I’ve long had a feeling
that our church nomenclature needs revision. Still, that’s a personal
matter. You’ve done your duty by me, and I’d be glad to come if I
didn’t have another engagement.”

The pages of a Chicago morning newspaper that lay across my knees
probably persuaded him that I was lying. However, after a moment’s
hesitation he sat down beside me.

“That’s funny, what you said about a church for sinners--but we have
one right here in Warburton; odd you never heard of it! It was written
up in the newspapers a good deal. It’s just across the street from St.
John’s on Water Street.”

I recalled now that I had seen a strange church in my walk to the
hotel, but the new St. John’s had so absorbed my attention that I had
passed it with only a glance. It came back to me that it was a white
wooden structure, and that boards were nailed across its pillared
portico as though to shut out the public while repairs were in progress.

“Saints excluded, sinners only need apply?”

He nodded, and looked at me queerly, as though, now that I had broached
the matter, he considered the advisability of telling me more. It was
ten o’clock and half a dozen church-bells clanged importunately as a
background for the _Adeste Fideles_ rung from St. John’s chimes.

“‘The Church For Honest Sinners,’ might suit you, only it’s
closed--closed for good, I guess,” he remarked, again scrutinizing me
closely.

He played nervously with a pack of cards similar to the one with which
he had introduced himself. Other men, quite as unmistakably transients
as I, were lounging down from breakfast, settling themselves to their
newspapers, or seeking the barber-shop. Something in my attitude toward
the church for which he was seeking worshippers seemed to arrest him.
He was a handsome, clear-eyed, wholesome-looking young fellow, whose
life had doubtless been well sheltered from evil; there was something
refreshingly naïve about him. I liked his straightforward manner of
appealing to strangers; a bank teller, perhaps, or maybe a clerk in
the office of one of the manufacturing companies whose indifference
to the welfare of their laborers I had come to investigate. Not the
most grateful of tasks, this of passing church advertisements about in
hotel lobbies on Sunday mornings. It requires courage, true manliness.
My heart warmed to him as I saw a number of men eying us from the
cigar-stand, evidently amused that the young fellow had cornered me. A
member of the group, a stout gentleman in checks, held one of the cards
in his hand and covertly pointed with it in our direction.

“If there’s a story about the sinners’ church I’d like to hear it,”
I remarked encouragingly. “It seemed to be closed--suppose they’re
enlarging it to accommodate the rush.”

“Well, no; hardly that,” he replied soberly. “It was built as an
independent scheme--none of the denominations would stand for it of
course.”

“Why the ‘of course’?”

“Well,” he smiled, “the idea of sin isn’t exactly popular, is it?
And besides everybody isn’t wicked; there are plenty of good people.
There’s good in all men,” he added, as though quoting.

“I can’t quarrel with that. But how about this Church For Honest
Sinners? Tell me the story.”

“Well, it’s a queer sort of story, and as you’re a stranger and I’m not
likely to meet you again, I’ll tell you all I know. It was built by
a woman.” He crossed his legs and looked at the clock. “She was rich
as riches go in a town like this. And she was different from other
people. She was left a widow with about a hundred thousand dollars, and
she set apart half of it to use in helping others. She wouldn’t do it
through societies or churches; she did it all herself. She wasn’t very
religious--not the way we use the word--not the usual sort of church
woman who’s zealous in guilds and societies and enjoys running things.
She wasn’t above asking the factory hands to her house now and then,
and was always helping the under dog. She was splendid--the finest
woman that ever lived; but of course people thought her queer.”

“Such people are generally considered eccentric,” I commented.

“The business men disliked her because they said she was spoiling the
poor people and putting bad notions into their heads.”

“I dare say they did! I can see that a woman like that would be
criticised.”

“Then when they tore down old St. John’s and began building the new
church, she said she’d build a church after her own ideas. She spent
twenty-five thousand dollars building that church you noticed in Water
Street and she called it ‘The Church For Honest Sinners.’ She meant to
put a minister in who had some of her ideas about religion, but right
there came her first blow. As her church wasn’t tied up to any of
the denominations she couldn’t find a man willing to take the job. I
suppose the real trouble was that nobody wanted to mix up with a scheme
like that; it was too radical; didn’t seem exactly respectable. It’s
easy, I suppose, when there’s a big whooping crowd--Billy Sunday and
that sort of thing--and the air is full of emotionalism, to get people
to the mourners’ bench to confess that they’re miserable sinners. But
you can see for yourself that it takes nerve to walk into the door of a
church that’s for sinners only--seems sort o’ foolish!

“I shouldn’t be telling you about this if I hadn’t seen that you had
the same idea the builder of that church had: that there’s too much of
the saint business and general smugness about our churches, and that a
church that frankly set out to welcome sinners would play, so to speak,
to capacity. You might think that all the Cains, Judases, and Magdalens
would feel that here at last was a door of Christian hope flung open
for them. But it doesn’t work that way--at least it didn’t in this
case. I suppose there are people in this town right now, all dressed
up to go to church, who’ve broken all the Ten Commandments without
feeling they were sinners; and of course the churches can’t go after
sin the way they used to, with hell and brimstone; the people won’t
stand for it. You’ve been thinking that a church set apart for sinners
would appeal to people who’ve done wrong and are sorry about it, but
it doesn’t; and that’s why that church on Water Street’s boarded
up--not for repairs, as you imagined, but because only one person has
ever crossed the threshold. It was the idea of the woman who built it
that the door should stand open all the time, night and day, and the
minister, if she could have found one to take the job, would have been
on the lookout to help the people who went there.”

This was rather staggering. Perhaps, I reflected, it is better after
all to suffer the goats to pasture, with such demureness as they can
command, among the sheep.

“I suppose,” I remarked, “that the founder of the church was satisfied
with her experiment--she hadn’t wholly wasted her money, for she had
found the answers to interesting questions as to human nature--the
vanity of rectitude, the pride of virtue, the consolations of
hypocrisy.”

He looked at me questioningly, with his frank innocent eyes, as though
estimating the extent to which he might carry his confidences.

“Let me say again that I shouldn’t be telling you all this if you
didn’t have her ideas--and without ever knowing her! She lived on the
corner below the church, where she could watch the door. She watched it
for about two years, day and night, without ever seeing a soul go in,
and people thought she’d lost her mind. And then, one Sunday morning
when the whole town--all her old friends and neighbors--were bound for
church, she came out of her house alone and walked straight down to
that church she had built for sinners, and in at the door.

“You see,” he said, rising quickly, as though recalling his obligations
to St. John’s Men’s League, “she was the finest woman in town--the best
and the noblest woman that ever lived! They found her at noon lying
dead in the church. The failure of her plan broke her heart; and that
made it pretty hard--for her family--everybody.”

He was fingering his cards nervously, and I did not question the
sincerity of the emotion his face betrayed.

“It is possible,” I suggested, “that she had grown morbid over some sin
of her own, and had been hoping that others would avail themselves of
the hospitality of a church that was frankly open to sinners. It might
have made it easier for _her_.”

He smiled with a childlike innocence and faith.

“Not only not possible,” he caught me up, with quick dignity, “but
incredible! She was my mother.”




THE SECOND-RATE MAN IN POLITICS

[1916]

  In our great modern States, where the scale of things is so large,
  it does seem as if the remnant might be so increased as to become an
  actual power, even though the majority be unsound.--MATTHEW ARNOLD,
  _Numbers_.


I

WHO governs America?

The answer is obvious: we are a republic, a representative democracy
enjoying to the utmost government of, for, and by the people. America
is governed by persons we choose, presumably on our own initiative, to
serve us, to make, execute, and interpret laws for us. Addicted as we
are to the joy of phrases, we find in these _clichés_ unfailing delight.

Democracy, ideally considered, is an affair of the wisest and best.
As the privileges of the ballot are generously extended to all, the
whole people are invested with an initiative and an authority which
it is their duty to exercise. We assume that all are proud of their
inheritance of liberty, jealous of their power, and alert in performing
the duties of citizenship. That we are not highly successful in
realizing this ideal is a matter that is giving increasing concern to
thoughtful Americans.

As these words are read thousands of candidates are before the
electorate for consideration, and the patriotic citizen is presumably
possessing himself of all available information regarding them,
determined to vote only for the most desirable. The parties have done
their best, or worst, as we choose to view the matter, and it is “up
to the people” to accept or reject those who offer themselves for
place. The citizen is face to face with the problem, Shall he vote for
candidates he knows to be unfit, merely to preserve his regularity,
or shall he cast his ballot for the fittest men without respect to
the party emblems on his ballot? Opposed to the conscientious voter,
and capable of defeating his purpose, are agencies and influences
with which it is well-nigh impossible for him to cope. The higher his
intelligence and the nobler his aim, the less he is able to reckon
with forces which are stubbornly determined to nullify his vote.

The American voter is not normally independent; it is only when there
has been some marked affront to the party’s intelligence or moral sense
that we observe any display of independence. Independent movements are
always reassuring and encouraging. The revolt against Blaine in 1884,
the Gold-Democratic movement in 1896, were most significant; and I am
disposed to give a somewhat similar value to the Progressive movement
of 1912. But the average voter is a creature of prejudice, who boasts
jauntily that he never scratches his ticket. He follows his party with
dogged submission and is more or less honestly blind to its faults.

As my views on this subject are more usually voiced by independents
than by partisans, it may not be amiss to say that I am a party man,
a Democrat, sufficiently “regular” to vote with a good conscience
in primary elections. Living in a State where there is no point of
rest in politics, where one campaign dovetails into another, I have
for twenty-five years been an observer of political tendencies and
methods. I may say of the two great parties, as Ingersoll remarked
of the life beyond, “I have friends in both places.” One of my best
friends was a “boss” who served a term in prison for scratching a
tally-sheet. I am perfectly familiar with the theories upon which
bossism is justified, the more plausible being that only by maintaining
strong local organizations, that is to say, Machines, can a party so
intrench itself as to support effectively the policies and reforms dear
to the heart of the idealist. And bosses do, indeed, sometimes use
their power benevolently, though this happens usually where they see a
chance to win advantage or to allay popular clamor.

It is not of the pending campaign that I write, and any references
I make to it are only for the purpose of illustrating phases or
tendencies that seem worthy of consideration at a time when public
thought is concentrated upon politics. And to give definite aim to this
inquiry I shall state it in the harshest terms possible:

We, a self-governing people, permit our affairs to be administered,
very largely, by second-rate men.

Our hearts throb indignantly as we ponder this. The types have a queer
look. Such an accusation is an unpardonable sin against American
institutions--against an intelligent, high-minded citizenry. It can,
however, do no harm to view the matter from various angles to determine
whether anything really may be adduced in support of it.


II

In theory the weight of the majority is with the fit. This is the
pleasantest of ideas, but it is not true. It is not true at least in so
great a number of contests as to justify any virtuous complacency in
the electorate. It is probably no more untrue now than in other years,
though the cumulative effect of a long experience of government by the
unfit is having its effect upon the nation in discouraging faith in
that important and controlling function of government that has to do
with the choice and election of candidates. Only rarely--and I speak
carefully--do the best men possible for a given office ever reach it.
The best men are never even considered for thousands of State, county,
and municipal elective offices; they do not offer themselves, either
because office-holding is distasteful, or because private business
is more lucrative, or because they are aware of no demand for their
services on the part of their fellow citizens. By fitness I mean the
competence produced by experience and training, fortified with moral
character and a sense of responsibility. I should say that a fit man
for public office is one who in his private affairs has established a
reputation for efficiency and trustworthiness.

In assuming that a democracy like ours presupposes in the electorate
a desire, no matter how feeble, to intrust public affairs to men of
fitness, to first-rate men, it would seem that with the approach of
every presidential campaign numbers of possible candidates would
receive consideration as eligible to our highest office. It will
be said that just as many candidates were available in 1916 as at
any other period in our history, but this is neither conclusive
nor heartening: there should be more! It cannot be pretended that
public service does not attract thousands of men; it can, however, be
complained that the offices fall very largely to the inferior.

We have just witnessed the spectacle of a great republic, which
confides the broadest powers to its chief executive, strangely
limited in its choice of candidates for the presidency to a handful
of men. No new commanding figure had sprung forward from the ranks
of either party in the most trying period the country has known in
fifty years. If Mr. Wilson’s renomination had not been inevitable, it
would be very difficult to name another Democrat who, by virtue of
demonstrated strength and public confidence, would have been able to
enter the lists against him. Our only Democratic Presidents since the
Civil War stepped from a governor’s seat to the higher office; but I
know of no Democratic governor who, in 1916, could have entered the
national convention supported by any appreciable public demand for his
nomination. And no Democratic senator could have debated Mr. Wilson’s
claims to further recognition. Speaker Clark, with the prestige of his
maximum five hundred and fifty-six votes on the tenth ballot of the
Baltimore Convention, might have been able to reappear at St. Louis
with a similar showing; but the Democratic range of possibilities
certainly had not widened. To be sure, Mr. Bryan would have remained to
reckon with; but, deeply as the party and the country is indebted to
him for his courageous stand against the bosses at Baltimore, he could
hardly have received a fourth nomination.

The Republicans were in no better case when their convention met at
Chicago. The Old Guard was stubbornly resolved, not only that Mr.
Roosevelt should not be nominated, but that he should not dictate
the choice of a Republican candidate. A short distance from the
scene of their deliberations, the Progressives, having failed to
establish themselves as a permanent contestant of the older parties,
tenaciously clung to their leader. Mr. Roosevelt’s effort to interest
the Republicans in Senator Lodge as a compromise candidate fell upon
deaf ears. Mr. Hughes’s high qualifications may not be seriously
questioned. He is a first-rate man, and the lack of enthusiasm with
which his nomination was received by the perfectly ordered and
controlled body of delegates is not to his discredit. Sore beset, the
Old Guard put forth a candidate little to their taste, one who, if
elected, would, we must assume, prove quite impatient of the harness
fashioned for Presidents by the skilled armorers of the good old days
of backward-looking Republicanism.

In taking from the bench a gentleman who was “out of politics” the
Republicans emphasized their lamentable lack of available candidates.
Nothing was ever sadder than the roll-call of States for the nomination
of “favorite sons.” Estimable though these men are, no one could have
listened to the nominating speeches and witnessed the subsequent
mechanical demonstrations without depression. None of these nominees
had the slightest chance; the orators who piped their little lays in
praise of them knew they had not; the vast audience that witnessed
the proceedings, perfectly aware of the farcical nature of these
banalities, knew they had not, and viewed the show with contemptuous
amusement.

The heartiness of the reception accorded Messrs. Depew and Cannon,
who were called upon to entertain the audience during a lull in the
proceedings, was not without its pathos. They dwelt upon the party’s
past glories with becoming poignancy. Mr. Borah, tactfully projected
as a representative of a newer order of Republicanism, was far less
effective. The convention was greatly stirred by no new voice; no new
leader flashed upon the stage to quicken it to new and high endeavor.
No less inspired or inspiring body of men ever gathered than those who
constituted the Republican Convention of 1916.

I asked a successful lawyer the other day how he accounted for the
lack of presidential timber. “It’s because the average American would
rather be president of the Pennsylvania Railroad than of the United
States,” he answered. And it is true, beyond question, that our highest
genius is employed in commerce and business rather than in politics.
If we, the people, do not seek means of promoting administrative
wisdom and efficiency in our government we shall pay one of these days
a high price for our indifference. There is danger ahead unless we are
disposed to take our politics more seriously, and unless more young men
of the best talent and the highest aims can be lured into public life.
The present showing is certainly not encouraging as to the future of
American statesmanship; and to say that the fit have always been few,
is not a particularly consoling answer.

It is true of a period still susceptible of intimate scrutiny--say,
from the Civil War--that presidential candidates have been chosen
in every case from a small group of potentialities in both parties.
We have established (stupidly in any large view of the matter)
geographical limitations upon the possible choice that greatly narrow
the field. Candidates for the presidency must be chosen with an eye to
the local effect, from States essential to success. Though Mr. Blaine’s
candidacy was surrounded by unusual circumstances, it emphasizes,
nevertheless, the importance to the parties of nominating men from the
“pivotal” States. We have had no New England President since Franklin
Pierce. This is not because the New England States have not produced
men of fitness, but is attributable solely to the small representation
of the Northeastern States in the Electoral College.

The South, likewise, has long been eliminated from the reckoning.
Though born in Virginia Mr. Wilson is distinctly not “a Southern man”
in the familiar connotations of that term. In old times the Southern
States contributed men of the first rank to both houses of Congress;
but, apart from Mr. Underwood (who received one hundred and seventeen
and one-half votes at Baltimore) and Mr. John Sharp Williams, there are
no Southerners of conspicuous attainments in the present Senate. The
Southern bar embraces now, perhaps as truly as at any earlier period,
lawyers of distinguished ability, but they apparently do not find
public life attractive.

No President has yet been elected from beyond the Mississippi, though
Mr. Bryan, thrice a candidate, widened the area of choice westward.
In the present year Governor Johnson and Senator Borah were the only
trans-Mississippi men mentioned as possibilities, and they cut no
figure in the contest. We are still a congeries of States, or groups of
States, rather than a nation, with a resulting political provincialism
that is disheartening when we consider the economic and political power
we wield increasingly in world affairs.

It is a serious commentary upon the talent of recent congresses that
the House has developed no men so commanding as to awaken speculation
as to their availability for the presidency. No member of the House
figured this year in Republican presidential speculations. Why do the
second-rate predominate in a body that may be called the most typical
of our institutions? Lincoln, Hayes, Garfield, Blaine, McKinley, Bryan,
all candidates for the presidency, had been members of the House,
but it has become negligible as a training-school for Presidents. A
year ago Mr. Mann received an occasional honorable mention, but his
petulant fling at the President as “playing politics,” in the grave
hour following the despatch of the final note to Germany, effectually
silenced his admirers. Admirable as partisanship may be, there are
times when even an opposition floor-leader should be able to rise
above it! Nor is it possible for Democrats to point to Mr. Kitchin
with any degree of pride. Of both these men it may be said that never
have leaders failed so lamentably to rise to their opportunities. Mr.
Hay, of Virginia, Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, not
only yielded reluctantly to the public pressure for preparedness, but
established his unfitness to hold any office by tacking on the army
bill a “joker” designed to create a place for a personal friend. Mr.
Wilson, like Mr. Cleveland, has found his congresses unruly or wabbly
or egregiously stupid, manifesting astonishingly little regard for
their party principles or policies. The present majority has been
distinguished for nothing so much as impotence and parochialism.

Without respect to party, the average representative’s vision is
no wider than his district, and he ponders national affairs solely
from a selfish standpoint. Through long years we have used him as an
errand-boy, a pension agent, a beggar at the national till. His time
is spent in demonstrating to his constituency that when “pork” is
being served he is on hand with Oliver Twist’s plate. The people of
one district, proud of their new post-office, or rejoicing in the
appearance of a government contractor’s dredge in their creek, do not
consider that their devoted congressman, to insure his own success, has
been obliged to assist other members in a like pursuit of spoils and
that the whole nation bears the burden.

The member who carries a map of his district with him to Washington,
and never broadens his horizon, is a relic of simpler times. In days
like these we can ill afford to smile with our old tolerance at the
“plain man of the people,” who is likely to be the cheapest kind
of demagogue. A frock coat and a kind heart are not in themselves
qualifications for a congressman. Eccentricity, proudly vaunted,
whimsicalities of speech, lofty scorn of conventions, have all been
sadly overworked. Talent of the first order is needed in Congress; it
is no place for men who can’t see and think straight.

The Senate preserves at least something of its old competence, and
the country respects, I think, the hard work recently performed by
it. While its average is low, it contains men--some of them little in
the public eye--who are specialists in certain fields. There is, I
believe, a general feeling that, with our tremendous industrial and
commercial interests, the presence in the upper house of a considerable
number of business men and of fewer lawyers would make for a better
balanced and more representative body. A first-rate senator need not
be an orator. The other day, when Senator Taggart, a new member,
protested vigorously against the latest river-and-harbor swindle the
country applauded. Refreshing, indeed, to hear a new voice in those
sacred precincts raised against waste and plunder! Senator Oliver, of
Pennsylvania, a protectionist, of course, is probably as well informed
on the tariff as any man in America. I give him the benefit of this
advertisement the more cheerfully as I do not agree with his views; but
his information is entitled to all respect. The late David Turpie, of
Indiana, by nature a recluse, and one of the most unassuming men who
ever sat in the Senate, was little known to the country at large. I
once heard Mr. Roosevelt and Judge Gray of Delaware engage in a most
interesting exchange of anecdotes illustrative of Mr. Turpie’s wide
range of information. He was a first-rate man. There is room in the
Senate for a great variety of talent, and its efficiency is not injured
by the frequent injection of new blood. What the country is impatient
of in the upper house is dead men who have little information and no
opinions of value on any subject. The election of senators directly by
the people will have in November its first trial--another step toward
pure democracy. We shall soon be able to judge whether the electorate,
acting independently, is more to be trusted than the legislatures.

I should be sorry to apply any words of President Wilson in a quarter
where he did not intend them, but a paragraph of his address to the
Washington correspondents (May 15) might well be taken to heart by a
number of gentlemen occupying seats in the legislative branch of the
government.

“I have a profound intellectual contempt for men who cannot see the
signs of the times. I have to deal with some men who know no more
of the modern processes of politics than if they were living in the
eighteenth century, and for them I have a profound and comprehensive
intellectual contempt. They are blind; they are hopelessly blind; and
the worst of it is I have to spend hours of my time talking to them
when I know before I start, quite as though I had finished, that it is
absolutely useless to talk to them. I am talking _in vacuo_.”

There are, indisputably, limitations upon the patience of a first-rate
man engaged in the trying occupation of attempting to communicate a
first-rate idea to a second-rate mind.


III

In recent years our periodical literature has devoted much space to
discussions of problems of efficiency. We have heard repeatedly of the
demand, not for two-thousand-dollar men, but for ten, twenty, and fifty
thousand dollar men, in the great industries. The efficiency engineer
has sprung into being; in my own city several hundred employees of an
automobile company are organized into a class, of which a professor of
psychology is the leader, the purpose being the promotion of individual
and corporate efficiency. The first-rate man is in demand as a buyer,
a salesman, a foreman, a manager. One of the largest corporations in
America pays its employees bonuses apportioned on a basis of their
value as demonstrated by actual performances from month to month. The
minutest economies are a matter of daily study in every manufacturing
and commercial house; the hunt for the first-rate man is unceasing.
Executive ability, a special genius for buying and selling, need never
go unrecognized. Recently a New York bank spent months searching for
a bond-seller and finally chose an obscure young man from a Western
town who fell by chance under the eye of a “scout” sent out to look
for talent. But this eager search for the first-rate man, so marked in
commerce and industry, only rarely touches our politics. It is only
in politics that the second-rate man finds the broadest field for the
exercise of his talents.

A President is beset by many embarrassments in the exercise of
the appointing power. Our feudal system, by which senators and
representatives are the custodians of post-office, district
attorneyships, marshalships, and countless other positions, does not
make for the recognition of the fit. While the power to appoint is
vested in the executive, his choice must be approved by the senators or
representatives. As the system operates, it is not really the President
who appoints but the senators or representatives, and the President is
expected to meet their wishes. To question their recommendations is to
arouse animosity, and where the fate of important legislation hangs
in the balance a President is under strong temptation to accept the
recommendation of second-rate men in order to keep the members of the
law-making bodies in good humor.

In the professions and industries, in commercial houses, even on the
farm, the second-rate man is not wanted; but political jobs, high and
low, are everywhere open to him. Everything but the public service
is standardized; politics alone puts a premium upon inferiority. The
greatest emphasis is laid upon the word service in every field but
government. The average American “wants what he wants when he wants
it,” and is proud of his ability to get it. “If it isn’t right, we
make it right,” is a popular business slogan. Hotels whose indifferent
service wins the displeasure of the travelling public are execrated
and blacklisted. On the other hand, I have listened for hours to the
laudation of good hotels, of the efficiency of railroads, of automobile
manufacturers who “give good service.” We have a pride in these things;
we like to relate incidents of our successful “kick” when the berth
that we had reserved by telegraph wasn’t forthcoming and how we “took
it up” with the railroad authorities, and how quickly our wounded
feelings were poulticed. “I guess that won’t happen again on _that_
road!” we chortle. Conversely we make our errands to a city hall or
court-house as few as possible, knowing that the “service,” offered
at the people’s expense is of a different order, and public officials
may not be approached in that confident spirit with which we carry our
needs or complaints to the heads of a private business.

Or, if some favor is to be asked, we brag that we have seen “Jim”
or “Bob” and that he “fixed” it for us. It happens not infrequently
that we want something “fixed” from purely selfish motives--something
that should not be “fixed”--and it gives us a pleasurable sense of our
“influence” to know that, as we have always treated “Jim” or “Bob”
all right, “Jim” or “Bob” cheerfully assists us. We chuckle over the
ease with which he accomplished the fixing where it would have been
impossible for us to effect it through a direct legitimate appeal. Thus
in hundreds of ways a boss, great or small, is able to grant favors
that cost him nothing, thereby blurring the vision of those he places
under obligations to the means by which he gains his power.

In municipal government the second and the third rate man, on down to
a point where differentiations fade to the vanishing point, finds his
greatest hope and security. As first-rate men are not available for the
offices, they fall naturally to the inferior, the incompetent, or the
corrupt. In few cities of a hundred thousand population is a man of
trained ability and recognized fitness ever seriously considered for
the mayoralty. Modern city government, with the broad powers conferred
upon mayors, requires intelligence of the highest order. Usually
without experience in large affairs, and crippled by a well-established
tradition that he must reward party workers and personal friends, the
incumbent surrounds himself with second and third rate men, for whose
blunders the taxpayer meekly pays the bills.

The mayor’s office is hardly second to the presidency in the variety
of its perplexities. A man of the best intentions will fail to satisfy
a whole community. There is in every city a group of reformers who
believe that a mayor should be able to effect the moral regeneration
of the human race in one term of office. The first-rate man is aware
of this, and the knowledge diminishes his anxiety to seek the place.
A common indictment against the capable man who volunteers for
municipal service is that his ignorance of political methods would
make him “impractical” if he were elected. This sentiment is expressed
frequently--often by large taxpayers. The insinuation is that a man of
character and ideals would be unable to deal with the powers that prey
by indirection. This is quite true: the fit man, the first-rate man,
who would undertake the office untrammelled by political obligations,
would not know the “good fellows” who must be dealt with in a spirit of
leniency. This delicate duty is more safely intrusted to one who brings
a certain sympathy to bear upon the task.

Whatever may be the merits of party government in its national
application, there is no sound argument for its continuance in
municipal affairs. Its effect is to discourage utterly, in most
communities, any effort the first-rate man may be absurd enough to make
to win enough of the franchises of his fellow citizens to land him in
the mayoralty. On one occasion a Republican United States senator,
speaking for his party’s candidate for the mayoralty at the last rally
of a campaign in my own city, declared that his party must win, as
defeat would have a discouraging effect on Republicans elsewhere.
A few years ago both parties chose, in the Indianapolis primaries,
mayoralty candidates of conspicuous unfitness. The Republican candidate
was an auctioneer, whose ready tongue and drolleries on the stump
made him the central figure in a highly picturesque campaign. He was
elected and the affairs of a city of a quarter of a million people
were cheerfully turned over to him. Ignorant of the very terminology
in which municipal affairs are discussed, he avoided embarrassment by
remaining away from his office as much as possible. In the last year
of his administration--if so dignified a term may be applied to his
incumbency--he resigned, to avoid the responsibility of dealing with
disorders consequent upon a serious strike, and took refuge on the
vaudeville stage. He was no more unfit on the day he resigned than on
the day of his nomination or election--a fact of which the electorate
had ample knowledge. He was chosen merely because he was a vote-getter.
Republicans voted for him to preserve their regularity.[A]

I am prolonging these comments on municipal government for the reason
that the city as a political factor is of so great influence in the
State and nation, and because the domination of the unfit in the
smaller unit offers more tangible instances for study. The impediments
encountered by the fit who offer themselves for public service are
many, and often ludicrous. Twice, in Indianapolis, men of the best
standing have yielded under pressure to a demand that they offer
themselves for the Republican mayoralty nomination. Neither had the
slightest intention of using the mayoralty as a stepping-stone to
higher office; the motives animating both were the highest. One of
them was quickly disposed of by the report sent “down the line” that
he had not been as regular as he might be, and by this token was an
undesirable candidate. The other was subjected to a crushing defeat in
the primary. There was nothing against him except that he was unknown
to the “boys in the trenches.”

From the window by which I write I can see the chimneys of the
flourishing industry conducted by the first of these gentlemen. He has
constantly shown his public spirit in the most generous fashion; he
is an admirable citizen. I dare say there is not an incompetent man
or woman on his pay-roll. If he were out of employment and penniless
to-morrow, scores of responsible positions would be open to him. But
the public would not employ him; his own party would not even permit
its membership to express its opinion of him; and had he gone before
the electorate he would in all likelihood have been defeated by an
invincible combination of every element of incompetence and venality in
the city.

The other gentleman, who began life as a bank clerk, made a success
of a commercial business, and is now president of one of the largest
banks in the State. Such men are ineligible for municipal office; they
are first-rate men; the very fact that they are men of character and
ability who could be trusted to manage public affairs as they conduct
their private business, removes them at once from consideration.

Such experiences as these are not calculated to encourage the capable
man, the first-rate man, to attempt to gain a public position. In fact,
it is the business of political organizations to make the defeat of
such men as humiliating as possible. They must be got rid of; they must
be taught better manners!

The good nature with which we accept the second-rate man in municipal
office is one of the most bewildering of all our political phenomena.
“Well, things have always been this way, and I guess they always will
be,” expresses the average citizen’s feeling about the matter. As he
cannot, without much personal discomfort, change the existing order, he
finds solace in the reflection that he couldn’t do anything about it if
he tried. The more intolerant he is of second-rate employees in his own
business, the more supinely he views the transfer of public business
from one set of incompetents to another.

To lift municipal government out of politics in States where the party
organizations never shut up shop but are ceaselessly plotting and
planning to perfect their lines, is manifestly no easy task, but it may
be accomplished by effective leadership where the people are sincerely
interested. And it is significant that the present movement for an
abandonment of the old pernicious, costly system took rise from the
dire calamities that befell two cities--Galveston and Dayton--which
were suddenly confronted with problems that it would have been madness
to intrust to incompetents. This illustrates a point overlooked by that
large body of Americans who refuse to bring to their politics the test
of fitness that they enforce in private business. The second-rate man
may successfully hide his errors in normal conditions, but his faults
and weaknesses become glaringly apparent when any severe demands are
made upon him.

I can suggest no permanent solution of the problem of municipal
government that does not embrace the training of men for its particular
duties. A development of the city-manager plan, of nation-wide scope,
fortified by special courses of training in schools able to give
the dignity of a stable profession to municipal administration may
ultimately be the remedy.


IV

The debauchery of young men by the bosses is a familiar phase of our
politics and is most potent in the game of checking the advance of the
fit and assuring domination by the unfit. Several thousand young men
leave college every year with some hope of entering upon a political
career. By the time a young man is graduated he has elected to follow
the banner of some party. If he lives in a city and shows a disposition
to be of practical service, he is warmly welcomed into the fold of
one of the organizations. He quickly becomes aware that only by the
display of a servile obedience can he expect to become _persona grata_
to the party powers. By the time he has passed through one campaign as
a trusted member of a machine, his political illusions are well-nigh
destroyed. His childish belief that only the fit should be elevated
to positions of responsibility, that public office is a public trust,
is pretty well dissipated. “Good” men, he finds, are good only by the
tests of partisanship as applied by the bosses. To strike at a boss is
_lésé majesté_, and invites drastic punishment.

The purpose of the young men’s political clubs everywhere is to infuse
the young voter with the spirit of blind obedience and subjection. He
is graciously permitted to serve on club committees as a step toward
more important recognition as ward committeeman, or he is given a
place of some sort at headquarters during the campaign. There are
dozens of ways in which the willing young man may be of use. His
illusions rapidly vanish. He is flattered by the attentions of the
bosses, who pat him on the back and assure him that they appreciate his
loyal devotion to the party. With the hope of preferment before him it
is essential that he establish as quickly as possible a reputation for
“regularity.” If his wise elders note any restiveness, any tendency
toward independence, they at once warn him that he must “play the
game straight,” and shut his eyes to the sins of his party. Or if his
counsellors sympathize with his predicament they advise him that the
only way he can gain a position from which to make his ideas effective
is by winning the favor of the bosses and building up a personal
following.

In a campaign preliminary to a local primary in my city I appealed
to a number of young men of good antecedents and rather exceptional
education, to oppose a particular candidate. One of them, on coming
home from an Eastern university, had introduced himself to me in the
name of a great educator who was one of my particular admirations.
In every one of these cases I was politely rebuffed. They said the
gentleman whose ambitions annoyed me was a “good fellow” and “all
right”; they couldn’t see that any good would come of antagonizing him.
And they were right. No good did come of it so far as the result was
concerned.

There are countless ways in which a young lawyer finds his connection
with a machine helpful. A word in the right quarter brings him a
client--a saloonkeeper, perhaps, who is meeting with resistance in his
effort to secure a renewal of his license; or petty criminal cases
before magistrates--easily arranged where the machine controls the
police. He cannot fail to be impressed with the perfection of a system
that so smoothly wields power by indirection. The mystery of it all and
the potency of the names of the high powers appeal to his imagination;
there is something of romance in it. A deputyship in the office of the
prosecuting attorney leads on to a seat in the legislature, and he may
go to Congress if he is “good.” He is purchased with a price, bought,
and paid for; his status is fixed; he is a second-rate man. And by
every such young man in America the ideal of democracy, the hope of
republican government, is just so much weakened.


V

Government by the unfit, domination by the inferior, is greatly
assisted by a widely accepted superstition that a second-rate man,
finding himself in a position of responsibility, is likely to display
undreamed of powers. The idea seems to be that the electorate, by a
kind of laying on of hands, confers fitness where none has previously
existed. Unfortunately such miracles are not frequent enough to form
the basis of a political philosophy. Recourse to the recall as a means
of getting rid of an undesirable office-holder strikes me as only
likely to increase the indifference, the languor, with which we now
perform our political duties.

Contempt for the educated man, a preposterous assumption that by
the very fact of his training he is unfitted for office, continues
prevalent in many minds. Conscious of this disqualification,
President Wilson finds amusement at times in referring to himself as
a schoolmaster; much criticism of his administration is based upon
the melancholy fact that he is a “professor,” a scholar, as though a
lifelong student of history and politics were disqualified, by the very
fact of his preparation, for exalted office.

The direct primary, as a means of assisting first-rate men to office,
has not yet realized what was hoped for it, and there is growing
scepticism as to its efficacy. It is one of our marked national
failings that we expect laws and systems to work automatically. If
the first-rate man cherishes the delusion that he need only offer
himself to his fellow partisans and they will delightedly spring to
his support, he is doomed to a sad awakening. Unless he has taken the
precaution to ask the organization’s permission to put his name on
the ballot and is promised support, he must perfect an organization
of his own with which to make his fight in the primary. He must open
headquarters from which to carry on his operations, make speeches
before as many citizens as can be assembled to hear him, enlist and
pay helpers, most of whom expect jobs in case he is successful. He
must drop money into palms of whose existence he never dreamed, the
recipients of his bounty being frequently “scouts” from his opponents’
camps. The blackmailing of candidates by charitable organizations--and
churches are not without shame in this particular--is only one of the
thousand annoyances. He is not likely to enjoy immunity from newspaper
attack. Months of time and much money are required for a primary
campaign. I venture the assertion that many hundreds of candidates
for office in this year of grace began their campaigns for election
already encumbered by debts incurred in winning their nominations,
which brought them only half-way to the goal. Such a burden, with all
its connotations of curtailed liberty and shackling obligations, may
not be viewed with equanimity. Instead of making office-holding more
attractive to the first-rate man, the direct primary multiplies his
discouragements.

The second-rate man, being willing to accept office as a party,
not a public, trust, and to use it in every way possible for the
strengthening of party lines, has the first-rate man, who has only his
merits to justify his ambitions, at a serious disadvantage. When an
organization (the term by which a machine prefers to be called) finds
that it is likely to meet with defeat through public resentment of
its excesses, it will sometimes turn to a first-rate man. But this is
only in cases of sheer desperation. There is nothing more amusing than
the virtuous air with which a machine will nominate a first-rate man
where there is no possible danger of party success. He it is whom the
bosses are willing to sacrifice. The trick is turned ingeniously to the
bosses’ advantage, for defeat in such instances proves to the truly
loyal that only the “regulars” can get anywhere.

A young friend of mine once persuaded me to join him in “bucking”
a primary for the election of delegates to a State convention. I
cheerfully lent my assistance in this laudable enterprise, the more
readily when he confided to me his intention of employing machine
methods. A young man of intelligence and humor, he had, by means which
I deplored but to which I contributed, lured from the organization
one of its star performers. I speak of this without shame, that the
cynical may not complain that I am in politics a high brow or dreamy
lotus eater. Our ally knew the game; he knew how to collect and deliver
votes by the most approved machine methods. We watched him work with
the keenest satisfaction. He brought citizens in great numbers to vote
our “slate,” many of them men who had never been in the ward before. We
gloated with satisfaction as the day declined and our votes continued
to pile up. Our moral natures were in the balance; if we beat the
machine with machine methods we meant never, never to be good again! It
seemed indeed that our investment in the skilled worker could not fail
of success. When the votes were counted, oh, what a fall was there, my
countrymen! “Our man” had merely used our automobiles, and I refrain
from saying what other munitions of war, to get out the vote of the
opposition! We had in other words, accomplished our own defeat!


VI

The past year has been marked by the agitation for military
preparedness; civil preparedness strikes me as being of equal
importance. If I am right--or only half right--in my assertion that we
are governed very largely by second-rate men and that public business
is confided chiefly to the unfit, then here is a matter that cannot be
ignored by those who look forward hopefully to the future of American
democracy. There are more dangers within than without, and our tame
acceptance of incompetence in civil office would certainly bring
calamity if suffered in a military establishment. The reluctance of
first-rate men to accept or seek office is more disquieting than the
slow enlistments in the army and navy. Competence in the one would do
much to assure intelligent foresight and efficiency in the other.

It is a disturbing thought that we, the people, really care so little,
and that we are so willing to suffer government by the second-rate,
only murmuring despairingly when the unhappy results of our apathy
bring us sharply face to face with failure.

“The fatalism of the multitude,” commented upon strikingly by Lord
Bryce, has established in us the superstition that a kindly providence
presides over our destinies and that “everything will come out right
in the end.” But government by good luck is not a safe reliance for a
nation of a hundred millions. Nothing in history supports a blind faith
in numbers or in the wisdom of majorities. America’s hope lies in the
multiplication of the fit--the saving remnant of Isaiah’s prophecies
and Plato’s philosophy--a doctrine applied to America by Matthew
Arnold, who remains one of the shrewdest and most penetrating of all
our critics. Mr. Arnold distrusted numbers and had no confidence in
majorities. He said:

  To be a voice outside the state, speaking to mankind or to the
  future, perhaps shaking the actual state to pieces in doing so, one
  man will suffice. But to reform the state in order to save it, to
  preserve it by changing it, a body of workers is needed as well as a
  leader--a considerable body of workers, placed at many points, and
  operating in many directions.

These days, amid “the thunder of the captains, and the shouting,”
there must be many thousands of Americans who are truly of the saving
remnant, who view public matters soberly and hold as something very
fine and precious our heritage of democracy. These we may suppose will
witness the dawn of election day with a lively apprehension of their
august responsibilities, and exercise their right of selection sanely
and wisely. “They only who build upon ideas, build for eternity,” wrote
Emerson.

This nation was founded on ideas, and clearly in the ideas of the fit,
the earnest, the serious, lies its hope for the future. To eliminate
the second-rate, to encourage the first-rate man to undertake offices
of responsibility and power--such must be the immediate concern and the
urgent business of all who love America.




THE LADY OF LANDOR LANE


I

“TAKE your choice; I have bungalows to burn,” said the architect.

He and his ally, the real-estate man, had been unduly zealous in the
planting of bungalows in the new addition beyond the college. About
half of them remained unsold, and purchasers were elusive. A promised
extension of the trolley-line had not materialized; and half a dozen
houses of the bungalow type, scattered along a ridge through which
streets had been hacked in the most brutal fashion, spoke for the
sanguine temper of the projectors of Sherwood Forest. The best thing
about the new streets was their names, which were a testimony to the
fastidious taste of a professor in the college who had frequently
thundered in print against our ignoble American nomenclature.

It was hoped that Sherwood Forest would prove particularly attractive
to newly married folk of cultivation, who spoke the same social
language. There must, therefore, be a Blackstone Road, as a lure for
struggling lawyers; a Lister Avenue, to tickle the imagination of young
physicians; and Midas Lane, in which the business man, sitting at
his own hearth side far from the jarring city, might dream of golden
harvests. To the young matron anxious to keep in touch with art and
literature, what could have been more delightful than the thought of
receiving her mail in Emerson Road, Longfellow Lane, Audubon Road, or
any one of a dozen similar highways (if indeed the new streets might
strictly be so called) almost within sound of the college bell? The
college was a quarter of a mile away, and yet near enough to shed
its light upon this new colony that had risen in a strip of forest
primeval, which, as the promoting company’s circulars more or less
accurately recited, was only thirty minutes from lobsters and head
lettuce.

This was all a year ago, just as August haughtily relinquished the
world to the sway of September. I held the chair of applied sociology
in the college, and had taken a year off to write a number of articles
for which I had long been gathering material. It had occurred to me
that it would be worth while to write a series of sociological studies
in the form of short stories. My plan was to cut small cross-sections
in the social strata of the adjoining city, in the suburban village
which embraced the college, and in the adjacent farm region, and
attempt to portray, by a nice balancing of realism and romance, the
lives of the people in the several groups I had been observing. I had
talked to an editor about it and he had encouraged me to try my hand.

I felt enough confidence in the scheme to risk a year’s leave, and I
now settled down to my writing zestfully. I had already submitted three
stories, which had been accepted in a cordial spirit that proved highly
stimulating to further endeavor, and the first of the series, called
_The Lords of the Round House_--a sketch of the domestic relationships
and social conditions of the people living near the railroad shops--had
been commented on favorably as a fresh and novel view of an old
subject. My second study dealt with a settlement sustained by the
canning industry, and under the title, _Eros and the Peach Crop_, I had
described the labors and recreations of this community honestly, and
yet with a degree of humor.

As a bachelor professor I had been boarding near the college with
the widow of a minister; but now that I was giving my time wholly to
writing I found this domicile intolerable. My landlady, admirable
woman though she was, was altogether too prone to knock at my door on
trifling errands. When I had filled my note-book with memoranda for a
sketch dealing with the boarding-house evil (it has lately appeared
as _Charging What the Onion Will Bear_), I resolved to find lodgings
elsewhere. And besides, the assistant professor of natural sciences
occupied a room adjoining mine, and the visits of strange _reptilia_ to
my quarters were far from stimulating to literary labor.

I had long been immensely curious as to those young and trusting souls
who wed in the twenties, establish homes, and, unterrified by cruel
laws enacted for the protection of confiding creditors, buy homes on
the instalment plan, keep a cow, carry life insurance, buy theatre
tickets, maintain a baby, and fit as snugly into the social structure
as though the world were made for them alone. In my tramps about the
city I had marked with professional interest the appearance of great
colonies of bungalows which had risen within a few years, and which
spoke with an appealing eloquence for an obstinate confidence in the
marriage tie. In my late afternoon excursions through these sprightly
suburban regions I had gazed with the frankest admiration upon wholly
charming young persons stepping blithely along new cement walks,
equipped with the neatest of card-cases, or bearing embroidered bags of
sewing; and maids in the smartest of caps opened doors to them. Through
windows guarded by the whitest of draperies, I had caught glimpses of
our native forests as transformed into the sturdiest of arts-and-crafts
furniture. Both flower and kitchen gardens were squeezed into compact
plots of earth; a Gerald or a Geraldine cooed from a perambulator at
the gate of at least every other establishment; and a “syndicate”
man-of-all-work moved serenely from furnace to furnace, from lawn to
lawn, as the season determined. On Sundays I saw the young husbands
hieing to church, to a golf-links somewhere, to tennis in some
vacant lot, or aiding their girlish wives in the cheerfulest fashion
imaginable to spray rose-bushes or to drive the irrepressible dandelion
from the lawn of its delight.

These phenomena interested me more than I can say. My aim was not
wholly sociological, for not only did I wish in the spirit of strictest
scientific inquiry to understand just how all this was possible, but
the sentimental aspect of it exercised a strange fascination upon me.
When I walked these new streets at night and saw lamps lighted in
dozens of cheery habitations, with the lord and lady of the bungalow
reading or talking in greatest contentment; or when their voices
drifted out to me from nasturtium-hung verandas on summer evenings,
I was in danger of ceasing to be a philosopher and of going over
bodily to the sentimentalists. Then, the scientific spirit mastering,
I vulgarly haunted the doors of the adjacent shops and communed with
grocers’ boys and drug clerks, that I might gain data upon which to
base speculations touching this species, this “group,” which presented
so gallant a front in a world where bills are payable not later than
the tenth of every calendar month.

“You may have the brown bungalow in Audubon Road, the gray one in
Washington Hedge, or the dark green one in Landor Lane. Take any
one you like; they all offer about the same accommodations,” said
the architect. “You can put such rent as you see fit in the nearest
squirrel box, and if you meet an intending purchaser with our
prospectus in his hand I expect you to take notice and tease him to
buy. We’ve always got another bungalow somewhere, so you won’t be
thrown in the street.”

I chose Landor Lane for a variety of reasons. There were as yet only
three houses in the street, and this assured a degree of peace. Many
fine forest trees stood in the vacant lots, and a number had been
suffered to remain within the parking retained between sidewalk and
curb, mitigating greatly the harsh lines of the new addition. But
I think the deciding factor was the name of the little street.
Landor had always given me pleasure, and while it is possible that a
residence in Huxley Avenue might have been more suitable for a seeker
of truth, there was the further reflection that truth, touched with the
iridescent glow of romance, need suffer nothing from contact with the
spirit of Walter Savage Landor.

Directly opposite my green bungalow was a dark brown one flung up
rather high above the lane. The promoters of the addition had refrained
from smoothing out the landscape, so that the brown bungalow was about
twenty feet above the street, while my green one was reached by only
half a dozen steps.

On the day that I made my choice I saw a child of three playing in
the grass plot before the brown bungalow. It was Saturday afternoon,
and the typical young freeholder was doing something with an axe near
the woodshed, and even as I surveyed the scene the domestic picture
was completed by the appearance of the inevitable young woman, who
came from the direction of the trolley-terminus, carrying the usual
neat card-case in her hand. Here was exactly what I wanted--a chance
to study at close hand the bungalow type, and yet, Landor Lane was
so quiet, its trio of houses so distributed, that I might enjoy that
coveted detachment so essential to contemplative observation and wise
judgments.

“I’ve forgotten,” mused the architect, as we viewed the scene together,
“whether the chap in that brown bungalow is Redmond, the patent
lawyer, or Manderson, the tile-grate man. There’s a baby of about the
same vintage at both houses. If that isn’t Redmond over there showing
Gladstonian prowess with the axe, it’s Manderson. Woman with child and
cart; number 58; West Gallery; artist unknown.” It pleased my friend’s
humor to quote thus from imaginary catalogues. “Well, I don’t know
whether those are the Redmonds or the Mandersons; but come to think of
it, Redmond isn’t a lawyer, but the inventor of a new office system by
which profit and loss are computed hourly by a device so simple that
any child may operate it. A man of your cloistral habits won’t care
about the neighbors, but I hope that chap isn’t Redmond. A man who
will think up a machine like that isn’t one you’d expose perfectly
good garden hose to, on dark summer nights.”


II

A Japanese boy who was working his way through college offered to
assume the responsibilities of my housekeeping for his board. Banzai
brought to the task of cooking the deft hand of his race. He undertook
the purchase of furniture to set me up in the bungalow, without asking
questions--in itself a great relief. In a week’s time he announced that
all was in readiness for my transfer, so that I made the change quite
casually, without other impedimenta than a portfolio and a suitcase.

On that first evening, as Banzai served my supper--he was a past
master of the omelet--I enjoyed a peace my life had not known before.
In collecting material for my earlier sketches I had undeniably
experienced many discomforts and annoyances; but here was an adventure
which could hardly fail to prove pleasant and profitable.

As I loafed with my pipe after supper, I resolved to make the most of
my good fortune and perfect a study of the bungalow as an expression
of American civilization which should be the final word on that
enthralling subject. I was myself, so to speak, a bungaloyd--the owner
or occupant of a bungalow--and while I was precluded by my state of
bachelorhood from entering fully into the life which had so aroused my
curiosity, I was nevertheless confident that I should be able to probe
deeply and sympathetically into the secret of the bungalow’s happiness.

Having arranged my books and papers I sought the open. Banzai
had secured some porch furniture of a rustic pattern, but he had
neglected to provide pillows, and as the chairs of hickory boughs
were uncomfortable, I strolled out into the lane. As I stood in the
walk, the door of the brown bungalow opened and a man came forth and
descended to the street. It was a clear night with an abundance of
stars, and the slim crescent of a young moon hung in the west. My
neighbor struck a match and drew the flame into his pipe in four or
five deliberate inhalations. In the match-flare I saw his face, which
impressed me as sombre, though this may have been the effect of his
dark, close-trimmed beard. He stood immovable for five minutes or more,
then strolled aimlessly away down the lane.

Looking up, I saw a green-shaded lamp aglow in the front window of the
bungalow, and almost immediately the young wife opened the door and
came out hastily, anxiously. She ran half-way down the steps, with the
light of the open door falling upon her, and after a hurried glance to
right and left called softly, “Tom!”

“Tom,” she repeated more loudly; then she ran back into the house and
reappeared, flinging a wrap over her shoulders, and walked swiftly away
in the direction taken by the lord of the bungalow.

Could it be possible, I pondered, that the happiness I had attributed
to bungalow folk was after all of such stuff as dreams are made of?
There had been almost a sob in that second cry of “Tom!” and I resented
it. The scene was perfectly set; the green-shaded lamp had been
lighted, ready for that communing of two souls which had so deeply
moved and interested me as I had ranged the land of the bungalow;
yet here was a situation which rose blackly in my imagination. I was
surprised to find how quickly I took sides in this unhappy drama; I was
all for the woman. The glimpse I had caught of her, tripping homeward
in the lane, swinging her card-case, had been wholly pleasing; and I
recalled the joyous quick rush with which she had clasped her child. I
was sure that Tom was a monster, eccentric, selfish, indifferent. There
had been a tiff, and he had gone off to sulk in the dark like a wilful,
perverse child.

I was patrolling my veranda half an hour later, when I heard steps
and then voices on the walk opposite, and back they came. It is a
woman’s way, I reflected, to make all the advances; and this young
wife had captured the runaway and talked him into good humor. A moment
later they were seated beside the table in the living-room, and so
disposed that the lamp did not obscure them from each other. She was
reading aloud, and occasionally glanced up, whether to make sure of
his attention or to comment upon the book I did not know; and when it
occurred to me that it was neither dignified nor decent to watch my
neighbors through their window, I went indoors and wrote several pages
of notes for a chapter which I now felt must be written, on “Bungalow
Shadows.”

Manderson was the name; Banzai made sure of this at the grocer’s. As I
took the air of the lane the next morning before breakfast, I saw that
the Redmonds were a different sort. Redmond, a big fellow, with a loud
voice, was bidding his wife and child good-by. The youngster toddled
after him, the wife ran after the child, and there was much laughter.
They all stopped to inspect me, and Redmond introduced himself and
shook hands, with the baby clutching his knees. He presented me to his
wife, and they cordially welcomed me to the lane to the baby’s cooing
accompaniment. They restored me to confidence in the bungalow type; no
doubt of the Redmonds being the real thing!


III

The lady of the brown bungalow was, however, far more attractive than
her sister of the red one, and the Mandersons as a family were far
more appealing than the Redmonds. My note-book filled with memoranda
touching the ways and manners of the Mandersons, and most of these, I
must confess, related to Mrs. Manderson. She was exactly the type I
sought, the veritable _dea ex machina_ of the bungalow world. She lived
a good deal on her veranda, and as I had established a writing-table on
mine I was able to add constantly to my notes by the mere lifting of
my eyes. I excused my impudence in watching her on scientific grounds.
She was no more to me than a new bird to an ornithologist, or a strange
plant to a botanist.

Occasionally she would dart into the house and attack an upright piano
that stood by the broad window of the living-room. I could see the firm
clean stroke of her arms as she played. Those brilliant, flashing,
golden things of Chopin’s she did wonderfully; or again it would be
Schumann’s spirit she invoked. Once begun, she would run on for an
hour, and Banzai would leave his kitchen and crouch on our steps to
listen. She appeared at times quite fearlessly with a broom to sweep
the walk, and she seemed to find a childish delight in sprinkling the
lawn. Or she would set off, basket in hand, for the grocer’s, and would
return bearing her own purchases and none the less a lady for a’ that.
There was about her an indefinable freshness and crispness. I observed
with awe her succession of pink and blue shirt waists, in which she
caught and diffused the sun like a figure in one of Benson’s pictures;
and when she danced off with her card-case in a costume of solid white,
and with a flappy white hat, she was not less than adorable.

Manderson nodded to me the second day, a little coldly, as we met in
the walk; and thereafter bowed or waved a hand when I fell under his
eye. One evening I heard him calling her across the dusk of the yard.
Her name was Olive, and nothing, it seemed to me, was ever more fitting
than that.

One morning as I wrote at my table on the veranda I was aroused by
a commotion over the way. The girl of all work appeared in the front
yard screaming and wringing her hands, and I rushed across the lane
to learn that the water-heater was possessed of an evil spirit and
threatened to burst. The lady of the bungalow had gone to town and the
peril was imminent. I reversed all the visible valves, in that trustful
experimental spirit which is the flower of perfect ignorance, and
the catastrophe was averted. I returned to my work, became absorbed,
and was only aroused by a tug at my smoking-jacket. Beside me stood
the Manderson baby, extending a handful of dahlias! Her manner was
of ambassadorial gravity. No word was spoken, and she trotted off,
laboriously descended my steps, and toddled across the lane.

Her mother waited at the curb, and as I bowed in my best manner,
holding up the dahlias, she called, “Thank you!” in the most entrancing
of voices. Mr. James declares that the way one person looks at another
may be, in effect, an incident; and how much more may “Thank you,”
flung across a quiet street, have the weight of hours of dialogue!
Her voice was precisely the voice that the loveliest of feminine names
connotes, suggesting Tennysonian harmonies and cadences, and murmuring
waters of----

  “Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio.”

A bunch of dahlias was just the epistolary form to which a bungalow
lady would resort in communicating with a gentleman she did not know.
The threatened explosion of the heater had thus served to introduce
me to my neighbor, and had given me at the same time a new revelation
of her sense of the proprieties, her graciousness, and charm. In my
visit to the house I had observed its appointments with a discreet but
interested eye, and I jotted down many notes with her dahlias on the
table before me. The soft tints of the walls, the well-chosen American
rugs, the comfort that spoke in the furniture reflected a consistent
taste. There was the usual den, with a long bench piled with cushions,
and near at hand a table where a tray of smoker’s articles was hedged
in with magazines, and there were books neatly shelved, and others,
lying about, testified to familiar use. The upright piano, by the
window of my frequent contemplation, bore the imprimatur of one of
the most reputable makers, and a tall rack beside it was filled with
music. Prone on the player’s seat lay a doll--a fact I noted with
satisfaction, as evidence of the bungalow baby’s supremacy even where
its mother is a veritable reincarnation of St. Cecilia.

The same evening Manderson came home in haste and departed immediately
with a suitcase. I had hoped that he would follow the dahlias in person
to discuss the housemaid’s embarrassments with the plumbing and bring
me within the arc of his domestic circle, but such was not to be the
way of it.

He was gone three days, and while the lady of the bungalow now bowed to
me once daily across the lane, our acquaintance progressed no further.
Nor, I may add, did my work move forward according to the schedule by
which it is my habit to write. I found myself scribbling verses--a
relaxation I had not indulged in since my college days. I walked much,
surveying the other streets in Sherwood Forest Addition and gloomily
comparing them with Landor Lane to their disadvantage. I tramped the
shore of the little lake and saw her there once and again, at play
with the baby. She and Mrs. Redmond exchanged visits frequently with
bungalow informality. One afternoon half a dozen young women appeared
for tea on the deep veranda, and the lane was gay with laughter. They
were the ladies of the surrounding bungalow district, and their party
was the merriest. I wondered whether she had waited for a day when her
husband was absent to summon these sisters. It was a gloomy fate that
had mated her with a melancholy soul like Manderson.


IV

I had written several couplets imploring the protection of the gods
for the Lady of the Lane, and these I had sketched upon a large sheet
of cardboard the better to scrutinize them. And thereby hangs the
saddest of revelations. My friend the architect had sent me a number
of advertisements with a request that I should persuade Banzai to
attach them to the adjacent landscape. Returning from a tramp I beheld
Olive (as I shall not scruple to call her) studying a placard on a
telephone-post in the lane a little beyond her bungalow. It struck me
as odd that she should be so interested in a mere advertisement of
bungalows, when she was already cosily domiciled in the prettiest one
the addition boasted. She laughed aloud, then turned guardedly, saw me,
and marched demurely home without so much as glancing a second time in
my direction.

After she had tripped up the steps and vanished I saw the grievous
thing that Banzai had done. By some inadvertence he had thrust the
card bearing my verses among the advertisements, and with all the
posts and poles and tree-boxes in Christendom to choose from, he had
with unconscious malevolence nailed my couplets to the telephone-pole
nearest the Manderson bungalow. It was an unpardonable atrocity, the
enormity of which I shall not extenuate by suppressing the verses:

  “Spirits that guard all lovely things
  Bend o’er this path thy golden wings.

  Shield it from storms and powers malign:
  Make stars and sun above it shine.

  May none pass here on evil bent:
  Bless it to hearts of good intent,

  And when (like some bright catch of song
  One hears but once though waiting long)

  Lalage suddenly at the door
  Views the adoring landscape o’er,

  O swift let friendly winds attend
  And faithful to her errands bend!

  Then when adown the lane she goes
  Make leap before her vine and rose!

  From elfin land bring Ariel
  To walk beside and guard her well.

  Defend her, pray, from faun and gnome
  Till through the Lane she wanders home!”

It was bad enough to apostrophize my neighbor’s wife in song; but to
publish my infamy to the world was an even more grievous sin. I tore
the thing down, bore it home, and thrust it into the kitchen range
before the eyes of the contrite Banzai. Across the way Olive played,
and I thought there was mockery in her playing.

Realism is, after all, on much better terms with Romance than the
critics would have us believe. If Manderson had not thawed sufficiently
to borrow the realistic monkey-wrench which Banzai used on our
lawn-mower, and if Olive had not romantically returned it a week
later with a card on which she had scribbled “Many apologies for the
long delay,” I might never have discovered that she was not in fact
Manderson’s wife but his sister. Hers was the neatest, the best-bred of
cards, and bore the name incontrovertibly----

  +--------------------------------+
  |                                |
  |                                |
  |      MISS OLIVE MANDERSON      |
  |                                |
  | 44 LANDOR LANE                 |
  +--------------------------------+

I throw this to the realists that they may chortle over it in the
way of their grim fraternity. Were I cursed with the least taint of
romanticism I should not disclose her maiden state at this point, but
hold it for stirring dramatic use at the moment when, believing her to
be the wife of the mournful tile-grate man, I should bid her good-by
and vanish forever.

The moment that card reached me by the hand of her housemaid she was
playing a Chopin polonaise, and I was across the lane and reverently
waiting at the door when the last chord sounded. It was late on an
afternoon at the threshold of October, but not too cool for tea _al
fresco_. When the wind blew chill from the lake she disappeared, and
returned with her hands thrust into the pockets of a white sweater.

It was amazing how well we got on from the first. She explained herself
in the fewest words. Her brother’s wife had died two years before, and
she had helped to establish a home for him in the hope of mitigating
his loneliness. She spoke of him and the child with the tenderest
consideration. He had been badly broken by his wife’s death, and was
given to brooding. I accused myself bitterly for having so grossly
misjudged him as to think him capable of harshness toward the fair
lady of his bungalow. He came while I still sat there and greeted me
amiably, and when I left we were established on the most neighborly
footing.

Thenceforth my work prospered. Olive revealed, with the nicest
appreciation and understanding of my needs, the joys and sorrows of
suburban bungalowhood. The deficiencies of the trolley service, the
uncertainties of the grocer’s delivery she described in the aptest
phrases, her buoyant spirit making light of all such vexations.

The manifold resources and subterfuges of bungalow housekeeping were
unfolded with the drollest humor. The eternal procession of cooks,
the lapses of the neighborhood hired man, the fitfulness of the
electric light--all such tragedies were illuminated with her cheery
philosophy. The magazine article that I had planned expanded into a
discerning study of the secret which had baffled and lured me, as to
the flowering of the bungalow upon the rough edges of the urban world.
The aspirations expressed by the upright piano, the perambulator, the
new book on the arts-and-crafts table, the card-case borne through
innumerable quiet lanes--all such phenomena Olive elucidated for my
instruction. The shrewd economies that explained the occasional theatre
tickets; the incubator that robbed the grocer to pay the milliner; the
home-plied needle that accounted for the succession of crisp shirt
waists--into these and many other mysteries Olive initiated me.

Sherwood Forest suddenly began to boom, and houses were in demand.
My architect friend threatened me with eviction, and to avert the
calamity I signed a contract of purchase, which bound me and my heirs
and assigns forever to certain weekly payments; and, blithe opportunist
that I am, I based a chapter on this circumstance, with the caption
“Five Dollars a Month for Life.” I wrote from notes supplied by Olive a
dissertation on “The Pursuit of the Lemon”--suggested by an adventure
of her own in search of the fruit of the _citrus limonum_ for use in
garnishing a plate of canned salmon for Sunday evening tea.

Inspired by the tender, wistful autumn days I wrote verses laboriously,
and boldly hung them in the lane in the hope of arresting my Rosalind’s
eye. One of these (tacked to a tree in a path by the lake) I here
insert to illustrate the plight to which she had brought me:

  “At eve a line of golden light
    Hung low along the west;
  The first red maple bough shone bright
    Upon the woodland’s breast.

  The wind blew keen across the lake,
    A wave mourned on the shore;
  Earth knew an instant some heartache
    Unknown to earth before.

  The wandering ghosts of summers gone
    Watched shore and wood and skies;
  The night fell like a shadow drawn
    Across your violet eyes.”


V

Olive suffered my rhyming with the same composure with which she met
the unpreluded passing of a maid of all work, or the ill-natured
smoking of the furnace on the first day it was fired. She preferred
philosophy to poetry, and borrowed Nietzsche from the branch library.
She persuaded me that the ladies of the bungalows are all practical
persons, and so far as I am concerned, Olive fixed the type. It had
seemed to me, as I viewed her comings and goings at long range, that
she commanded infinite leisure; and yet her hours were crowded with
activities. I learned from her that cooks with diplomas are beyond
the purses of most bungalow housekeepers; and as Olive’s brother’s
digestive apparatus was most delicate she assumed the responsibility
of composing cakes and pastries for his pleasure. With tea (and we
indulged in much teaing) she gave me golden sponge-cake of her own
making which could not have failed to delight the severest Olympian
critic. Her sand tarts established a new standard for that most
delectable item of the cook-book. She ironed with her own hands the
baby’s more fragile frocks. Nor did such manual employments interfere
in any way whatever with the delicacy of her touch upon the piano. She
confided to me that she made a practice of reviewing French verbs at
the ironing-board with a grammar propped before her. She belonged to
a club which was studying Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, and she was
secretary of a musical society--formed exclusively of the mistresses
of bungalows, who had nobly resolved to devote the winter to the study
of the works of John Sebastian Bach.

It gradually became clear that the romance of the American bungalow was
reinforced and strengthened by a realism that was in itself romance,
and I was immensely stimulated by this discovery. It was refreshing to
find that there are, after all, no irreconcilable differences between
a pie well made and a Chopin polonaise well played. Those who must
quibble over the point may file a demurrer, if they so please, with the
baby asleep in the perambulator on the nearest bungalow veranda, and
the child, awaking, will overrule it with a puckered face and a cry
that brings mama on the run with Carlyle in her hand.


VI

Olive was twenty-five. Twenty-five is the standard age, so to speak,
of bungalow matrons. My closest scrutiny has failed to discover one
a day older. It is too early for any one to forecast the ultimate
fate of the bungalow. The bungalow speaks for youth, and whether it
will survive as an architectural type, or whether those hopeful young
married persons who trustingly kindle their domestic altars in bungalow
fireplaces will be found there in contentment at fifty, is not for this
writing. What did strike me was the fact that Olive, being twenty-five,
was an anomaly as a bungalow lady by reason of her unmarriedness.
Her domesticity was complete, her efficiency indisputable, her charm
ineffable; and it seemed that here was a chance to perfect a type
which I, with my strong scientific bent, could not suffer to pass.
By the mere process of changing the name on her visiting card, and
moving from a brown to a green bungalow, she might become the perfect
representation of the most interesting and delightful type of American
women. Half of my study of bungalow life was finished, and a publisher
to whom I submitted the early chapters returned them immediately with a
contract, whose terms were in all ways generous, so that I was able to
view the future in that jaunty confidence with which young folk intrust
their fate to the bungalow gods.

I looked up from my writing-table, which the chill air had driven
indoors, and saw Olive on her lawn engaged in some mysterious
occupation. She was whistling the while she dabbed paint with a brush
and a sophisticated air upon the bruised legs of the baby’s high chair.

At my approach Romance nudged Realism. Or maybe it was Realism that
nudged Romance. I cannot see that it makes the slightest difference,
one way or another, on whose initiative I spoke: let it suffice that
I did speak. Realism and Romance tripped away and left me alone
with the situation. When I had spoken Olive rose, viewed her work
musingly, with head slightly tilted, and still whistling touched the
foot-rest of the baby chair lingeringly with the paint-brush. Those
neat cans of prepared paint which place the most fascinating of joys
within the range of womankind are in every well-regulated bungalow
tool-closet--and another chapter for my book began working in my
subconsciousness.

A little later Romance and Realism returned and stood to right and left
of us by the living-room fire. Realism, in the outward form of W. D.
H., winked at Romance as represented by R. L. S. I observed that W. D.
H., in a pepper-and-salt business suit, played with his eye-glasses; R.
L. S., in a velvet jacket, toyed with his dagger hilt.

Olive informed me that her atrabilious brother was about to marry a
widow in Emerson Road, so there seemed to be no serious obstacle to
the immediate perfecting of Olive as a type by a visit to the young
clergyman in the white bungalow in Channing Lane, on the other side
of Sherwood Forest Addition. Romance and Realism therefore quietly
withdrew and left us to discuss the future.

“I think,” said Olive with a far-away look in her eyes, “that there
should be a box of geraniums on our veranda rail next summer, and that
a hen-house could be built back of the coal shed without spoiling the
looks of the yard.”

As I saw no objection whatever to these arrangements, we took the baby
for a walk, met Tom at the car, and later we all dined together at
the brown bungalow. I seem to recall that there was roast fowl for
dinner, a salad with the smoothest of mayonnaise, canned apricots, and
chocolate layer cake, and a Schumann programme afterward.




HOW, THEN, SHOULD SMITH VOTE?

[1920]


THE talk on the veranda had been prolonged, and only my old friend
Smith, smoking in meditative silence, had refused to contribute to
our discussion of the men and the issues. Between campaigns Smith is
open-minded on all matters affecting the body politic. Not infrequently
his views are marked by a praiseworthy independence. Smith has brains;
Smith thinks. A Republican, he criticises his party with the utmost
freedom; and when sorely tried he renounces it with a superb gesture
of disdain. But on election day, in a mood of high consecration, he
unfailingly casts his ballot for the Republican nominee. A week earlier
he may have declared in the most convincing manner that he would not
support the ticket; and under extreme provocation I have known him to
threaten to leave the Republican fold for all time.

Party loyalty is one of the most powerful factors in the operation of
our democracy, and it has its special psychology, to which only a
Josiah Royce could do full justice. Smith really thinks that he will
bolt; but when it comes to the scratch an influence against which he
is powerless stays his hand when he is alone in the voting booth with
his conscience and his God. Later, when gently reminded of this mood
of disaffection, he snarls that, when it comes down to brass tacks,
any Republican is better than any Democrat, anyhow--a fragment of
philosophy that is the consolation of great numbers of Smiths.

Smith, as I was saying, had refrained from participating in our talk
on that August night where the saltless sea complained upon the beach
and the pines took counsel of the stars. Then, as the party broke up,
Smith flung his cigar into Lake Michigan and closed the discussion by
remarking with a despairing sigh--

“Well, either way, the people lose!”


I

Smith prides himself on his ability to get what he wants when he wants
it--in everything but politics. In all else that pertains to his
welfare Smith is informed, capable, and efficient. In his own affairs
he tells the other fellow where to get off, and if told he can’t do
a thing he proceeds at once to do it and to do it well. It is only
in politics that his efforts are futile and he takes what is “handed
him.” Under strong provocation he will, in the manner of a dog in the
highway, run barking after some vehicle that awakens his ire; but
finding himself unequal to the race, he meekly trots back to his own
front yard. If the steam roller runs over him and the self-respect is
all but mashed out of him, he picks himself up and retires to consider
it yet again. He has learned nothing, except that by interposing
himself before a machine of superior size and weight he is very likely
to get hurt; and this he knew before.

Smith and I are in the north woods thirty-five miles from a telegraph
instrument, where it is possible to ponder great questions with a
degree of detachment. Loafing with Smith is one of the most profitable
things I do; he is the best of fellows, and, as our lives have run
parallel from school-days with an unbroken intimacy, we are thoroughly
familiar with each other’s manner of thought. What I am setting down
here is really a condensed report of our talks. Just where Smith leaves
off and I begin doesn’t matter, for we speak the same language of the
Ancient Brotherhood of the Average Man. Smith is a Republican; I am a
Democrat. We have “gone to the mat” in many campaigns, each valiantly
defending his party and its heroes. But, chumming together in August,
1920, the punch had gone out of us. We talked of men and issues, but
not with our old fervor. At first we were both shy of present-day
matters, and disposed to “sidle up” to the immediate situation--to
reach it by reluctant, tangential approaches, as though we were
strangers, wary of wounding each other’s feelings.

We mean to keep smiling about this whole business. We Americans seem
destined to rock dizzily on the brink of many precipices without ever
quite toppling over. We have lived through wars and rumors of wars, and
have escaped pestilence and famine, and we are deeply grateful that the
present campaign lays so light a tax upon the emotions. The republic
isn’t going to perish, no matter who’s elected. One thing is certain,
however, and that is that this time we--that is, Smith and I--are not
going to be jostled or pushed.

The other day we interviewed an Indian--whether untaxed or enrolled
at the receipt of custom we didn’t ascertain. Smith asked him whether
he was for Cox or Harding, and the rightful heir to all the territory
in sight, interpreting our courteous inquiry in a restricted tribal
rather than a national spirit replied, “No whisk.” He thought we were
deputy sheriffs looking for boot-leggers. Even at that, Smith held “no
whisk” to be the most intelligent answer he had as yet received to his
question.

Smith nearly upset the canoe one morning as he turned suddenly to
demand fiercely: “What’s this campaign all about anyhow?” This was a
dismaying question, but it precipitated a fortnight of reminiscences
of the changing fortunes of parties and of battles long ago, with
the usual profitless palaver as to whether the giants of other days
were really bigger and nobler than those of the present. We decided,
of course, that they were, having arrived at that time of life when
pygmies loom large in the twilight shades of vanishing perspectives.
The recuperative power of parties kept us interested through several
evenings. It seemed a miracle that the Democratic party survived the
Civil War. We talked much of Cleveland, speaking of him wistfully, as
the habit now is--of his courage and bluff honesty.

In generous mood we agreed that Mr. Bryan had at times rendered
meritorious service to his country, and that it was a good thing to
encourage such evangelists occasionally to give the kettle a vigorous
stirring up. The brilliant qualities as well as the many irritating
characteristics of Colonel Roosevelt were dwelt upon, and we readily
and amiably concluded that many pages of American history would be dull
without him. He knew what America is all about, and that is something.
We lamented the disheartening circumstance that in the very nature
of our system of political management there must always be men of
first-rate capacity who can never hope to win the highest place--men,
for example, of indubitable wisdom, character, and genius, like George
F. Edmunds, Elihu Root, and Judge Gray of Delaware.

“When I’ve got a place to fill in my business,” said Smith, “I pick out
a man I’m dead sure can handle it; I can’t afford to experiment with
fakers and amateurs. But when it comes to choosing a mayor in my town
or a President of the United States, I’ve got to take what I can get.”

There is no justification for the party system, unless the
major parties are alert and honest in criticism and exercise a
restraining influence upon each other. It is perfectly legitimate
for the opposition to pick out all the weak spots in the record
of an administration and make the most of them. The rules of good
sportsmanship do not, unfortunately, apply in politics. With all
our insistence as a nation upon fair play, we don’t practise our
greatest game in that spirit. It was not, I should say, until after
Mr. Cleveland’s second election that the Civil War ceased to color
political discussion. Until I was well on toward manhood, I was
troubled not a little by a fear that the South would renew the war, so
continually was the great struggle of the sixties brought fearsomely
to the attention, even in local contests. In the criticism that has
been heaped upon Mr. Wilson’s administration we have been reminded
frequently that he has been far too responsive to Southern influence.

The violence of our partisanship is responsible for the intrusion of
all manner of extraneous matters into campaigns. It would seem that
some single striking issue that touches the pocketbook, like the tariff
or silver, is necessary, if the electorate is to be thoroughly aroused.
Human nature in a democracy is quite what it is under any other form of
government, and is thoroughly disposed to view all matters selfishly.
Shantung and Fiume are too remote to interest the great number of us
whose club is the corner grocery. Anything beyond Main Street is alien
to our interest. We’ll buy food for the starving in other lands, but
that’s missionary work, not politics. Politics is electing our township
ticket, even though Bill Jones does beat his wife and is bound to make
a poor constable.

We became slightly cynical at times, in the way of Americans who talk
politics heart-to-heart. The national convention, where there is a
thrill in the sonority of the very names of the far-flung commonwealths
as they are recited on roll-call, is, on the face of it, a glorious
expression of democracy at work. But in actual operation every one
knows that a national convention is only nominally representative.
The delegates in their appointed places are not free and independent
American citizens, assembled, as we would believe, to exercise their
best judgment as trustees of the “folks back home.” Most of them owe
their seats to the favor of a district or State boss; from the moment
the convention opens they are the playthings of the super-bosses, who
plan in advance every step in the proceedings.

Occasionally there are slips: the ringmaster cracks his whip, confident
that the show will proceed according to programme, only to be
embarrassed by some irresponsible performer who refuses to “take” the
hoops and hurdles in the prescribed order. In other terms, some absurd
person may throw a wrench into a perfectly functioning machine and
change the pattern it has been set to weave. Such sabotage calls for a
high degree of temerariousness, and cannot be recommended to ambitious
young patriots anxious to ingratiate themselves with the powers that
control. At Baltimore, in 1912, Mr. Bryan did the trick--the most
creditable act of his career; but in accepting for his reward the
premiership for which he was so conspicuously unfit he foolishly
spoiled his record and promptly fulfilled the worst predictions of his
enemies.

There is an oft-quoted saying that the Democratic party always may be
relied upon to do the wrong thing. Dating from 1876, when it so nearly
won the presidency, it has certainly been the victim of a great deal of
bad luck. However, remembering the blasting of many Republican hopes
and the swift passing of many Republican idols--the catastrophe that
befell the much-enduring Blaine, Mr. Taft’s melancholy adventures with
the presidency, the Progressive schism, and the manner in which Mr.
Hughes struck out with the bases full--it may hardly be said that the
gods of good-fortune have been markedly faithful to the Republicans.
Disappointments are inevitable; but even the Grant third-termers and
the followers of the Plumed Knight and the loyal Bryan phalanx outlived
their sorrows. The supporters of McAdoo and Palmer, of Wood and Lowden,
appear to be comfortably seated on the bandwagon.

Smith was an ardent supporter of General Wood’s candidacy, and we sat
together in the gallery of the convention hall at Chicago and observed
with awe and admiration the manner in which the general received the
lethal thrust. The noisy demonstrations, the oratory, the vociferous
whoops of the galleries touched us not at all, for we are not without
our sophistication in such exhibitions. We listened with pleasure to
the impromptus of those stanch veterans of many battles, Messrs. Depew
and Cannon. At other times, during lulls that invited oratory, we heard
insistent calls for Mr. Beveridge; but these did not reach the ear, or
failed to touch the heart, of the chairman. The former senator from
Indiana had been a Progressive, and was not to be trusted before a
convention that might, with a little stimulation, have trampled the
senatorial programme under foot.

We knew before the opening prayer was uttered that, when the delegates
chose a candidate, it would be only a _pro forma_ confirmation of a
selection made privately by half a dozen men, devout exponents of
that principle of party management which holds that the wisdom of the
few is superior to the silly clamor of the many. At that strategic
moment when it became hazardous to indulge the deadlock further, and
expediency called for an adjournment that the scene might be set for
the last act, the great lords quite shamelessly consulted in full view
of the spectators. Messrs. Lodge, Smoot, Watson, and Crane, hastily
reinforced by Mr. Herrick, who, aware that the spotlight was soon to be
turned upon Ohio, ran nimbly across the reporters’ seats to join the
conference, stood there in their majesty, like complacent Olympians
preparing to confer a boon upon mankind. It was a pretty bit of drama.
The curtain fell, as upon a second act where the developments of the
third are fully anticipated and interest is buoyed up only through the
intermission by a mild curiosity as to the manner in which the plot
will be worked out.

My heart warmed to the enterprising reporter who attached himself to
the sacred group for a magnificent moment. His forcible ejection only
emphasized the tensity of the situation and brought into clearer relief
the august figures of the pontiffs, who naturally resented so gross an
intrusion upon their privacy.


II

The other night, when every prospect divulged by the moon’s soft
radiance was pleasing and only the thought of man’s clumsy handiwork
was vile, Smith shocked me by remarking:

“This patter of both parties about the dear people makes me sick. That
vox populi vox Dei stuff was always a fake. We think we’re hearing
an echo from heaven when it’s only a few bosses in the back room of
a hotel somewhere telling us what we ought to want.” We descanted
upon this at length, and he adduced much evidence in support of his
contention. “What we’ve got in this country,” he snorted, when I tried
to reason him out of his impious attitude, “is government of the people
by the bosses--for the bosses’ good. The people are like a flock of
silly sheep fattening for the wolf, and too stupid to lift their eyes
from the grass to see him galloping down the hill. They’ve got to be
driven to the hole in the wall and pushed through!”

He was mightily pleased when I told him he had been anticipated by many
eminent authorities running back to Isaiah and Plato.

“Saving remnant” was a phrase to his liking, and he kept turning
it over and investing it with modern meanings. Before we blew out
the candles we were in accord on the proposition that while we have
government by parties the parties have got to be run by some one; what
is everybody’s business being, very truly, nobody’s business. Hence the
development of party organizations and their domination by groups, with
the groups themselves deriving inspiration usually from a single head.
Under the soothing influence of these bromides Smith fell to sleep
denouncing the direct primary.

“Instead of giving the power to the people,” he muttered drowsily,
“the bloomin’ thing has commercialized office-seeking. We’re selling
nominations to the highest bidder. If I were ass enough to chase a
United States senatorship, I wouldn’t waste any time on the people
until I’d been underwritten by a few strong banks. And if I won, I’d
be like the Dutchman who said he was getting along all right, only he
was worried because he had to die and go to hell yet. It would be my
luck to be pinched as a common felon, and to have my toga changed for a
prison suit at Leavenworth.”

Some candidate for the doctorate, hard put for a subject, might find it
profitable to produce a thesis on American political phraseology. As a
people we are much addicted to felicitous combinations of words that
express large ideas in the smallest possible compass. Not only does
political wisdom lend itself well to condensation, but the silliest
fallacy will carry far if knocked into a fetching phrase. How rich in
its connotations even to-day is the old slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler
too”! and many others equally illuminative of a period might be dug
out of the records from the beginning of our history, including “the
tariff is a tax,” “the full dinner-pail,” down to “he kept us out of
war.” A telling phrase or a catchword is enormously persuasive and
convincing--the shrewdest possible advertisement.

There is no way of knowing how many of our hundred millions ever read
a national platform, but I will hazard the guess that not more than
twenty-five per cent have perused the platforms of 1920 or will do
so before election day. The average voter is content to accept the
interpretations and laudatory comment of his party paper, with its
assurance that the declaration of principles and purposes is in keeping
with the great traditions of the grand old party. It is straining
Smith’s patriotism pretty far to ask him to read a solid page of small
type, particularly when he knows that much of it is untrue and most of
it sheer bunk. Editorial writers and campaign orators read platforms
perforce; but to Smith they are fatiguing to the eye and a weariness
to the spirit. The primary qualification for membership on a platform
committee is an utter lack--there must be no question about it--of a
sense of humor. The League of Nations plank of the Republican platform
is a refutation of the fallacy that we are a people singularly blessed
with humor. We could ask no more striking proof of the hypnotic power
of a party name than the acceptance of this plank, solemnly sawed,
trimmed, and painted red, white, and blue, in the committee-room, and
received by the delegates with joyous acclamation.


III

The embarrassments of the partisan who is challenged to explain the
faith that is in him are greatly multiplied in this year of grace.
Considerable literature is available as to the rise and development
of the two major parties, but a student might exhaust the whole of
it and yet read the Chicago and San Francisco platforms as through a
glass darkly. There is a good deal of Jeffersonian democracy that is
extremely difficult to reconcile with many acts of Mr. Wilson. The
partisan who tries to square his Democracy or his Republicanism with
the faith he inherited from his grandfather is doomed to a severe
headache. The rope that separates the elephant from the donkey in the
menagerie marks only a nominal difference in species: they eat the
same fodder and, when the spectator’s back is turned, slyly wink at
each other. There is a fine ring to the phrase “a loyal Republican”
or “a loyal Democrat,” but we have reached a point of convergence
where loyalty is largely a matter of tradition and superstition.
What Jefferson said on a given point, or what Hamilton thought about
something else, avails little to a Democrat or a Republican in these
changed times. We talk blithely of fundamental principles, but are
still without the power to visualize the leaders of the past in newly
developed situations of which they never dreamed. To attempt to
interview Washington as to whether he intended his warning against
entangling alliances to apply to a League of Nations to insure the
peace of the world is ridiculous; as well invoke Julius Cæsar’s opinion
of present-day questions of Italian politics.

Delightful and inspiring as it would doubtless be, we can’t quite
trust the government to the counsels of the ouija-board. The seats
of the cabinet or of the supreme bench will hardly be filled
with table-rapping experts until more of us are satisfied of the
authenticity of the communications that purport to be postmarked
oblivion. We quote the great spirits of the past only when we need
them to give weight and dignity to our own views. (Incidentally, a
ouija-board opinion from John Marshall as to the propriety of tacking
a police regulation like the Eighteenth Amendment to the Federal
Constitution would be first-page stuff for the newspapers.)

Monroe was luckier than most of our patriarchs. The doctrine associated
with his name is jealously treasured by many patriotic Americans who
haven’t the slightest idea of the circumstances that called it forth;
but to mention it in a discussion of international affairs is to stamp
the speaker as a person of breeding, endowed with intellectual gifts of
the highest order. If by some post-mortem referendum we could “call up”
Monroe to explain just how far America might safely go in the defense
of his doctrine, and whether it could be advantageously extended
beyond the baths of all the western stars to keep pace with such an
expansion as that represented by the Philippines, we might profit by
his answer--and again, we might not.

We can’t shirk our responsibilities. One generation can’t do the work
of another. In the last analysis we’ve got to stand on our own feet and
do our own thinking. The Constitution itself has to be interpreted over
and over again, and even amended occasionally; for the world does, in
spite of all efforts to stop it, continue to move right along. This is
not a year in which either of the major parties can safely harp upon
its “traditional policy.” There are skeletons in both closets that
would run like frightened rabbits if dragged into the light and ordered
to solve the riddles of 1920.

The critics of President Wilson have dwelt much on the vision of the
founders, without conceding that he too may be blessed with a seer’s
vision and the tongue of prophecy. To his weaknesses as a leader
I shall revert later; but his high-mindedness and earnest desire
to serve the nation and the world are questioned only by the most
buckramed hostile partisan, or by those who view the present only
through the eyes of dead men.


IV

When President Wilson read his war message to the Congress it must
have been in the minds of many thousands who thrilled to the news
that night, that a trinity of great American presidents was about to
be completed; that a niche awaited Mr. Wilson in the same alcove with
Washington and Lincoln. Many who were impatient and restless under the
long correspondence with the Imperial German Government were willing
to acknowledge that the delay was justified; that at last the nation
was solidly behind the administration; that amid the stirring call of
trumpets partisanship would be forgotten; and that, when the world
was made safe for law and decency, Mr. Wilson would find himself in
the enjoyment of an unparalleled popularity. It did not seem possible
that he could fail. That he did fail of these hopes and expectations
is not a matter that any true lover of America can contemplate with
jubilation. Those of us who ask the greatest and the best things of
and for America can hardly be gratified by any failure that might
be construed as a sign of weakness in democracy. But Mr. Wilson’s
inability to hold the confidence of the people, to win his adversaries
to his standard, to implant himself in the affections of the mass,
cannot be attributed to anything in our political system but wholly to
his own nature. It is one of the ironies of our political life that a
man like Mr. McKinley, without distinguished courage, originality, or
constructive genius, is able, through the possession of minor qualities
that are social rather than political, to endear himself to the great
body of his countrymen. It may be, after all our prayers for great men,
that negative rather than positive qualities are the safest attributes
of a President.

It may fairly be said that Mr. Wilson is intellectually the equal
of most of his predecessors in the presidency, and the superior of
a very considerable number of them. The very consciousness of the
perfect functioning of his own mental machinery made him intolerant
of stupidity, and impatient of the criticism of those with whom it
has been necessary for him to do his work, who have, so to put it,
only asked to be “shown.” If the disagreeable business of working
in practical politics in all its primary branches serves no better
purpose, it at least exercises a humanizing effect; it is one way
of learning that men must be reasoned with and led, not driven. In
escaping the usual political apprenticeship, Mr. Wilson missed wholly
the liberalizing and broadening contacts common to the practical
politician. At times--for example, when the Adamson Law was passed--I
heard Republicans, with unflattering intonation, call him the shrewdest
politician of his time; but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Nominally the head of his party, and with its future prosperity in his
hands, he has shown a curious indifference to the maintenance of its
morale.

“Produce great men; the rest follows.” The production of great men
is not so easy as Whitman imagined; but in eight tremendous years
we must ruefully confess that no new and commanding figure has risen
in either branch of Congress. Partisanship constantly to the fore,
but few manifestations of statesmanship: such is the record. It is
well-nigh unbelievable that, where the issues have so constantly
touched the very life of the nation, the discussions could have been
so marked by narrowness and bigotry. The exercise of autocratic power
by a group pursuing a policy of frustration and obstruction is as
little in keeping with the spirit of our institutions as a stubborn,
uncompromising course on the part of the executive. The conduct of the
Republican majority in the Senate is nothing of which their party can
be proud.

Four years ago I published some reflections on the low state to which
the public service had fallen, and my views have not been changed
by more recent history. It would be manifestly unfair to lay at Mr.
Wilson’s door the inferiority of the men elected to the Congress;
but with all the potentialities of party leadership and his singular
felicity of appeal, he has done little to quicken the public conscience
with respect to the choice of administrators or representatives. It
may be said in his defense that his hours from the beginning were too
crowded to permit such excursions in political education; but we had a
right to expect him to lend the weight of his authoritative voice and
example to the elevation of the tone of the public service. Poise and
serenity of temper we admire, but not to the point where it seemingly
vanishes into indifference and a callousness to criticism. The appeal
two years ago for a Democratic Congress, that the nation’s arm might
be strengthened for the prosecution of the war, was a gratuitous slap
at the Republican representatives who had supported his war policies,
and an affront to the public intelligence, that met with just rebuke.
The cavalier discharge of Lansing and the retention of Burleson show an
equally curious inability to grasp public opinion.


V

The whole handling of the League of Nations was bungled, as most of
the Democrats I know privately admit. The end of a war that had
shaken the very foundations of the earth was a fitting time to attempt
the formation of an association of the great powers to enforce the
peaceful settlement of international disputes. Here was a matter that
spoke powerfully to the conscience and the imagination, and in the
chastened mood of a war-weary world it seemed a thing possible of
achievement. Certainly, in so far as America was concerned, it was a
project to be approached in such manner that its success could in no
way be jeopardized by partisanship. The possibility of opposition by
Democratic senators, the hostility of Republican senators, which was
not merely partisan but in certain quarters tinged with bitter personal
hatred of the President, was to be anticipated and minimized.

The President’s two trips abroad were a mistake, at least in that
they encouraged those of his critics who assailed him as an autocrat
and supreme egotist stubbornly bent upon doing the whole business in
his own way. The nation was entitled to the services in the peace
negotiations of its best talent--men strongly established in public
confidence. Mr. Wilson paid dearly for his inability to recognize
this. His own appearance at Versailles conveyed a false impression of
his powers, and the effect at home was to cause uneasiness among many
who had most cordially supported him.

The hovering figure of Colonel House has been a constant irritation
to a public uninformed as to the training or experience that set him
apart for preferment. In sending from the homebound ship an invitation
to the august Foreign Relations committee to gather at the White House
at an hour appointed and hear the good news that a league was in
prospect, the President once more displayed a lamentable ignorance of
human nature. His attitude was a trifle too much like that of a parent
returning from a journey and piquing the curiosity of his household by
a message conveying the glad tidings that he was bringing presents for
their delight. There are one hundred millions of us, and we are not to
be managed in this way.

Colonel Roosevelt might have done precisely these things and “got
away with it.” Many thousands would have said it was just like him,
and applauded. The effect of Mr. Wilson’s course was to precipitate
a prolonged battle over the league and leave it high in the air. It
hovers over the present campaign like a toy balloon floating within
reach of languid and indifferent spectators. In that part of the
country with whose feelings and temper on public matters I may pretend
to some knowledge, I do not believe that any one cares greatly about
it. The moment it became a partisan question, it lost its vitality as
a moral issue that promised peace and security to America and all the
world. Our attitude with respect to the league has added nothing to the
nation’s dignity; rather, by our wabbly course in this matter we have
done much to weaken the case for world democracy. Its early acceptance,
with reservations that would have stilled the cry of denationalization,
would have made it an achievement on which the Democratic party
might have gone to the people with satisfaction and confidence. Even
considered as an experiment of dubious practicability, it would have
been defensible at least as an honest attempt to blunt the sword of the
war god. The spirit in which we associated ourselves with the other
powers that resisted the Kaiser’s attempt to bestride the world like a
Colossus needed for its complete expression the further effort to make
a repetition of the gigantic struggle impossible.

As a people we are strongly aroused and our imagination quickened by
anything that may be viewed in a glow of spirituality; and a scheme
of peace insurance already in operation would have proved a dangerous
thing to attack. But the league’s moral and spiritual aspects have
been marred or lost. The patience of the people has been exhausted
by the long debate about it, and the pettiness and insincerity,
the contemptible evasion and hair-splitting, that have marked the
controversy over what is, in its purpose and aim, a crystallization
of the hope of mankind in all the ages. Such a league might fail;
certainly its chance of success is vastly decreased by America’s
refusal to participate.


VI

In the cool airs of the North Smith and I have honestly tried to reduce
the league situation to intelligible terms. Those voters who may feel
constrained to regard the election as a referendum of the league will
do well to follow our example in pondering the speeches of acceptance
of the two candidates. Before these words are read both Governor Cox
and Senator Harding will doubtless have amplified their original
statements, but these are hardly susceptible of misinterpretation as
they stand. Mr. Harding’s utterance is in effect a motion to lay on the
table, to defer action to a more convenient season, and take it up _de
novo_. Governor Cox, pledging his support to the proposition, calls for
the question. Mr. Harding defines his position thus:

  With a Senate advising, as the Constitution contemplates, I would
  hopefully approach the nations of Europe and of the earth, proposing
  that understanding which makes us a willing participant in the
  consecration of nations to a new relationship, to commit the moral
  forces of the world, America included, to peace and international
  justice, still leaving America free, independent, and self-reliant,
  but offering friendship to all the world.

  If men call for more specific details, I remind them that moral
  committals are broad and all-inclusive, and we are contemplating
  peoples in the concord of humanity’s advancement. From our own
  view-point the programme is specifically American, and we mean to be
  American first, to all the world.

Mr. Cox says, “I favor going in”; and meets squarely the criticism that
the Democratic platform is not explicit as to reservations. He would
“state our interpretations of the Covenant as a matter of good faith to
our associates and as a precaution against any misunderstanding in the
future,” and quotes from an article of his own, published in the New
York _Times_ before his nomination, these words:

  In giving its assent to this treaty, the Senate has in mind the fact
  that the League of Nations which it embodies was devised for the sole
  purpose of maintaining peace and comity among the nations of the
  earth and preventing the recurrence of such destructive conflicts as
  that through which the world has just passed. The co-operation of
  the United States with the league, and its continuance as a member
  thereof, will naturally depend upon the adherence of the league to
  that fundamental purpose.

He proposes an addition to the Covenant of some such paragraph as this:

  It will, of course, be understood that, in carrying out the purpose
  of the league, the government of the United States must at all times
  act in strict harmony with the terms and intent of the United States
  Constitution, which cannot in any way be altered by the treaty-making
  power.

There is no echo here of the President’s uncompromising declaration
that the Covenant must be accepted precisely as he presented it. To
the lay mind there is no discernible difference between a reservation
and an interpretation, when the sole purpose in either case would be
to make it clear to the other signatories, through the text of the
instrument itself, that we could bind ourselves in no manner that
transcended the Constitution.

Smith is endowed with a talent for condensation, and I cheerfully quote
the result of his cogitations on the platforms and the speeches of the
candidates. “The Republican senators screamed for reservations, but
when Hiram Johnson showed symptoms of kicking out of the traces they
pretended that they never wanted the league at all. But to save their
faces they said maybe some time when the sky was high and they were
feeling good they would shuffle the deck and try a new deal. Cox is for
playing the game right through on the present layout. If you’re keen
for the League of Nations, your best chance of ever seeing America sign
up is to stand on Cox’s side of the table.”

Other Smiths, not satisfied with his analysis, and groping in the
dark, may be grateful for the leading hand of Mr. Taft. The former
President was, in his own words, “one of the small group who, in 1915,
began the movement in this country for the League of Nations and the
participation of the United States therein.” Continuing, he said, in
the Philadelphia _Ledger_ of August 1:

  Had I been in the Senate, I would have voted for the league and
  treaty as submitted; and I advocated its ratification accordingly.
  I did not think and do not now think that anything in the League
  Covenant as sent to the Senate would violate the Constitution of the
  United States, or would involve us in wars which it would not be to
  the highest interest of the world and this country to suppress by
  universal boycott and, if need be, by military force.

In response to a question whether, this being his feeling, he would not
support Mr. Cox, Mr. Taft made this reply:

  No such issue as the ratification of the League of Nations as
  submitted can possibly be settled in the coming election. Only
  one-third of the Senate is to be elected, and but fifteen Republican
  senators out of forty-nine can be changed. There remain in the
  Senate, whatever the result of the election, thirty-three Republicans
  who have twice voted against the ratification of the league without
  the Lodge reservations. Of the fifteen retiring Republicans, many are
  certain of re-election. Thirty-three votes will defeat the league.

Smith, placidly fishing, made the point that a man who believed in a
thing would vote for it even though it was a sure loser, and asked
where a Democratic landslide would leave Mr. Taft. When I reminded him
that he had drifted out of the pellucid waters of political discussion
and snagged the boat on a moral question, he became peevish and refused
to fish any more that day.

The league is the paramount issue, or it is not; you can take it, or
leave it alone. The situation may be wholly changed when Mr. Root, to
whom the Republican league plank is attributed, reports the result of
his labors in organizing the international court of arbitration. Some
new proposal for an association of nations to promote or enforce peace
would be of undoubted benefit to the Republicans in case they find
their negative position difficult to maintain.

The platforms and speeches of acceptance present, as to other matters,
nothing over which neighbors need quarrel. As to retrenchment, labor,
taxation, and other questions of immediate and grave concern, the
promises of both candidates are fair enough. They both clearly realize
that we have entered upon a period that is likely to witness a strong
pressure for modifications of our social and political structure.
Radical sentiment has been encouraged, or at least tolerated, in a
disturbing degree by the present administration. However, there is
nothing in Mr. Cox’s record as governor or in his expressed views
to sustain any suspicion that he would temporize with the forces of
destruction. The business of democracy is to build, not to destroy;
to help, not to hinder. We have from both candidates much the same
assurances of sympathy with the position held nowadays by all
straight-thinking men--that industrial peace, concord, and contentment
can be maintained only by fair dealing and good-will among all of us
for the good of all.

From their public utterances and other testimony we are not convinced
that either candidate foreshadows a stalwart Saul striding across the
hills on his way to the leadership of Israel. Mr. Harding shows more
poise--more caution and timidity, if you will; Mr. Cox is a more alert
and forthright figure, far likelier to strike “straight at the grinning
Teeth of Things.” He is also distinctly less careful of his speech.
He reminds the Republicans that “McKinley broke the fetters of our
boundary lines, spoke of the freedom of Cuba, and carried the torch of
American idealism to the benighted Philippines”--a proud boast that
must have pained Mr. Bryan. In the same paragraph of his speech of
acceptance we are told that “Lincoln fought a war on the purely moral
question of slavery”--a statement that must ring oddly in the ears of
Southerners brought up in the belief that the South fought in defense
of State sovereignty. These may not be inadvertences, but a courageous
brushing away of old litter; he is entitled to the benefit of the
doubt.


VII

Smith rose from his morning dip with the joyful countenance of a diver
who has found a rare pearl. We were making progress, he said; he
thought he had got hold of what he called the God’s truth of the whole
business. What those fellows did at Chicago and San Francisco was to
cut the barbed-wire entanglements in No Man’s Land, so that it doesn’t
make much difference on which side of the battle-line we find ourselves
on election day. The parties have unwittingly flung a challenge to
the independent voter. An extraordinary opportunity is presented to
citizens everywhere to scrutinize with unusual care their local tickets
and vote for the candidates who promise the best service. As Smith put
it, we ought to be able to scramble things a good deal. Keep the bosses
guessing: this he offered as a good slogan for the whole Smith family.
In our own Indiana we would pick and choose, registering, of course,
our disapproval of Senator Watson as a post-graduate of the Penrose
school, and voting for a Democrat for governor because Governor
Goodrich’s administration has been a continuous vaudeville of error and
confusion, and the Democratic candidate, a gentleman heretofore unknown
in politics, talks common sense in folksy language.

We finally concluded as to the presidency that it came down to a choice
of men tested by their experience, public acts, and the influences
behind them. The imperative demand is for an efficient administration
of the federal government. The jobs must be given to big men of
demonstrated capacity. Undoubtedly Mr. Harding would have a larger
and more promising field to draw upon. If it were possible for Mr.
Cox to break a precedent and state with the frankness of which he
seems capable the order of men he would assemble for his counsellors
and administrators, he would quiet an apprehension that is foremost
in the minds of an innumerable company of hesitating voters. Fear of
continuance of Mr. Wilson’s indulgent policy toward mediocrity and a
repetition of his refusal to seek the best help the nation offered
(until compelled to call upon the expert dollar-a-year man to meet the
exigencies of war) is not a negligible factor in this campaign, and
Mr. Cox, if he is wise, will not ignore it.

The manner of Mr. Harding’s nomination by the senatorial cabal, whose
influence upon his administration is hardly a speculative matter,
invites the consideration of progressive Republicans who rankle under
two defeats fairly chargeable to reactionary domination. It was
apparent at Chicago that the Old Guard had learned nothing and would
risk a third consecutive defeat rather than accept any candidate not
of their choosing. Mr. Harding’s emphasis upon his belief in party
government, as distinguished from personal government--obviously a slap
at Mr. Wilson--is susceptible of an unfortunate interpretation, as Mr.
Cox was quick to see. If the Republican candidate means submission to
organization chiefs, or to such a group as now controls the Senate and
the party, his declaration is not reassuring.

If Smith, in his new mood of independence, votes for Mr. Cox, and I,
not a little bitter that my party in these eight years has failed to
meet my hopes for it, vote for Mr. Harding, which of us, I wonder,
will the better serve America?

With renewed faith and hope we packed our belongings and made ready for
our return to the world of men. Having settled the nation’s affairs,
and being on good terms with our consciences, we turned for a last look
at the camp before embarking. Smith took the platforms and the speeches
of acceptance of the candidates for President and Vice-President of
the United States, affixed them firmly to a stone, and consigned them
without ceremony to the deep. The fish had been naughty, he said, and
he wanted to punish them for their bad manners.




THE POOR OLD ENGLISH LANGUAGE


IN the whole range of human endeavor no department is so hospitable to
the amateur as education. Here the gates are always open. Wide is the
field and many are the fools who disport therein.

Politics we are all too prone to forget between campaigns; literature
and the graphic arts engage only our languid attention and science
interests us only when our imaginations are mightily stirred. But we
all know how the young idea should be taught to shoot. We are either
reactionaries, lamenting the good old times of the three _r’s_ and the
little red schoolhouse, or we discuss with much gravity such weighty
problems as the extension or curtailment of the elective system, or
we fly to the defense or demolition of the ideas of Dewey and other
reformers. It is folly not to hold opinions where no one is sure of
anything and every one is free to strut in the silken robes of wisdom.
Many of us receive at times flattering invitations to express opinions
touching the education of our youth. Though my own schooling was
concluded at the algebra age, owing to an inherent inability to master
that subject or even comprehend what it was all about, I have not
scrupled to contribute to educational symposia at every opportunity.
Perhaps I answer the riddles of the earnest critics of education the
more cheerfully from the very fact of my benightedness. When the
doors are closed and the potent, grave, and reverend signiors go into
committee of the whole to determine why education does not indeed
educate--there, in such a company, I am not only an eager listener but,
with the slightest encouragement, I announce and defend my opinions.

Millions are expended every year for the public enlightenment, and yet
no one is satisfied either with the method or the result. Some one is
always trying to do something for culture. It seems at times that the
efforts of the women of America to increase the remnant that is amiably
disposed toward sweetness and light cannot fail, so many and so zealous
are the organizations in which they band themselves for this laudable
purpose. A little while ago we had a nation-wide better-English week
to encourage respect among the youth of this jazzy age for the poor old
English language.

I shall express without apology my opinion that in these free States
we are making no marked headway in the attempt to improve spoken or
written English. Hardly a day passes that I do not hear graduates of
colleges confuse their pronouns; evil usages are as common as the
newspapers. And yet grammar and rhetoric are taught more or less
intelligently by a vast army of overworked and underpaid teachers,
according to the text-books fashioned by specialists who really do try
to make themselves intelligible.

My attitude toward this whole perplexing business is one of the
greatest tolerance. I doubt seriously whether I could pass an
examination in English grammar. A Japanese waiter in a club in my town
used to lie in wait for me, when I visited the house at odd hours in
search of seclusion, for the purpose of questioning me as to certain
perplexing problems in grammar. He had flatteringly chosen me from the
club roster as a lettered person, and it was with astonishment that he
heard my embarrassed confession that I shared his bewilderment. To any
expert grammarians who, inspired by this revelation, begin a laborious
investigation of these pages in pursuit of errors, I can only say that
I wish them good luck in their adventure. At times I do manifestly
stumble, and occasionally the blunder is grievous. A poem of my
authorship once appeared in a periodical of the most exacting standards
with a singular noun mated to a plural verb. For proof-readers as a
class I entertain the greatest veneration. Often a query courteously
noted on the margin of a galley has prevented a violence to my mother
tongue which I would not consciously inflict upon it.

To add to the fury of the grammar hounds, I will state that at times
in my life I have been able to read Greek, Latin, Italian, and French
without ever knowing anything about the grammar of either of these
languages beyond what I worked out for myself as I went along. This
method or lack of method is not, I believe, original with me, for there
are, or have been, inductive methods of teaching foreign languages
which set the student at once to reading and made something rather
incidental of the grammar. This is precisely what I should do with
English if I were responsible for the instruction of children at the
age when it is the fashion to begin hammering grammar into their
inhospitable minds. Ignorant of grammar myself, but having--if I may
assume so much--an intuitive sense of the proper and effective manner
of shaping sentences, there would be no text-books in my schoolroom.
All principals, trustees, inspectors, and educational reformers
would be excluded from my classes, and I should insist on protection
from physical manifestations of their indignation on my way to and
from the schoolhouse. The first weeks of my course would be purely
conversational. I should test the students for their vulgarities and
infelicities, and such instances, registered on the blackboard, would
visualize the errors as long as necessary. The reading of indubitably
good texts in class would, of course, be part of the programme, and the
Bible I should use freely, particularly drawing upon the Old Testament
narratives.

I should endeavor to make it appear that clean and accurate speech is
a part of good manners, an important item in the general equipment for
life. When it came to writing, I should begin with the familiar letter,
leaving the choice of subject to the student. These compositions, read
in the class, would be criticised, as far as possible, by the students
themselves. I should efface myself completely as an instructor and
establish the relation of a fellow-seeker intent upon finding the best
way of saying a thing. If there were usages that appeared to be common
to a neighborhood, or intrusions of dialect peculiar to a State or a
section, I might search out and describe their origin, but if they
were flavorsome and truly of the soil I should not discourage their
use. Self-consciousness in these early years is to be avoided. The
weaknesses of the individual student are only discernible where he is
permitted to speak and write without timidity.

When a youngster is made to understand from a concrete example that a
sentence is badly constructed, or that it is marred by a weak word or
a word used out of its true sense, the rules governing such instances
may be brought to his attention with every confidence that he will
understand their point. My work would be merely a preparation for the
teaching of grammar, if grammar there must be; but I should resent such
instruction if my successor failed to relate my work to his.

I consider the memorizing of short passages of verse and prose an
important adjunct to the teaching of English by any method. “Learn
it by heart” seems to have gone out of fashion in late years. I have
recently sat in classes and listened to the listless reading, paragraph
by paragraph, of time-honored classics, knowing well that the students
were getting nothing out of them. The more good English the student
carries in his head the likelier he is to gain a respect for his
language and a confidence and effectiveness in speaking and writing it.

Let the example precede the rule! If there is any sense in the rule
the example will clarify it; if it is without justification and
designed merely to befuddle the student, then it ought to be abolished
anyhow. The idea that children should be seen and not heard belongs
to the period when it was believed that to spare the rod was to spoil
the child. Children should be encouraged to talk, to observe and to
describe the things that interest them in the course of the day. In
this way they will form the habit of the intelligent reporter who, on
the way to his desk from an assignment, plans his article, eager to
find the best way of telling his story. Instead of making a hateful
mystery of English speech it should be made the most natural thing in
the world, worthy of the effort necessary to give it accuracy, ease,
and charm.

The scraps of conversation I overhear every day in elevators, across
counters, on the street, and in trolley-cars are of a nature to
disturb those who view with complacency the great treasure we pour
into education. The trouble with our English is that too much is
taught and not enough is learned. The child is stuffed, not fed. Rules
crammed into him for his guidance in self-expression are imperfectly
assimilated. They never become a part of him. His first contacts with
grammar arouse his hostility, and seeing no sense in it he casts it
aside with the disdain he would manifest for a mechanical toy that
refused to work in the manner promised by the advertisement.




FOOTNOTE:

[A] This gentleman again captured the Republican nomination for mayor
of Indianapolis in the May primary, 1921.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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