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Title: Under dispute

Author: Agnes Repplier

Release date: September 2, 2023 [eBook #71550]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER DISPUTE ***





                             UNDER DISPUTE

                                   BY
                        AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.
             AUTHOR OF “POINTS OF FRICTION,” “COMPROMISES,”
                        “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC.

                             [Illustration]

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                  1924




                   COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY AGNES REPPLIER
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                          The Riverside Press
                       CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
                         PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




                                 Note


Five of the twelve essays in this volume, “To Counsel the Doubtful,”
“The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography,” “The Divineness of
Discontent,” “Strayed Sympathies,” and “The Battlefield of Education,”
are reprinted through the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly_; four
of them, “The Masterful Puritan,” “Are Americans a Timid People?”
“Allies,” and “The American Laughs,” through the courtesy of _The Yale
Review_; “The Preacher at Large,” through the courtesy of _The Century
Magazine_; “They Had Their Day,” through the courtesy of _Harper’s
Magazine_; “The Idolatrous Dog,” through the courtesy of _The Forum_.




                               Contents


The Masterful Puritan                                                  1

To Counsel the Doubtful                                               31

Are Americans a Timid People?                                         58

The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography                             88

Strayed Sympathies                                                   119

The Divineness of Discontent                                         148

Allies                                                               178

They Had Their Day                                                   203

The Preacher at Large                                                233

The Battlefield of Education                                         258

The American Laughs                                                  286

The Idolatrous Dog                                                   312




                             UNDER DISPUTE




                         The Masterful Puritan


When William Chillingworth, preaching at Oxford in the first year of
England’s Civil War, defined the Cavaliers as publicans and sinners,
and the Puritans as Scribes and Pharisees, he expressed the reasonable
irritation of a scholar who had no taste or aptitude for polemics, yet
who had been blown about all his life by every wind of doctrine. Those
were uneasy years for men who loved moderation in everything, and who
found it in nothing. It is not from such that we can hope for insight
into emotions from which they were exempt, and purposes to which they
held no clue.

In our day it is generously conceded that the Puritans made admirable
ancestors. We pay them this handsome compliment in after-dinner
speeches at all commemorative meetings. Just what they would have
thought of their descendants is an unprofitable speculation. Three
hundred years divide us from those stern enthusiasts who, coveting
lofty things, found no price too high to pay for them. “It is not
with us as with men whom small matters can discourage, or small
discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again,” wrote William
Brewster, when one half of the Mayflower Pilgrims had died in the
first terrible year, and no gleam of hope shone on the survivors. To
perish of hunger and cold is not what we should now call a “small
discontentment.” To most of us it would seem a good and sufficient
reason for abandoning any enterprise whatsoever. Perhaps if we would
fix our attention upon a single detail--the fact that for four years
the Plymouth colonists did not own a cow--we should better understand
what life was like in that harsh wilderness, where children who could
not get along without milk had but one other alternative--to die.

Men as strong as were the Puritan pioneers ask for no apologies at our
hands. Their conduct was shaped by principles and convictions which
would be insupportable to us, but which are none the less worthy of
regard. Matthew Arnold summed up our modern disparagement of their
standards when he pictured Virgil and Shakespeare crossing on the
Mayflower, and finding the Pilgrim fathers “intolerable company.” I
am not sure that this would have been the case. Neither Virgil nor
Shakespeare could have survived Plymouth. That much is plain. But three
months on the Mayflower might not have been so “intolerable” as Mr.
Arnold fancied. The Roman and the Elizabethan were strong-stomached
observers of humanity. They knew a man when they saw one, and they
measured his qualities largely.

Even if we make haste to admit that two great humanizers of society,
art and letters, played but a sorry part in the Puritan colonies, we
know they were less missed than if these colonies had been worldly
ventures, established solely in the interest of agriculture or of
trade. Sir Andrew Macphail tersely reminds us that the colonists
possessed ideals of their own, “which so far transcended the things of
this world that art and literature were not worth bothering about in
comparison with them.” Men who believe that, through some exceptional
grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of
culture. If they believe that they share God with all races, all
nations, and all ages, culture comes in the wake of religion. But the
Puritan’s God was a somewhat exclusive possession. “Christ died for a
select company that was known to Him, by name, from eternity,” wrote
the Reverend Samuel Willard, pastor of the South Church, Boston, and
author of that famous theological folio, “A Compleat Body of Divinity.”
“The bulk of mankind is reserved for burning,” said Jonathan Edwards
genially; and his Northampton congregation took his word for it. That
these gentlemen knew no more about Hell and its inmates than did Dante
is a circumstance which does not seem to have occurred to any one. A
preacher has some advantages over a poet.

If the Puritans never succeeded in welding together Church and State,
which was the desire of their hearts, they had human nature to thank
for their failure. There is nothing so abhorrent--or so perilous--to
the soul of man as to be ruled in temporal things by clerical
authority. Yet inasmuch as the colony of Massachusetts Bay had for its
purpose the establishment of a state in which all citizens should be of
the same faith, and church membership should be essential to freemen,
it was inevitable that the preacher and the elder should for a time
dominate public counsels. “Are you, sir, the person who serves here?”
asked a stranger of a minister whom he met in the streets of Rowley. “I
am, sir, the person who rules here,” was the swift and apt response.

Men whose position was thus firmly established resented the
unauthorized intrusion of malcontents. Being reformers themselves,
they naturally did not want to be reformed. Alone among New England
colonists, the Pilgrims of Plymouth, who were Separatists or
Independents, mistrusted the blending of civil and religious functions,
and this mistrust had deepened during the sojourn of their leaders in
Holland. Moreover, unlike their Boston neighbours, the Pilgrims were
plain, simple people; “not acquainted,” wrote Governor Bradford, “with
trades nor traffique, but used to a countrie life, and the innocente
trade of husbandry.” They even tried the experiment of farming their
land on a communal system, and, as a result, came perilously close to
starvation. Only when each man cultivated his own lot, that is, when
individualism supplanted socialism, did they wring from the reluctant
soil food enough to keep them alive.

To the courage and intelligence of the Pilgrim and Puritan leaders,
Governor Bradford and Governor Winthrop, the settlers owed their safety
and survival. The instinct of self-government was strong in these men,
their measures were practical measures, their wisdom the wisdom of
the world. If Bradford had not made friends with the great sachem,
Massasoit, and clinched the friendship by sending Edward Winslow to
doctor him with “a confection of many comfortable conserves” when he
was ill, the Plymouth colonists would have lost the trade with the
Indians which tided them over the first crucial years. If Winthrop had
not by force of argument and persuasion obtained the lifting of duties
from goods sent to England, and induced the British creditors to grant
favourable terms, the Boston colony would have been bankrupt. The keen
desire of both Plymouth and Boston to pay their debts is pleasant to
record, and contrasts curiously with the reluctance of wealthy States
to accept the Constitution in 1789, lest it should involve a similar
course of integrity.

It is hardly worth while to censure communities which were
establishing, or seeking to establish, “a strong religious state”
because they were intolerant. Tolerance is not, and never has
been, compatible with strong religious states. The Puritans of New
England did not endeavour to force their convictions upon unwilling
Christendom. They asked only to be left in peaceful possession of a
singularly unprolific corner of the earth, which they were civilizing
after a formula of their own. Settlers to whom this formula was
antipathetic were asked to go elsewhere. If they did not go, they were
sent, and sometimes whipped into the bargain--which was harsh, but not
unreasonable.

Moreover, the “persecution” of Quakers and Antinomians was not
primarily religious. Few persecutions recorded in history have been.
For most of them theology has merely afforded a pious excuse. Whatever
motives may have underlain the persistent persecution of the Jews,
hostility to their ancient creed has had little or nothing to do with
it. To us it seems well-nigh incredible that Puritan Boston should have
vexed its soul because Anne Hutchinson maintained that those who were
in the covenant of grace were freed from the covenant of works--which
sounds like a cinch. But when we remember that she preached against the
preachers, affirming on her own authority that they had not the “seal
of the Spirit”; and that she “gave vent to revelations,” prophesying
evil for the harassed and anxious colonists, we can understand their
eagerness to be rid of her. She was an able and intelligent woman,
and her opponents were not always able and intelligent men. When
the turmoil which followed in her wake destroyed the peace of the
community, Governor Winthrop banished her from Boston. “It was,” says
John Fiske, “an odious act of persecution.”

A vast deal of sympathy has been lavished upon the Puritan settlers
because of the rigours of their religion, the austerity of their
lives, their lack of intellectual stimulus, the comprehensive absence
of anything like amusement. It has been even said that their sexual
infirmities were due to the dearth of pastimes; a point of view which
is in entire accord with modern sentiment, even if it falls short
of the facts. Impartial historians might be disposed to think that
the vices of the Puritans are apparent to us because they were so
industriously dragged to light. When all moral offences are civil
offences, and when every man is under the close scrutiny of his
neighbours, the “find” in sin is bound to be heavy. Captain Kemble, a
Boston citizen of some weight and fortune, sat two hours in the stocks
on a wintry afternoon, 1656, doing penance for “lewd and unseemly
behaviour”; which behaviour consisted in kissing his wife “publiquely”
at his own front door on the Lord’s day. The fact that he had just
returned from a long voyage, and was moved to the deed by some excess
of emotion, failed to win him pardon. Neighbours were not lightly
flouted in a virtuous community.

That there were souls unfit to bear the weight of Puritanism, and
unable to escape from it, is a tragic truth. People have been born out
of time and out of place since the Garden of Eden ceased to be a human
habitation. When Judge Sewall read to his household a sermon on the
text, “Ye shall seek me and shall not find me,” the household doubtless
protected itself by inattention, that refuge from admonition which is
Nature’s kindliest gift. But there was one listener, a terrified child
of ten, who had no such bulwark, and who brooded over her unforgiven
sins until her heart was bursting. Then suddenly, when the rest of the
family had forgotten all about the sermon, she broke into “an amazing
cry,” sobbing out her agonized dread of Hell. And the pitiful part of
the tale is that neither father nor mother could comfort her, having
themselves no assurance of her safety. “I answered her Fears as well as
I could,” wrote Judge Sewall in his diary, “and prayed with many Tears
on either part. Hope God heard us.”

The incident was not altogether uncommon. A woman of Boston, driven
to desperation by the uncertainty of salvation, settled the point for
herself by drowning her baby in a well, thus ensuring damnation, and
freeing her mind of doubts. Methodism, though gentler than Calvinism,
accomplished similar results. In Wesley’s journal there is an account
of William Taverner, a boy of fourteen, who was a fellow passenger on
the voyage to Georgia; and who, between heavy weather and continuous
exhortation, went mad with fear, and saw an indescribable horror at the
foot of his bed, “which looked at him all the time unless he was saying
his prayers.”

Our sympathy for a suffering minority need not, however, blind
us to the fact that the vast majority of men hold on to a creed
because it suits them, and because their souls are strengthened by
its ministrations. “It is sweet to believe even in Hell,” says that
archmocker, Anatole France; and to no article of faith have believers
clung more tenaciously. Frederick Locker tells us the engaging story
of a dignitary of the Greek Church who ventured, in the early years of
faith, to question this popular tenet; whereupon “his congregation,
justly incensed, tore their bishop to pieces.”

No Puritan divine stood in danger of suffering this particular form
of martyrdom. The religion preached in New England was a cruel
religion, from which the figure of Christ, living mercifully with men,
was eliminated. John Evelyn noted down in his diary that he heard the
Puritan magistrates of London “speak spiteful things of our Lord’s
Nativity.” William Brewster was proud to record that in Plymouth “no
man rested” on the first Christmas day. As with Bethlehem, so with
Calvary. Governor Endicott slashed with his sword the red cross of
Saint George from the banner of England. The emblem of Christianity
was anathema to these Christians, as was the Mother who bore Christ,
and who saw Him die. The children whom He blessed became to Jonathan
Edwards “young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.” The
sweetness of religion, which had solaced a suffering world, was wiped
out. “The Puritans,” wrote Henry Adams pithily, “abandoned the New
Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the beginning, and
renew the quarrel with Eve.”

It took strong men to live and thrive under such a ministration,
wrestling with a sullen earth for subsistence, and with an angry Heaven
for salvation. Braced to endurance by the long frozen winters, plainly
fed and plainly clad, in peril, like Saint Paul, of sea and wilderness,
narrow of vision but steadfast to principles, they fronted life
resolutely, honouring and illustrating the supreme worth of freedom.

That they had compensations, other than religious, is apparent to all
but the most superficial observer. The languid indifference to our
neighbour’s moral and spiritual welfare, which we dignify by the name
of tolerance, has curtailed our interest in life. There must have
been something invigorating in the iron determination that neighbours
should walk a straight path, that they should be watched at every step,
and punished for every fall. The Puritan who said, “I will not. Thou
shalt not!” enjoyed his authority to the uttermost. The prohibitionist
who repeats his words to-day is probably the only man who is having a
thoroughly good time in our fretful land and century. It is hard, I
know, to reconcile “I will not. Thou shalt not!” with freedom. But the
early settlers of New England were controlled by the weight of popular
opinion. A strong majority forced a wavering minority along the road of
rectitude. Standards were then as clearly defined as were boundaries,
and the uncompromising individualism of the day permitted no juggling
with responsibility.

It is not possible to read the second chapter of “The Scarlet Letter,”
and fail to perceive one animating principle of the Puritan’s life.
The townspeople who watch Hester Prynne stand in the pillory are moved
by no common emotions. They savour the spectacle, as church-goers of
an earlier age savoured the spectacle of a penitent in sackcloth at
the portal; but they have also a sense of personal participation in
the dragging of frailty to light. Hawthorne endeavours to make this
clear, when, in answer to Roger Chillingworth’s questions, a bystander
congratulates him upon the timeliness of his arrival on the scene.
“It must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the
wilderness, to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is
searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people.” An
unfortunate speech to make to the husband of the culprit (Hawthorne is
seldom so ironic), but a cordial admission of content.

There was a picturesque quality about the laws of New England, and a
nicety of administration, which made them a source of genuine pleasure
to all who were not being judged. A lie, like an oath, was an offense
to be punished; but all lies were not equally punishable. Alice Morse
Earle quotes three penalties, imposed for three falsehoods, which show
how much pains a magistrate took to discriminate. George Crispe’s
wife who “told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly,” was
simply admonished. Will Randall who told a “plain lie” was fined ten
shillings. Ralph Smith who “lied about seeing a whale,” was fined
twenty shillings and excommunicated--which must have rejoiced his
suffering neighbours’ souls.

The rank of a gentleman, being a recognized attribute in those days,
was liable to be forfeited for a disgraceful deed. In 1631, Josias
Plastowe of Boston was fined five pounds for stealing corn from the
Indians; and it was likewise ordered by the Court that he should be
called in the future plain Josias, and not Mr. Plastowe as formerly.
Here was a chance for the community to take a hand in punishing a
somewhat contemptible malefactor. It would have been more or less than
human if it had not enjoyed the privilege.

By far the neatest instance of making the punishment fit the crime is
recorded in Governor Bradford’s “Diary of Occurrences.” The carpenter
employed to construct the stocks for the Plymouth colonists thought
fit to charge an excessive rate for the job; whereupon he was speedily
clapped into his own instrument, “being the first to suffer this
penalty.” And _we_ profess to pity the Puritans for the hardness and
dulness of their lives! Why, if we could but see a single profiteer
sitting in the stocks, one man out of the thousands who impudently
oppress the public punished in this admirable and satisfactory manner,
we should be willing to listen to sermons two hours long for the rest
of our earthly days.

And the Puritans relished their sermons, which were masterful like
themselves. Dogma and denunciation were dear to their souls, and they
could bear an intolerable deal of both. An hour-glass stood on the
preacher’s desk, and youthful eyes strayed wistfully to the slender
thread of sand. But if the discourse continued after the last grain had
run out, a tithingman who sat by the desk turned the glass, and the
congregation settled down for a fresh hearing. A three-hour sermon was
a possibility in those iron days, while an eloquent parson, like Samuel
Torrey of Weymouth, could and did pray for two hours at a stretch. The
Reverend John Cotton, grandfather of the redoubtable Cotton Mather, and
the only minister in Boston who was acknowledged by Anne Hutchinson
to possess the mysterious “seal of the Spirit,” had a reprehensible
habit of preaching for two hours on Sunday in the meeting-house (his
family and servants of course attending), and at night, after supper,
repeating this sermon to the sleepy household who had heard it in the
morning.

For a hundred and fifty years the New England churches were unheated,
and every effort to erect stoves was vigorously opposed. This at
least could not have been a reaction against Popery, inasmuch as the
churches of Catholic Christendom were at that time equally cold. That
the descendants of men who tore the noble old organs out of English
cathedrals, and sold them for scrap metal, should have been chary
of accepting even a “pitch-pipe” to start their unmelodious singing
was natural enough; but stoves played no part in the service. The
congregations must have been either impervious to discomfort, or very
much afraid of fires. The South Church of Boston was first heated in
the winter of 1783. There was much criticism of such indulgence, and
the “Evening Post,” January 25th, burst into denunciatory verse:

    “Extinct the sacred fires of love,
      Our zeal grown cold and dead;
    In the house of God we fix a stove
      To warm us in their stead.”

Three blots on the Puritans’ escutcheon (they were men, not seraphs)
have been dealt with waveringly by historians. Witchcraft, slavery
and Indian warfare gloom darkly against a shining background of
righteousness. Much has been made of the fleeting phase, and little
of the more permanent conditions--which proves the historic value
of the picturesque. That Salem should to-day sell witch spoons and
trinkets, trafficking upon memories she might be reasonably supposed to
regret, is a triumph of commercialism. The brief and dire obsession of
witchcraft was in strict accord with times and circumstances. It bred
fear, horror, and a tense excitement which lifted from Massachusetts
all reproach of dulness. The walls between the known and the unknown
world were battered savagely, and the men and women who thronged from
house to house to see the “Afflicted Children” writhe in convulsions
had a fearful appreciation of the spectacle. That terrible child,
Ann Putnam, who at twelve years of age was instrumental in bringing
to the scaffold some of the most respected citizens of Salem, is a
unique figure in history. The apprehensive interest she inspired in her
townspeople may be readily conceived. It brought her to ignominy in the
end.

The Plymouth colonists kept on good terms with their Indian neighbours
for half a century. The Bay colonists had more aggressive neighbours,
and dealt with them accordingly. It was an unequal combat. The
malignancy of the red men lacked concentration and thoroughness. They
were only savages, and accustomed to episodic warfare. The white
men knew the value of finality. When Massachusetts planned with
Connecticut to exterminate the Pequots, less than a dozen men escaped
extermination. It was a very complete killing, and no settler slept
less soundly for having had a hand in it. Mr. Fiske says that the
measures employed in King Philip’s War “did not lack harshness,” which
is a euphemism. The flinging of the child Astyanax over the walls of
Troy was less barbarous than the selling of King Philip’s little son
into slavery. Hundreds of adult captives were sent at the same time to
Barbados. It would have been more merciful, though less profitable, to
have butchered them at home.

The New England settlers were not indifferent to the Indians’ souls.
They forbade them, when they could, to hunt or fish on the Lord’s day.
John Eliot, Jonathan Edwards, and other famous divines preached to
them earnestly, and gave them a fair chance of salvation. But, like
all savages, they had a trick of melting into the forest just when
their conversion seemed at hand. Cotton Mather, in his “Magnalia,”
speculates ruthlessly upon their condition and prospects. “We know
not,” he writes, “when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of
this mighty continent; yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoyed
these miserable savages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of the Lord
would never come to destroy or disturb his absolute Empire over them.”

Naturally, no one felt well disposed towards a race which was under
the dominion of Satan. Just as the Celt and the Latin have small
compunction in ill-treating animals, because they have no souls, so
the Puritan had small compunction in ill-treating heathens, because
their souls were lost.

Slavery struck no deep roots in New England soil, perhaps because the
nobler half of the New England conscience never condoned it, perhaps
because circumstances were unfavourable to its development. The negroes
died of the climate, the Indians of bondage. But traders, in whom
conscience was not uppermost, trafficked in slaves as in any other
class of merchandise, and stoutly refused to abandon a profitable line
of business. Moreover, the deep discordance between slavery as an
institution and Puritanism as an institution made such slave-holding
more than ordinarily odious. Agnes Edwards, in an engaging little
volume on Cape Cod, quotes a clause from the will of John Bacon of
Barnstable, who bequeathed to his wife for her lifetime the “use and
improvement” of a slave-woman, Dinah. “If, at the death of my wife,
Dinah be still living, I desire my executors to sell her, and to use
and improve the money for which she is sold in the purchase of Bibles,
and distribute them equally among my said wife’s and my grandchildren.”

There are fashions in goodness and badness as in all things else; but
the selling of a worn-out woman for Bibles goes a step beyond Mrs.
Stowe’s most vivid imaginings.

These are heavy indictments to bring against the stern forbears
whom we are wont to praise and patronize. But Pilgrim and Puritan
can bear the weight of their misdeeds as well as the glory of their
achievements. Of their good old English birthright, “truth, pitie,
freedom and hardiness,” they cherished all but pitie. No price was
too high for them to pay for the dignity of their manhood, or for
the supreme privilege of dwelling on their own soil. They scorned
the line of least resistance. Their religion was never a cloak for
avarice, and labour was not with them another name for idleness and
greed. Eight hours a day they held to be long enough for an artisan
to work; but the principle of giving little and getting much, which
rules our industrial world to-day, they deemed unworthy of freemen. No
swollen fortunes corrupted their communities; no base envy of wealth
turned them into prowling wolves. If they slew hostile Indians without
compunction, they permitted none to rob those who were friendly and
weak. If they endeavoured to exclude immigrants of alien creeds,
they would have thought shame to bar them out because they were
harder workers or better farmers than themselves. On the whole, a
comparison between their methods and our own leaves us little room for
self-congratulation.

From that great mother country which sends her roving sons over land
and sea, the settlers of New England brought undimmed the sacred fire
of liberty. If they were not akin to Shakespeare, they shared the
inspiration of Milton. “No nobler heroism than theirs,” says Carlyle,
“ever transacted itself on this earth.” Their laws were made for the
strong, and commanded respect and obedience. In Plymouth, few public
employments carried any salary; but no man might refuse office when it
was tendered to him. The Pilgrim, like the Roman, was expected to serve
the state, not batten on it. What wonder that a few drops of his blood
carries with it even now some measure of devotion and restraint. These
were men who understood that life is neither a pleasure nor a calamity.
“It is a grave affair with which we are charged, and which we must
conduct and terminate with honour.”




                       “To Counsel the Doubtful”


In the “Colony Records” of Plymouth it is set down that a certain
John Williams lived unhappily with his wife--a circumstance which was
as conceivable in that austere community as in less godly towns. But
the Puritan magistrate who, in the year 1666, undertook to settle
this connubial quarrel, had no respect for that compelling word,
“incompatibility.” The afflicted couple were admonished “to apply
themselves to such waies as might make for the recovery of peace and
love betwixt them. And for that end, the Court requested Isacke Bucke
to bee officious therein.”

It is the delight and despair of readers, especially of readers
inclined to the intimacies of history, that they are so often told the
beginnings of things, and left to conjecture the end. How did Isacke
Bucke set about his difficult and delicate commission, and how did the
contentious pair relish his officiousness? The Puritans were tolerably
accustomed to proffering advice. It was part of their social code, as
well as a civil and religious duty. They had a happy belief in the
efficacy of expostulation. In 1635 it was proposed that the magistrates
of Boston should “in tenderness and love admonish one another.” And
many lively words must have come of it.

Roman Catholics, who studied their catechism when they were children,
will always remember that the first of the “Spiritual Works of Mercy”
is “To counsel the doubtful.” Taken in conjunction with the thirteen
other works, it presents a compendium of holiness. Taken by itself,
apart from less popular rulings, such as “To forgive offences,” and
“To bear wrongs patiently,” it is apt to be a trifle overbearing.
Catholic theology has defined the difference between a precept and a
counsel--when the Church speaks. A precept is binding, and obedience to
it is an obligation. A counsel is suggestive, and obedience to it is a
matter of volition. The same distinction holds good in civil and social
life. A law must be obeyed; but it is in no despite of our counsellors,
moral or political, that we reserve the right of choice.

Three hundred years ago, Robert Burton, who was reflective rather
than mandatory, commented upon the reluctance of heretics to be
converted from their errors. It seemed to him--a learned and detached
onlooker--that one man’s word, however well spoken, had no effect upon
another man’s views; and he marvelled unconcernedly that this should be
the case. The tolerance or the indifference of our day has disinclined
most of us to meddle with our neighbour’s beliefs. We are concerned
about his tastes, his work, his politics, because at these points
his life touches ours; but we have a decent regard for his spiritual
freedom, and for the secret responsibility it entails.

There are, indeed, devout Christian communities which expend their
time, money and energy in extinguishing in the breasts of other
Christians the faith which has sufficed and supported them. The
methods of these propagandists are more genial than were those of
the Inquisition; but their temerity is no less, and their animating
principle is the same. They proffer their competing set of dogmas with
absolute assurance, forgetting that man does not live by fractions
of theology, but by the correspondence of his nature to spiritual
influences moulded through the centuries to meet his needs. To counsel
the doubtful is a Christian duty; but to create the doubts we counsel
is nowhere recommended. It savours too closely of omniscience.

The counsels offered by age to youth are less expansive, and less
untrammelled than are the counsels offered by youth to age. Experience
dulls the courageous and imaginative didacticism that is so heartening,
because so sanguine, in the young. We have been told, both in England
and in the United States, that youth is now somewhat displeased
with age, as having made a mess of the world it was trying to run;
and that the shrill defiance which meets criticism indicates this
justifiable resentment. It is not an easy matter to run a world at
the best of times, and Germany’s unfortunate ambition to control the
running has put the job beyond man’s power of immediate adjustment.
The social lapses that have been so loudly lamented by British and
American censors are the least serious symptoms of the general
disintegration--the crumbling away of a cornice when the foundations
are insecure.

It is interesting, however, to note the opposing methods employed by
carping age to correct the excesses of youth. When a Western State
disapproves of the behaviour of its young people, it turns to the
courts for relief. It asks and obtains laws regulating the length of a
skirt, or the momentum of a dance. When a New England State disapproves
of the behaviour of its young people, it writes articles, or circulates
and signs a remonstrance. Sometimes it confides its grievance to
a Federation of Women’s Clubs, hoping that the augustness of this
assembly will overawe the spirit of revolt. I may add that when Canada
(Province of Quebec) disapproves of the behaviour of its young people,
it appeals to the Church, which acts with commendable promptness and
semi-occasional success.

All these torrents of disapproval have steeped society in an ebb-tide
of rejected counsels. It would seem that none of us are conducting
ourselves as properly as we should, and that few of us are satisfactory
to our neighbours. In the rapid shifting of responsibility, we find
ourselves accused when we thought we were accusers. We say that a
girl’s dress fails to cover a proper percentage of her body, and are
told that it is the consequence of our inability to preserve peace. We
pay a predatory grocer the price he asks for his goods, and are told
that it is our fault he asks it. If we plead that hunger-striking--the
only alternative--is incompatible with common sense and hard work,
we are offered a varied assortment of substitutes for food. There is
nothing in which personal tastes are more pronounced or less persuasive
than in the devices of economy. Sooner or later they resolve themselves
into the query of the famous and frugal Frenchman: “Why should I pay
twelve francs for an umbrella when I can buy a bock for six sous?”

The most hopeful symptom of our times (so fraught with sullenness
and peril) is the violent hostility developed some years ago between
rival schools of verse. There have always been individual critics as
sensitive to contrary points of view as are the men who organize raids
on Carnegie Hall whenever they disagree with a speaker. Swinburne was a
notable example of this tyranny of opinion. It was not enough for him
to love Dickens and to hate Byron, thus neatly balancing his loss and
gain. He was impelled by the terms of his nature ardently to proclaim
his love and his hate, and intemperately to denounce those who loved
and hated otherwise.

That so keen and caustic a commentator as Mr. Chesterton should have
been annoyed because he could not turn back the tide of popular
enthusiasm which surged and broke at Rudyard Kipling’s feet was natural
enough. He assured the British public that “Recessional” was the work
of a “solemn cad”; and the British public--quite as if he had not
spoken--took the poem to its heart, wept over it, prayed over it,
and dilated generally with emotions which it is good for a public to
feel. The looker-on was reminded a little of Horace Walpole fretfully
explaining to Paris that a Salisbury Court printer could not possibly
know anything about the habits of the English aristocracy; and of Paris
replying to this ultimatum by reading “Clarissa Harlowe” with all its
might and main, and shedding torrents of tears over the printer’s
matchless heroine.

The asperity of a solitary critic is, however, far less impelling than
the asperity of a whole school of writers and of their opponents.
Just when the ways of the world seemed darkest, and its nations most
distraught, the _literati_ effected a welcome diversion by quarreling
over rules of prosody. The lovers of rhyme were not content to read
rhyme and to write it; the lovers of polyphonic prose were not content
to read polyphonic prose and to write it; but both factions found their
true joy in vivaciously criticizing and counselling their antagonists.
Miss Amy Lowell was right when she said, with her customary insight and
decision, that the beliefs and protests and hates of poets all go to
prove the deathless vigour of the art. Unenlightened outsiders took up
the quarrel with pleasure, finding relief in a dispute that threatened
death and disaster to no one.

Few contentions are so innocent of ill-doing. The neighbours whom
we counsel most assiduously are the nations of the world and their
governments, which might well be doubtful, seeing that they stumble
at every step; but which perhaps stand more in need of smooth roads
than of direction. It is true that M. Stéphane Lauzanne, editor of
“Le Matin,” assured us in the autumn of 1920 that France did not
seek American gold, or ships, or guns, or soldiers--“only counsels.”
This sounded quite in our line, until the Frenchman, with that fatal
tendency to the concrete which is typical of the Gallic mind, proceeded
to explain his meaning: “We ask of the country of Edison and of the
Wrights that it will present us with a system for a league of nations
that will work. If there were nothing needed but eloquence, the
statesmen of old Europe would have been sufficient.”

Why did not M. Lauzanne ask for the moon while he was about it? What
does he suppose we Americans have been striving for since 1789 but
systems that will work? Henry Adams, commenting upon the disastrous
failure of Grant’s administration, says just this thing. “The world”
(the American world) “cared little for decency. What it wanted, it did
not know. Probably a system that would work, and men who could work it.
But it found neither.”

And still the search goes on. A system of taxation that will work.
A system of wage-adjustment that will work. A system of prohibition
that will work. A system of public education that will work. These are
the bright phantoms we pursue; and now a Paris editor casually adds a
system for a working league of nations. “If France is in the right,
let America give us her moral support. If France is in the wrong, let
America show us the road to follow.”

To presume agreement where none exists is the most dangerous form
of self-deception. When newspapers and orators tell us that to the
United States has come “the moral leadership of the world,” we must
understand them to imply that foreign nations, with whom we have little
in common, are of our way of thinking--provided always that they know
what we think, and that we know ourselves. For the wide divergence of
national aspirations, they make scant allowance; for misunderstanding
and ill-will, they make no allowance at all. Before the election of
1920, the spokesmen of both political parties assured us with equal
fervour that our country was destined to be the bulwark of the world’s
peace. Their prescriptions for peace differed radically in detail; but
all agreed that ours was to be the administering hand, and all implied
the readiness of Europe (and, if need be, Asia and Africa) to accept
our restoratives. “Want America to teach Turkey,” was the headline of
a leading newspaper, which, in October, 1920, deplored the general
unteachableness of the Turk.

Perhaps the careless crudeness of headlines deceives a large class of
hurried readers who rely too implicitly upon them. When the Conference
at Versailles was plodding through its task, a New York paper announced
in large type: “Italy dissatisfied with territory assigned her by
Colonel House.” It had a mirth-provoking sound; but, after all, the
absurdity was in no way attributable to Colonel House; and, in the
matter of dissatisfaction, not even a headline could go beyond the
facts. What has ever impelled the “Tribuna” and the “Avanti” to express
amicable agreement, save their mutual determination to repudiate the
intervention of the United States?

When Mr. Wilson risked speaking directly to the Italian people, he
paved the way for misunderstanding. To a government, words are words.
It deals with them itself, and it makes allowance for the difficulty
of translating them into action. But a proletariat is apt, not merely
to attach significance to words, but to read an intensive meaning into
them. We have not done badly by Italy. We spent a great deal of money
upon her cold and hungry children. She is sending us shiploads of
immigrants. Her resentment at our counsel has seemed to us unwise and
ungrateful, seeing that we must naturally know what is best for her.
We cannot accept ill-will with the unconcern of Great Britain, which
has been used to it, and has survived it, for centuries. We feel that
we deserve well of the world, because we are immaculately free from
coveting what we do not want or need.

And yet one wonders now and then whether, if there had been four years
of glorious and desolating war on this Western continent, and the
United States had emerged triumphant, but spent, broken and bankrupt,
we should be so sure of our mission to regenerate. Would we then be so
high-handed with England, so critical of France? No people in the world
resent strictures more than we do. No people in the world are less keen
for admonishment. The sixty-six members of the Yale Faculty who in 1920
sent a remonstrance to Congress, protesting against any interference in
the domestic policies of Great Britain, based their protest upon our
unalterable determination to preserve our own independence unviolated,
and to manage our own affairs. They felt, and said, that we should be
scrupulous to observe the propriety we exacted of others.

The ingenious device of appointing an American committee, which in its
turn appointed an American commission to sit as a court of appeal, and
receive evidence touching the relations of Great Britain and Ireland,
was the most original and comprehensive measure for counselling the
doubtful that this country has ever seen. The informality of the scheme
made it a pure delight. Governors of Wyoming and North Dakota, mayors
of Milwaukee and Anaconda, clergymen and college professors, ladies
and gentlemen of unimpeachable respectability and unascertainable
information, all responded to the “Nation’s” call, and placed their
diplomacy at its disposal.

Pains were taken by Mr. Villard to convince the public that the
object of the committee was to avert “the greatest calamity which
could befall the civilized world”--a war between Great Britain and
the United States, than which nothing seemed less likely. Its members
disclaimed anything like “improper interference in the concerns of
another nation.” They evidently did not consider that summoning
Ireland and England to appear as plaintiff and defendant before a
self-constituted tribunal three thousand miles away was in the nature
of an interference. “I meddle with no man’s conscience,” said Cromwell
broad-mindedly, when he closed the Catholic churches, and forbade the
celebration of Mass.

The humour of selecting a group of men and women in one corner of
the world, and delegating to them the unofficial task of settling
public affairs in another, was lost upon Americans, who, having been
repeatedly told that they were to “show the way,” conceived themselves
to be showing it. When Great Britain and Ireland settled their own
affairs without asking our advice or summoning our aid, there were
hyphenated citizens in New York and elsewhere who deeply resented
such independent action, and who have shown ever since a bitter
unfriendliness to their own kith and kin. Even Mr. Cosgrave’s burst of
Gaelic eloquence before the League of Nations, which should have melted
a heart of flint, was powerless to allay their ill-temper.

If well-meaning counsellors could be persuaded that there are phenomena
upon which they are not all qualified to give advice, they might
perhaps forbear to send delegations of children to the White House.
This is a popular diversion, and one which is much to be deplored. In
the hour of our utmost depression, when our rights as a free nation
were denied us, and the lives of our citizens were imperilled on land
and sea, a number of children were sent to Mr. Wilson, to ask him not
to go to war. It was as though they had asked him not to play games on
Sunday, or not to put Christmas candles in his windows. Three years
later, another deputation of innocents marched past the White House,
bearing banners with severely worded directions from their mothers
as to how the President (then a very ill man) should conduct himself.
The language used was of reprehensible rudeness. The exhortations
themselves appeared to be irrelevant. “American women demand that
anarchy in the White House be stopped!” puzzled the onlookers, who
wondered what was happening in that sad abode of pain, what women these
were who knew so much about it, and why a children’s crusade had been
organized for the control of our foreign and domestic policies.

The last query is the easiest answered. Picketing is a survival of the
childish instinct in the human heart. It represents the play-spirit
about which modern educators talk so glibly, and which we are bidden to
cherish and preserve. A society of “American Women Pickets” (delightful
phrase!) is out to enjoy itself, and its pleasures are as simple as
they are satisfying. To parade the streets, to proffer impertinent
instructions, to be stared at by passers-by, and to elude the law which
seeks to abate public nuisances--what better sport could be asked
either for little boys and girls, or for Peter Pans valiantly refusing
to mature? Mr. Harding was pursued in his day by picketing children,
and Mr. Coolidge has probably the same pleasure awaiting him. Even
the tomb at Mount Vernon has been surrounded by malcontents, bearing
banners with the inscription, “Washington, Thou Art Truly Dead!” To
which the mighty shade, who in his day had heard too often the sound
and fury of importunate counsels, and who, because he would not
hearken, had been abused, like “a Nero, a defaulter and a pickpocket,”
might well have answered from the safety and dignity of the tomb, “Deo
gratias!”

When a private citizen calls at the White House, to “frankly advise”
a modification of the peace treaty; when a private citizen writes to
the American Bar Association, to “frankly advise” this distinguished
body of men to forbear from any discussion of public affairs at their
annual meeting; when a private citizeness writes to the Secretary of
War to “frankly advise” that he should treat the slacker of to-day as
he would treat the hero of to-morrow, we begin to realize how far the
individual American is prepared to dry-nurse the Nation. Every land has
its torch-bearers, but nowhere else do they all profess to carry the
sacred fire. It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind
is unfavourable to preachment. We can hardly conceive a delegation of
little French girls sent to tell M. Millerand what their mothers think
of him. Even England shows herself at times impatient of her monitors.
“Mr. Norman Angell is very cross,” observed a British reviewer dryly.
“Europe is behaving in her old mad way without having previously
consulted him.”

“Causes are the proper subject of history,” says Mr. Brownell, “and
characteristics are the proper subject of criticism.” It may be that
much of our criticism is beside the mark, because we disregard the
weight of history. Our fresh enthusiasm for small nations is dependent
upon their docility, and upon their respect for boundary lines which
the big nations have painstakingly defined. That a boundary which has
been fought over for centuries should be more provocative of dispute
than a claim staked off in Montana does not occur to an American
who has little interest in events that antedate the Declaration of
Independence. Countries, small, weak and incredibly old, whose sons
are untaught and unfed, appear to be eager for supplies and insensible
to moral leadership. We recognize these characteristics, and resent
or deplore them according to our dispositions; but for an explanation
of the causes--which might prove enlightening--we must go further back
than Americans care to travel.

“I seldom consult others, and am seldom attended to; and I know no
concern, either public or private, that has been mended or bettered
by my advice.” So wrote Montaigne placidly in the great days of
disputation, when men counselled the doubtful with sword and gun,
reasoning in platoons, and correcting theological errors with the
all-powerful argument of arms. Few men were then guilty of intolerance,
and fewer still understood with Montaigne and Burton the irreclaimable
obstinacy of convictions. There reigned a profound confidence in
intellectual and physical coercion. It was the opinion of John Donne,
poet and pietist, that Satan was deeply indebted to the counsels of
Saint Ignatius Loyola, which is a higher claim for the intelligence of
that great churchman than Catholics have ever advanced. Milton, whose
ardent and compelling mind could not conceive of tolerance, failed to
comprehend that Puritanism was out of accord with the main currents of
English thought and temper. He not only assumed that his enemies were
in the wrong, says Sir Leslie Stephen, “but he often seemed to expect
that they would grant so obvious an assertion.”

This sounds modern. It even sounds American. We are so confident that
we are showing the way, we have been told so repeatedly that what
we show is the way, that we cannot understand the reluctance of our
neighbours to follow it. There is a curious game played by educators,
which consists in sending _questionnaires_ to some hundreds, or some
thousands, of school-children, and tabulating their replies for the
enlightenment of the adult public. The precise purport of this game
has never been defined; but its popularity impels us to envy the
leisure that educators seem to enjoy. A few years ago twelve hundred
and fourteen little Californians were asked if they made collections of
any kind, and if so, what did they collect? The answers were such as
might have been expected, with one exception. A small and innocently
ironic boy wrote that he collected “bits of advice.” His hoard was the
only one that piqued curiosity; but, as in the case of Isacke Bucke and
the quarrelsome couple of Plymouth, we were left to our own conjectures.

The fourth “Spiritual Work of Mercy” is “To comfort the sorrowful.”
How gentle and persuasive it sounds after its somewhat contentious
predecessors; how sure its appeal; how gracious and reanimating its
principle! The sorrowful are, after all, far in excess of the doubtful;
they do not have to be assailed; their sad faces are turned toward
us, their sad hearts beat responsively to ours. The eddying drifts of
counsel are loud with disputation; but the great tides of human emotion
ebb and flow in obedience to forces that work in silence.

    “The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
    Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”




                     Are Americans a Timid People?


As the hare is timid--no! They have made good their fighting record in
war. They have proved themselves over and over again to be tranquilly
courageous in moments of acute peril. They have faced “their duty and
their death” as composedly as Englishmen; and nobler comparison there
is none. The sinking of the Titanic offered but one opportunity out
of many for the display of a quality which is apt to be described in
superlatives; but which is, nevertheless, an inherent principle of
manhood. The protective instinct is strong in the native American. He
does not prate about the sacredness of human life, because he knows,
consciously or unconsciously, that the most sacred thing in life is the
will to surrender it unfalteringly.

Of what then are Americans afraid, and what form does their timidity
take? Mr. Harold Stearns puts the case coarsely and strongly when he
affirms that our moral code resolves itself into fear of what people
may say. With a profound and bitter distaste for things as they are,
he bids us beware lest we confuse “the reformistic tendencies of our
national life--Pollyanna optimism, prohibition, blue laws, clericalism,
home and foreign missions, exaggerated reverence for women, with
anything a civilized man can legitimately call moral idealism....
These manifestations are the fine flower of timidity, and fear, and
ignorance.”

Mr. Stearns is a robust writer. His antagonists, if he has any, need
never fear the sharp thrust of an understatement. He recognizes the
tyranny of opinion in the United States; but he does not do full
justice to its serio-comic aspects, to the part it plays in trivial
as well as in august affairs, to the nervousness of our regard, to
the absurdities of our subordination. There are successful newspapers
and periodicals whose editors and contributors walk a chalked path,
shunning facts, ignoring issues, avoiding the two things which spell
life for all of us--men and customs--and triumphantly presenting a
non-existent world to unobservant readers. Henry Adams said that the
magazine-made female has not a feature that would have been recognized
by Adam; but our first father’s experience, while intimate and
conclusive, was necessarily narrow. We have evolved a magazine-made
universe, unfamiliar to the eyes of the earth-dweller, and unrelated to
his soul.

When this country was pronounced to be too democratic for liberty,
the epigram came as close to the truth as epigrams are ever permitted
to come. Democracies have been systematically praised because we
stand committed to democratic tenets, and have no desire to foul
our own roost. It is granted that equality, rather than freedom, is
their animating principle. It is granted also that they are sometimes
unfortunate in their representatives; that their legislative bodies
are neither intelligent nor disinterested, and that their public
service is apt to be distinguished for its incapacity. But with so
much vigour and proficiency manifested every day in private ventures,
we feel they can afford a fair share of departmental incompetence. The
tremendous reserves of will and manhood, the incredible insufficiency
of direction, which Mr. Wells remarked in democratic England when
confronted by an overwhelming crisis, were equally apparent in the
United States. It would seem as though a high average of individual
force and intelligence failed to offer material for leadership.

The English, however, unlike Americans, refuse to survey with unconcern
the spectacle of chaotic officialdom. They are a fault-finding people,
and have expressed their dissatisfaction since the days of King John
and the Magna Carta. They were no more encouraged to find fault than
were other European commonalties that kept silence, or spoke in
whispers. The Plantagenets were a high-handed race. The hot-tempered
Tudors resented any opinions their subjects might form. Elizabeth had
no more loyal servant than the unlucky John Stubbs, who lost his right
hand for the doubtful pleasure of writing the “Gaping Gulf.” Any other
woman would have been touched when the culprit, raising his hat with
his left hand which had been mercifully spared, cried aloud, “God
save the Queen!” Not so the great Elizabeth. Stubbs had expressed his
views upon her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou, and it was no
business of his to have views, much less to give them utterance; while
his intimation that, at forty-six, she was unlikely to bear children
was the most unpardonable truth he could have spoken.

The Stuarts, with the exception of the second Charles, were as
resentful of candour as were the Tudors. “I hope,” said James the
First to his Commons, “that I shall hear no more about liberty of
speech.” The Hanoverians heartily disliked British frankness because
they heartily disliked their unruly British subjects. George the Third
had all Elizabeth’s irascibility without her power to indulge it. And
Victoria was not much behind either of them--witness her indignation at
the “Greville Memoirs,” “an insult to royalty,” and her regret that the
publishers were not open to prosecution.

It was no use. Nothing could keep the Englishman from speaking his
mind. With him it was not only “What is there that a man dare not
do?” but “What is there that a man dare not say?” Many a time he paid
more for the privilege than it was worth; but he handed it down to
his sons, who took care that it was not lost through disuse. When
Sorbière visited England in 1663, he was amazed to find the “common
people” discussing public affairs in taverns and inns, recalling the
glories as well as the discomforts of Cromwell’s day, and grumbling
over the taxes. “They do not forbear saying what they think of the
king himself.” In the “Memoirs” of the publisher, John Murray, there
is an amusing letter from the Persian envoy, Mirza Abul Hassan, dated
1824, and expressing his opinion of a government which permitted such
unrestrained liberty. Englishmen “do what they like, say what they
like, write what they like in their newspapers,” comments the Oriental
with bewildered but affectionate contempt. “How far do you think it
safe to go in defying your sovereign?” asked Madame de Pompadour of
John Wilkes, when that notorious plain-speaker had taken refuge in
Paris from his incensed king and exasperated creditors. “That, Madame,”
said the member from Aylesbury, “is what I am trying to find out.”

In our day the indifference of the British Government to what used
to be called “treasonable utterances” has in it a galling element of
contempt. Not that the utterances are invariably contemptible. Far
from it. Blighting truths as well as extravagant senilities may still
be heard in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square. But the orators might be
addressing their audiences in classic Greek for any token the London
bobby gives of listening or comprehending. “Words are the daughters of
earth; deeds are the sons of Heaven.” The bobby has never heard this
grandiloquent definition; but he divides them as clearly in his own
mind into hot air and disorderly conduct, and he takes his measures
accordingly.

In the United States, as in all countries which enjoy a representative
government, censure and praise run in familiar grooves. The party
which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which
is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity
in the party which is out. This antagonism is duly reflected by the
press; and the job of arriving at a correct conclusion is left to the
future historian. As an instance of the fashion in which history can
be sidetracked by politics, the reader is referred to the portraits
of Andrew Jackson as drawn by Mr. Beveridge in his “Life of John
Marshall,” and by Mr. Bowers in his “Party Battles of the Jackson
Period.”

The first lesson taught us by the Great War was that we got nowhere
in political leading-strings, and that none of our accustomed formulas
covered this strange upheaval. It was like trying to make a correct
survey of land which was being daily cracked by earthquakes. Our
national timidity entrenched itself behind a wilful disregard of facts.
It was content to view the conflict as a catastrophe for which nobody,
or everybody, was to blame. Our national intrepidity manifested itself
from the outset in a sense of human responsibility, in a bitter denial
of our right to ignorance or indifference. The timidity was not an
actual fear of getting hurt; the intrepidity was not insensitiveness to
danger. What tore our Nation asunder was the question of accepting or
evading a challenge which had--so we at first thought--only a spiritual
significance.

In one of Birmingham’s most genially nonsensical stories, “The Island
Mystery,” there is an American gentleman named Donovan. He is rich,
elderly, good-tempered, brave, kind and humorous; as blameless in his
private life as King Arthur, as corrupt politically and financially as
Tweed or Fiske; a buyer of men’s souls in the market-place, a gentle,
profound and invulnerable cynic. To him a young Irishman sets forth the
value of certain things well worth the surrender of life; but the old
American smiles away such a primitive mode of reckoning. The salient
article of his creed is that nothing should be paid for in blood that
can be bought for money; and that, as every man has his price, money,
if there is enough of it, will buy the world. He is never betrayed,
however, into a callous word, being mindful always of the phraseology
of the press and platform; and the reader is made to understand that
long acquaintance with such phraseology has brought him close to
believing his own pretences. “In the Middle West where I was raised,”
he observes mildly, “we don’t think guns and shooting the proper way of
settling national differences. We’ve advanced beyond those ideas. We’re
a civilized people, especially in the dry States, where university
education is common, and the influence of women permeates elections.
We’ve attained a nobler outlook upon life.” It reads like a humorous
illustration of Mr. Stearns’s unhumorous invectives.

Sociologists are wont to point to the American public as a remarkable
instance of the herd mind--a mind not to be utterly despised. It makes
for solidity, if not for enlightenment. It is the most economical way
of thinking; it saves trouble and it saves noise. So acute an observer
as Lord Chesterfield set store by it as unlikely to disturb the peace
of society; so practical a statesman as Sir Robert Walpole found it
the best substratum upon which to rear the fabric of constitutional
government. It is most satisfactory and most popular when void of all
sentiment save such as can be expressed by a carnation on Mother’s
Day, or by the social activities of an Old Home Week. Strong emotions
are as admittedly insubordinate as strong convictions. “A world full
of patriots,” sighs the peace-loving Honourable Bertrand Russell, “may
be a world full of strife.” This is true. A single patriot has been
known to breed strife in plenty. Who can measure the blood poured out
in the cause that Wallace led, the “sacred” human lives sacrificed at
his behest, the devastations that marked his victories and defeats?
And all that came of such regrettable disturbances were a gallows at
Smithfield, a name that shines like a star in the murk of history, and
a deathless impulse to freedom in the hearts of a brave people.

The herd mind is essentially and inevitably a timid mind. Mr. Sinclair
Lewis has analyzed it with relentless acumen in his amazing novel,
“Babbitt.” The worthy citizen who gives his name to the story has
reached middle age without any crying need to think for himself. His
church and his newspaper have supplied his religious and political
creeds. If there are any gaps left in his mind, they are filled up at
his business club, or at his “lodge,” that kindly institution designed
to give “the swaddled American husband” a chance to escape from home
one night in the week. Church, newspaper, club and lodge afford a
supply of ready-made phrases which pass muster for principles as well
as for conversation.

Yet stirring sluggishly in Babbitt’s blood are a spirit of revolt, a
regard for justice, and a love of freedom. He does not want to join the
Good Citizens’ League, and he refuses to be coerced into membership.
He does not like the word “Vigilante,” or the thing it represents.
His own sane instinct rejects the tyranny of the conservative rich
and of the anarchical poor. He dimly respects Seneca Doane and
Professor Brockbank when he sees them marching in the strikers’
parade. “Nothing in it for them, not a cent!” But his distaste for the
strikers themselves, for any body of men who obstruct the pleasant
ways of prosperity, remains unchanged. In the end--and it is an end
which comes quickly--he finds that the one thing unendurable to his
soul is isolation. Cut off from the thought currents of his group,
he is chilled, lonely, and beset by a vague uneasiness. He yields,
and he yields without a pang, glad to get back into the warm familiar
atmosphere of class complacency, of smugness, of “safety first”; glad
to sacrifice a wavering idealism and a purposeless independence for
the solid substance of smooth living and conformity to his neighbours’
point of view.

The curious thing about Mr. Lewis’s analysis is that back of the
contempt he strives to awaken in our souls is a suspicion that
Babbitt’s herd mind, the mind of many thousands of Americans, is, on
the whole, a safe mind for the country. It will not raise us to any
intellectual or spiritual heights, but neither will it plunge us into
ruin. It is not making trouble for itself, or for the rest of the
world. In its dull, imperfect way it represents the static forces of
society. Sudden and violent change is hostile to its spirit. It may
be trusted to create a certain measure of commercial prosperity, to
provide work for workers, and safety for securities. It is not without
regard for education, and it delights in practical science--the science
which speeds transit, or which collects, preserves and distributes
the noises of the world. It permits artists and authors to earn their
daily bread, which is as much as artists and authors have any business
to expect, and which is a very precious privilege. In revolutionary
Russia, the intelligentsia were the first to starve, an unpleasant
reminder of possibilities.

What Mr. Lewis implies is that, outside of the herd mind he is
considering, may be found understanding and a sense of fair play.
But this is an unwarranted assumption. The intelligence of the
country--and of the world--is a limited quantity; and fair play is
less characteristic of groups than of individuals. Katharine Fullerton
Gerould, in an immensely discontented paper entitled “The Land of the
Free,” presents the reverse of Mr. Lewis’s medal. She contends that,
as a people, we have “learned fear,” and that, while England has kept
the traditions of freedom (a point on which Mr. Chesterton vehemently
disagrees with her), we are content with its rhetoric. But she finds
us terrorized by labour as well as by capital, by reformers and
theorists as well as by the unbudging conservative. Fanatics, she says,
are no longer negligible. They have learned how to control votes by
organizing ignorance and hysteria. “In company with your most intimate
friends you may lift amused eyebrows over the Fundamentalists, over the
anti-cigarette organization, over the film censors, over the people
who wish to shape our foreign policy in the interests of Methodism,
over the people who wish to cut ‘The Merchant of Venice’ out of school
editions of Shakespeare. But it is only in company with your most
intimate friends that you can do this. If you do it in public, you are
going to be persecuted. You are sure, at the very least, to be called
‘un-American.’”

It is a bearable misfortune to be called un-American, because the
phrase still waits analysis. The only sure way to escape it is by
stepping warily--as in an egg-dance--among the complicated interests
sacred to democracies. The agile egg-dancer, aware that there is
nothing in the world so sensitive as a voter (Shelley’s coddled plant
was a hardy annual by comparison), discountenances plain speech on
any subject, as liable to awaken antagonism. There is no telling whom
it may hit, and there is no calculating the return blows. “To covet
the truth is a very distinguished passion,” observes Santayana. It
has burned in the bosom of man, but not in the corporate bosoms of
municipalities and legislative bodies. A world of vested interests is
not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.

The plain-speaker may, for example, offend the Jews; and nothing can be
more manifestly unwise than to give umbrage to a people, thin-skinned,
powerful and clannish, who hold the purse-strings of the country. Look
what happened to Sargent’s fresco in the Boston Library, which angered
the Synagogue it inadequately represented. Or he may offend the Irish,
who control wards, and councils, and local elections; and who, being
always prompt to retaliate, are best kept in a good humour. Or he may
offend either the Methodists or the Roman Catholics, powerful factors
in politics, both of them, and capable of dealing knock-down blows. A
presidential election was once lost and won through an unpardonable
affront to Catholicism; and are we not now drinking soda-fountain
beverages in obedience to the mandates of religious bodies, of which
the Methodists are the most closely organized and aggressive?

It is well to consider these things, and the American press does very
soberly and seriously consider them. The Boston “Transcript” ventured,
it is true, to protest against the ruling of the Navy Department
which gave to Jewish seamen of the ancient faith three days’ leave
of absence, from the thirty-first of March, 1923, to the second of
April, with such “additional time” as was practicable, that they
might attend the rites of the Synagogue; while Gentile seamen of the
Christian faith enjoyed no such religious privileges. The newspapers
in general, however, discreetly avoided this issue. “Life” pointed out
with a chuckle that the people who disapproved of President Lowell’s
decision to exclude negroes from the Harvard Freshman dormitories “rose
up and slammed him”; while the people who approved were “less vocal.”
When Rear Admiral Sims said disconcertingly: “The Kentucky is not a
battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction ever
perpetrated by the white race”; even those reviewers who admitted that
the Admiral knew a battleship when he saw one, were more ready to
soften his words than to uphold them.

The negro is a man and a brother. He is also a voter, and as such
merits consideration. There is no more popular appeal throughout the
length and breadth of the North than that of fairness to the coloured
citizen. Volumes have been written about his rights; but who save
President Roosevelt ever linked responsibilities with rights, duties
with deliverance? Who, at least, save President Roosevelt ever paused
in the midst of a scathing denunciation of the crime of lynching (a
stain on the Nation’s honour and a blight on the Nation’s rectitude)
to remind the black man that his part of the contract was to deliver
up the felon to justice, that his duty to his country, his race, and
his manhood was to refuse all sanctuary to crime? A few years ago an
acute negro policeman in Philadelphia recognized and trapped a negro
criminal. For this he received his full measure of commendation;
but he also received threatening letters from other negroes whose
simple conception of a policeman’s part was the giving of shelter and
protection to offenders of his own race.

The nastiest bit of hypocrisy ever put forward by wrong-doers was the
cant of the early slave-dealers about Christianity and the negroes’
souls. The slaves were Christianized by thousands, and took kindly to
their new creed; but their spiritual welfare was not a controlling
factor in the commerce which supplied the Southern States with labour.
That four fifths of the labourers were better off in America than
they would have been in Africa was a circumstance equally unfit to be
offered as a palliative by civilized men. The inherent injustice of
slavery lay too deep for vindication. But now that the great wrong has
been righted (and that three hundred thousand white men laid down
their lives in the righting is a fact which deserves to be remembered),
now that the American negroes are free, Christian, educated, and
privileged (like artists and authors) to earn their daily bread, they
cannot candidly regret that their remote ancestors had not been left
unmolested on the coast of Guinea. They have their grievances; but they
are the most fortunate of their race. The debt the white men owed them
has been paid. There is left a mutual dependence on the law, a mutual
obligation of self-imposed decency of behaviour from which not even
voters are exempt.

Timidity is superimposed upon certain classes of men who are either
tied up with red tape, like teachers, soldiers and sailors, or unduly
dependent upon other men, like legislators, and like clerics in those
churches which are strong enough to control the insubordinations of
the pulpit. Of all these classes, legislators are the worst off,
because their dependence is the most ignoble and disastrous. So long
as a future election is the controlling influence in their lives, they
have no alternative but to truckle to any compact body of voters that
bullies them into subjection. So long as they take for their slogan,
“We aim to please,” they must pay out their manhood for the privilege
of pleasing. In 1923 Senator Borah charged Congress with “organized
cowardice” in the matter of the soldiers’ bonus. It was a borrowed
phrase neatly refitted. The spectacle of a body of lawmakers doubling
and turning like a hare in its efforts to satisfy the servicemen
without annoying the taxpayer struck the Senator--and others--as the
kind of exaggerated subjection which paves the way to anarchy.

Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to the
soul of Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard places on
the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the ground that he
feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the inquisitorial spirit
which is part of the righteousness of America, and which keeps watch
and ward over all the schooling of the country. “Education,” he wrote,
“like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his
eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.”

The policy of shutting one’s eyes and holding one’s tongue is highly
esteemed in all professions, and in all departments of public service.
The man who can hear black called white without fussily suggesting that
perhaps it is only grey; the man who evades responsibility, and eschews
inside criticism (like the criticism of a battleship by an admiral);
the man who never tells an unpalatable truth “at the wrong time” (the
right time has yet to be discovered), is the man whose success in life
is fairly well assured. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates
the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism
which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness. The first belongs to brave and
lonely men; the second is the endearing quality of men whose sagging
energy and cautious content can be trusted to make no trouble for their
kind.

The plain-speaking of soldiers and sailors is reprobated and punished,
but their discretion is less conspicuously rewarded. They are expected
to be undeviatingly brave in the field and at sea; but timorous and
heedful when not engaged in fighting their country’s enemies. They
are at a disadvantage in times of peace, strait-jacketed by rules and
regulations, regarded with suspicion by sociologists, with hostility by
pacifists, with jealousy by politicians. A grateful Republic dismisses
the men who fought for her, and cherishes her army of office-holders.
When General Wood and Admiral Sims spoke some unpleasant truths, nobody
ventured to call these truths lies; but everybody said that General
Wood and Admiral Sims were not the proper persons to speak them. As the
proper persons to speak them never would have spoken them, the country
would have been spared the discomfort of listening, and the “common
quiet,” which is mankind’s concern, would have been undisturbed.

So far, then, is Mr. Harold Stearns right in accusing us as a nation
of timidity. So far, then, is Mrs. Gerould right in accusing us of
exaggerated prudence. That something akin to timidity has crept into
the hearts of Englishmen, who are fortified by a long tradition of
freedom and common sense, is evidenced by the title given to two
recent volumes of scholarly, and by no means revolutionary, papers,
“Outspoken Essays.” Frankness must be at a discount when it becomes
self-conscious, and constitutes a claim to regard. The early essayists
were fairly outspoken without calling anybody’s attention to the fact.
The contributors to those great and grim “Reviews” which so long held
the public ear were outspoken to the verge of brutality. A comfortless
candour was their long suit. Never before in the history of English
letters has this quality been so rare as to be formally adopted and
proclaimed.

Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to the
discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect our
lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds. This
he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom. He
aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because the
tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance. But
none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are free to
speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company of friends
(which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the market-place;
and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the exercise of an
unquestioned prerogative. Under no other circumstance is it possible to
say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance
can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional
affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they
are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, “in the best
and noblest sense of a good and noble word,” is to hold fast to the
principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to
the shores of the Delaware.




               The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography


Mr. Edmund Gosse, commenting on the lack of literary curiosity in
the early years of the seventeenth century, ascribes it to a growing
desire for real knowledge, to an increasing seriousness of mind. Men
read travels, history, philosophy, theology. “There were interesting
people to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Sir Aston Cokayne
mentions that he knew all the men of his time, and could have written
their lives, had it been worth his while. Instead of doing this, the
exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies.”

A century later, when literary curiosity had in some measure revived,
Sir Walter Scott, losing his temper over Richard Cumberland’s
“Memoirs,” wrote of their author in the “Quarterly Review”: “He has
pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by publishing his own
life, and the private history of his acquaintances.”

A better illustration of La Fontaine’s wisest fable, “The Miller, his
Son, and the Ass,” could not anywhere be found. The only way to please
everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and leave the
world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men seek to live,
they must in some way get their beast to market, and be criticized
accordingly.

It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing
output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and
flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work.

    “For now the dentist cannot die,
    And leave his forceps as of old,
    But round him, ere his clay be cold,
    Is spun the vast biography.”

The astute dentist says very sensibly: “If there is any money to be
made out of me, why not make it myself? If there is any gossip to be
told about me, why not tell it myself? If modesty restrains me from
praising myself as highly as I should expect a biographer to praise me,
prudence dictates the ignoring of circumstances which an indiscreet
biographer might drag into the light. I am, to say the least, as
safe in my own hands as I should be in anybody else’s; and I shall,
moreover, enjoy the pleasure dearest to the heart of man, the pleasure
of talking about myself in the terms that suit me best.”

Perhaps it is this open-hearted enjoyment which communicates itself to
the reader, if he has a generous disposition, and likes to see other
people have a good time. Even the titles of certain autobiographical
works are saturated with self-appreciation. We can see the august
simper with which a great lady in the days of Charles the Second
headed her manuscript: “A True Relation of the Birth, Breeding and Life
of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Written by Herself.” Mr.
Theodore Dreiser’s “A Book About Myself” sounds like nothing but a loud
human purr. The intimate wording of “Margot Asquith, An Autobiography,”
gives the key to all the cheerful confidences that follow. Never before
or since has any book been so much relished by its author. She makes
no foolish pretence of concealing the pleasure that it gives her; but
passes on with radiant satisfaction from episode to episode, extracting
from each in turn its full and flattering significance. The volumes are
as devoid of revelations as of reticence. If at times they resemble the
dance of the seven veils, the reader is invariably reassured when the
last veil has been whisked aside, and he sees there is nothing behind
it.

The happiness of writing an autobiography which is going to be
published and read is a simple and comprehensible emotion. Before books
were invented, men carved on stone something of a vainglorious nature
about themselves, and expected their subjects, or their neighbours,
to decipher it. But there is a deeper and subtler gratification in
writing an autobiography which seeks no immediate public, and contents
itself with the expression of a profound and indulged egotism. Marie
Bashkirtseff has been reproached for making the world her father
confessor; but the reproach seems hardly justified in view of the fact
that the “Journal,” although “meant to be read,” was never thrust by
its author upon readers, and was not published until six years after
her death. She was, although barely out of girlhood, as complex as
Mrs. Asquith is simple and robust. She possessed, moreover, genuine
intellectual and artistic gifts. The immensity of her self-love and
self-pity (she could be more sorry for her own troubles than anybody
who ever lived) steeped her pages in an ignoble emotionalism. She was
often unhappy; but she revelled in her unhappiness, and summoned the
Almighty to give it his serious attention. Her overmastering interest
in herself made writing about herself a secret and passionate delight.

There must always be a different standard for the confessions which,
like Rousseau’s, are made voluntarily to the world, and the confessions
which, like Mr. Pepys’s, are disinterred by the world from the caches
where the confessants concealed them. Not content with writing in a
cipher, which must have been a deal of trouble, the great diarist
confided his most shameless passages to the additional cover of
Spanish, French, Greek and Latin, thus piquing the curiosity of
a public which likes nothing better than to penetrate secrets and
rifle tombs. He had been dead one hundred and twenty-two years before
the first part of his diary was printed. Fifty years later, it was
considerably enlarged. One hundred and ninety years after the garrulous
Secretary of the Admiralty had passed into the eternal silences,
the record of his life (of that portion of it which he deemed worth
recording) was given unreservedly to English readers. The “Diary” is
what it is because of the manner of the writing. Mr. Lang says that of
all who have gossiped about themselves, Pepys alone tells the truth.
Naturally. If one does not tell the truth in a Greek cipher, when shall
the truth be told?

The severe strictures passed by George Eliot upon autobiographies
are directed against scandal-mongering no less than against personal
outpourings. She could have had the English-speaking world for a
confidant had she consented to confide to it; but nothing was less to
her liking. She objected to “volunteered and picked confessions,” as in
their nature insincere, and also as conveying, directly or indirectly,
accusations against others. Her natural impulse was to veil her own
soul--which was often sick and sore--from scrutiny; and, being a person
of limited sympathies, she begrudged her neighbour the privilege of
exhibiting his soul, sores and all, to the public. The struggle of
human nature “to bury its lowest faculties,” over which she cast
unbroken silence, is what the egotist wants to reveal, and the public
wants to observe. When Nietzsche says debonairly of himself, “I have
had no experience of religious difficulties, and have never known what
it was to feel sinful,” the statement, though probably untrue, creates
at once an atmosphere of flatness. It is what Walt Whitman ardently
admired in beasts--

    “They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins,
    They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”

Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves--but not
comparable to it--is the pleasure of writing unlovingly about our
fellows. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
I think that the last years of Saint-Simon, those sad impoverished
years when he lived forgotten by his world, must have been tremendously
cheered by the certainty that, sooner or later, the public would read
his memoirs. Nobody knows with what patient labour, and from what
devious sources he collected his material; but we can all divine the
secret zest with which he penned his brilliant, malicious, sympathetic,
truth-telling pages. Thirty years after his death some of these pages
crept cautiously into print; but a full hundred years had passed
before the whole text was given to the world. Perhaps the dying
French gentleman anticipated no earlier resurrection for his buried
manuscript; but he knew his nation and he knew his work. The nation and
the work were bound to meet.

A somewhat similar satisfaction must have stolen into the heart of
Charles Greville when he wrote the last pages of his diary, and laid
it aside for future publication. Nineteenth-century England presented
none of the restrictions common to eighteenth-century France; and ten
years after Greville’s death the first instalment of the ever-famous
“Memoirs” exploded like a bomb in the serried ranks of British official
and fashionable life. It shook, not the security, but the complacency
of the Queen on her throne. It was an intelligent and impartial picture
of the times; and there is nothing that people like less than to be
intelligently and impartially described. Moreover, the writer was no
anonymous critic whose words came unweighted by authority, no mere man
of letters whom men of affairs could ignore. He had lived in the heart
of administrative England, and he knew whereof he spoke.

Lord Hervey’s memoirs are not autobiographical at all: they are
historical, like the memoirs of Sully, and Jean de Joinville, and
Philippe de Comines. They are very properly entitled “Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second,” and what their author did not know about
that interesting reign (as seen from the angle of the Court) was not
worth the knowing. Historians have made free use of his material; and
some of those to whom it has been most valuable, like Thackeray, have
harshly depreciated the chronicler. Dr. Jowett, in a moment of cynical
misgiving, said that every amusing story must of necessity be unkind,
untrue, or immoral. Hervey’s stories are not untrue, and not often
immoral; but they _are_ unkind. What did he see about him of which he
could consistently write with kindness? His sharpest thrusts have a
careless quality which redeems them from the charge of vindictiveness.
When he says of Frederick, Prince of Wales, “He was as false as his
capacity would allow him to be,” it sounds like an observation passed
with casual unconcern upon a natural phenomenon which had chanced to
come under his notice.

Sully was a maker of history as well as a writer of history. He had
no taste and no time for self-analysis, and, like Joinville, he had
the rare good fortune to serve a master whom he sincerely loved and
admired. Comines also admired his master, but he did not love him.
Nobody has yet been put on record as loving Louis the Eleventh. All
these men wrote with candour and acumen. No pleasure which they can
have taken in compiling their memoirs can equal, or even approach, the
pleasure with which we read them. Their accuracy is the accuracy of the
observer, not of the antiquarian. “In my opinion,” writes Comines, “you
who lived in the age when these affairs were transacted have no need to
be informed of the exact hours when everything was done.” “I now make
known to my readers,” observes Joinville composedly, “that all they
shall find in this book which I have declared I have seen and known, is
true, and what they ought most firmly to believe. As for such things as
I have mentioned as hearsay, they may understand them as they please.”

These excursions into the diversified region of the memoir lead us
away from the straight and narrow path of the autobiography. These
saunterings along the pleasant byways of history distract us from
the consideration of the human soul, as shown us by its too ecstatic
possessor. We know as much as we need to know about the souls of Lord
Hervey, and Sully, and of the Sire de Joinville, which was really a
beautiful article; but we know a great deal more about the souls of
George the Second, and Henry of Navarre, and of Saint Louis, shining
starlike through the centuries. What we gain is better worth having
than what we lose.

When we read the true autobiography, as that of Benvenuto Cellini, we
see the august men of the period assume a secondary place, a shadowy
significance. They patronize the artist or imprison him, according to
their bent. They give him purses of five hundred ducats when they are
complacent, and they banish him from their very limited domains when
he kills somebody whom they prefer to keep alive. But not for one
moment is our attention distracted from the narrator himself to these
rude arbiters of fate. He makes it plain to us from the start that he
is penning his autobiography in a spirit of composed enjoyment, and
because he deems it “incumbent upon upright men who have performed
anything noble or praiseworthy to record with their own hand the events
of their lives.” He tells us in detail how it pleased God that he
should come into the world; and he tells us of all that he has done
to make God’s action in the matter a source of regret, as well as of
satisfaction, to others. Those true words of Frederick the Great,
“On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scélérat,” are singularly
applicable to this particular rascal. It is as difficult to find
standards by which to appraise his worth as it is to find rules by
which to test his accuracy. Just as it has been said of Rousseau, that
even in the very ecstasy of truth-telling he does not tell the truth,
so it may be said of Cellini, that even in the very ecstasy of lying he
does not wholly lie.

It is characteristic of a simpler age than the one we live in now
that autobiographers sang their own praises candidly and lustily.
Cellini puts graceful eulogies of himself into the mouths of his
contemporaries, which is one way, and a very good way, of getting them
said. The Duchesse de Montpensier (La Grande Mademoiselle) goes a step
further, and assures us that the Creator is sympathetically aware of
her merits and importance. “I may say without vanity that just Heaven
would not bestow such a woman as I am upon a man who was unworthy of
her.” Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, and sister of Frederick the
Great, writes with composure: “Happily my good disposition was stronger
than the bad example of my governess”; and, as the testimony of the
governess was not taken, Wilhelmina’s carries the day.

This directness contrasts pleasantly with the more involved, and
possibly more judicious, methods employed by memoir-writers like
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the immortal Maria, and by
autobiographers like Harriet Martineau. Mr. Edgeworth, recounting his
first experience of married life, says with conscious nobility: “I felt
the inconvenience of an early and hasty marriage; and though I heartily
repented of my folly, I determined to bear with fortitude and temper
the evil I had brought upon myself.”

Miss Martineau, whose voluminous work is ranked by Anna Robeson Burr as
among the great autobiographies of the world, does not condescend to
naïveté; but she never forgets, or permits her reader to forget, what
a superior person she is. When Miss Aiken ventures to congratulate
her upon her “success” in London society, she loftily repudiates the
word. Success implies endeavour, and she (Harriet Martineau) has
“nothing to strive for in any such direction.” When she sails for the
United States, it is with the avowed purpose of “self-discipline.” She
has become “too much accustomed to luxury,” and seeks for wholesome
hardships. It sounds a trifle far-fetched. Byron--an incomparable
traveller--admits that folks who go “a-pleasuring” in the world must
not ask for comfort; but even Byron did not visit the East in order to
be uncomfortable. He was not hunting a corrective for St. James Street
and Piccadilly.

There is no finer example in the world of the happiness of writing an
autobiography than that afforded us by Miss Martineau. Her book is a
real book, not an ephemeral piece of self-flattery. Her enjoyment of
it is so intense that it impedes her progress. She cannot get on with
her narrative because of the delight of lingering. Every circumstance
of an uneventful childhood invites her attention. Other little girls
cry now and then. Mothers and nurserymaids are aware of this fact.
Other little girls hate to get up in the morning. Other little girls
are occasionally impertinent to their parents. But no one else has
ever recorded these details with such serious and sympathetic concern.
A petulant word from an older sister (most of us have lived through
something of the kind) made her resolve “never to tell anybody anything
again.” This resolution was broken. She has told everybody everything,
and the telling must have given her days, and weeks, and months of
undiluted pleasure.

Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural
that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it.
But Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened,
overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young was a
melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his surroundings,
and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through years so harassed by
poverty, so untempered by discretion, so embittered by disappointments,
that his tragic suicide was the only thing which could have brought his
manifold miseries to an end. Yet Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting
forth her difficulties, and in expressing a reasonable self-pity.
Arthur Young relieved his mind by a well-worked-out system of intensive
grumbling. Even Haydon seems to have sought and found a dreary solace
in the recital of his woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to
read, but was evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.

That George Sand’s “Histoire de Ma Vie” afforded its author more than
her proper share of contentment is evidenced by its length, and by the
relish which is stamped on every page. Sir Leslie Stephen pronounced
it the best autobiography he had ever read. It seems to have delighted
him as Rousseau’s “Confessions” delighted Emerson; which goes to
prove that intellectual kinship need not necessarily be accompanied
by any similarity of taste. “If we would really know our hearts,”
says Bishop Wilson, “let us impartially review our actions.” George
Sand and Rousseau reviewed their actions with the fondest solicitude;
but were biased in their own favour. Gibbon reviewed his actions, and
such emotions as he was aware of, with an impartiality that staggers
us; but his heart, at no time an intrusive organ, gave him little
concern. Franklin, with whom truth-telling was never an “ecstasy,” but
a natural process like breathing and eating, reviewed his actions
candidly, if not altogether impartially, and left the record without
boast, or apology, or the reticence dictated by taste, to the judgment
of coming generations. He was a busy man, engaged, like Sully, in
making history on a large scale. It pleased him, not only to write
his recollections, but to bequeath them, as he bequeathed so much
else, to the young nation that he loved. He never sought to patent his
inventions. He never sought to publish his autobiography. His large
outlook embraced the future, and America was his residuary legatee.

John Wesley kept a journal for fifty-five years. This is one of the
most amazing facts in the history of letters. He was beyond comparison
the hardest worker of his day. John Stuart Mill, who knew too much and
did too much for any one man, also wrote an autobiography, which the
reading world has been content to ignore. But Mill’s failing health
compelled him sometimes to rest. Wesley never rested. It is estimated
that for over thirty years he rode, on an average, eight thousand miles
a year. He preached in his lifetime full thirty thousand sermons--an
overwhelming and relentless figure. He wrestled with lagging
Churchmen of the Establishment no less than with zealous Antinomians,
Swedenborgians, Necessitarians, Anabaptists and Quakers. Other records
of human endeavour read like the idling of a summer day alongside of
his supernatural activities. Yet so great is the compulsion of the born
diarist to confide to the world the history of his thoughts and deeds
that Wesley found time--or took time--to write, in a minute, cryptic
short-hand, a diary which fills seven large volumes. He not only wanted
to do this; he _had_ to do it. The narrative, now bald and itemized,
now stirring and spirited, now poignant and terrible, was part of
himself. He might have said of it more truly than Walt Whitman said of
“Leaves of Grass,” that whoever laid hold upon the book laid hold upon
a man.

To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist, and
deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding perfection.
Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every
year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks
the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their
development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful
and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved
and illuminating disclosure. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita sua” was
written with an avowed purpose--to make clear the sincerity of his
religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness. The stern
coercion which gave it birth, and which carried it to a triumphant
close, was remote from any sense of enjoyment save such as might be
found in clarity of thought and distinction of workmanship. The thrust
of truth in this fragment of autobiography has carried it far; but it
is not by truth alone that a book lives. It is not by simple veracity
that minds “deeply moralized, discriminating and sad” have charmed, and
will always charm, the few austere thinkers and fastidious critics whom
a standardized world has spared.

The pleasure derived by ordinary readers from memoirs and reminiscences
is twofold. It is the pleasure of acquiring agreeable information in
an agreeable way, and it is, more rarely, the pleasure of a direct
and penetrating mental stimulus. “The Education of Henry Adams” has
so filtered through the intelligent public mind that echoes of it
are still to be heard in serious lectures and flippant after-dinner
speeches. We can, if we are adroit borrowers, set up intellectual
shop-keeping on Mr. Adams’s stock-in-trade. We can deal out over our
own counters his essentially marketable wares.

The simpler delight afforded us by such a charming book as Frederick
Locker’s “Confidences,” which is not confidential at all; or by John
Murray’s well-bred “Memoirs of a Publisher”; or by Lord Broughton’s
“Recollections of a Long Life,” is easy to estimate. We could ill spare
Lord Broughton’s volumes, both because he tells us things we do not
learn elsewhere, and because of his illuminating common sense. The
world of authorship has of late years so occupied itself with Lord
Byron that we wince at the sound of his name. But if we really want
to know him, we must still turn to Broughton for the knowledge. The
account of Byron’s wedding in the “Recollections” is as unforgettable
as the account of Byron’s funeral in Moore’s diffuse and rambling
“Memoirs.” It is in such narratives that the eye-witness eclipses, and
must forever eclipse, the most acute and penetrating investigator.
Biographers cannot stand as Broughton stood at the door of Seaham,
when the ill-mated couple drove away to certain misery: “I felt as if
I had buried a friend.” Historians cannot stand as John Evelyn stood
on the Strand, when the second Charles entered London: “I beheld him
and blessed God!” Or at Gravesend, seven years later, when the Dutch
fleet lay at the mouth of the Thames: “A dreadful spectacle as ever
Englishmen saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off!”

Ever since that most readable book, “An Apology for the Life of Mr.
Colley Cibber, Comedian,” was given to the English world, actors and
playwrights have been indefatigable autobiographers. They may write
about themselves alone, as did Macready, or about themselves and the
world, after the fashion of Frances Kemble. They may be amusing, like
Ellen Terry, or discursive, like Augustus Thomas, or casual, like John
Drew. But they fall into line, and tell us what dramas they wrote, what
companies they managed, what parts they played, and when and where
they played them, together with any scraps of theatrical gossip they
may be fortunate enough to recollect. All, at least, except the once
celebrated Mrs. Inchbald. She recollected so much that the publisher,
Phillips, offered her a thousand pounds for her manuscript; and her
confessor, a wise and nameless Catholic priest, persuaded her to burn
it unread. Yet there are people so perversely minded as to disapprove
of auricular confession.

The golden age of the autobiographer has come, perhaps to stay.
Mr. Howells, observant and sympathetic, welcomed its dawning, and
the fullness of its promise. He was of the opinion that this form
of composition represented “the supreme Christian contribution to
literature”; and, while admitting that there were bad as well as
good specimens of the art, he stoutly maintained that one more
autobiography, however indifferent, was better than one less--a
disputable point.

The question which confronts the reading public is this: “How far
should the law of kindness, which we all profess to follow, influence
us in allowing to our fellow creatures the happiness of writing books
about themselves?” There is no use saying that it would be impossible
to stop them. Nothing in the way of inhibitions is impossible to the
United States. “There is no country,” says the observant Santayana, “in
which people live under more powerful compulsions.”

Americans have so far been inclined to tolerate the vanity of the
autobiography, because mankind is naturally vain, and to forgive
its dullness, because life is frequently dull. Moreover, they are
well disposed towards any form of art or letters that lays claim to
the quality of truth; and it is generally conceded that a man knows
himself better than others know him. He does not know, and he never
can know, how he appears to his acquaintances. The sound of his own
voice, the light in his own eye, his accent, his mannerisms, his
laugh, the sensations, pleasurable or otherwise, which he produces
by his presence--these things, apparent to every casual observer,
are unfamiliar to him. But his _naturel_ (a word too expressive for
translation) which others must estimate by the help of circumstantial
evidence, he can, if he be honest, know and judge.

This, at least, is the theory on which rest the lucidity of art
and the weight of conscience. Yet George Sand, who was given to
self-inspection, self-analysis and self-applause, admitted the dimness
of her inward vision. “The study of the human heart,” she wrote, “is of
such a nature, that the more we are absorbed by it, the less clearly do
we see.”




                          Strayed Sympathies

 It is probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for
 any unpopular person than to give way to perfect raptures of moral
 indignation against his abstract vices.--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.


It is not only more instructive--it is more enlivening. The
conventionalities of criticism (moral, not literary, criticism) pass
from mouth to mouth, and from pen to pen, until the iterations of the
press are crystallized in encyclopædias and biographical dictionaries.
And from such verdicts there is no appeal. Their laboured impartiality,
their systematic adjustments, their careful avoidance of intuition,
produce in the public mind a level sameness of misunderstanding. Many
sensible people think this a good result. Even a man who did his own
thinking, and maintained his own intellectual free-hold, like Mr.
Bagehot, knew and upheld the value of ruts. He was well aware how
far a little intelligence can be made to go, unless it aspires to
originality. Therefore he grumbled at the paradoxes which were somewhat
of a novelty in his day, but which are out-worn in ours, at the making
over of virtue into vice, and of vice into something more inspiriting
than virtue. “We have palliations of Tiberius, eulogies on Henry the
Eighth, devotional exercises to Cromwell, and fulsome adulations of the
first Napoleon.”

That was a half-century ago. To-day, Tiberius is not so much out of
favour as out of mind; Mr. Froude was the last man really interested
in the moral status of Henry the Eighth; Mr. Wells has given us his
word for it that Napoleon was a very ordinary person; and the English
people have erected a statue of Cromwell close to the Houses of
Parliament, by way of reminding him (in his appointed place) of the
survival of representative government. The twentieth century does
not lean to extravagant partialities. Its trend is to disparagement,
to searchlights, to that lavish and ironic candour which no man’s
reputation can survive.

When Mr. Lytton Strachey reversed Mr. Stevenson’s suggestion, and
chose, as subject-matter of a book, four people of whom the world had
heard little but good, who had been praised and reverenced beyond their
deserts, but for whom he cherished a secret and cold hostility, he
experimented successfully with the latent uncharitableness of men’s
minds. The brilliancy with which the four essays were written, the
keenness of each assault, the charm and persuasiveness of the style,
delighted even the uncensorious. The business of a biographer, said the
author in a very engaging preface, is to maintain his own freedom of
spirit, and lay bare events as he understands them, “dispassionately,
impartially, and without ulterior intentions.”

It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey
disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon, and
no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered also
that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of stubborn
character and compelling will, as far removed from irreproachable
excellence as from criminality. Of such, much criticism may be offered;
but the only way to keep an open outlook is to ask, “What was their
life’s job?” “How well did they do it?” Men and women who have a
pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale was _all_ job) cannot
afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move with an irresistible
impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr. Strachey is
never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon these forceful
and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their more amenable
contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we should be glad to
forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington we
hope to remember while we live.

The popularity of “Eminent Victorians” inspired a host of followers.
Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr.
J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy
discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and that
every side of his character was open to assault. The result of this
perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his contemporaries
liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have been content to take
the word of those who knew him. He may have been, as Mr. Strahan
asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a bad official and a worse
friend; but he managed to give a different impression. Addison’s
friends and neighbours found him a modest, honourable, sweet-tempered
gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous
words: “You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is
arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a
thousand things in him which before lay buried.”

This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were
I coveting praise, this is the form I’d like the praise to take.

The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of
our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms,
thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the
way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who
so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men
has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship
of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. “The editor
of the ‘Morning Post,’” observed Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily, “begins
his day by wondering whom he shall denounce”; and opposing editors, as
nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry, and malice against
malignity.

I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written “The
Mirrors of Downing Street,” and I am sure that, were an American able
to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur to
him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. The public actions
of public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour’s personal
selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not
matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip
with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener “greatness
of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,” is harsh
speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman “whom
he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times,
could never bring herself to marry him,” is a personality which “Town
Topics” would scorn. “The Mirrors of Downing Street” aspired to a moral
purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe
dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the
expense of our neighbour’s character.

The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to
come by than the “raptures of moral indignation,” of which he heard
more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through the world
to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach
it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder
it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and there,
as we step apprehensively into historic bypaths, we are cheered by
patches of sunshine, straight glimpses into truths which put a more
credible, because a more merciful, construction upon men’s actions, and
lighten our burden of dispraise.

I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an avenue of
approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis the Eleventh
as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist. He has a natural
desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews every side of
Louis’s character with dispassionate sincerity.

First, as a Catholic: “The king was very liberal to the Church, and, in
some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the poor to
give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at perfection.”

Next, as a husband: “As for ladies, he never meddled with them in my
time; for when I came to his court he lost a son, at whose death he was
greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence never to
have intercourse with any other woman than the queen. And though this
was no more than he was bound to do by the canons of the Church, yet it
was much that he should have such self-command as to persevere firmly
in his resolution, considering that the queen (though an excellent lady
in other respects) was not a princess in whom a man could take any
great delight.”

Finally, as a ruler: “The king was naturally kind and indulgent to
persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no need
of him.... But this I say boldly in his commendation, that in my whole
life I never knew any man so wise in his misfortunes.”

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in
misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously
regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history in an
ejaculation, “Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!” it rests our
souls to say, “Amen!”

We cannot easily love Swift. The great “professional hater” frightens
us out of the timid regard which we should like--in honour of English
literature--to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble sentence
of Thackeray’s which, if it does not soften our hearts, cannot fail to
clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging misapprehension
which we confuse with moral distaste. “Through the storms and tempests
of his [Swift’s] furious mind the stars of religion and love break out
in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds
and maddening hurricane of his life.” One clear and penetrating note
(“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”) is worth much careful auditing
of accounts.

The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his
“Early History of Charles James Fox,” and the picture of Aaron Burr
drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,” are
happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating
kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the terms
are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a man whose
history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are swayed by
their political passions. An historian without political passions is as
rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all Conservatives were in
fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition to George the Third
is the acid test he applies to separate gold from dross. Mr. Beveridge
regards the Federalists as the strength, and the Republicans as the
weakness, of the young nation. Thomas Jefferson is _his_ test, and a
man hated and hounded by Jefferson necessarily wins his support.

Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their sympathizers
in a cold north light which softens and conceals nothing. Men of
positive quality, they look best when clearly seen. “Research and fact
are ever in collision with fancy and legend,” observes Mr. Beveridge
soberly; and it is to research and fact that he trusts to rescue
his accomplished filibuster from those unproved charges which live
by virtue of their vagueness. Writers of American school histories,
remembering the duty of moral indignation, have played havoc with the
reputation of Aaron Burr; and American school-children, if they know
him at all, know him as a duellist and a traitor. They are sure about
the duel (it was one of the few facts firmly established in my own mind
after a severe struggle with American history); but concerning the
treason, they are at least as ill-informed as their elders.

British children do better, perhaps, with John Wilkes. Little Londoners
can gaze at the obelisk which commemorates his mayoralty, and think of
him as a catless Whittington. The slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” has an
attractive ring to all who are not of Madame Roland’s way of thinking.
No man ever gave his partisans more to defend, or his opponents better
chances to attack; and friends and foes rose repeatedly and fervently
to their opportunities. A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend
well worth the having, reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted
confidence, a careful art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a
niceness of touch which wins halfway all readers who love the English
language. Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt as was William
Godwin, and Wilkes’s debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by
some one else as were Godwin’s; but when Trevelyan alludes softly to
his “unambitious standard of solvency,” this sordid detail becomes
unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if
they provoke the shadow of a smile.

Lord Rosebery’s “Napoleon: the Last Phase” is a work nobly conceived
and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an austere resolve
to make what amends a single Englishman can make for an ungenerous
episode in English history. Its sympathy for a fallen foe bears no
likeness to the sympathy which impelled Théodore de Banville, broken in
health and hope by the siege of Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a
young Prussian officer, a mere boy, who was found dead on the field,
with a blood-stained volume of Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery’s
book is written with a proud sadness, a stern indignation, eminently
fitted to its subject; but he is not so much kind as just. Napoleon is
too vast a figure to be approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr.
Wells asserts, that, had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would
never have conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say
that a lack of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with
Wilhelm the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.

There is a wide assortment of unpopular characters whose company it
would be very instructive to keep. They belong to all ages, countries
and creeds. Spain alone offers us three splendid examples--the Duke
of Alva, Cardinal Ximenez, and Philip the Second. Alva, like the
Corsair, possessed one virtue, which was a more valuable virtue than
the Corsair’s, but brings him in less credit, because the object of
his unswerving loyalty and devotion was not a guileless lady, but a
sovereign, less popular, if possible, than himself. Cardinal Ximenez,
soldier, statesman, scholar, priest, ascetic, author and educator,
was also Grand Inquisitor, and this fact alone seems to linger in the
minds of men. That, for his day, he was a moderate, avails him little.
That he made a point of protecting scholars and professors from the
pernicious interference of the Inquisition ought to avail him a great
deal. It might were it better known. There is a play of Sardou’s in
which he is represented as concentrating all the deadly powers of his
office against the knowledge which he most esteemed. This is the way
the drama educates.

And Philip? It would be a big piece of work to win for Philip even a
partial recognition of his moderate merits. The hand of history has
dealt heavily with him, and romance has preyed upon his vitals. In
fact, history and romance are undistinguishable when they give free
play to the moral indignation he inspires. It is not enough to accuse
him of the murder of the son whom he hated (though not more heartily
than George the Second hated the Prince of Wales): they would have
us understand that he probably poisoned the brother whom he loved.
“Don John’s ambitions had become troublesome, and he ceased to live
at an opportune moment for Philip’s peace of mind,” is the fashion in
which Gayarré insinuates his suspicions; and Gayarré’s narrative--very
popular in my youth--was recommended to the American public by
Bancroft, who, I am convinced, never read it. Had he penetrated to the
eleventh page, where Philip is alluded to as the Christian Tiberius, or
to the twentieth, where he is compared to an Indian idol, he would have
known that, whatever the book might be, it was not history, and that,
as an historian, it ill became him to tell innocent Americans to read
it.

But how were they to be better informed? Motley will not even allow
that Philip’s fanatical devotion to his Church was a sincere devotion.
He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing Cromwell of levity,
or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of turning the King’s
few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness for his third wife,
Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach. “Well would it be
for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no heavier sin to
lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.” Well would it be
for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier charge to our
account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of Orange, it is
true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son; but that was
merely a political argument. He would as soon have charged him with
the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been safely isolated at
Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of Orange--a brave and
wise ruler--as “an enemy of the human race.”

Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of
popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of
Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colours. Mr. Martin
Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated gentleman, with a correct taste
in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal
and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors;
a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects,
to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy
reading, because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders;
his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of
conscience; and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face
the essential readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I
have done,” he said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should
fall in ruins around me.”

Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with
no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of
Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of
truth? Certain empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from
Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having
some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow
and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the
chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on
these subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new
impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may
have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and
unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the
Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said,
in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his
patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost
on the vulgar.”

Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the
imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in
her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter
of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”;
and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this fragment
of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the Lucrezia of
romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She
has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti’s canvas,
in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in countless poems and
stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively for our entertainment.
The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is
one which the world will not lightly let go.

And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people who
chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife and
duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her numerous
children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and pitiful to
Jews. “She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous and devout,” wrote
Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke of Ferrara. “She is
beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,” echoed the Chevalier Bayard
years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we might like to think
of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one from the maelstrom of
Rome, where she had been a pawn in the game of politics, and placed
in a secure and splendid home. The Lucrezia of romance would have
found the court of Ferrara intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history
took to dullness as a duck to water. She was a sensible, rather than
a brilliant woman, fully alive to the duties and dignities of her
position, and well aware that respectability is a strong card to play
in a vastly disreputable world.

There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid for
unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the rehabilitation
of man in the French Revolution found little to say for its chosen
instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose methods were open to
reproach. Of late, however, a certain weariness has been observable
in men’s minds when these reformers are in question, a reluctance to
expand with _any_ emotion where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is,
indeed, by way of thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely
resembles the elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious
valuation; it is letting picturesqueness run away with reason--a habit
incidental to editorship.

The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and Marat
were ineffective; not without ability in their respective lines, but
unfitted for the parts they played. Marat’s turn of mind was scientific
(our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre’s
turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful
lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for
which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far
as to say that the Great War ruined Clemenceau’s life. The “Tiger”
was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had he been
content to spend all his years teaching in a girls’ school, he might
(though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a better
man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat is not
expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.

“Almost everybody,” says Stevenson, “can understand and sympathize
with an admiral, or a prize-fighter”; which genial sentiment is less
contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty years ago. A new type
of admiral has presented itself to the troubled consciousness of men,
a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by Farragut, unsung by Newbolt.
In robbing the word of its ancient glory, Tirpitz has robbed us of an
emotion we can ill-afford to lose. “The traditions of sailors,” says
Mr. Shane Leslie, “have been untouched by the lowering of ideals which
has invaded every other class and profession.” The truth of his words
was brought home to readers by the behaviour of the British merchant
marine, peaceful, poorly paid men, who in the years of peril went out
unflinchingly, and as a matter of course, to meet “their duty and their
death.” Many and varied are the transgressions of seafaring men; but we
have hitherto been able to believe them sound in their nobler parts.
We should like to cherish this simple faith, and, though alienated
from prize-fighters by the narrowness of our civic and social code,
to retain our sympathy for admirals. It cannot be that their fair
fame will be forever smirched by the tactics of a man who ruined the
government he served.

The function of criticism is to clear our mental horizon, to get us
within close range of the criticized. It recognizes moral as well as
intellectual issues; but it differentiates them. When Emerson said,
“Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure
truth, but to truth for the sake of culture,” he implied that truth,
besides being a better thing than culture, was also a more lovable
thing, which is not the case. It takes temerity to love Goethe; but
there are always men--young, keen, speculative, beauty-loving men--to
whom he is inexpressibly dear because of the vistas he opens, the
thoughts he releases, the “inward freedom” which is all he claimed to
give. It takes no less temerity to love Emerson, and he meant that it
should be so, that we should climb high to reach him. He is not lovable
as Lamb is lovable, and he would not have wanted to be. A man who all
his life repelled unwelcome intimacies had no desire to surrender his
memory to the affection of every idle reader.

It is such a sure thing to appeal from intelligence to the moral
sense, from the trouble involved in understanding to the ease with
which judgment is passed, that critics may be pardoned their frequent
misapprehensions. Problems of conduct are just as puzzling as problems
of intellect. That is why Mr. Stevenson pronounced a sneaking kindness
to be “instructive.” He offered it as a road to knowledge rather than
as a means of enjoyment. Not that he was unaware of the pleasures which
follow in its wake. He knew the world up and down well enough to be
thankful that he had never lost his taste for bad company.




                     The Divineness of Discontent


When a distinguished Oxford student told Americans, through the
distinguished medium of Harvard College, that they were “speeding with
invincible optimism down the road to destruction,” they paid him the
formal compliment of listening to, and commenting upon, his words. They
did not go so far as to be disturbed by them, because it is the nature
of men to remain unmoved by prophecies. Only the Greek chorus--or
its leader--paid any heed to Cassandra; and the folly of Edgar Poe
in accepting without demur the reiterated statement of his raven
is apparent to all readers of a much-read poem. The world has been
speeding through the centuries to destruction, and the end is still
remote. Nevertheless, as it is assuredly not speeding to perfection,
the word that chills our irrational content may do us some small
service. It is never believed, and it is soon forgotten; but for a time
it gives us food for thought.

Any one born as long ago as I was must remember that the virtue most
deeply inculcated in our nurseries was content. It had no spiritual
basis to lend it dignity and grace, but was of a Victorian smugness;
though, indeed, it was not Victorian at all, but an inheritance from
those late Georgian days which were the smuggest known to fame. It was
a survival from Hannah More and Jane Taylor, ladies dissimilar in most
respects, but with an equal gift for restricting the horizon of youth.
I don’t remember who wrote the popular story of the “Discontented Cat”
that lived in a cottage on bread and milk and mice, and that made
itself unhappy because a wealthy cat of its acquaintance was given
buttered crumpets for breakfast; but either Jane Taylor or her sister
Ann was responsible for the “Discontented Pendulum,” which grew tired
of ticking in the dark, and, being reminded that it had a window to
look through, retorted very sensibly that there was no use having a
window, if it could not stop a second to look through it.

The nursery theory of content was built up on the presumption that you
were the favoured child of fortune--or of God--while other, and no less
worthy, children were objects of less kindly solicitude. Miss Taylor’s
“Little Ann” weeps because she sees richly clad ladies stepping into a
coach while she has to walk; whereupon her mother points out to her a
sick and ragged beggar child, whose

    “naked feet bleed on the stones,”

and with enviable hardness of heart bids her take comfort in the sight:

    “This poor little beggar is hungry and cold,
      No father nor mother has she;
    And while you can daily such objects behold,
      You ought quite contented to be.”

Hannah More amplified this theory of content to fit all classes and
circumstances. She really did feel concern for her fellow creatures,
for the rural poor upon whom it was not the custom of Church or
State to waste sympathy or help. She refused to believe that British
labourers were “predestined to be ignorant and wicked”--which was to
her credit; but she did, apparently, believe that they were predestined
to be wretchedly poor, and that they should be content with their
poverty. She lived on the fat of the land, and left thirty thousand
pounds when she died; but she held that bare existence was sufficient
for a ploughman. She wrote twenty-four books, which were twenty-four
too many; but she told the ever-admiring Wilberforce that she permitted
“no writing for the poor.” She aspired to guide the policies and the
morals of England; but she was perturbed by the thought that under-paid
artisans should seek to be “scholars and philosophers,” though they
must have stood in more need of philosophy than she did.

It was Ruskin who jolted his English readers, and some Americans, out
of the selfish complacency which is degenerate content. It was he who
harshly told England, then so prosperous and powerful, that prosperity
and power are not virtues, that they do not indicate the sanction
of the Almighty, or warrant their possessors in assuming the moral
leadership of the world. It was he who assured the prim girlhood of my
day that it was not the petted child of Providence, and that it had
no business to be contented because it was better off than girlhood
elsewhere. “Joy in nothing that separates you, as by any strange
favour, from your fellow creatures, that exalts you through their
degradation, exempts you from their toil, or indulges you in times of
their distress.”

This was a new voice falling upon the attentive ears of youth--a fresh
challenge to its native and impetuous generosity. Perhaps the beggar’s
bare feet were not a legitimate incentive to enjoyment of our own neat
shoes and stockings. Perhaps it was a sick world we lived in, and the
beggar was a symptom of disease. Perhaps when Emerson (we read Emerson
and Carlyle as well as Ruskin) defined discontent as an infirmity of
the will, he was thinking of personal and petty discontent, as with
one’s breakfast or the weather; not with the discontent which we never
dared to call divine, but which we dimly perceived to have in it some
noble attribute of grace. That the bare existence of a moral law should
so exalt a spirit that neither sin nor sorrow could subdue its gladness
was a profundity which the immature mind could not be expected to
grasp.

Time and circumstance lent themselves with extraordinary graciousness
to Emerson’s invincible optimism. It was easier to be a transcendental
philosopher, and much easier to cherish a noble and a sweet content,
before the laying of the Atlantic cable. Emerson was over sixty when
this event took place, and, while he lived, the wires were used with
commendable economy. The morning newspaper did not bring him a detailed
account of the latest Turkish massacre. The morning mail did not
bring him photographs of starving Russian children. His temperamental
composure met with little to derange it. He abhorred slavery; but
until Lincoln forced the issue, he seldom bent his mind to its
consideration. He loved “potential America”; but he had a happy faculty
of disregarding public affairs. Passionate partisanship, which is the
basis of so much satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul.
He loved mankind, but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved
him much wear and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough
about his friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he
estimated Alcott so highly.

This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the things
of the spirit, made possible Emerson’s intellectual life. He may have
been, as Santayana says, “impervious to the evidence of evil”; yet
there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb of
the world’s virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes
of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the
supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in
the invincible justice, the “loaded dice” of God, he sums up in careful
words his modest faith in man: “Hours of sanity and consideration
are always arriving to communities as to individuals, when the truth
is seen, and the martyrs are justified.” Perhaps martyrs foresee the
dawning of this day or ever they come to die; but to those who stand by
and witness their martyrdom, the night seems dark and long.

There is a species of discontent which is more fervently optimistic
than all the cheerfulness the world can boast. It is the discontent
of the passionate and unpractical reformer, who believes, as Shelley
believed, in the perfectibility of the human species, and who thinks,
as Shelley thought, that there is a remedy for every disease of
civilization. To the poet’s dreaming eyes the cure was simple and sure.
Destruction implied for him an automatic reconstruction, a miraculous
survival and rebirth. Uncrown the king, and some noble prophet or
philosopher will guide--not rule--the people. Unfrock the priest,
and the erstwhile congregation will perfect itself in the practice
of virtue. Take the arms from the soldier and the policeman, the cap
and gown from the college president, authority from the judge, and
control from the father. The nations will then be peaceful, the mobs
orderly, the students studious, the criminals virtuous, the children
well-behaved. An indifferent acquaintance with sociology, and a
comprehensive ignorance of biology, made possible these pleasing
illusions. Nor did it occur to Shelley that many men, his equals in
disinterestedness and his superiors in self-restraint, would have found
his reconstructed world an eminently undesirable dwelling-place.

Two counsels to content stand bravely out from the mass of
contradictory admonitions with which the world’s teachers have
bewildered us. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians, says simply:
“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”;
and Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the mighty spectacle of life and
death, bids us pass serenely through our little space of time, and
end our journey in content. It is the meeting-point of objective and
subjective consciousness. The Apostle was having a hard time of it.
The things he disciplined himself to accept with content were tangible
things, of an admittedly disagreeable character--hunger and thirst,
stripes and imprisonment. They were not happening to somebody else;
they were happening to _him_. The Emperor, seeking refuge from action
in thought, steeled himself against the nobleness of pity no less than
against the weakness of complaint. John Stuart Mill, who did not suffer
from enervating softness of heart, pronounced the wholesale killing of
Christians in the reign of Marcus Aurelius to be one of the world’s
great tragedies. It was the outcome, not only of imperial policy, but
of sincere conviction. Therefore historians have agreed to pass it
lightly by. How can a man do better than follow the dictates of his own
conscience, or of his own judgment, or of whatever directs the mighty
ones of earth who make laws instead of obeying them? But the immensity
of pain, the long-drawn agony involved in this protracted persecution
might have disturbed even a Stoic philosopher passing serenely--though
not harmlessly--through his little space of time.

This brings me to the consideration of one prolific source of
discontent, the habit we have acquired--and cannot let go--of
distressing ourselves over the daily progress of events. The classic
world, “innocent of any essential defeat,” was a pitiless world,
too clear-eyed for illusions, too intelligent for sedatives. The
Greeks built the structure of their lives upon an almost perfect
understanding of all that it offered and denied. The Romans, running an
empire and ruling a world, had much less time for thinking; yet Horace,
observant and acquiescent, undeceived and undisturbed, is the friend of
all the ages. It is not from him, or from any classic author, that we
learn to talk about the fret and fever of living. He would have held
such a phrase to be eminently ill-bred, and unworthy of man’s estate.

The Middle Ages, immersed in heaving seas of trouble, and lifted
Heaven-ward by great spiritual emotions, had scant breathing-space
for the cultivation of nerves. Men endured life and enjoyed it. Their
endurance and their enjoyment were unimpaired by the violence of their
fellow men, or by the vision of an angry God. Cruelty, which we cannot
bear to read about, and a Hell, which we will not bear to think about,
failed signally to curb the zest with which they lived their days.
“How high the tide of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says Mr.
Chesterton significantly, “we know only by the colossal walls they
built to keep it within bounds.” There is no reason to suppose that
Dante, whose fervid faith compassed the redemption of mankind, disliked
his dream of Hell, or that it irked him to consign to it so many
eminent and agreeable people.

The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that
could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no
lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive
to read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day,
Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able,
estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced
serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had
ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a
prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she improved the
occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful statues which she
had always coveted, and which had been the most treasured possessions
of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and the husband of her dearest
friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when others came to grief, but a
stout one when disaster faced her way. If the men and women who lived
through those highly coloured, harshly governed days had fretted too
persistently over the misfortunes of others, or had spent their time
questioning the moral intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would
have failed of its fruition, and the world would be a less engaging
place for us to live in now.

There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is
a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both spring
from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both have
a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry Adams” and
the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point. Blunt’s
quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures and his
God--a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to
embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even a moderate
self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his party is out
of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty millions a year in
slaughtering the Filipinos”--a crude estimate of work and cost. “The
Press is the most complete engine ever invented for the concealment of
historic truth.” “Patriotism is the virtue of nations in decay.” “The
whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had
never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all.”

“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed
fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s
civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to
his expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and
Mohammedanism--an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of sensuality and
averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the Englishman set
off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.

Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but unregenerate
followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents, pillaged his luggage,
robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely about. Blunt’s rage at
this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s” vegetarian who is chased
by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in Islam, and I shall go no
further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion in the world, perhaps
the better.”

Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained only
the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. “Three quarters of man’s
misery,” says the diary, “comes from pretending to be what he is not,
a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds, when in
reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.”

This is the kind of thing Walt Whitman used now and then to say, though
neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness of beasts
and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful, Whitman,
would have laughed his loudest over Blunt’s final analysis of the
situation: “All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man
could be shut out.” A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland and the
poet Gray:

    “Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir,
      And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul’s.”

To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the
deep-seated discontent of Henry Adams is to reënter the world of the
intellect. Mark Pattison confessed that he could not take a train
without thinking how much better the time-table might have been
planned. It was an unhappy twist of mind; but the Rector of Lincoln
utilized his obtrusive critical faculties by applying them to his own
labours, and scourging himself to greater effort. So did Henry Adams,
though even the greater effort left him profoundly dissatisfied. He was
unelated by success, and he could not reconcile himself to that degree
of failure which is the common portion of mankind. His criticisms are
lucid, balanced, enlightening, and occasionally prophetic, as when
he comments on the Irishman’s political passion for obstructing even
himself, and on the perilous race-inertia of Russia. “Could inertia on
such a scale be broken up, or take new scale?” he asks dismayed; and we
read the answer to-day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority
accepting what comes to them, as they accept day and night and the
seasons.

If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the
“Education,” which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is
everywhere an appeal to man’s austere equity and disciplined reason.
Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind resorted to it
for want of training, and he admitted that he had never met a perfectly
trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason which made him
see that friends were good to him, and the world not unkind; that the
loveliness of the country about Washington gave him pleasure, even when
he found “a personal grief in every tree”; and that a self-respecting
man refrains from finding wordy fault with the conditions under which
he lives. He did not believe, with Wordsworth, that nature is a holy
and beneficent thing, or with Blake, that nature is a wicked and
malevolent thing; but he knew better than to put up a quarrel with an
invincible antagonist. He erred in supposing that other thoughtful
men were as discontented as he was, or that disgust with the methods
of Congress corroded their hours of leisure; but he expressed clearly
and with moderation his unwillingness to cherish “complete and archaic
deceits,” or to live in a world of illusions. His summing up is the
summing up of another austere and uncompromising thinker, Santayana,
when confronted by the same problem: “A spirit with any honour is not
willing to live except in its own way; a spirit with any wisdom is not
over-eager to live at all.”

As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in
the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must
think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly
as we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent--a
question which briskly answers itself--but the relative rightness.
Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable
law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its
condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He sees
in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial optimism of the
American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet Emerson and Santayana
reach the same general conclusion. The first says that hours of sanity
and consideration come to communities as to individuals, “when the
truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified”; the second that “people
in all ages sometimes achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and
that, if our will and conduct were better disciplined, “contentment
would be more frequent and more massive.”

It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of
sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the Muscovite
are set on things which do not make for the massive contentment of the
world. The orderly processes of civilization have been so wrenched and
shattered that readjustment is blocked at some point in every land, in
our own no less than in others. There are those who say that the World
War went beyond the bounds of human endurance; and that the peculiar
horror engendered by indecent methods of attack--poison-gases, high
explosives and corrosive fluids--has dimmed the faith and broken the
spirit of men. But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the
civilized world into wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive
force. Europe to-day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk
dwelling upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for
aid.

Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little
Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s
meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our neighbour’s
bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,” says Mr.
Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference for some
time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe were
reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City should
have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not know; but space
has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The farther we travel
from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the sympathy for injured
France. The farther we travel from the Pacific coast, the fainter is
the prejudice against Japan.

It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content
with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’
lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct
a world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent
grief in the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be
a content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be
absolved.

The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness, of the
British prisoners in the World War astounded the more temperamental
Germans. Long, long ago it was said of England: “Even our condemned
persons doe goe cheerfullie to their deths, for our nature is free,
stout, hautie, prodigal of life and blood.” This heroic strain,
tempered to an endurance which is free from the waste of emotionalism,
produces the outward semblance and the inward self-respect of a content
which circumstances render impossible. It keeps the soul of man immune
from whatever degradation his body may be suffering. It saves the land
that bred him from the stigma of defeat. It is remotely and humanly
akin to the tranquillity of the great Apostle in a Roman prison. It
is wholly alien to the sin of smugness which has crept in among the
domestic virtues, and rendered them more distasteful than ever to
austere thinkers, and to those lonely, generous souls who starve in the
midst of plenty.

There is a curious and suggestive paragraph in Mr. Chesterton’s
volume of loose ends, entitled “What I Saw in America.” It arrests
our attention because, for once, the writer seems to be groping for
a thought instead of juggling with one. He recognizes a keen and
charming quality in American women, and is disturbed because he also
recognizes a recoil from it in his own spirit. This is manifestly
perplexing. “To complain of people for being brave and bright and kind
and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And yet there
is something in the background that can be expressed only by a symbol;
something that is not shallowness, but a neglect of the subconscious,
and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can be missed amid
all that laughter and light, under those starry candelabra of the
ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me in a wordless
wave that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she would walk in
beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full of older
stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion,
even in the most large and elusive terms.”

Baudelaire has conveyed them measurably in four words:

    “Sois belle! Sois triste!”

Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with
perfect felicity the undercurrent of discontent which lends worth to
courage and charm to intelligence. Back of all our lives is the sombre
setting of a world ill at ease, and beset by perils. Darkening all our
days is the gathering cloud of ill-will, the ugly hatred of man for
man, which is the perpetual threat to progress. We Americans may not be
so invincibly optimistic as our critics think us, and we may not yet
be “speeding” down the road to destruction, as our critics painfully
foretell; but we are part of an endangered civilization, and cannot
hold up our end, unsupported by Europe. An American woman, cautiously
investing her money in government bonds, said to her man of business:
“These at least are perfectly secure?” “I should not say that,” was the
guarded reply; “but they will be the last things to go.”

A few years ago there was a period that saw the workingmen and
working-women of the United States engaged in three hundred and
sixty-five strikes--one for every day of the year--and all of them on
at once. Something seems lacking in the equity of our industrial life.
The “Current History” of the New York “Times” is responsible for the
statement that eighty-five thousand men and women met their deaths by
violence in the United States during the past decade. Something seems
lacking in our programme of peace.

Can it be that Mr. Wells is right when he says that the American
believes in peace, but feels under no passionate urgency to organize
it? Does our notable indifference to the history of the past mean
that we are unconcerned about the history of the present? Two things
are sure. We cannot be nobly content with our own prosperity, unless
its service to the world is made manifest; grace before meat is not
enough to bless the food we eat. And we cannot be nobly content with
our unbroken strength, with the sublimity of size and numbers, unless
there is something correspondingly sublime in our leadership of the
wounded nations. Our allies, who saved us and whom we saved, face the
immediate menace of poverty and assault. They face it with a slowly
gathered courage which we honour to-day, and may be compelled to
emulate to-morrow. “The fact that fear is rational,” says Mr. Brownell,
“is what makes fortitude divine.”




                                Allies


“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de Commines,
“is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of friendship
between republics, had he ever conceived of representative government.
What he knew was that the friendships of men, built on affection and
esteem, outlast time; and that the friendships of nations, built on
common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests,
which are always liable to deflection. He had proof, if proof were
needed, in the invasion of France by Edward the Fourth under the
pressure of an alliance with Charles of Burgundy. It was one of the
urbane invasions common to that gentlemanly age. “Before the King of
England embarked from Dover, he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a
native of Normandy, to the King of France, with a letter of defiance
couched in language so elegant and so polite that I can scarcely
believe any Englishman wrote it.”

This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous.
When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh, who
hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy,
who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no
condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and went
back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with his
enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there also is
our heart.”

The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly
designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception in
early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in
fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in
1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” The
Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British protectorate, and
the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley were presumably defending
their friends. This particular officer expressed his sense of the
situation in a fervid hope that when the Ashanti were beaten, as they
deserved to be, the English would then come to speedy terms with them,
“and drive these brutes of Fanti off the map.”

It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on every
page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against Napoleon
were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic elements; and
it was well for those statesmen whose reason and whose tempers were so
controlled that they were able to perceive the humours of this giant
game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear of France drew the Allies
together; a mutual distrust of one another pulled them apart. Sir
Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, endeavoured from the beginning
to make England understand that Austria would prefer her own interests
to the interests of the Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that
she should do so. The situation, as he saw it, was something like this:

“Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’

“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a _pas
seul_.’”

Unfortunately the allurements of a _pas seul_ were too strong to be
anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted away
when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at sea,
paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was briefly
summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot--more brilliant and less astute than
his brother--at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great,
overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted the
arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him
acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The
only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort.

One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and
consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty England’s
purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her exports to the
countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised implicit obedience.
In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to Lord Grenville: “The trade
of England and the necessities of the Continent will find each other
out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one of the confederates will be
true to the gang, and I have little doubt of our trade penetrating
into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”--Which it did.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines
us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of
contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations
that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high pinnacle
they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never sounded. When
Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review” his personal conviction
that the war had been “a ghastly and unnecessary blunder, which need
not have happened, and ought not to have happened,” this casual
statement was taken up and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic,
after the exasperating fashion in which a Greek chorus takes up and
repeats in strophe and antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the
play. And to what purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s
brutal ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder?
Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a
ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers
knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers
could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded
to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened
need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not
vouchsafed to an imperilled world.

It is possible for two boys to build up a friendship on the basis
of a clean fight. It is possible for two nations to build up a good
understanding on the basis of a clean fight. The relations between
Great Britain and South Africa constitute a case in point. Germany’s
fighting was unclean from start to finish. Therefore, while there are
many to feel commiseration for her, there are none to do her honour.
The duration of the war has little to do with this strong sentiment
of disesteem. Had it lasted four months instead of four years, the
deeds done in Belgium and in France would have sterilized the seeds
of friendship in the minds of all who remembered them. To an abnormal
sense of superiority, Germany added an abnormal lack of humour, which
made her regard all resistance as an unjustifiable and unpardonable
affront. Her resentment that Belgians should have presumed to defend
their country was like the resentment of that famous marauder, the Earl
of Cassillis, when Allan Stewart refused to be tortured into signing
away his patrimony. “You are the most obstinate man I ever saw to
oblige me to use you thus,” said the justly indignant Earl. “I never
thought to have treated any one as your stubbornness has made me treat
you.”

The emotional ebb-tide which followed the signing of the armistice was
too natural to be deplored, save that it gave to obstructionists their
chance to decry the matchless heroisms of the war. No people can be
heroic over the problem of paying debts out of an empty treasury. Need
drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness. Bargaining
is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that
it is an ennobling process. If it were given to debtors to love their
creditors, there would have been no persecution of the Jews. If it were
given to creditors to love their debtors, there would be no poverty on
earth. That all the nations, now presumably on friendly terms, should
be following their own interests would seem to most of us the normal
thing it is, if they did not so persistently affect to be amazed and
grieved at one another’s behaviour, and if the mischief-makers of every
land were not actively engaged in widening breaches into chasms.

It is inevitable and logical that the men who were pacifists when the
word had a sinister meaning should heartily detest their countries’
allies who helped them win the war. The English “Nation and Athenæum”
wrote of France in 1922 as it might have written--but did not--of
Germany in 1914. Poincaré it likened to Shylock, France to a butcher
eager for the shambles. “French militarism at work in the Rhineland is
a lash to every evil passion.” “Europe is kept in social and political
disorder by the sheer selfishness of France.” “There _was_ a France of
the mind. Victory killed it, and a long slow renovation of the soul
must precede its resurrection.”

Like the ingenuous Mr. Pepys, the “Nation” does “just naturally hate
the French,” and takes it hard that the world should persistently
regard them as a valuable asset to civilization. The concentrated
nationalism which held Verdun now expresses itself in a steely
resolution to hold France, and to recover for her out of the wreckage
of Europe the material aid of which she stands in need. Coöperation
is a good word and a good thing. To a Frenchman it means primarily
the interest of his own country. What else does it mean to any of us?
Britain’s policy of conciliation, our policy of aloofness, Germany’s
bargaining, and Russia’s giant bluff, all have the same significance.
“Be not deceived! Nothing is so dear to any creature as his profit,”
said Epictetus, who, having stript his own soul bare of desires, was
correspondingly ready to forgive the acquisitive instincts of others.

Mr. Edward Martin, writing very lucidly and very sympathetically of
the French, admits that their conception of their duty to the world
“is to defend France, keep her functioning, and make her powerful
and prosperous.” It sounds narrow, and practical, and arrogant. It
also sounds familiar. France feels herself to be intellectually and
artistically a thing of value. The best service she can render to the
world is her own preservation. How does America feel? The very week
that Mr. Martin offered his interpretation of Gallic nationalism,
a writer in the “Review of Reviews” (New York), after asserting
with indescribable smugness that Americans “have been trained to an
attitude of philanthropy hardly known in other countries,” proceeded
to illustrate this attitude by defending high tariffs, restricted
immigration, and other comforting pieces of legislation. “Our best
service to the world,” he explained, “lies in maintaining our national
life and character.”

This is just what France thinks, only her most zealous sons forbear to
define prudence as philanthropy. They believe that the world is the
better for what they have to give; but they know that it is not for the
world’s sake that they so keenly desire to be in a position to give it.
They are profoundly sentimental, but their sentiment is all for _la
patrie_. Internationally they are practical to the point of hardness,
and they see no reason why they should be otherwise. There is for them
no pressing necessity to assume that they love their neighbours as
themselves.

It is different with Americans in whom idealism and materialism dispute
every inch of the ground. A Texan professor, sent by the American
Peace Commission to investigate conditions in Germany, published in
“The North American Review,” May, 1922, a paper on “American Ideals
and Traditions,” which was widely quoted as embodying a clear and
fervid spirit of hopefulness, much needed in these disillusioned days.
The writer took the high ground that Americans were the first people
in the world “to make the spirit of disinterested human service the
measure of a nation as well as of a man. What is now termed American
humanitarianism is but the American spirit of philanthropy at home,
translated into international relations.” This “simple historical
fact” is the key to all our actions. “The entrance of America into the
Great War was not a species of interruption in the normal flow of its
idealism; but was the irresistible on-pressing of the great current of
our ‘will to human service.’”

One wonders if this particular idealist remembers what happened in
Europe, in the United States, and on the high seas, between July, 1914,
and April, 1917? Does he recall those thirty-two months, close-packed
with incidents of such an order that their cumulative weight broke
down our hardy resistance to “service,” and drove us slowly but
splendidly into action? Great deeds are based on great emotions; but
the conflicting emotions of that period are not accurately described
as “irresistible.” The best of them were too long and too successfully
resisted. We gain no clear impression of events by thinking in
ornamental terms. Headlines are one thing, and history is another. “In
judging others,” says Thomas à Kempis, “a man usually toileth in vain.
For the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth. But in judging
and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with profit.”

The continued use of the word “entangling” is to be regretted. It
arouses an excess of uneasiness in cautious souls. All alliances
from marriage up--or down--must necessarily entangle. The anchorites
of Thebais are the only examples we have of complete emancipation
from human bonds. That simple and beautiful thing, minding our own
affairs and leaving our neighbours to mind theirs, is unhappily not
possible for allies. Neither is a keen and common desire for peace
a sufficient basis for agreement. Peace must have terms, and terms
require a basis of their own--justice, reason, and the limited gains
which are based on mutual concessions. “Whether we are peaceful depends
upon whether others are provocative.” Mr. W. H. Mallock tells us a
pleasant story of an old Devonshire woman who was bidden by the parson
to be “conciliating” to her husband. “I labour for peace, sir,” was
the spirited reply. “But when I speak to he thereof, he directly makes
hisself ready for battle.”

There are students of history who would have us believe that certain
nations are natural allies, fitted by character and temperament to
agree, and to add to one another’s pleasure and profit. Germany and
Russia have been cited more than once as countries instinctively well
disposed towards each other, because each supplements the other’s
talents. Bismarck ranked the Germans as among the male, and the
Slavs as among the female nations of the world. The driving power he
rightfully assigned to Germany. “The soft Slav nature,” says a writer
in “The New Republic,” “emotional, sensitive, but undisciplined, has
derived most of such progress as it has made in material civilization
from German sources.”

Both countries have proved unsound allies, and Russia has the feminine
quality of changeableness. “Dangerous to her foes, disastrous to her
friends.” Both make the same kind of currency, and stand in need of
business partners who make a different sort. America, with the gold of
Europe locked up in her treasury, is the most desirable, but least
accessible, partner in Christendom. As the great creditor of the
civilized world, she has been impelled to assert that no participation
on her part in any international conference implies a surrender of her
claims to payment. France, as the great sufferer by a world’s war, has
made it equally clear that no participation on _her_ part implies a
surrender of her claims to reparation. The anger and shame with which
the Allies first saw the injuries inflicted on her have been softened
by time; and that strange twist in human nature which makes men more
concerned for the welfare of a criminal than for the welfare of his
victim has disposed us to think kindly of an unrepentant Germany. But
France cannot well forget the wounds from which she bleeds. Less proud
than Britain, which prefers beggary to debt, she is infinitely more
logical; and it is the unassailable strength of her position which has
irritated the sentimentalists of the world, whose hearts are in the
right place, but whose heads are commonly elsewhere.

The French press has waxed sorrowful and bitter over France’s sense of
isolation. Her cherished belief in the “unshakable American friendship”
has been cruelly shattered, and she has asked of Heaven and earth where
is the (proverbially absent) gratitude of republics. That there is no
such thing as an unshakable national friendship is as well known to the
clear-headed and well-informed French as to the rest of us. They were
our very good friends in 1777, and our love for them flamed high. They
were our very bad friends in 1797, and by the time they had taken or
sunk three hundred and forty American ships, our affection had grown
cool. It revived in 1914 under the impetus of their great wrongs and
greater valour. Some good feeling remains, and bids fair to remain, if
the press and the politicians of both lands will kindly let it alone;
but popular enthusiasm, a fire of straw, burned itself quickly out.
After all, we ourselves are no longer the idol of our whilom friends.
A fairy god-mother is popular only when she is changing pumpkins into
coaches, and mice into prancing bays. When she gives nothing but good
advice, her words are no more golden than her neighbour’s. In the realm
of the practical, a friendship which does not help, and an enmity which
does not hurt, can never be controlling factors.

Great Britain sets scant store by any ally save the sea. She has
journeyed far, changing friends on the road as a traveller by post
changed horses. She has fought her way, and is singularly devoid
of rancour towards her enemies. The time has indeed gone by when,
after battle, the English and French knights--or what was left of
them--would thank each other for a good fight. Those were days of
lamentable darkness, when the last thing a gentleman craved was the
privilege of dying in his bed by some slow and agonizing process, the
gift of nature, and gratefully designated as “natural.” The headsman
for the noble, the hangman for the churl, and the fortunes of war for
everybody, made death so easy to come by, and so inexpensive, that
there was a great deal of money left for the pleasures of living.
That stout-hearted Earl of Northumberland who thanked God that for
two hundred years no head of his house had died in bed, knew what
his progenitors had been spared. Even in the soberly civilized
eighteenth century there lingered a doubt as to the relative value of
battle-field, gallows and sick-chamber.

    “Men may escape from rope and gun,
      _Some_ have outlived the doctor’s pill;”

sang Captain Macheath to the fashionable world which thronged to hear
the verities of “The Beggar’s Opera.”

Fighting and making up, alternate friends and foes, the nations of
Europe have come in a thousand years to know one another fairly well.
There was a short time when Napoleon’s threatened invasion awakened
in England’s breast a hearty and healthy abhorrence of France. There
was a long time when the phrase, “virgin of English,” applied to a few
perilously placed French seaports (Saint-Malo, for example), revealed,
as only such proud and burning words can ever reveal, the national
hatred of England. Over and over again history taught the same lesson;
that the will of a people is stout to repel the invader, and that a
foreign alliance offers no stable foundation for policy. But a great
deal is learned from contact, whether it be friendly or inimical;
and the close call of the Great War has left behind it a legacy of
percipience. It was an Englishman who discovered during those years
that the French officers snored “with a certain politeness.” It was a
great American who said that France had “saved the soul of the world.”
It was a Frenchman who wrote comprehensively: “To disregard danger,
to stand under fire, is not for an Englishman an act of courage; it
is part of a good education.” When gratitude is forgotten, as all
things which clamour for remembrance should be, and sentimentalism has
dissolved under the pitiless rays of reality, there remains, and will
remain, a good understanding which is the basis of good will.

At present the nations that were drawn together by a common peril are a
little tired of one another’s company, and more than a little irritated
by one another’s grievances. The natural result of this weariness and
irritation is an increase of sympathy for Germany, who now finds
herself detested by her former allies, and smiled upon by at least some
of her former foes. All that she says, and she has a great deal to say,
is listened to urbanely. General Ludendorff has assured the American
public that Prussia was innocent of even a desire to injure England.
What she sought was peace “on conditions acceptable and inoffensive
to both parties.” The Crown Prince’s memoirs, which have been
appreciatively reviewed, set forth in eloquent language the Arthurian
blamelessness of the Hohenzollerns. “The results of the excessive
Viennese demand upon Serbia involved us in the war against our will.”

The breathless competition for the memoirs of the exiled Kaiser was a
notable event in the publishing world. The history of literature can
show nothing to resemble it. In 1918 we gravely discussed the propriety
of trying this gentleman for his life. In 1922 we contended with far
more heat for the privilege of presenting to a gratified public his
imperial views upon his imperial policy. Americans exulted over the
acquisition of these copyrights as they exulted over the acquisition of
the Blue Boy. It is a grand thing to be able to outbid one’s neighbour,
and pay a “record-smashing” price for any article in the market.
Certain inflexible and unhumorous souls took umbrage at this catering
to a principle we professed to reject, at the elevation of Wilhelm the
Second to the rank of the world’s most favoured author. They thought it
implied a denial of all we reverenced, of all we fought for, of all we
knew to be good. It really implied nothing but curiosity; and curiosity
is not to be confounded with homage. Saint Michael is honoured of men
and angels; but if he and Lucifer gave their memoirs to the world,
which would be better paid for, or more read?




                          They Had Their Day


“To a man,” says an engaging cynic in Mr. Stephen McKenna’s “Sonia,”
“sex is an incident: to a woman it is everything in this world and in
the next”; a generalization which a novelist can always illustrate with
a heroine who meets his views. We have had many such women in recent
fiction, and it takes some discernment to perceive that in them sex
seems everything, only because honour and integrity and fair-mindedness
are nothing. They are not swept by emotions good or bad; but when all
concern for other people’s rights and privileges is eliminated, a great
deal of room is left for the uneasy development of appetites which may
be called by any name we like.

Among the Georgian and early-Victorian novelists, Richardson alone
stands as an earnest and pitiless expositor of sex. He slipped as far
away from it as he could in “Sir Charles Grandison,” but in doing
so he slipped away from reality. The grossness of Fielding’s men is
not intrinsic; it is, as Mr. McKenna would say, incidental. Jane
Austen, who never wrote of things with which she was unfamiliar, gave
the passions a wide berth. Scott was too robustly masculine, and
Dickens too hopelessly and helplessly humorous, to deal with them
intelligently. Thackeray dipped deep into the strong tide of life, and
was concerned with all its eddying currents. Woman was to him what she
was not to Scott, “une grande réalité comme la guerre”; and, like war,
she had her complications. He found these complications to be for the
most part distasteful; but he never assumed that a single key could
open all the chambers of her soul.

When Mrs. Ritchie said of Jane Austen’s heroines that they have “a
certain gentle self-respect, and humour, and hardness of heart,” she
must have had Emma in her mind. Humour hardens the heart, at least to
the point of sanity; and Emma surveys her little world of Highbury very
much as Miss Austen surveyed her little world of Steventon and Chawton,
with a less piercing intelligence, but with the same appreciation of
foibles, and the same unqualified acceptance of tedium. To a modern
reader, the most striking thing about the life depicted in all these
novels is its dullness. The men have occupations of some sort, the
women have none. They live in the country, or in country towns. Of
outdoor sports they know nothing. They walk when the lanes are not too
muddy, and some of them ride. They play round games in the evening, and
always for a stake. A dinner or a dance is an event in their lives;
and as for acting, we know what magnificent proportions _it_ assumes
when we are told that even to Henry Crawford, “in all the riot of his
gratifications, it was as yet an untasted pleasure.”

Emma, during the thirteen months in which we enjoy her acquaintance,
finds plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. Her unwarranted
interference in the love affairs of two people whom it is her plain
business to let alone is the fruit of ennui. Young, rich, nimble of wit
and sound of heart, she lives through days and nights of inconceivable
stupidity. She does not ride, and we have Mr. Knightley’s word for it
that she does not read. She can sketch, but one drawing in thirteen
months is the sum of her accomplishment. She may possibly have a regard
for the “moral scenery” which Hannah More condescended to admire; but
nature is neither law nor impulse to her soul. She knows little or
nothing of the country about her own home. It takes the enterprising
Mrs. Elton to get her as far as Box Hill, a drive of seven miles,
though the view it commands is so fine as to provoke “a burst of
admiration” from beholders who have apparently never taken the trouble
to look at it before. “We are a very quiet set of people,” observes
Emma in complacent defence of this apathy, “more disposed to stay at
home than engage in schemes of pleasure.”

Dr. Johnson’s definition of a novel as “a smooth tale, generally of
love,” fits Miss Austen well. It is not that she assigns to love a
heavy rôle; but there is nothing to interfere with its command of the
situation. Vague yearnings, tempestuous doubts, combative principles,
play no part in her well-ordered world. The poor and the oppressed
are discreetly excluded from its precincts. Emma does not teach the
orphan boy to read, or the orphan girl to sew. She looks after her
father’s comfort, and plays backgammon with him in the evenings. Of
politics she knows nothing, and the most complicated social problem
she is called on to face is the recognition, or the rejection, of her
less fashionable neighbours. Are, or are not, the Coles sufficiently
genteel to warrant her dining with them? Highbury is her universe,
and no restless discontent haunts her with waking dreams of the Tiber
and the Nile. Frank Churchill may go to London, sixteen miles off, to
get his hair cut; but Emma remains at Hartfield, and holds the centre
of the stage. We can count the days, we can almost count the hours in
her monotonous life. She is unemotional, even for her setting; and it
was after reading her placid history that Charlotte Brontë wrote the
memorable depreciation of all Miss Austen’s novels.

But, though beset and environed by dullness, Emma is not dull.
On the contrary, she is remarkably engaging; less vivacious than
Elizabeth Bennet, but infinitely more agreeable. She puts us into a
good humour with ourselves, she “produces delight.” The secret of her
potency is that she has grasped the essential things of life, and let
the non-essentials go. There is distinction in the way she accepts
near duties, in her sense of balance, and order, and propriety.
She is a normal creature, highly civilized, and sanely artificial.
Mr. Saintsbury says that Miss Austen knew two things: humanity and
art. “Her men, though limited, are true, and her women are, in
the old sense, absolute.” Emma is “absolute.” The possibility--or
impossibility--of being Mr. Knightley’s intellectual competitor never
occurs to her. She covets no empty honours. She is content to be
necessary and unassailable.

Mr. Chesterton has written a whimsical and fault-finding paper
entitled “The Evolution of Emma,” in which he assumes that this
embodiment of domesticity is the prototype of the modern welfare worker
who runs birth-control meetings and baby weeks, urges maternity bills
upon legislators, prates about segregation, and preaches eugenics and
sex hygiene to a world that knows a great deal more about such matters
than she does. Emma, says Mr. Chesterton, considers that because she
is more genteel than Harriet Smith she is privileged to alienate this
humble friend from Robert Martin who wants to marry her, and fling her
at the head of Mr. Elton who doesn’t. Precisely the same spirit--so
he asserts--induces the welfare worker to conceive that her greater
gentility (she sometimes calls it intelligence) warrants her gross
intrusion into the lives of people who are her social inferiors. It is
because they _are_ her social inferiors that she dares to do it. The
goodness of her intentions carries no weight. Emma’s intentions are of
the best, so far as she can separate them from her subconscious love of
meddling.

This ingenious comparison is very painful to Emma’s friends in the
world of English readers. It cannot be that she is the ancestress of
a type so vitally opposed to all that she holds correct and becoming.
I do not share Mr. Chesterton’s violent hostility to reformers, even
when they have no standard of taste. There are questions too big
and pertinacious for taste to control. I only think it hard that,
feeling as he does, he should compare Emma’s youthful indiscretions
with more radical and disquieting activities. Emma is indiscreet, but
she is only twenty-one. At twenty-two she is safely married to Mr.
Knightley, and her period of indiscretion is over. At twenty-two she
has fulfilled her destiny, has stepped into line, and, as the centre of
the social unit, is harmoniously adjusted, not to Highbury alone, but
to civilization and the long traditions of the ages. That she should
regard her lover, even in her first glowing moments of happiness, as an
agreeable companion, and as an assistant in the care of her father, is
characteristic. “Self-respect, humour and hardness of heart” are out
of hand with romance. So much the better for Mr. Knightley, who will
never find his emotions drained, his wisdom questioned, his authority
denied, and who will come in time to believe that he, and not his wife,
is “absolute.”

    “The formal stars do travel so,
    That we their names and courses know;
    And he that on their changes looks
    Would think them govern’d by our books.”

Miss Austen’s views on marriage are familiar to her readers, and need
no comment. They must have been drawn from a careful survey of the
society which surrounded her, a society composed for the most part of
insensitive, unrebellious men and women who had the habit of making the
best of things. At times the cynicism is a trifle too pronounced, as
when Eleanor Dashwood asks herself why Mr. Palmer is so ill-mannered:

“His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many
others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour
of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman. But she knew
that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be
lastingly hurt by it.”

At times simplicity and sincerity transcend the limits of likelihood,
as when Elizabeth Watson says to her young sister:

“I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself;
but I do not think there are many very disagreeable men. I think I
could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income.”

At times a delicacy of touch lends distinction to the frankest
worldliness, as when Mary Crawford generously applauds her brother
Henry’s determination to marry Fanny Price:

“I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and that
even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality
and good breeding of a gentleman.”

There is a lamentable lack of sentiment in even this last and happiest
exposition of married life; but it expresses the whole duty of
husbands, and the whole welfare of wives, as understood in the year
1814.

If Jane Austen and Thackeray wrought their heroines with perfect and
painstaking accuracy, Scott’s attitude was for the most part one
of reprehensible indifference. His world was run by men, and the
ringleted sylphs of seventeen (the word “flapper” had not then cast
discredit on this popular age) play very simple parts. Ruskin, it may
be remembered, ardently admired these young ladies, and held them up
as models of “grace, tenderness and intellectual power” to all his
female readers. It never occurred to the great moralist, any more
than to the great story-teller, that a girl is something more than
a set of assorted virtues. “To Scott, as to most men of his age,”
observes an acute English critic, “woman was not an individual, but an
institution--a toast that was drunk some time after Church and King.”

Diana Vernon exists to be toasted. She has the

    “True blue
    And Mrs. Crewe”

quality associated in our minds with clinking glasses, and loud-spoken
loyalty to Stuart or to Hanoverian. She has always caught the fancy
of men, and has been likened in her day to Shakespeare’s Beatrice,
Rosalind and Portia, ladies of wit and distinction, who aspire to play
adventurous rôles in the mad medley of life. She is as well fitted to
provoke general admiration as Julia Mannering is to awaken personal
regard. She is one of the five heroines of English fiction with whom
Mr. Saintsbury avows no man of taste and spirit can fail to fall in
love. He does not aspire, even in fancy, to marry her. His choice of a
wife is Elizabeth Bennet. But for “occasional companionship” he gives
Diana the prize.

Occasional companionship is all that we get of her in “Rob Roy.”
She enlivens the opening chapters very prettily, but is eliminated
from the best and most vigorous episodes. My own impression is that
Scott forgot all about Miss Vernon while he was happily engaged with
MacGregor, and the Bailie, and Andrew Fairservice; and that whenever
he remembered her, he produced her on the stage as mysteriously and
as irrelevantly as a conjurer lifts white rabbits out of his hat.
Wrapped in a horseman’s cloak, she comes riding under a frosty moon,
gives Frank Osbaldistone a packet of valuable papers, bids him one of
half-a-dozen solemn and final farewells, and disappears until the next
trick is called. It was a good arrangement for Scott, who liked to have
the decks cleared for action; but it makes Diana unduly fantastic and
unreal.

So, too, does the weight of learning with which Rashleigh Osbaldistone
has loaded her. Greek and Latin, history, science and philosophy, “as
well as most of the languages of modern Europe,” seem a large order for
a girl of eighteen. Diana can also saddle and bridle a horse, clear
a five-barred gate, and fire a gun without winking. Yet she has a
“tiny foot”--so at least Scott says--and she rides to hounds with her
hair bound only by the traditional ribbon, so that her long tresses
“stream on the breeze.” The absurd and complicated plot in which she is
involved is never disentangled. Dedicated in infancy to the cloister,
which was at least unusual, she has been released by Rome from vows
she has never taken, only on condition that she marries a cousin who
is within the forbidden degree of kindred. Her numerous allusions to
this circumstance--“The fatal veil was wrapped round me in my cradle,”
“I am by solemn contract the bride of Heaven, betrothed to the convent
from the cradle”--distress and mystify poor Frank, who is not clever
at best, and who accepts all her verdicts as irrevocable. Every time
she bids him farewell, he believes it to be the end; and he loses the
last flicker of hope when she sends him a ring by--of all people under
Heaven--Helen MacGregor, who delivers it with these cheerful words:
“Young man, this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is
a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to
whom joy can never be known. Her last words were ‘Let him forget me
forever.’”

After which the astute reader is prepared to hear that Frank and Diana
were soon happily married, without any consideration for cradle or for
cloister, and without the smallest intervention from Rome.

Miss Vernon is one of Scott’s characters for whom an original has been
found. This in itself is a proof of vitality. Nobody would dream of
finding the original of Lucy Bertram, or Isabella Wardour, or Edith
Bellenden. As a matter of fact, the same prototype would do for all
three, and half-a-dozen more. But Captain Basil Hall expended much
time and ingenuity in showing that Scott drew Diana after the likeness
of Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, a young lady of Edinburgh who married an
Austrian nobleman, and left Scotland before the first of the Waverley
Novels was written.

Miss Cranstoun was older than Scott, well born, well looking, a
fearless horse-woman, a frank talker, a warm friend, and had some
reputation as a wit. It was through her that the young man made his
first acquaintance with Bürger’s ballad, “Lenore,” which so powerfully
affected his imagination that he sat up all night, translating it into
English verse. When it was finished, he repaired to Miss Cranstoun’s
house to show her the fruits of his labour. It was then half-past six,
an hour which to that vigorous generation seemed seasonable for a
morning call. Clarissa Harlowe grants Lovelace his interviews at five.

Miss Cranstoun listened to the ballad with more attention than Diana
vouchsafed to her lover’s translation from Ariosto (it was certainly
better worth hearing), gave Scott his meed of praise and encouragement,
and remained his friend, confidant and critic until her marriage
separated them forever. There are certain points of resemblance between
this clever woman and the high-spirited girl whom Justice Inglewood
calls the “heath-bell of Cheviot,” and MacGregor “a daft hempsie but
a mettle quean.” It may be that Diana owes her vitality to Scott’s
faithful remembrance of Miss Cranstoun, just as Jeanie Deans owes her
rare and perfect naturalness to his clear conception of her noble
prototype, Helen Walker. “A novel is history without documents, nothing
to prove it,” said Mr. John Richard Green; but unproved verities, as
unassailable as unheard melodies, have a knack of surviving the rack
and ruin of time.

When Thackeray courageously gave to the world “a novel without a hero,”
he atoned for his oversight by enriching it with two heroines, so
carefully portrayed, so admirably contrasted, that each strengthens and
perfects the other. Just as Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart are etched
together on the pages of history with a vivid intensity which singly
they might have missed, so Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp (_place à la
vertu_) are etched together on the pages of fiction with a distinctness
derived in part from the force of comparison. And just as readers
of history have been divided for more than three hundred years into
adherents of the rival queens, so readers of novels have been divided
for more than seventy years into admirers of the rival heroines. “I
have been Emmy’s faithful knight since I was ten years old, and read
‘Vanity Fair’ somewhat stealthily,” confessed Andrew Lang; and by way
of proving his allegiance, he laid at his lady’s feet the stupidest
repudiation of Rebecca ever voiced by a man of letters. To class her
with Barnes Newcome and Mrs. Macknezie is an unpardonable affront. A
man may be a perfect Sir Galahad without surrendering all sense of
values and proportion.

When “Vanity Fair” was published, the popular verdict was against
Becky. She so disedified the devout that reviewers, with the awful
image of the British Matron before their eyes, dealt with her in a
spirit of serious condemnation. It will be remembered that Taine,
caring much for art and little for matrons, protested keenly against
Thackeray’s treatment of his own heroine, against the snubs and sneers
and censures with which the English novelist thought fit to convince
his English readers that he did not sympathize with misconduct. These
readers hastened in turn to explain that Becky was rightfully “odious”
in her author’s eyes, and that she was “created to be exposed,” which
sounds a little like the stern creed which held that men were created
to be damned. Trollope, oppressed by her dissimilarity to Grace Crawley
and to Lily Dale, openly mourned her shortcomings; and a writer in
“Frazier’s Magazine” assured the rank and file of the respectable that
in real life they would shrink from her as from an infection. One voice
only, that of an unknown critic in a little-read review, was raised in
her defence. This brave man admitted without flinching her many sins,
but added that he loved her.

The more lenient standards of our day have lifted Rebecca’s reputation
into the realm of disputable things. So distinguished a moralist as
Mr. William Dean Howells praised her tepidly; being disposed in her
favour by a distaste, not for Amelia, but for Beatrix Esmond, whom
he pronounced a “doll” and an “eighteenth-century marionette,” and
compared with whom he found Becky refreshingly real. As for Thackeray’s
harshness, Mr. Howells condoned it on the score of incomprehension.
“His morality is the old conventional morality which we are now a
little ashamed of; but in his time and place he could scarcely have had
any other. After all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his period.”

This is an interesting point of view. To most of us “Vanity Fair”
seems about as simple as “Ecclesiastes,” the author of which was also
“strictly of his period.” Sir Sidney Low, the most trenchant critic
whom the fates have raised to champion the incomparable Becky, is by
way of thinking that in so far as Thackeray was a moralist, he was
unfair to her; but that in so far as he was a much greater artist than
a moralist, she emerges triumphant from his hands. “She is the first
embodiment in English fiction of the woman whose emotions are dominated
by her intellect. She is a fighter against fate, and she wages war
with unfailing energy, passing lightly, as great warriors do, over the
bodies of the killed and wounded.”

She does more. She snatches a partial victory out of the jaws of a
crushing defeat. The stanchest fighter expects some backing from
fate, some good cards to lay on the table. But Becky’s fortunes are
in Thackeray’s hands, and he rules against her at every turn. Life
and death are her inexorable opponents. Miss Crawley recovers (which
she has no business to do) from a surfeit of lobster, when by dying
she would have enriched Rawdon, already in love with Rebecca. Lady
Crawley lives just long enough to spoil Becky’s chance of marrying
Sir Pitt. It is all very hard and very wrong. The little governess
had richly earned Miss Crawley’s money by her patient care of that
ungrateful invalid. She would have been kind and good-tempered to Sir
Pitt, whereas his virtuous son and daughter-in-law (the lady Jane whom
Thackeray never ceases to praise) leave the poor old paralytic to the
care of a coarse, untrained and cruel servant. Becky is not the only
sufferer by the bad luck which makes her from start to finish, “a
fighter against fate.”

Sir Sidney is by no means content with the somewhat murky twilight
in which we take leave of this great little adventuress, with the
atmosphere of charity lists, bazaars and works of piety which
depressingly surrounds her. He is sure she made a most charming and
witty old lady, and that she eventually won over Colonel Dobbin (in
spite of Amelia’s misgivings) by judicious praise of the “History of
the Punjaub.” And I am equally sure that she never suffered herself to
lose so valuable an asset as young Rawdon. Becky’s indifference to her
son is the strongest card that Thackeray plays. By throwing into high
relief the father’s proud affection for the boy (who is an uncommonly
nice little lad), he deepens and darkens the mother’s unconcern. Becky
is impervious to the charm of childhood, and she is not affectionate.
Once in a while she is moved by a generous impulse; but the crowded
cares and sordid scheming of her life leave no room for sensibility.

Nevertheless, if the Reverend Bute Crawley and his household look
upon little Rawdon with deep respect as the possible heir of Queen’s
Crawley, “between whom and the title there was only the sickly pale
child, Pitt Binkie,” it is unlikely that Rebecca the farseeing would
ignore the potential greatness of her son. She cannot afford to lose
any chance, or any combination of chances, in the hazardous game she
plays. There is nothing like the spectacle of this game in English
letters. To watch Becky manipulate her brother-in-law, Sir Pitt, is a
never-ending delight. He is dull, pompous, vain, ungenerous. He has
inherited the fortune which should have been her husband’s. Yet there
is no hatred in her heart, nor any serious malice. Hatred, like love,
is an emotional extravagance, and Becky’s accounts are very strictly
kept.

Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in the little
house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is sincerely
happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing into his room
with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for his dinner;
she gives him Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage to warm his frozen blood,
telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked up in France;
she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for her
little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and
conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene; and
she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who does
nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but
Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the
head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric
of her social life.

The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of slight
importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try
to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous
kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities: valour, and wit,
and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling acceptance of fate. No
one recognizes these qualities except Lord Steyne, who has a greatness
of his own. It will be remembered that on one occasion he gives
Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to discharge her indebtedness to Miss
Briggs; and subsequently discovers that the amount due the “sheep-dog”
is six hundred pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay
any of it out of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not
angry at being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He
is charmed.

“His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof
of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing--but getting double
the sum she wanted, and paying nobody--it was a magnificent stroke.
‘What an accomplished little devil it is!’ he thought. ‘She beats all
the women I have ever seen in the course of my well-spent life. They
are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself, and a fool in her
hands--an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies.’”

With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal, Becky’s
case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and punished
in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded amid
life’s minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely; but
which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I hope
it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals of
fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly
from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been without
appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and pitying
observers; but Becky’s is the last ghost in Christendom whom I should
dare to affront with pity.




                         The Preacher at Large


The spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach
the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime,
but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her
continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable
and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of personal and national
smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and
poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however,
is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behaviour are subject to
geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and
triumphs in the sermon.

Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled at the
thought of a lady taking orders, or climbing the pulpit steps. She
had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Honourable
Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase of
her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently buried
in his garden), pronounced her to be “an encyclopædia of all literary
vices.” Yet for forty years she told her countrymen what they should
do, and what they should leave undone, in return for which censorship
they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand pounds, a great
deal of money in those days.

Miss More is a connecting link between the eighteenth century,
which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both
were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, “didactic with a
difference.” Addison was characterized in his day as “a parson in a
tie-wig,” an unfriendly, but not altogether inaccurate, description,
the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and
primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth
century (_ce siècle sans âme_) was, in polite life, singularly shy of
religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the
caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the
nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about
Heaven and Hell in his sermons, “as though he had been a Methodist.”

From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century
moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster Abbey, and
the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments,
and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling
against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar
extracted from him the price of a drink by pleading mournfully that
all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took easily with the
crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is
plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Henry Adams said
without feeling, that “morality is a private and costly luxury,” and so
forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.

The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is
to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business
it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two
magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on “The Vanishing
Sermon,” and “Will Preaching Become Obsolete?” I exchange them for two
others, and find lengthy articles entitled “Can We Control Our Own
Morals?” and “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life.” Now, if a
disquisition on “Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life” be not a
sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavour to
ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse
to listen to professional preaching, because, while their democratic
ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for
scientific perfection in their products “leave them not far from the
Kingdom of Heaven,” the Church, unhappily for itself, “has not been big
enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their
allegiance.”

This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go
to church--a novel and, I should think, popular point of view.
Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average
clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia,
and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects.
As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their
own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered
scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the
concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a
compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. “The faith we need
is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the
demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and
morals by going at it in the right way.” The tendency of a simple
truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism,
is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print
than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.

Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The preacher’s
function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too direct to
be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men and women listen
with pleasure to dull sermons, because they recognize the legitimate
relation between priest and people, and their minds are attuned to
receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the attention and awaken
the sympathy of a congregation honest enough to admit that dullness
is the paramount note of human intercourse, and that it is as well
developed in the listeners as in the speaker, think of the power which
individual intelligence derives from collective authority. This is the
combination which so fascinated Henry Adams when he speculated upon
the ecclesiasticism of the thirteenth century; its nobility, lucidity
and weight. “The great theologians were also architects who undertook
to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the
Church Administrative, both expressing--and expressed by--the Church
Architectural.”

With the coming of the printed word, the supreme glory of the spoken
word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for oratory as for
conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so accommodating,
that its day will wane only with the waning warmth of the sun, or
the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even under the new
dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of creeds (twenty-four
religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a hundred years ago), even
though ecclesiastical architecture has ceased to express anything but a
love of comfort and an understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds
his own. There are always people interested in the relation of their
souls to God; and when it happens that a man is born into the world
capable of convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is
the relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.

John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching
at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman’s
head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed
congregation. “But none of them cried out any more than if it had been
a butterfly.” _There_ was a test of the preacher’s supremacy. What
other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a
very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play “Hamlet,” in the
old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered
with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of
Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of
a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost.
“Spellbound” is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very
ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily broken.
Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short
of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the
business it had on hand.

That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is
a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more
bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is
full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When Darnley, new
wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker,
went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles’, that uncompromising divine
likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing
in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when
Knox preached, “he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of
it.” Darnley, furious, or frightened, or both, left the church while
the victorious preacher was still marshalling the hosts of Israel to
combat.

Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain
Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to
hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have
been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth
six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened
his return to France and to freedom.

It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien
tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world “of sin, and of
justice, and of judgment,” even from that “good, honest and painful
sermon” which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings
and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized discourse which
offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no standards of taste.
Frederick Locker gives us in his “Confidences” a grim description of
the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery.
Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary
chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic
views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, “half
apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our
souls.”

This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also indicate
the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be
satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to
be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness
of their touch and the keen edge of their humour are now preaching
thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be grateful
that we had learned to read. Who so debonair when he was gay, who so
incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so
understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never
to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it
prophesying; but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one
knows this better than he does.

The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are
happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton’s wrath
are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who have
no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most
sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the
same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton’s chosen readers,
are not capitalists, or philanthropists, or prohibitionists, or any of
the things he abhors; and we wish he would leave these gentry alone,
and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the
old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge
of life.

Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American
edition of the “Letters from a Chinese Official,” a species of sermon,
it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and
gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful
lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We
could not make over the United States into a second China. “Some god
this severance rules.” But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series
of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a
great deal of good they did us.

Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so
light-hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have grown
impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson’s sermons now seem to us a
trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did not mind
being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being blamed for
Germany’s transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of suffering Europe,
Mr. Dickinson says, “America is largely responsible for our condition,”
a flat denial seems in order. America did not invade Belgium, she did
not burn French towns, she did not sink merchant ships. It seems to be
Mr. Dickinson’s impression that our entrance, not without provocation,
into the war “prolonged” the struggle, to the grievous injury of
the Allies as well as of the Central Powers. There is a veracious
paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington’s “Penrod” stories, which describes
the bewilderment of an ordinary American boy who does something he
cannot well help doing, and who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate
or delighted father, according to a point of view which is a veiled
mystery to him. So, too, the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly
when a British pacifist tells him that, by fighting the war to a
finish, he and his nation are to blame for the economic ruin of Europe.

There is the same misunderstanding between unprofessional as between
sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful originality when
they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I see a serious
essayist hailed as “the first wholly realistic and deductive moralist”
that the country, or the century, has produced, I naturally examine his
deductions with interest. What I find is a severe, but well-merited,
denunciation of the civilized world as hypocritical, because its
practice is not in accord with its profession. Readers of the New
Testament will recall the same divergence between the practice and the
profession of the Jews two thousand years ago. It has been neither
unknown nor unobserved in any age, in any land, amid any people since.

There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More’s day, and
there are a great many clergymen preaching now. Churches and temples
and halls of every conceivable denomination, and of no conceivable
denomination, are open to us. There is something fair and square in
going to a place of which sermons are the natural product, and hearing
one. There is also something fair and square in taking a volume of
sermons down from the shelf, and reading one. I am not of those who
believe that a sermon, like a speech, needs to be spoken. A great
deal of quiet thinking goes with the printed page, and the reader
has one obvious advantage over the listener. He can close the book
at any moment without disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah
More intruded her admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her
successors betray us into being sermonized when we are pursuing our
week-day avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor
square. It is the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the
greatest living exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no
escape from its unauthorized supervision.

When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon under
a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and beginning
brightly, “What right has any one to preach?” we feel a sense of
betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church
discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour,
or a sense of humanity should debar an author from pretending he is
not preaching when he writes like this: “If we have a desire that seems
to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict within
us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the whole
self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to
be aimed at--the identity of duty and desire.” And so on, and so on,
through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine
preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à Kempis,
reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly recommends
us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though he was, he
understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of the camp, and
refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living Christians are
called, and will be called to the end of time, the church militant.

A sanguine preacher in “The Popular Science Monthly” holds out a hope
that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an adroit
application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a race
which “instinctively and spontaneously” does right. Therefore it
behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, “the
preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be depended
upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much social
compulsion.” It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton loudly
asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well accustomed to
these divergencies on the part of our preachers to take them deeply to
heart.

Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is not
his long suit) in denouncing “the diabolical idiocy that can regard
beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly”; and I am disposed,
in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I read a
pleasantly worded little sermon on “An Artist’s Morality,” being
curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or a
moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced was
the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to amend his
blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief element of discord
was his pipe. “As a thing of sudden nastiness, I threw it out of the
window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep breath of cool October
air.”

It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just
as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would
account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving
pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the
drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the
soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence
that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the
hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the
rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting
speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough
to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The
franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them.
Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and
respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they
have never aspired to commit.

“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been
men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of
expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing that he was
himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered
before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these
monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of Authors,” which is
calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from
a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to
influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played
the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf
warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies,
or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel,
this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When
religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for
morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities
of men grow feverish, and lose the “imperious sweetness” of sanctity.

If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us,
perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas
are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been
more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he
desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look
upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of
people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula
for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because
she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her
as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which
was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity.
The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only changed its
habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was
formerly the strong-hold of literature.




                     The Battle-Field of Education


Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss Bingley
defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an accomplished
woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to ease of manner and
address “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing,
and the modern languages.” To which Mr. Darcy subjoined: “All this
she must possess, and she must have something more substantial in the
improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth
Bennet stoutly affirmed that she had never met a woman in whom
“capacity, taste, application and elegance” were so admirably and so
formidably united.

Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man
in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed
by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that,
like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they
are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves
chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of
ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget,
or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated
man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not
burden his mind “for a Vatican.”

With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable
increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest
deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan
boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric
mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously
an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in
the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy,
leisure, opportunity--these things are doled out to him in niggardly
fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of
time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped
her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity.

Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and
final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of
Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias.
Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were
the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and
the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there
were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like
the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.”
Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts
of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his
master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion
of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive
conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and
the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says
Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That
they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the
graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s
thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the
human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an
athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else
shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts
of men”?

A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a
strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young
Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for freedom,
for self-development, for doing away with serious and severe study.
The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up
and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher
is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the
Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for
remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of
questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of
our educational system has recently complained that college professors
are not practical. “The undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four
most impressionable years of his life under the tuition and influence
of highly trained, greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial
incompetents, who have as little interest in, or understanding of,
business as has the boy himself.”

It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college professors
knew anything about finance, they would probably not remain college
professors. Learning and wealth have never run in harness since
Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a brave man who should
say which was the better gift; but one thing is sure: unless we are
prepared to grant the full value of scholarship which adds nothing
to the wealth of nations, or to the practical utilities of life, we
shall have only partial results from education. And such scholarship
can never be generally approved. It is, and must forever remain, says
Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble
word, essentially unpopular.”

The educational substitutes, now in vogue, are many, and varied,
and, of their kind, good. They can show results, and results that
challenge competition. Mr. Samuel Gompers, for example, writes with
pardonable complacency of himself: “When I think of the education I
got in the London streets, the training acquired by work in the shop,
the discipline growing out of attempts to build an organization to
accomplish definite results, of the rich cultural opportunities through
human contacts, I know that my educational opportunities have been very
unusual.”

This is, in a measure, true, and it is not the first time that such
opportunities have been lauded to the skies. “If a lad does not learn
in the streets,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is because he has no
faculty of learning.”--“Books! Don’t talk to me of books!” said Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough. “My books are cards and men.” It will even
be remembered that old Weller boasted to Mr. Pickwick of the tuition
he had afforded Sam by turning him at a tender age into the London
gutters, to learn what lessons they could teach.

Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets, or
to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid,
instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge of
the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and grace.
It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach men how
to pronounce that language correctly. This is an educational nicety
disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of the best-informed
women I ever knew, who had been honoured by several degrees, and who
had turned her knowledge to good account, could never pronounce the
test word, America. One of the ablest and most influential lawyers I
ever knew, a college man with an imposing library, came no nearer to
success. The lady said “Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient
Brittany. The gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself
intelligible to the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed
so frequently and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may
be held accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for
grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois
has decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant
time-worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being
“outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon children who
prefer to say “It is me.”

Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the
by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to speak
contemptuously concerning things which must be learned from books,
without any deep understanding of things which must be learned from
people armed with books, and backed by the authority of tradition. When
Goethe said that the education of an Englishman gave him courage to be
what nature had made him, he illuminated, after his wont, a somewhat
shadowy subject. William James struck the same note, and amplified it,
not too exhaustively, in “Talks to Teachers”: “An English gentleman is
a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who, for all
the emergencies of life, has his line of behaviour distinctly marked
out for him in advance.”

If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid
Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate, they
may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And Englishmen who
have humorously lamented the wasted years of youth (“May I be taught
Greek in the next world if I know what I _did_ learn at school!” said
the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be under the obligation of
expressing more dissatisfaction than they feel.

In the United States the educational by-products are less clear-cut,
because the force of tradition is weaker, and because too many boys are
taught too long by women. The difficulty of obtaining male teachers has
accustomed us to this anomaly, and we have even been heard to murmur
sweet phrases concerning the elevating nature of feminine influence.
But the fact remains that a boy is destined to grow into a man, and
for this contingency no woman can prepare him. Only men, and men of
purpose and principle, can harden him into the mould of manhood. It is
a question of character, which great by-product of education cannot
be safely undervalued even in a busy and clever age. “It was always
through enfeeblement of character,” says Gustave Le Bon, “and not
through enfeeblement of intellect, that the great peoples disappeared
from history.”

And this truth paves the way for an assertion which, however
controvertible, is not without strong support. Of all the direct
products of education (of education as an end in itself, and not as an
approach to something else), a knowledge of history is most essential.
So, at least, it seems to me, though I speak with diffidence, being
well aware that makers of history, writers of history, and teachers of
history, have agreed that it is an elusive, deceptive and disputable
study. Yet it is the heart of all things, and every intellectual
by-path leads to this central theme. Most firmly do I believe with “the
little Queen-Anne man” that

    “The proper study of mankind is man”;

and how shall we reach him save through the pages of history? It is
the foundation upon which are reared the superstructures of sociology,
psychology, philosophy and ethics. It is our clue to the problems of
the race. It is the gateway through which we glimpse the noble and
terrible things which have stirred the human soul.

A cultivated American poet has said that men of his craft “should
know history inside out, and take as much interest in the days of
Nebuchadnezzar as in the days of Pierpont Morgan.” This is a spacious
demand. The vast sweep of time is more than one man can master, and the
poet is absolved by the terms of his art from severe study. He may know
as much history as Matthew Arnold, or as little as Herrick, who lived
through great episodes, and did not seem to be aware of them. But Mr.
Benét is wise in recognizing the inspiration of history, its emotional
and imaginative appeal. New York and Pierpont Morgan have their tale
to tell; and so has the dark shadow of the Babylonian conqueror, who
was so feared that, while he lived, his subjects dared not laugh; and
when he died, and went to his appointed place, the poor inmates of Hell
trembled lest he had come to rule over them in place of their master,
Satan.

“The study of Plutarch and ancient historians,” says George Trevelyan,
“rekindled the breath of liberty and of civic virtue in modern
Europe.” The mental freedom of the Renaissance was the gift of the
long-ignored and reinstated classics, of a renewed and generous belief
in the vitality of human thought, the richness of human experience.
Apart from the intellectual precision which this kind of knowledge
confers, it is indirectly as useful as a knowledge of mathematics or of
chemistry. How shall one nation deal with another in this heaving and
turbulent world unless it knows something of more importance than its
neighbour’s numerical and financial strength--namely, the type of men
it breeds. This is what history teaches, if it is studied carefully and
candidly.

How did it happen that the Germans, so well informed on every other
point, wrought their own ruin because they failed to understand the
mental and moral make-up of Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans? What
kind of histories did they have, and in what spirit did they study
them? The Scarborough raid proved them as ignorant as children of
England’s temper and reactions. The inhibitions imposed upon the port
of New York, and the semi-occasional ship which they granted us leave
to send from it, proved them more ignorant than kittens of America’s
liveliest idiosyncrasies.

In the United States an impression prevails that the annals of Asia
and of Europe are too long and too complicated for our consideration.
Every now and then some educator, or some politician who controls
educators, makes the “practical” suggestion that no history prior to
the American Revolution shall be taught in the public schools. Every
now and then some able financier affirms that he would not give a fig
for _any_ history, and marshals the figures of his income to prove its
uselessness.

Yet our vast heterogeneous population is forever providing problems
which call for an historical solution; and our foreign relations would
be clarified by a greater accuracy of knowledge. To the ignorance of
the average Congressman and of the average Senator must be traced
their most conspicuous blunders. Back of every man lies the story of
his race. The Negro is more than a voter. He has a history which may be
ascertained without undue effort. Haiti, San Domingo, Liberia, all have
their tales to tell. The Irishman is more than a voter. He has a long,
interesting and instructive history. It pays us to be well informed
about these things. “The passionate cry of ignorance for power” rises
in our ears like the death-knell of civilization. Down through the
ages it has sounded, now covetous and threatening, now irrepressible
and triumphant. We know what every one of its conquests has cost the
human race; yet we are content to rest our security upon oratorical
platitudes and generalities, upon the dim chance of a man being reborn
in the sacrament of citizenship.

In addition to the things that it is useful to know, there are things
that it is pleasant to know, and pleasure is a very important
by-product of education. It has been too long the fashion to deny,
or at least to decry, this species of enjoyment. “He that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes; and Sir Thomas Browne
musically bewails the dark realities with which “the unhappiness of our
knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.” But it was probably the things he
did, rather than the things he knew, which soured the taste of life in
the Hebrew’s mouth; and as for Sir Thomas Browne, no man ever derived
a more lasting satisfaction from scholarship. His erudition, like his
religion, was pure profit. His temperament saved him from the loudness
of controversy. His life was rich within.

This mental ease is not so much an essential of education as the reward
of education. It makes smooth the reader’s path; it involves the
capacity to think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote
of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of
acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value.
It emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things,
useful or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the
world. Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things on
a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive accuracy;
yet they were the blight rather than the spur of conversation. Even
the “more cultivated portion of the ignorant,” to borrow a phrase
of Stevenson’s, is hostile to lectures, unless the lecturer has the
guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before him in serried
and somnolent rows.

The decline and fall of the classics has not been unattended by
controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and
nobly defended. For no other have so many masterly arguments been
marshalled in vain. There was a pride and a splendour in the long
years’ study of Greek. It indicated in England that the nation had
reached a height which permitted her this costly inutility, this
supreme intellectual indulgence. Greek was an adornment to the minds
of her men, as jewels were an adornment to the bodies of her women.
No practical purpose was involved. Sir Walter Scott put the case
with his usual simplicity and directness in a letter to his second
son, Charles, who had little aptitude for study: “A knowledge of the
classical languages has been fixed upon, not without good reason, as
the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may scramble
into distinction without it, it is always with difficulty, just like
climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.”

In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards
extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative
poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there
was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There
was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements, to
whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight. Now
that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood that
Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the best
that has been known and thought in the world.”

Against this practical decision no argument avails. Burke’s plea for
the severity of the foundation upon which rest the principles of taste
carries little weight, because our standard of taste is genial rather
than severe. The influence of Latinity upon English literature concerns
us even less, because prose and verse are emancipated from the
splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the mere reader,
who is not an educational economist, asks himself now and then in what
fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if vocational training
had supplanted the classics in their day. And to come nearer to our
time, and closer to our modern and moderate appreciations, how would
the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and the lines “On the
Death of a Favourite Cat” have been composed, had Gray not spent all
his life in the serene company of the Latins?

It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the year
1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable classicist,
left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them to-day. Dr.
Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating class of Johns
Hopkins University, summed up collegiate as well as professional
education as the acquisition of the capacity to do work of a specific
character. “Knowledge can come only as the result of experience. What
is learned in any other way seldom has such reality as to make it an
actual part of our lives.”

A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience, valuable
though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid by his
patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr. Goodnow stood
on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable students to work
along chosen lines--to turn them into doctors, lawyers, priests, mining
engineers, analytical chemists, expert accountants. They may or may
not be educated men in the liberal sense of the word. They may or may
not understand allusions which are current in the conversation of
educated people. Such conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is
interwoven with knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit
participant can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues
and concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once
heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who abhorred
being questioned) if he did not think American women talked better than
English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist gently, “they are more
ready and much more brilliant. They rise to every suggestion. But”--as
if moved by some strain of recollection--“English women so often know
what they are talking about.”

Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like
intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results;
they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander
to cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil
they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they are
least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business
Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man to see any
good in a college education, when he finds he has nothing to offer
which business men want.

This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that
the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries.
But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for
the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in feeding
from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity. When
the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,--“In a
democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the good of
the whole number,”--I know that common sense has been violated by an
assertion which no one is expected to take seriously. A life-career
course may be established in every college in the land, and students
carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and unremunerative
knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be practised in the
interests of the public. The mechanical education, against which Mr.
Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently selfish. Its impelling
motive is not “going over,” but getting on.

“It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for
education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will
dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were
over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities”
were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a consuming
passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple thing in his
day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into place. He
would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in the college he
founded, had his counsels not been needed on weightier matters, and
in wider spheres. As for industrial education, those vast efficiency
courses given by leading manufacturers to their employees, which
embrace an astonishing variety of marketable attainments, they would
have seemed to him like the realization of a dream--a dream of diffused
light and general intelligence.

We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to double
fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The elimination
of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high light, the
supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin as an
essential study leaves us without any educational standard save a
correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern languages,
and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with precise academic
studies. The scientist discards many of these studies as not being
germane to his subject. The professional student deals with them as
charily as possible. The future financier fears to embarrass his mind
with things he does not need to know.

Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and
back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters
that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience
which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student
that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a
clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain
minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man
with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The world,” observed
Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.”




                          The American Laughs


It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock--who knew whereof he
spoke--that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what,
seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a
responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”

This being so, why should human beings, individually and collectively,
be so contemptuous of one another’s humour? To be puzzled by it is
natural enough. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible
as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or angry, to say with
Steele that we can judge a man’s temper by the things he laughs at,
is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs as he loves, moved by
secret springs that do not affect his neighbour. Yet no sooner did
America begin to breed humorists of her own than the first thing these
gentlemen did was to cast doubts upon British humour. Even a cultivated
laugher like Mr. Charles Dudley Warner suffered himself to become
acrimonious on this subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated
by saying that if Mr. Warner considered Knickerbocker’s “New York” to
be the equal of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and that if Mr. Lowell really
thought Mr. N. P. Willis “witty,” then there was no international
standard of satire or of wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not
think Mr. Willis witty at all. He used the word in a friendly and
unreflecting moment, not expecting a derisive echo from the other side
of the sea.

And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the “Illustrated London News”
against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it does
not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth are
not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a
continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life to
enjoy their humorous aspect.

Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward lectured in
London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this once famous
joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say that anything
less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his Cabinet in Mr.
Drinkwater’s play could not be found in the literature of any land.
It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused our sympathy for
the officials who had to listen to it. But the American jest, like
the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it is claimed that
when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities, which, like the Greek
epic, were always subject to change, these absurdities were funny.
Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that London was “puzzled and
enraptured with the very mystery of the humour”; but Mr. Leacock,
being at that time three years old, was not there to discern this
for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell _was_ there on the opening night,
November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the mystery to be far in
advance of the rapture. The description he was wont to give of this
unique entertainment (a “Panorama,” and a lecture on the Mormons), of
the depressing, unventilated Egyptian Hall in which it was given, of
the wild extravagances of the speaker, which grew wilder and wilder as
the audience grew more and more bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven
knows, but the essence of the fun lay in failure.

Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests.
The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon to
furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their ways,
and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers were
compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital experiences they
have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes, Brigham Young was
an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds, Solomon has always been
distinguished for other things than wives. Therefore Artemus Ward’s
casual drolleries presupposed a humorous background which did not
exist. A chance allusion to a young friend in Salt Lake City who had
run away with a boarding school was received in stupefied silence.
Then suddenly a woman’s smothered giggle showed that light had dawned
on one receptive brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various
parts of the hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought
currents of the audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next
unrecognizable pleasantry.

The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh often and
without discrimination. This is what the English say of us, and this is
what some Americans have said of the English. Henry James complained
bitterly that London play-goers laughed unseasonably at serious plays.
I wonder if they received Ervine’s “John Ferguson” in this fashion, as
did American play-goers. That a tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that
human pain, unbearable because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth
may be comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to
every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding.
People laughed at Molnar’s “Liliom” out of sheer nervousness, because
they could not understand it. And “Liliom” had its comedy side. But
nobody could have helped understanding “John Ferguson,” and there was
no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre surrender to
the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the house; and
the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that this laughter
had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that she had steeled
herself to meet and to ignore it.

It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at “Hedda
Gabler,” perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the unreasonableness
of human nature as unfolded in that despairing drama. They should
have been forgiven and congratulated, and so should the American
audiences who were reproached for laughing at “Mary Rose.” The charm,
the delicacy, the tragic sense of an unknown and arbitrary power with
which Barrie invested his play were lost in the hands of incapable
players, while its native dullness gained force and substance from
their presentation. A lengthy dialogue on a pitch-black stage between
an invisible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening
nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in
the face of such tedious loquacity.

We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of
the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they
dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh,
weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations
of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was
played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia,
they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for
these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented,
degenerates swiftly into farce--into very bad farce, too, as Swift said
of the vulgar malignities of fate.

The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and
pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it,
was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and
unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary,
was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My
first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed Marriage,”
in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge
by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological
bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with
Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at
the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was
a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans.
The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage
with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father:
“Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a damned ould fool!” At these
reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying
the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and
animation. It was seemingly--though I should be sorry to think it--the
touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.

When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, “The
Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the American stage, men
laughed--generally at the wrong time--out of the hopeless confusion
of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly an enigma. The night I
saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or
anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure
what, hurled denunciations and one missile--which looked strangely
like a piece of pie--at the actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but
not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had
subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited
speaker at a public dinner, began, “From time immemorial”--But the
house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited
for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began
again, “From time immemorial”--At this point one of the policemen
who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the
theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from
time immemorial we were destined never to know.

A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-reel
comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of Americans
look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four hours. It is
not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy show, depending
on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks. Hazlitt says that bangs
and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and,
until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of
business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men
hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public
into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the
hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman
is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble
has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its
purely accidental character. As for accessories--well, it takes
more time and trouble to make a mouse run up a woman’s skirt at the
right moment, or a greyhound carry off a dozen crullers on its tail,
than it does to turn out a whole sentimental scenario, grey-haired
mother, high-minded, pure-hearted convict son, lumber-camp virtue,
town vice, and innocent childhood complete. Whether or not the time
and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that
mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and
laughter-loving public.

The dearth of humorous situations--at no time inexhaustible--has
compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed,
violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man
acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner
without coming to grief. Even the animals--dogs, donkeys and pigs--are
subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life.
Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great
protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe
from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks
into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot
down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after
she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in
air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked
up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a
circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the
producers of comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious
life” can be made to hold.

Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as
unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining
causes--why should we?--until the contradictory definitions of
philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize
its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our
pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s
misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that
laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough,
spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from strength, and
we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement
of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their
kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls,
says that the comic makes its appeal to “the intelligence pure and
simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a “social gesture” and
a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence
upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective
would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness.
Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour
is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of
mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination.”

The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as
unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they lay
down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a jest
offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any disposition
to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason
than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly
serious when invited too freely to be amused. An entertainment which
promises to be funny is handicapped from the start. It has to plough
deep into men’s risibilities before it can raise its crop of laughter.
I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a man out of a cannon,
the audience laughed convulsively; not because it found anything
ludicrous in the performance, but because it had been startled out of
its composure, and relieved from a gasping sense of fear.

Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which had
been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a married
man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which seems to us
to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not have been
regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as amusing. Boswell
tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted by hearing that
an English gentleman had left his estate to his three sisters that he
laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to a post (he was
walking home through the London streets) to keep himself from falling
to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw anything ludicrous
in such a last will and testament. Sophocles makes Electra describe
Clytemnestra as “laughing triumphantly” over the murder of Agamemnon;
but Electra was a prejudiced witness. Killing an undesired husband
is no laughing matter, though triumph over its accomplishment--when
failure means death--is a legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a
singularly august and composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and
Electra inherit their nervous systems; and not on their testimony
should we credit her with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and
unbecoming.

In our efforts to discover what can never be discovered--the secret
sources of laughter--we have experimented with American children;
testing their appreciation of the ludicrous by giving them blocks
which, when fitted into place, display absurd and incongruous pictures.
Their reactions to this artificial stimulus are of value, only when
they are old enough for perception, and young enough for candour. The
merriment of children, of little girls especially, is often unreal
and affected. They will toss their heads and stimulate one another to
peals of laughter which are a pure make-believe. When they are really
absorbed in their play, and astir with delicious excitation, they do
not laugh; they give vent to piercing shrieks which sound as if they
were being cut into little pieces. These shrieks are the spontaneous
expression of delight; but their sense of absurdity, which implies a
sense of humour, is hard to capture before it has become tainted with
pretence.

There are American newspapers which print every day a sheet or a
half-sheet of comic pictures, and there are American newspapers which
print every Sunday a coloured comic supplement. These sincere attempts
to divert the public are well received. Their vulgarity does not
offend. “What,” asks the wise Santayana, “can we relish if we recoil
at vulgarity?” Their dullness is condoned. Life, for all its antics,
is confessedly dull. Our absurdities may amuse the angels (Walpole had
a cheerful vision of their laughter); but they cannot be relied on to
amuse our fellow men. Nevertheless the coloured supplement passes from
hand to hand--from parents to children, from children to servants.
Even the smudgy black and whites of the daily press are soberly and
conscientiously scrutinized. A man, reading his paper in the train,
seldom skips that page. He examines every little smudge with attention,
not seemingly entertained, or seeking entertainment, but without
visible depression at its incompetence.

I once had the pleasure of hearing a distinguished etcher lecture on
the art of illustrating. He said some harsh words about these American
comics, and threw on the screen a reproduction of one of their most
familiar series. The audience looked at it sadly. “I am glad,”
commented the lecturer, “that you did not laugh. Those pictures are, as
you perceive, as stupid as they are vulgar. Now I will show you some
clever English work”: and there appeared before us the once famous Ally
Sloper recreating himself and his family at the seashore. The audience
looked at him sadly. A solemn stillness held the hall. “Why don’t you
laugh?” asked the lecturer irritably. “I assure you that picture _is_
funny.” Whereupon everybody laughed; not because we saw the fun--which
was not there to see--but because we were jolted into risibility by the
unwarranted despotism of the demand.

The prohibition jest which stands preeminent in the United States,
and has afforded French and English humorists a field which they have
promptly and ably filled, draws its vitality from the inexhaustible
springs of human nature. Readers and play-goers profess themselves
tired of it; moralists deprecate its undermining qualities; but the
conflict between a normal desire and an interdict is too unadjustable,
too rich in circumstance, and too far-reaching in results, to be
accepted in sober silence. The complications incidental to prohibition,
the battle of wits, the turns of the game, the adventures--often sorry
enough--of the players, all present the essential elements of comedy.
Mrs. Gerould has likened the situation to an obstacle race. It is that,
and it is something more. In earlier, easier days, robbery was made
justifiably droll. The master thief was equally at home in northern
Europe and in the far East. England smiled at Robin Hood. France
evolved that amazing epithet, “chevalier d’industrie.” But arrayed
against robbery were a moral law and a commandment. Arrayed against
wine are a legal ordinance and the modern cult of efficiency. It will
be long before these become so sacrosanct as to disallow a laugh.

The worst that has been said of legitimate American humour is that it
responds to every beck and call. Even Mr. Ewan S. Agnew, whose business
it is to divert the British public, considers that the American
public is too easily diverted. We laugh, either from light-hearted
insensitiveness, or from the superabundant vitality, the half-conscious
sense of power, which bubbles up forever in the callous gaiety of
the world. Certainly Emerson is the only known American who despised
jocularity, and who said early and often that he did not wish to be
amused. The most striking passage in the letters of Mr. Walter Page
is the one which describes his distaste for the “jocular” Washington
luncheons at which he was a guest in the summer of 1916. He had come
fresh from the rending anxiety, the heroic stress and strain of
London; and the cloudless atmosphere of our capital wounded his spirit.
England jested too. “Punch” had never been so brilliant as in the
torturing years of war. But England had earned the right to jest. There
was a tonic quality in her laughter. Page feared from the bottom of
his soul lest the great peaceful nation, safe, rich and debonair, had
suffered her “mental neutrality” to blot out from her vision the agony
of Europe, and the outstanding facts which were responsible for the
disaster.

This unconcern, which is the balance wheel of comedy, has tempered the
American mind to an easy acceptance of chance. Its enthusiasms are
modified, its censures are softened by a restraining humour which is
rooted deeply in indifference. We recognize the sanity of our mental
attitude, but not its incompleteness. Understanding and sympathy are
products of civilized life, as clarifying in their way as tolerance
and a quick perception of the ludicrous. An American newspaper printed
recently a photograph entitled “Smilin’ Through,” which showed two
American girls peering through two holes in a shell-torn wall of
Verdun, and laughing broadly at their sport. The names and addresses of
these frolicsome young women were given, and their enjoyment of their
own drollery was emphasized for the diversion of other young women at
home.

Now granted that every nation, like every man, bears the burden of its
own grief. Granted also that every woman, like every man, has her own
conception of the humorous, and that we cannot reasonably take umbrage
because we fail to see the fun. Nevertheless the memories of Verdun
do not make for laughter. There is that in its story which sobers the
world it has ennobled. Four hundred thousand French soldiers gave
their lives for that battered fortress which saved Paris and France.
Mr. Brownell reminds us that there is such a thing as rectitude outside
the sphere of morals, and that it is precisely this austere element in
taste which assures our self-respect. We cannot analyze, and therefore
cannot criticize, that frothy fun which Bergson has likened to the foam
which the receding waves leave on the ocean sands; but we know, as he
knows, that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste is bitter in
our mouths. We are tethered to our kind, and it is the sureness of our
reaction to the great and appealing facts of history which makes us
inheritors of a hard-won civilization, and qualified citizens of the
world.




                          The Idolatrous Dog


We shall never know why a feeling of shame attends certain harmless
sensations, certain profoundly innocent tastes and distastes. Why, for
example, are we abashed when we are cold, and boastful when we are not?
There is no merit or distinction in being insensitive to cold, or in
wearing thinner clothing than one’s neighbour. And what strange impulse
is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music
when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom? We
are not necessarily morons or moral lepers because we have no ear for
harmony. It is a significant circumstance that Shakespeare puts his
intolerant lines,

    “The man that hath no music in himself,
    Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
    Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Let no such man be trusted”--

in the mouth of Lorenzo who disdained neither stratagems nor spoils,
and who carried off the Jew’s ducats as well as the Jew’s daughter.
And Jessica, who sits by his side in the moonlight, and responds with
delicate grace

    “I am never merry when I hear sweet music,”

is the girl who “gilded” herself with stolen gold, and gave her dead
mother’s ring for a monkey.

It is a convenience not to feel cold when the thermometer falls, and
it is a pleasure to listen appreciatively to a symphony concert. It is
also a convenience to relish the proximity of dogs, inasmuch as we live
surrounded by these animals, and it is a pleasure to respond to their
charm. But there is no virtue in liking them, any more than there is
virtue in liking wintry weather or stringed instruments. An affection
for dogs is not, as we have been given to understand, a test of an open
and generous disposition. Still less is their affection for us to be
accepted as a guarantee of our integrity. The assumption that a dog
knows a good from a bad human being when he sees one is unwarranted. It
is part of that engulfing wave of sentiment which swept the world in
the wake of popular fiction. Dickens is its most unflinching exponent.
Henry Gowan’s dog, Lion, springs at the throat of Blandois, alias
Lagnier, alias Rigaud, for no other reason than that he recognizes him
as a villain, without whom the world would be a safer and better place
to live in. Florence Dombey’s dog, Diogenes, looks out of an upper
window, observes Mr. Carker peacefully walking the London streets, and
tries to jump down and bite him then and there. He sees at once what
Mr. Dombey has not found out in years--that Carker is a base wretch,
unworthy of the confidence reposed in him.

A few animals of this kind might, in real life, close the courts of
justice. The Dickens dog is detective, prosecuting attorney, judge,
jury and executioner, all in one. He stands responsible for a whole
school of fictitious canines who combine the qualities of Vidocq,
Sherlock Holmes, and the Count of Monte Cristo. I read recently a story
in which the villain was introduced as “that anomalous being, the man
who doesn’t like dogs.” After that, no intelligent reader could have
been unprepared to find him murdering his friend and partner. So much
was inevitable. And no experienced reader could have been unprepared
for the behaviour of the friend and partner’s dog, which recognizes the
anomaly as a person likely to commit murder, and, without wasting time
on circumstantial evidence, tracks him down, and, unaided, brings him
to his death. A simple, clean-cut retribution, contrasting favourably
with the cumbersome processes of law.

A year ago the Governor of Maine had the misfortune to lose his dog.
He signified his sense of loss, and his appreciation of the animal’s
good qualities, by lowering the American flag on the Augusta State
House to half-mast. He was able to do this because he was Governor,
and there was no one to say him nay. Nevertheless, certain sticklers
for formality protested against an innovation which opened up strange
possibilities for the future; and one logical lady observed that a
dog was no more a citizen than was a strawberry patch, a statement
not open to contradiction. The country at large, however, supported
the Governor’s action. Newspaper men wrote editorials lauding the
“homespun” virtues of an official who set a true value on an honest
dog’s affection. Poets wrote verses about “Old Glory” and “Garry” (the
dog’s name); and described Saint Peter as promptly investing this
worthy quadruped with the citizenship of Heaven. The propriety or
impropriety of lowering the national flag for an animal--which was the
question under dispute--was buried beneath the avalanche of sentiment
which is always ready to fall at the sound of a dog’s name.

A somewhat similar gust of criticism swept Pennsylvania when a resident
of that State spent five hundred dollars on the obsequies of his dog.
The Great War, though drawing to a close, was not yet over, and perhaps
the thought of men unburied on the battle-field, and refugees starving
for bread, intensified public feeling. There was the usual outcry, as
old as Christianity--“this might have been given to the poor.” There
was the usual irrelevant laudation of the Pennsylvania dog, and of dogs
in general. People whose own affairs failed to occupy their attention
(there are many such) wrote vehement letters to the daily press. At
last a caustic reader chilled the agitation by announcing that he was
prepared to give five hundred dollars any day for the privilege of
burying his next-door neighbour’s dog. Whether or not this offer was
accepted, the public never knew; but what troubled days and sleepless
nights must have prompted its prodigality!

The honour accorded to the dog is no new thing. It has for centuries
rewarded his valour and fidelity. Responsibilities, duties,
compensations--these have always been his portion. Sirius shines in
the heavens, and Cerberus guards in hell. The dog, Katmir, who watched
over the Seven Sleepers for three hundred and nine years, gained
Paradise for his pains, as well he might. Even the ill-fated hounds of
Actæon, condemned to kill their more ill-fated master, are in some sort
immortal, inasmuch as we may know, if we choose, the names of every
one of them. Through the long pages of legend and romance the figure
of the dog is clearly outlined; and when history begins with man’s
struggle for existence, the dog may be found his ally and confederate.
It was a strange fatality which impelled this animal to abandon
communal life and the companionship of his kind for the restraints,
the safety, the infinite weariness of domesticity. It was an amazing
tractableness which caused him to accept a set of principles foreign to
his nature--the integrity of work, the honourableness of servitude, the
artificial values of civilization.

As a consequence of this extraordinary change of base, we have grown
accustomed to judge the dog by human standards. In fact, there are
no other standards which apply to him. The good dog, like the good
man, is the dog which has duties to perform, and which performs them
faithfully. The bad dog, like the bad man, is the dog which is idle,
ill-tempered and over-indulged by women. Women are responsible for most
of the dog-failures, as well as for many of the man-failures of the
world. So long as they content themselves with toy beasts, this does
not much matter; but a real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his
mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration
of his moral being.

What if the shepherd dog fares hardly, and if exposure stiffens his
limbs! He has at least lived, and played his part in life. Nothing more
beautiful or more poignant has ever been written about any animal than
James Hogg’s description of his old collie which could no longer gather
in the sheep, and with which he was compelled to part, because--poor
Ettrick shepherd--he could not afford to pay the tax on two dogs. The
decrepit beast refused to be separated from the flocks which had been
his care and pride. Day after day he hobbled along, watching the new
collie bustling about his work, and--too wise to interfere--looking
with reproachful eyes at the master who had so reluctantly discarded
him.

The literature of the dog is limitless. A single shelf would hold all
that has been written about the cat. A library would hardly suffice
for the prose and verse dedicated to the dog. From “Gêlert” to “Rab”
and “Bob, Son of Battle,” he has dominated ballad and fiction. Few are
the poets and few the men of letters who have not paid some measure of
tribute to him. Goethe, indeed, and Alfred de Musset detested all dogs,
and said so composedly. Their detestation was temperamental, and not
the result of an unfortunate encounter, such as hardened the heart of
Dr. Isaac Barrow, mathematician, and Master of Trinity College. Sidney
Smith tells us with something akin to glee that this eminent scholar,
when taking an early stroll in the grounds of a friend and host, was
attacked by a huge and unwarrantably suspicious mastiff. Barrow, a
fighter all his life (a man who would fight Algerine pirates was not to
be easily daunted), hurled the dog to the ground, and fell on top of
him. The mastiff could not get up, but neither could Barrow, who called
loudly for assistance. It came, and the combatants were separated; but
a distaste for morning strolls and an aversion for dogs lingered in the
Master’s mind. There was one less enthusiast in the world.

We are apt to think that the exuberance of sentiment entertained by
Americans for dogs is a distinctively British trait, that we have
inherited it along with our language, our literature, our manliness,
our love of sport, our admirable outdoor qualities. But it may be
found blooming luxuriously in other and less favoured lands. That
interesting study of Danish childhood by Carl Ewald, called “My Little
Boy,” contains a chapter devoted to the lamentable death of a dog
named Jean, “the biggest dog in Denmark.” This animal, though at times
condescending to kindness, knew how to maintain his just authority. “He
once bit a boy so hard that the boy still walks lame. He once bit his
own master.” The simple pride with which these incidents are narrated
would charm a dog-lover’s soul. And the lame boy’s point of view is not
permitted to intrude.

Of all writers who have sung the praises of the dog, and who have
justified our love for him, Maeterlinck has given the fullest
expression to the profound and absorbing egotism which underlies
this love. Never for a moment does he consider his dog save as a
worshipper. Never does he think of himself save as a being worshipped.
Never does he feel that this relationship can be otherwise than just,
reasonable, and satisfying to both parties. “The dog,” he says,
“reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He has a
morality which surpasses all that he is able to discover in himself,
and which he can practise without scruple and without fear. He
possesses truth in its fullness. He has a certain and infinite ideal.”

And what is this ideal? “He” (the dog) “is the only living being that
has found, and recognizes, an indubitable, unexceptionable and definite
god.”

And who is this god? M. Maeterlinck, you, I, anybody who has bought
and reared a puppy. Yet we are told that the dog is intelligent. What
is there about men which can warrant the worship of a wise beast? What
sort of “truth in its fullness” is compatible with such a blunder?
Yet it is for the sake of being idolized that we prize and cherish the
idolater. Our fellow mortals will not love us unless we are lovable.
They will not admire us unless we are admirable. Our cats will probably
neither love nor admire us, being self-engrossed animals, free from
encumbering sensibilities. But our dogs will love and admire the
meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical
homage. M. Maeterlinck recognizes our dependence on the dog for the
deification we crave, and is unreasonably angry with the cat for her
aloofness. In her eyes, he complains, we are parasites in our own
homes. “She curses us from the depths of her mysterious heart.”

She does not. She tolerates us with a wise tolerance, recognizing our
usefulness, and indulgent of our foibles. Domesticity has not cost her
the heavy price it has cost the dog. She has merely exchanged the
asylum of cave or tree for the superior accommodation of the house.
Her habits remain unaltered, her freedom unviolated. Cream-fed and
pampered, she still loves the pleasures of the chase; nor will she pick
and choose her prey at the recommendation of prejudiced humanity. M.
Maeterlinck, who has striven to enter into the consciousness of the
dog, describes it as congested with duties and inhibitions. There are
chairs he must not sit on, rooms he must not enter, food he must not
steal, babies he must not upset, cats he must not chase, visitors he
must not bark at, beggars and tramps he must not permit to enter the
gates. He lives under as many, and as strict, compulsions as though he
were a citizen of the United States. By comparison with this perverted
intelligence, this artificial morality, the mind of the cat appears
like a cool and spacious chamber, with only her own spirit to fill it,
and only her own tastes and distastes to be consulted and obeyed.

Perhaps it is because the dog is so hedged in by rules and regulations
that he has lost his initiative. Descended from animals that lived
in packs, and that enjoyed the advantages of communal intelligence,
he could never have possessed this quality as it was possessed by an
animal that lived alone, and had only his own acuteness and experience
to rely on. But having surrendered his will to the will of man, and his
conscience to the keeping of man, the dog has by now grown dependent
for his simplest pleasures upon man’s caprice. He loves to roam; but
whereas the cat does roam at will, rightly rejecting all interference
with her liberty, the dog craves permission to accompany his master
on a stroll, and, being refused, slinks sadly back to confinement and
inaction. I have great respect for those exceptional dogs that take
their exercise when they need or desire it in self-sufficing solitude.
I once knew an Irish terrier that had this independent turn of mind. He
invited himself to daily constitutionals, and might have been seen any
morning trotting along the road, miles away from home, with the air of
an animal walking to keep his flesh down. In the end he was run over by
a speeding motor, but what of that? Die we must, and, while he lived,
he was free.

A lordliness of sentiment mars much of the admirable poetry written
about dogs. The poet thrones himself before addressing his devoted and
credulous ally. Even Matthew Arnold’s lines to “Kaiser Dead”--among the
best of their kind--are heavy with patronage:

    “But all those virtues which commend
    The humbler sort who serve and tend,
    Were thine in store, thou faithful friend.”

To be sure, Kaiser was a mongrel; but why emphasize his low estate?
As a matter of fact, mongrels, like self-made men, are apt to have a
peculiar complacency of demeanour. They do not rank themselves among
“the humbler sort”; but “serve and tend” on the same conditions as
their betters.

Two years ago Mr. Galsworthy, who stands in the foremost rank of
dog-lovers, and who has drawn for us some of the most lifelike and
attractive dogs in fiction, pleaded strongly and emotionally for the
exemption of this animal from any form of experimental research. He had
the popular sentiment of England back of him, because popular sentiment
always _is_ emotional. The question of vivisection is one of abstract
morality. None but the supremely ignorant can deny its usefulness.
There remain certain questions which call for clean-cut answers. Does
our absolute power over beasts carry with it an absolute right? May we
justifiably sacrifice them for the good of humanity? What degree of
pain are we morally justified in inflicting on them to save men from
disease and death? If we faced the issue squarely, we should feel no
more concern for the kind of animal which is used for experimentation
than for the kind of human being who may possibly benefit by the
experiment. Right and wrong admit of no sentimental distinctions. Yet
the vivisectionist pleads, “Is not the life of a young mother worth
more than the life of a beast?” The anti-vivisectionist asks: “How can
man deliberately torture the creature that loves and trusts him?” And
Mr. Galsworthy admitted that he had nothing to say about vivisection in
general. Cats and rabbits might take their chances. He asked only that
the dog should be spared.

It has been hinted more than once that if we develop the dog’s
intelligence too far, we may end by robbing him of his illusions.
He has absorbed so many human characteristics--vanity, sociability,
snobbishness, a sense of humour and a conscience--that there is danger
of his also acquiring the critical faculty. He will not then content
himself with flying at the throats of villains--the out-and-out
villain is rare in the common walks of life--he will doubt the godlike
qualities of his master. The warmth of his affection will chill, its
steadfastness will be subject to decay.

Of this regrettable possibility there is as yet no sign. The hound,
Argus, beating the ground with his feeble tail in an expiring effort to
welcome the disguised Odysseus, is a prototype of his successor to-day.
Scattered here and there in the pages of history are instances of
unfaithfulness; but their rarity gives point to their picturesqueness.
Froissart tells us that the greyhound, Math, deserted his master, King
Richard the Second, to fawn on the Duke of Lancaster who was to depose
and succeed him; and that a greyhound belonging to Charles of Blois
fled on the eve of battle to the camp of John de Montfort, seeking
protection from the stronger man. These anecdotes indicate a grasp of
political situations which is no part of the dog’s ordinary make-up.
Who can imagine the fortunate, faithful little spaniel that attended
Mary Stuart in her last sad months, and in her last heroic hours,
fawning upon Queen Elizabeth? Who can imagine Sir Walter Scott’s dogs
slinking away from him when the rabble of Jedburgh heaped insults on
his bowed grey head?

The most beautiful words ever written about a dog have no reference
to his affectionate qualities. Simonides, celebrating the memory of
a Thessalian hound, knows only that he was fleet and brave. “Surely,
even as thou liest in this tomb, I deem the wild beasts yet fear thy
white bones, Lycas; and thy valour great Pelion knows, and the lonely
peaks of Cithæron.” This is heroic praise, and so, in a fashion, is
Byron’s epitaph on Boatswain. But Byron, being of the moderns, can find
no better way of honouring dogs than by defaming men; a stupidity,
pardonable in the poet only because he was the most sincere lover of
animals the world has ever known. His tastes were catholic, his outlook
was whimsical. He was not in the least discomposed when his forgetful
wolf-hound bit him, or when his bulldog bit him without the excuse of
forgetfulness. Moore tells us that the first thing he saw on entering
Byron’s palace in Venice was a notice, “Keep clear of the dog!” and the
first thing he heard was the voice of his host calling out anxiously,
“Take care, or that monkey will fly at you.”

It is a pleasant relief, after floundering through seas of sentiment,
to read about dogs that were every whit as imperfect as their masters;
about Cowper’s “Beau” who has been immortalized for his disobedience;
or Sir Isaac Newton’s “Diamond” who has been immortalized for the
mischief he wrought; or Prince Rupert’s “Boy” who was shot while
loyally pulling down a rebel on Marston Moor; or the Church of
England spaniel, mentioned by Addison, who proved his allegiance to
the Establishment by worrying a dissenter. It is also a pleasure of
a different sort to read about the wise little dog who ran away from
Mrs. Welsh (Carlyle’s mother-in-law) on the streets of Edinburgh, to
follow Sir Walter Scott; and about the London dog of sound literary
tastes who tried for many nights to hear Dickens read. It is always
possible that if men would exact a less unalterable devotion from their
dogs, they might find these animals to be possessed of individual and
companionable traits.

But not of human sagacity. It is their privilege to remain beasts,
bound by admirable limitations, thrice happy in the things they do
not have to know, and feel, and be. “The Spectator” in a hospitable
mood once invited its readers to send it anecdotes of their dogs. The
invitation was, as might be imagined, cordially and widely accepted.
Mr. Strachey subsequently published a collection of these stories in
a volume which had all the vraisemblance of Hans Andersen and “The
Arabian Nights.” Reading it, one could but wonder and regret that the
tribe of man had risen to unmerited supremacy. The “Spectator” dogs
could have run the world, the war and the Versailles Conference without
our lumbering interference.


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