Most of the papers included in this volume have already appeared in one
or another of the following magazines: _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The
Dial_, _The New Republic_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Yale Review_, _The
Columbia University Quarterly_, and are reprinted here with the kind
permission of the editors.
Bitter-sweet, and a northwest wind
To sing his requiem,
Who was
Our Age,
And who becomes
An imperishable symbol of our ongoing,
For in himself
He rose above his body and came among us
Prophetic of the race,
The great hater
Of the dark human deformity
Which is our dying world,
The great lover
Of the spirit of youth
Which is our future’s seed....
JAMES OPPENHEIM.
Randolph Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, May 30, 1886.
He died in New York, December 22, 1918. Between these two dates was
packed one of the fullest, richest, and most significant lives of the
younger generation. Its outward events can be summarized in a few
words. Bourne went to the public schools in his native town, and then
for some time earned his living as an assistant to a manufacturer of
automatic piano music. In 1909 he entered Columbia, graduating in 1913
as holder of the Gilder Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year
of study and investigation in Europe. In 1911 he had begun contributing
to _The Atlantic Monthly_, and his first book, “Youth and Life,” a
volume of essays, appeared in 1913. He was a member of the contributing
staff of _The New Republic_ during its first three years; later he
was a contributing editor of _The Seven Arts_ and _The Dial_. He had
published, in addition to his first collection of essays and a large
number of miscellaneous articles and book reviews, two other books,
“Education and Living” and “The Gary Schools.” At the time of his death
he was engaged on a novel and a study of the political future.
It might be guessed from this that Bourne at thirty-two had not quite
found himself. His interests were indeed almost universal: he had
written on politics, economics, philosophy, education, literature. No
other of our younger critics had cast so wide a net, and Bourne had
hardly begun to draw the strings and count and sort his catch. He was
a working journalist, a literary freelance with connections often of
the most precarious kind, who contrived, by daily miracles of audacity
and courage, to keep himself serenely afloat in a society where his
convictions prevented him from following any of the ordinary avenues
of preferment and recognition. It was a feat never to be sufficiently
marvelled over; it would have been striking, in our twentieth century
New York, even in the case of a man who was not physically handicapped
as Bourne was. But such a life is inevitably scattering, and it was
only after the war had literally driven him in upon himself that he set
to work at the systematic harvesting of his thoughts and experiences.
He had not quite found himself, perhaps, owing to the extraordinary
range of interests for which he had to find a personal common
denominator; yet no other young American critic, I think, had exhibited
so clear a tendency, so coherent a body of desires. His personality
was not only unique, it was also absolutely expressive. I have had the
delightful experience of reading through at a sitting, so to say, the
whole mass of his uncollected writings, articles, essays, book reviews,
unprinted fragments, and a few letters, and I am astonished at the
way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor of
the man spreads itself over every paragraph. Here was no anonymous
reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing
himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in
the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the
singing line of an intense and beautiful desire.
What was that desire? It was for a new fellowship in the youth of
America as the principle of a great and revolutionary departure in our
life, a league of youth, one might call it, consciously framed with
the purpose of creating, out of the blind chaos of American society,
a fine, free, articulate cultural order. That, as it seems to me, was
the dominant theme of all his effort, the positive theme to which he
always returned from his thrilling forays into the fields of education
and politics, philosophy and sociology. One finds it at the beginning
of his career in such essays as “Our Cultural Humility,” one finds it
at the end in the “History of a Literary Radical.” One finds it in that
pacifism which he pursued with such an obstinate and lonely courage and
which was the logical outcome of the checking and thwarting of those
currents of thought and feeling in which he had invested the whole
passion of his life. _Place aux jeunes_ might have been his motto: he
seemed indeed the flying wedge of the younger generation itself.
I shall never forget my first meeting with him, that odd little
apparition with his vibrant eyes, his quick, birdlike steps and the
long black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris.
It was in November, 1914, and we never imagined then that the war
was going to be more than a slash, however deep, across the face of
civilization, we never imagined it was going to plough on and on until
it had uprooted and turned under the soil so many green shoots of
hope and desire in the young world. Bourne had published that radiant
book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the
Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of
the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of
some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come
home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility
fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the _gaya scienza_,
his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never
a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. One
divined him in a moment, the fine, mettlesome temper of his intellect,
his curiosity, his acutely critical self-consciousness, his aesthetic
flair, his delicate sense of personal relationships, his toughness
of fiber, his masterly powers of assimilation, his grasp of reality,
his burning convictions, his beautifully precise desires. Here was
Emerson’s “American scholar” at last, but radiating an infinitely
warmer, profaner, more companionable influence than Emerson had ever
dreamed of, an influence that savored rather of Whitman and William
James. He was the new America incarnate, with that stamp of a sort of
permanent youthfulness on his queer, twisted, appealing face. You felt
that in him the new America had suddenly found itself and was all astir
with the excitement of its first maturity.
His life had prepared him for the rôle, for the physical disability
that had cut him off from the traditional currents and preoccupations
of American life had given him a poignant insight into the predicament
of all those others who, like him, could not adjust themselves to the
industrial machine--the exploited, the sensitive, the despised, the
aspiring, those, in short, to whom a new and very different America
was no academic idea but a necessity so urgent that it had begun to be
a reality. As detached as any young East Sider from the herd-unity of
American life, the colonial tradition, the “genteel tradition,” yet
passionately concerned with America, passionately caring for America,
he had discovered himself at Columbia, where so many strains of the
newer immigrant population meet one another in the full flood and
ferment of modern ideas. Shut in as he had been with himself and his
books, what dreams had passed through his mind of the possibilities of
life, of the range of adventures that are open to the spirit, of some
great collective effort of humanity! Would there never be room for
these things in America, was it not precisely the task of the young to
make room for them? Bourne’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been
doughty preachers and reformers: he had inherited a certain religious
momentum that thrust him now into the midst of the radical tide. Above
all, he had found companions who helped him to clarify his ideas
and grapple with his aims. Immigrants, many of them, of the second
generation, candidates for the “melting-pot” that had simply failed
to melt them, they trailed with them a dozen rich, diverse racial and
cultural tendencies which America seemed unable either to assimilate or
to suppress. Were they not, these newcomers of the eleventh hour, as
clearly entitled as the first colonials had been to a place in the sun
of the great experimental democracy upon which they were making such
strange new demands? They wanted a freer emotional life, a more vivid
intellectual life; oddly enough, it was they and not the hereditary
Americans, the “people of action,” who spoke of an “American culture”
and demanded it. Bourne had found his natural allies. Intensely
Anglo-Saxon himself, it was America he cared for, not the triumph of
the Anglo-Saxon tradition which had apparently lost itself in the
pursuit of a mechanical efficiency. It was a “trans-national” America
of which he caught glimpses now, a battleground of all the cultures, a
super-culture, that might perhaps, by some happy chance, determine the
future of civilization itself.
It was with some such vision as this that he had gone abroad. If that
super-culture was ever to come it could only be through some prodigious
spiritual organization of the youth of America, some organization
that would have to begin with small and highly self-conscious groups;
these groups, moreover, would have to depend for a long time upon the
experience of young Europe. The very ideas of spiritual leadership,
the intellectual life, the social revolution were foreign to a modern
America that had submitted to the common mould of business enterprise;
even philosophers like Professor Dewey had had to assume a protective
coloration, and when people spoke of art they had to justify it as
an “asset.” For Bourne, therefore, the European tour was something
more than a preparation for his own life: he was like a bird in the
nesting season, gathering twigs and straw for a nest that was not to
be his but young America’s, a nest for which old America would have
to provide the bough! He was in search, in other words, of new ideas,
new attitudes, new techniques, personal and social, for which he was
going to demand recognition at home, and it is this that gives to his
“Impressions of Europe 1913-1914”--his report to Columbia as holder
of the Gilder Fellowship--an actuality that so perfectly survives the
war. Where can one find anything better in the way of social insight
than his pictures of radical France, of the ferment of the young
Italian soul, of the London intellectuals--Sidney Webb, lecturing
“with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward
children,” Shaw, “clean, straight, clear, and fine as an upland wind
and summer sun,” Chesterton, “gluttonous and thick, with something
tricky and unsavory about him”; of the Scandinavian note,--“one got
a sense in those countries of the most advanced civilization, yet
without sophistication, a luminous modern intelligence that selected
and controlled and did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the chaos
of twentieth century possibility”? We see things in that white light
only when they have some deeply personal meaning for us, and Bourne’s
instinct had led him straight to his mark. Two complex impressions
he had gained that were to dominate all his later work. One was
the sense of what a national culture is, of its immense value and
significance as a source and fund of spiritual power even in a young
world committed to a political and economic internationalism. The
other was a keen realization of the almost apostolic rôle of the young
student class in perpetuating, rejuvenating, vivifying and, if need be,
creating this national consciousness. No young Hindu ever went back
to India, no young Persian or Ukrainian or Balkan student ever went
home from a European year with a more fervent sense of the chaos and
spiritual stagnation and backwardness of his own people, of the happy
responsibility laid upon himself and all those other young men and
women who had been touched by the modern spirit.
It was a tremendous moment. Never had we realized so keenly the
spiritual inadequacy of American life: the great war of the cultures
left us literally gasping in the vacuum of our own provincialism,
colonialism, naïveté, and romantic self-complacency. We were in
much the same position as that of the Scandinavian countries during
the European wars of 1866-1870, if we are to accept George Brandes’
description of it: “While the intellectual life languished, as a plant
droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied. They
rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed
they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated,
public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe.
They dreamed that by their idealism they would regenerate the foreign
nations. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which
would lead the cause of the peoples to victory--and they woke up
unfree, impotent, ignorant.” It was through a great effort of social
introspection that Scandinavia had roused itself from the stupor of
this optimistic idealism, and at last a similar movement was on foot in
America. _The New Republic_ had started with the war, _The Masses_ was
still young, _The Seven Arts_ and the new _Dial_ were on the horizon.
Bourne found himself instantly in touch with the purposes of all these
papers, which spoke of a new class-consciousness, a sort of offensive
and defensive alliance of the younger intelligentsia and the awakened
elements of the labor groups. His audience was awaiting him, and no one
could have been better prepared to take advantage of it.
It was not merely the exigencies of journalism that turned his mind at
first so largely to the problems of primary education. In Professor
Dewey’s theories, in the Gary Schools, he saw, as he could see it
nowhere else, the definite promise, the actual unfolding of the freer,
more individualistic, and at the same time more communistic social life
of which he dreamed. But even if he had not come to feel a certain
inadequacy in Professor Dewey’s point of view, I doubt if this field
of interest could have held him long. Children fascinated him; how
well he understood them we can see from his delightful “Ernest: or
Parent for a Day.” But Bourne’s heart was too insistently involved
in the situation of his own contemporaries, in the stress of their
immediate problems, to allow him to linger in these long hopes. This
young intelligentsia in whose ultimate unity he had had such faith--did
he not see it, moreover, as the war advanced, lapsing, falling apart
again, reverting into the ancestral attitudes of the tribe? Granted the
war, it was the business of these liberals to see that it was played,
as he said, “with insistent care for democratic values at home, and
unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that
should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.”
Instead, the “allure of the martial” passed only to be succeeded by
the “allure of the technical,” and the “prudent, enlightened college
man,” cut in the familiar pattern, took the place of the value-creator,
the path-finder, the seeker of new horizons. Plainly, the younger
generation had not begun to find its own soul, had hardly so much as
registered its will for a new orientation of the American spirit.
Had it not occurred before, this general reversion to type? The
whole first phase of the social movement had spent itself in a sort
of ineffectual beating of the air, and Bourne saw that only through
a far more heroic effort of criticism than had yet been attempted
could the young intelligentsia disentangle itself, prevail against
the mass-fatalism of the middle class, and rouse the workers out of
their blindness and apathy. Fifteen years ago a new breath had blown
over the American scene; people felt that the era of big business had
reached its climacteric, that a new nation was about to be born out
of the social settlements, out of the soil that had been harrowed and
swept by the muck-rakers, out of the spirit of service that animated
a whole new race of novelists, and a vast army of young men and young
women, who felt fluttering in their souls the call to some great
impersonal adventure, went forth to the slums and the factories and
the universities with a powerful but very vague desire to realize
themselves and to “do something” for the world. But one would have
said that movement had been born middle-aged, so earnest, so anxious,
so conscientious, so troubled, so maternal and paternal were the faces
of those young men and women who marched forth with so puzzled an
intrepidity; there was none of the tang and fire of youth in it, none
of the fierce glitter of the intellect; there was no joyous burning
of boats; there were no transfigurations, no ecstasies. There was
only a warm simmer of eager, evangelical sentiment that somehow never
reached the boiling-point and cooled rapidly off again, and that host
of tentative and wistful seekers found themselves as cruelly astray
as the little visionaries of the Children’s Crusade. Was not the
failure of that movement due almost wholly to its lack of critical
equipment? In the first place, it was too naïve and too provincial,
it was outside the main stream of modern activity and desire, it had
none of the reserves of power that result from being in touch with
contemporary developments in other countries. In the second place, it
had no realistic sense of American life: it ignored the facts of the
class struggle, it accepted enthusiastically illusions like that of
the “melting-pot,” it wasted its energy in attacking “bad” business
without realizing that the spirit of business enterprise is itself
the great enemy, it failed to see the need of a consciously organized
intellectual class or to appreciate the necessary conjunction in our
day of the intellectuals and the proletariat. Worst of all, it had no
personal psychology. Those crusaders of the “social consciousness”
were far from being conscious of themselves; they had never broken the
umbilical cord of their hereditary class, they had not discovered their
own individual lines of growth, they had no knowledge of their own
powers, no technique for using them effectively. Embarked in activities
that instantly revealed themselves as futile and fallacious, they
also found their loyalties in perpetual conflict with one another.
Inevitably their zeal waned and their energy ebbed away, and the tides
of uniformity and commercialism swept the American scene once more.
No one had grasped all these elements of the social situation so firmly
as Bourne. He saw that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation
of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our
institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American
mind to the currents of contemporary desire and effort and experiment
abroad. And along each of these lines he did the work of a pioneer.
Who, for example, had ever thought of exploring the soul of the
younger generation as Bourne explored it? He had planned a long
series of literary portraits of its types and personalities: half
a dozen of them exist (along with several of quite a different
character!--the keenest satires we have), enough to show us how
sensitively he responded to those detached, groping, wistful, yet
resolutely independent spirits whom he saw weaving the iridescent
fabric of the future. He who had so early divined the truth of Maurice
Barrès’ saying, that we never conquer the intellectual suffrages of
those who precede us in life, addressed himself exclusively to these
young spirits: he went out to meet them, he probed their obscurities;
one would have said that he was a sort of impresario gathering the
personnel of some immense orchestra, seeking in each the principle
of his own growth. He had studied his chosen minority with such
instinctive care that everything he wrote came as a personal message to
those, and those alone, who were capable of assimilating it; and that
is why, as we look over his writings to-day, we find them a sort of
corpus, a text full of secret ciphers, and packed with meaning between
the lines, of all the most intimate questions and difficulties and
turns of thought and feeling that make up the soul of young America.
He revealed us to ourselves, he intensified and at the same time
corroborated our desires; above all, he showed us what we had in common
and what new increments of life might arise out of the friction of our
differences. In these portraits he was already doing the work of the
novelist he might well have become,--he left two or three chapters
of a novel he had begun to write, in which “Karen” and “Sophronisba”
and “The Professor” would probably have appeared, along with a whole
battle-array of the older and younger generations; he was sketching
out the rôle some novelist might play in the parturition of the new
America. Everything for analysis, for self-discovery, for articulation,
everything to put the younger generation in possession of itself!
Everything to weave the tissue of a common understanding, to help the
growth and freedom of the spirit! There was something prophetic in
Bourne’s personality. In his presence one felt, in his writings one
realizes, that the army of youth is already assembling for “the effort
of reason and the adventure of beauty.”
I shall say little of his work as a critic of institutions. It
is enough to point out that if such realistic studies as his
“Trans-National America” and his “Mirror of the Middle West” (a
perfect example, by the way, of his theory of the book review as an
independent enquiry with a central idea of its own), his papers on the
settlements and on sociological fiction had appeared fifteen years
ago, a vastly greater amount of effective energy might have survived
the break-up of the first phase of the social movement. When he showed
what mare’s-nests the settlements and the “melting-pot” theory and
the “spirit of service” are, and what snares for democracy lie in
Meredith Nicholson’s “folksiness,” he closed the gate on half the blind
alleys in which youth had gone astray; and he who had so delighted
in Veblen’s ruthless condensation of the mystical gases of American
business implied in every line he wrote that there is a gulf fixed
between the young intellectual and the unreformable “system.” The young
intellectual, henceforth, was an unclassed outsider, with a scent
all the more keenly sharpened for new trails because the old trails
were denied him, and for Bourne those new trails led straight, and by
the shortest possible route, to a society the very reverse of ours,
a society such as A.E. has described in the phrase, “democratic in
economics, aristocratic in thought,” to be attained through a coalition
of the thinkers and the workers. The task of the thinkers, of the
intelligentsia, in so far as they concerned themselves directly with
economic problems, was, in Bourne’s eyes, chiefly to _think_. It was a
new doctrine for American radicals; it precisely denoted their advance
over the evangelicism of fifteen years ago. “The young radical to-day,”
he wrote in one of his reviews, “is not asked to be a martyr, but he is
asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader.... The labor movement in
this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist
analysis and criticism of industrial relations. Labor will scarcely do
this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out
its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive
thought it will not be done.... The only way by which middle-class
radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly
intellectual.”
Finally, through Bourne more than through any other of our younger
writers one gained a sense of the stir of the great world, of the
currents and cross-currents of the contemporary European spirit,
behind and beneath the war, of the tendencies and experiences and
common aims and bonds of the younger generation everywhere. He was an
exception to what seems to be the general rule, that Americans who
are able to pass outside their own national spirit at all are apt to
fall headlong into the national spirit of some one other country:
they become vehement partisans of Latin Europe, or of England, or of
Germany and Scandinavia, or, more recently, of Russia. Bourne, with
that singular union of detachment and affectionate penetration which
he brought also to his personal relationships, had entered them all
with an equal curiosity, an impartial delight. If he had absorbed the
fine idealism of the English liberals, he understood also the more
elemental, the more emotional, the more positive urge of revolutionary
Russia. He was full of practical suggestions from the vast social and
economic laboratory of modern Germany. He had caught something also
from the intellectual excitement of young Italy; most of all, his
imagination had been captivated, as we can see from such essays as
“Mon Amie,” by the candor and the self-consciousness and the genius
for social introspection of radical France. And all these influences
were perpetually at play in his mind and in his writings. He was the
conductor of innumerable diverse inspirations, a sort of clearing-house
of the best living ideas of the time; through him the young writer and
the young thinker came into instant contact with whatever in the modern
world he most needed. And here again Bourne revealed his central aim.
He reviewed by choice, and with a special passion, what he called the
“epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire.” It
is easy to see, in his articles on such books as “Pelle the Conqueror”
and Gorky’s Autobiography and “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,”
that what lured him was the common struggle and aspiration of youth
and poverty and the creative spirit everywhere, the sense of a new
socialized world groping its way upward. It was this rich ground-note
in all his work that made him, not the critic merely, but the leader.
It is impossible to say, of course, what he would have become if
his life had been spared. The war had immensely stimulated his
“political-mindedness”: he was obsessed, during the last two years of
his life, with a sense of the precariousness of free thought and free
speech in this country; if they were cut off, he foresaw, the whole
enterprise, both of the social revolution and of the new American
culture, would perish of inanition; he felt himself at bay. Would he,
with all the additional provocation of a hopelessly bungled peace
settlement, have continued in the political field, as his unfinished
study on “The State” might suggest? Or would that activity, while
remaining vivid and consistent, have subsided into a second place
behind his more purely cultural interests?
Personally, I like to think that he would have followed this second
course. He speaks in the “History of a Literary Radical” of “living
down the new orthodoxies of propaganda” as he and his friends had lived
down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and I believe that, freed
from the obsessions of the war, his criticism would have concentrated
more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American
literature as the nucleus of that rich, vital and independent national
life he had been seeking in so many ways to promote. Who that knew his
talents could have wished it otherwise? Already, except for the poets,
the intellectual energy of the younger generation has been drawn almost
exclusively into political interests; and the new era, which has begun
to draw so sharply the battle-line between radicals and reactionaries,
is certain only to increase this tendency. If our literary criticism
is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is
certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the
wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are
as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of
the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his
letters: “I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art
with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so
little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood.... My opinion
is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one’s weapons
_for_ art; one must simply turn them _against_ what is hostile to
art.” That is why Bourne, whose ultimate interest was always artistic,
found himself a guerilla fighter along the whole battlefront of the
social revolution. He was drawn into the political arena as a skilful
specialist, called into war service, is drawn into the practice of a
general surgery in which he may indeed accomplish much but at the price
of the suspension of his own uniqueness. Others, at the expiration
of what was for him a critical moment, the moment when all freedom
seemed to be at stake, might have been trusted to do his political
work for him; the whole radical tide was flowing behind him; his
unique function, meanwhile, was not political but spiritual. It was
the creation, the communication of what he called “the allure of fresh
and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural
styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling and feeling given fiber and
outline by intelligence.” Was it not to have been hoped, therefore,
that he would have revived, exemplified among these new revolutionary
conditions, and on behalf of them, the lapsed rôle of the man of
letters?
For if he held a hammer in one hand, he held in the other a
divining-rod. He, if any one, in the days to come, would have
conjured out of our dry soil the green shoots of a beautiful and a
characteristic literature: he knew that soil so well, and why it was
dry, and how it ought to be irrigated! We have had no chart of our
cultural situation to compare with his “History of a Literary Radical,”
and certainly no one has combined with an analytical gift like his,
and an adoration for the instinct of workmanship, so burning an eye
for every stir of life and color on the drab American landscape. I
think of a sentence in one of his reviews: “The appearance of dramatic
imagination in any form in this country is something to make us all
drop our work and run to see.” That was the spirit which animated all
his criticism: is it not the spirit that creates out of the void the
thing it contemplates?
To have known Randolph Bourne is indeed to have surprised some of the
finest secrets of the American future. But those who lived with him in
friendship will remember him for reasons that are far more personal,
and at the same time far more universal, than that: they will remember
him as the wondrous companion, the lyrical intellect, the transparent
idealist, most of all perhaps as the ingenuous and lonely child. It is
said that every writer possesses in his vocabulary one talismanic word
which he repeats again and again, half unconsciously, like a sort of
signature, and which reveals the essential secret of his personality.
In Bourne’s case the word is “wistful”; and those who accused him
of malice and bitterness, not realizing how instinctively we impute
these qualities to the physically deformed who are so dauntless in
spirit that they repel our pity, would do well to consider that secret
signature, sown like some beautiful wild flower over the meadow of
his writings, which no man can counterfeit, which is indeed the token
of their inviolable sincerity. He was a wanderer, the child of some
nation yet unborn, smitten with an inappeasable nostalgia for the
Beloved Community on the far side of socialism, he carried with him the
intoxicating air of that community, the mysterious aroma of all its
works and ways. “High philosophic thought infused with sensuous love,”
he wrote once, “is not this the one incorrigible dream that clutches
us?” It was the dream he had brought back from the bright future in
which he lived, the dream he summoned us to realize. And it issues now
like a gallant command out of the space left vacant by his passing.
For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a
singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might
miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but
the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer
or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers
of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible,
which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his
school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible
scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him--exploits of
British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures
of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid
perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn
and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and
no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until
the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits
and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary
art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were
very hard to open--at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were
there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems--but nobody ever discussed them
or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly
_Outlook_ and _Independent_ and _Christian Work_, and felt they were
doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with _St.
Nicholas_ and _The Youth’s Companion_. It was only that Miro saw the
black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary
conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced
him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All
he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used
a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and
conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with
sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about.
Certainly the filibusters were easier.
At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the
literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and
Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the
teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said
of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the
complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not
until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume
that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture.
His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the
conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty
and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of
Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness
was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take
Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make
you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about
it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books.
But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and
vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in
the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English
classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension.
As for the dead classics, they came to Miro from the hands of his
teachers with a prestige even vaster than the books of his native
tongue. No doubt ever entered his head that four years of Latin and
three years of Greek, an hour a day, were the important preparation he
needed for his future as an American citizen. No doubt ever hurt him
that the world into which he would pass would be a world where, as his
teacher said, Latin and Greek were a solace to the aged, a quickener
of taste, a refreshment after manual labor, and a clue to the general
knowledge of all human things. Miro would as soon have doubted the
rising of the sun as have doubted the wisdom of these serious, puckered
women who had the precious manipulation of his cultural upbringing in
their charge. Miro was a bright, if a rather vague, little boy, and a
fusion of brightness and docility gave him high marks in the school
where we went together.
No one ever doubted that these marks expressed Miro’s assimilation
of the books we pored over. But he told me later that he had never
really known what he was studying. Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon,
Homer, were veiled and misty experiences to him. His mind was a moving
present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and
piercing into a no more comprehended future. He could at no time have
given any intelligible account of Æneas’s wanderings or what Cicero was
really inveighing against. The Iliad was even more obscure. The only
thing which impressed him deeply was an expurgated passage, which he
looked up somewhere else and found to be about Mars and Venus caught
in the golden bed. Cæsar seemed to be at war, and Xenophon wandering
somewhere in Asia Minor, with about the same lengthiness and hardship
as Miro suffered in reading him. The trouble, Miro thought afterwards,
was that these books were to his mind flickering lights in a vast
jungle of ignorance. He does not remember marvelling at the excessive
dulness of the stories themselves. He plodded his faithful way, using
them as his conscientious teachers did, as exercises in language. He
looked on Virgil and Cicero as essentially problems in disentangling
words which had unaccountably gotten into a bizarre order, and in
recognizing certain rather amusing and ingenious combinations, known as
“constructions.” Why these words took so irritating an order Miro never
knew, but he always connected the problem with those algebraic puzzles
he had elsewhere to unravel. Virgil’s words were further complicated
by being arranged in lines which one had to “scan.” Miro was pleased
with the rhythm, and there were stanzas that had a roll of their own.
But the inexorable translating that had to go on tore all this fabric
of poetry to pieces. His translations were impeccable, but, as he never
wrote them down, he had never before his eyes the consecutive story.
Translations Miro never saw. He knew that they were implements of
deadly sin that boys used to cheat with. His horror of them was such
as a saint might feel towards a parody of the Bible. Just before Miro
left school, his sister in a younger class began to read a prose
translation of the Odyssey, and Miro remembers the scorn with which he
looked down on so sneaking an entrance into the temple of light. He
knew that not everyone could study Latin and Greek, and he learned to
be proud of his knowledge. When at last he had passed his examinations
for college--his Latin composition and grammar, his syntax and his
sight-reading, and his Greek composition and grammar, his Greek syntax
and sight-reading, and his translation of Gallic battles and Anabatic
frosts, and Dido’s farewell and Cicero’s objurgations--his zealous
rage did not abate. He even insisted on reading the Bucolics, while he
was away on his vacation, and a book or two in the Odyssey. His family
was a little chilled by his studiousness, but he knew well that he was
laying up cultural treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not
corrupt, neither do thieves break in and steal.
Arrived at college, Miro expanded his cultural interests on the
approved lines. He read Horace and Plato, Lysias and Terence,
impartially, with faithful conscience. Horace was the most exciting
because of the parodies that were beginning to appear in the cleverer
newspapers. Miro scarcely knew whether to be amused or shocked at “Odi
Persicos” or “Integer Vitæ” done into current slang. The professors,
mild-mannered men who knew their place and kept it, never mentioned
these impudent adventures, but for Miro it was the first crack in
his Ptolemaic system of reverences. There came a time when his mind
began to feel replete, when this heavy pushing through the opaque
medium of dead language began to fatigue him. He should have been able
to read fluently, but there were always turning up new styles, new
constructions, to plague him. Latin became to him like a constant diet
of beefsteak, and Greek like a constant diet of fine wheaten bread.
They lost their taste. These witty poets and ostentatious orators--what
were they all about? What was their background? Where did they fit
into Miro’s life? The professors knew some history, but what did that
history mean? Miro found himself surfeited and dissatisfied. He began
to look furtively at translations to get some better English than he
was able to provide. The hair-splittings of Plato began to bore him
when he saw them in crystal-clear English, and not muffled in the
original Greek. His apostasy had begun.
It was not much better in his study of English literature. Miro
was given a huge anthology, a sort of press-clipping bureau of
_belles-lettres_, from Chaucer to Arthur Symons. Under the direction
of a professor who was laying out a career for himself as poet--or
“modern singer,” as he expressed it--the class went briskly through
the centuries sampling their genius and tasting the various literary
flavors. The enterprise reminded Miro of those books of woollen samples
which one looks through when one is to have a suit of clothes made.
But in this case, the student did not even have the pleasure of seeing
the suit of clothes. All that was expected of him, apparently, was
that he should become familiar, from these microscopic pieces, with
the different textures and patterns. The great writers passed before
his mind like figures in a crowded street. There was no time for
preferences. Indeed the professor strove diligently to give each writer
his just due. How was one to appreciate the great thoughts and the
great styles if one began to choose violently between them, or attempt
any discrimination on grounds of their peculiar congeniality for
one’s own soul? Criticism had to spurn such subjectivity, scholarship
could not be wilful. The neatly arranged book of “readings,” with its
medicinal doses of inspiration, became the symbol of Miro’s education.
These early years of college did not deprive Miro of his cultural
loyalty, but they deadened his appetite. Although almost inconceivably
docile, he found himself being bored. He had come from school a
serious boy, with more than a touch of priggishness in him, and a
vague aspiration to be a “man of letters.” He found himself becoming
a collector of literary odds-and-ends. If he did not formulate this
feeling clearly, he at least knew. He found that the literary life was
not as interesting as he had expected. He sought no adventures. When he
wrote, it was graceful lyrics or polite criticisms of William Collins
or Charles Lamb. These canonized saints of culture still held the field
for Miro, however. There was nothing between them and that popular
literature of the day that all good men bemoaned. Classic or popular,
“highbrow” or “lowbrow,” this was the choice, and Miro unquestioningly
took the orthodox heaven. In 1912 the most popular of Miro’s English
professors had never heard of Galsworthy, and another was creating a
flurry of scandal in the department by recommending Chesterton to his
classes. It would scarcely have been in college that Miro would have
learned of an escape from the closed dichotomy of culture. Bored with
the “classic,” and frozen with horror at the “popular,” his career as
a man of culture must have come to a dragging end if he had not been
suddenly liberated by a chance lecture which he happened to hear while
he was at home for the holidays.
The literary radical who appeared before the Lyceum Club of Miro’s
village was none other than Professor William Lyon Phelps, and it is
to that evening of cultural audacity Miro thinks he owes all his later
emancipation. The lecturer grappled with the “modern novel,” and tossed
Hardy, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope, into the minds of
the charmed audience with such effect that the virgin shelves of the
village library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon
whom these great names dawned for the first time. “Jude the Obscure”
and “Resurrection” were of course kept officially away from the vulgar,
but Miro managed to find “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil” and “Anna Karenina”
and “The Warden” and “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “The Return of the
Native.” Later at college he explored the forbidden realms. It was as
if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the
Apocrypha. A new world was opened to Miro that was neither “classic”
nor “popular,” and yet which came to one under the most unimpeachable
auspices. There was, at first, it is true, an air of illicit adventure
about the enterprise. The lecturer who made himself the missionary of
such vigorous and piquant doctrine had the air of being a heretic, or
at least a boy playing out of school. But Miro himself returned to
college a cultural revolutionist. His orthodoxies crumbled. He did not
try to reconcile the new with the old. He applied pick and dynamite to
the whole structure of the canon. Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality,
suddenly appeared to him as literary qualities in forms that he could
understand. They were like oxygen to his soul.
If these qualities were in the books he had been reading, he had never
felt them. The expurgated sample-books he had studied had passed too
swiftly over the Elizabethans to give him a sense of their lustiness.
Miro immersed himself voluptuously in the pessimism of Hardy. He fed on
the poignant torture of Tolstoi. While he was reading “Resurrection,”
his class in literature was making an “intensive” study of Tennyson.
It was too much. Miro rose in revolt. He forswore literary courses
forever, dead rituals in which anæmic priests mumbled their trite
critical commentary. Miro did not know that to naughtier critics even
Mr. Phelps might eventually seem a pale and timid Gideon, himself stuck
in moral sloughs. He was grateful enough for that blast of trumpets
which made his own scholastic walls fall down.
The next stage in Miro’s cultural life was one of frank revolt. He
became as violent as a heretic as he had been docile as a believer.
Modern novels merely started the rift that widened into modern
ideas. The professors were of little use. Indeed, when Miro joined a
group of radicals who had started a new college paper, a relentless
vendetta began with the teachers. Miro and his friends threw over
everything that was mere literature. Social purpose must shine from
any writing that was to rouse their enthusiasm. Literary flavor was
to be permissible only where it made vivid high and revolutionary
thought. Tolstoi became their god, Wells their high priest. Chesterton
infuriated them. They wrote violent assaults upon him which began in
imitation of his cool paradoxicality and ended in incoherent ravings.
There were so many enemies to their new fervor that they scarcely knew
where to begin. There were not only the old tables of stone to destroy,
but there were new and threatening prophets of the eternal verities who
had to be exposed. The nineteenth century which they had studied must
be weeded of its nauseous moralists. The instructors consulted together
how they might put down the revolt, and bring these sinners back to the
faith of cultural scripture.
It was of no avail. In a short time Miro had been converted from an
aspiration for the career of a cultivated “man of letters” to a fiery
zeal for artistic and literary propaganda in the service of radical
ideas. One of the results of this conversion was the discovery that he
really had no standards of critical taste. Miro had been reverential
so long that he had felt no preferences. Everything that was classic
had to be good to him. But now that he had thrown away the books that
were stamped with the mark of the classic mint, and was dealing with
the raw materials of letters, he had to become a critic and make
selection. It was not enough that a book should be radical. Some of
the books he read, though impeccably revolutionary as to ideas, were
clearly poor as literature. His muffled taste began to assert itself.
He found himself impressionable where before he had been only mildly
acquisitive. The literature of revolt and free speculation fired him
into a state of spiritual explosiveness. All that he read now stood out
in brighter colors and in sharper outlines than before. As he reached a
better balance, he began to feel the vigor of literary form, the value
of sincerity and freshness of style. He began to look for them keenly
in everything he read. It was long before Miro realized that enthusiasm
not docility had made him critical. He became a little proud of his
sensitive and discriminating reactions to the modern and the unsifted.
This pursuit had to take place without any help from the college.
After Miro graduated, it is true that it became the fashion to study
literature as the record of ideas and not merely as a canon of sacred
books to be analyzed, commented upon, and absorbed. But no dent was
made upon the system in Miro’s time, and, the inventory of English
criticism not going beyond Stevenson, no college course went beyond
Stevenson. The Elizabethans had been exhumed and fumigated, but the
most popular attention went to the gallery of Victorians, who combined
moral soundness with literary beauty, and were therefore considered
wholesome food for young men. The instructors all remained in the state
of reverence which saw all things good that had been immemorially
taught. Miro’s own teacher was a fragile, earnest young man, whose
robuster parents had evidently seized upon his nature as a fortunate
pledge of what the family might produce in the way of an intellectual
flower that should surpass in culture and gentility the ambitions of
his parents. His studiousness, hopeless for his father’s career as
grocer, had therefore been capitalized into education.
The product now shone forth as one of the most successful and
promising younger instructors in the department. He knew his subject.
Card-indexes filled his room, covering in detail the works, lives,
and deaths of the illustrious persons whom he expounded, as well as
everything that had been said about them in the way of appreciation or
interpretation. An endless number of lectures and courses could be
made from this bountiful store. He never tried to write himself, but he
knew all about the different kinds of writing, and when he corrected
the boys’ themes he knew infallibly what to tell them to avoid. Miro’s
vagaries scandalized his teacher all the more because during his first
year in college Miro had been generally noticed as one with the proper
sobriety and scholarly patience to graduate into a similar priestly
calling. Miro found scant sympathy in the young man. To the latter,
literary studies were a science not an art, and they were to be treated
with somewhat the same cold rigor of delimitation and analysis as
any other science. Miro felt his teacher’s recoil at the idea that
literature was significant only as the expression of personality or
as interpretation of some social movement. Miro saw how uneasy he
became when he was confronted with current literature. It was clear
that Miro’s slowly growing critical sense had not a counterpart in the
scholastic mind.
When Miro and his friends abandoned literary studies, they followed
after the teachers of history and philosophy, intellectual arenas of
which the literary professors seemed scandalously ignorant. At this
ignorance Miro boiled with contempt. Here were the profitable clues
that would give meaning to dusty literary scholarship, but the scholars
had not the wits to seize them. They lived along, playing what seemed
to Miro a rather dreary game, when they were not gaping reverently at
ideas and forms which they scarcely had the genuine personality to
appreciate. Miro felt once and for all free of these mysteries and
reverences. He was to know the world as it has been and as it is. He
was to put literature into its proper place, making all “culture”
serve its apprenticeship for him as interpretation of things larger
than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tides of
society.
Miro’s later cultural life is not without interest. When he had
finished college and his architectural course, and was making headway
in his profession, his philosophy of the intellectual life began to
straighten itself out. Rapid as his surrender of orthodoxy had been,
it had taken him some time to live down that early education. He found
now that he would have to live down his heresies also, and get some
coherent system of tastes that was his own and not the fruit of either
docility or the zeal of propaganda.
The old battles that were still going on helped Miro to realize his
modern position. It was a queer, musty quarrel, but it was enlisting
minds from all classes and of all intellectual fibers. The “classics”
were dying hard, as Miro recognized whenever he read, in the magazines,
attacks on the “new education.” He found that professors were still
taken seriously who declared in passion that without the universal
study of the Latin language in American schools all conceptions of
taste, standards, criticism, the historic sense itself, would vanish
from the earth. He found that even as late as 1917 professional men
were gathering together in solemn conclave and buttressing the “value
of the classics” with testimonials from “successful men” in a variety
of vocations. Miro was amused at the fact that the mighty studies once
pressed upon him so uncritically should now require, like the patent
medicines, testimonials as to their virtue. Bank presidents, lawyers,
and editors had taken the Latin language regularly for years, and had
found its effects painless and invigorating. He could not escape the
unconscious satire that such plump and prosperous Americans expressed
when they thought it admirable to save their cherished intellectual
traditions in any such fashion.
Other conservatives Miro saw to be abandoning the line of opposition
to science, only to fall back on the line of a defensive against
“pseudo-science,” as they seemed to call whatever intellectual
interests had not yet become indubitably reputable. It was a line which
would hold them rather strongly for a time, Miro thought, because so
many of the cultural revolutionists agreed with them in hating some of
these arrogant and mechanical psychologies and sociologies that reduced
life to figures or organisms. But Miro felt also how obstructive was
their fight. If the “classics” had done little for him except to hold
his mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous
taste, they seemed to have done little more for even the thorough
scholars. When professors had devoted scholarly lives to the “classics”
only to exhibit in their own polemics none of the urbanity and
intellectual command which were supposed by the believer somehow to
rub off automatically on the faithful student, Miro had to conclude an
absence of causal connection between the “classics” and the able modern
mind. When, moreover, critical power or creative literary work became
almost extinct among these defenders of the “old education,” Miro felt
sure that a revolution was needed in the materials and attitudes of
“culture.”
The case of the defenders was all the weaker because their enemies were
not wanton infidels, ignorant of the holy places they profaned. They
were rather cultural “Modernists,” reforming the church from within.
They had the classic background, these young vandals, but they had
escaped from its flat and unoriented surface. Abreast of the newer
objective, impersonal standards of thinking, they saw the weakness of
these archaic minds which could only appeal to vested interests in
culture and testimonials from successful men.
The older critics had long since disavowed the intention of
discriminating among current writers. These men, who had to have an
Academy to protect them, lumped the younger writers of verse and prose
together as “anarchic” and “naturalistic,” and had become, in these
latter days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of
standards that no longer represented our best values. Every one, in
Miro’s time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the older critics seemed
to have lost all sense of hospitality and to have become tired and a
little spitefully disconsolate, while the newer ones were too intent on
their crusades against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a
constructive pointing of the way.
Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an era. He and his
friends had lived down both their old orthodoxies of the classics and
their new orthodoxies of propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and
self-consciousness which had marked their teachers. The new culture
would be more personal than the old, but it would not be held as a
personal property. It would be democratic in the sense that it would
represent each person’s honest spontaneous taste. The old attitude was
only speciously democratic. The assumption was that if you pressed
your material long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable
public, they would acquire it. But the material was something handed
down, not grown in the garden of their own appreciations. Under
these conditions the critic and appreciator became a mere impersonal
register of orthodox opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his
judgments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a member
of the herd--a cultivated herd, it is true, but still a herd. It was
the mass that spoke through the critic and not his own discrimination.
These authoritative judgments might, of course, have come--probably
had come--to the herd through discerning critics, but in Miro’s time
judgment in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one
felt the original discernment, but because one was impressed by the
weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it seemed to Miro.
Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions and were
breaking through into new and personal forms, so Miro saw the younger
critics breaking through these cultural conventions. To the elders
the result would seem mere anarchy. But Miro’s attitude did not want
to destroy, it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted no
more second-hand appreciations. No one’s cultural store was to include
anything that one could not be enthusiastic about. One’s acquaintance
with the best that had been said and thought should be encouraged--in
Miro’s ideal school--to follow the lines of one’s temperament. Miro,
having thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly coming
back to him. Some would always repel him, others he hoped to understand
eventually. But if it took wisdom to write the great books, did it not
also take wisdom to understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped
to recover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with Greek
when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse of Gilbert Murray?
Miro was willing to believe that no education was complete without at
least an inoculation of the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was
transcending.
As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered where the
critics were to come from. He saw, on the one hand, Mr. Mencken and
Mr. Dreiser and their friends, going heavily forth to battle with
the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms that hurt the
polite and cultivated young men of the old school. And he saw these
violent critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming themselves
moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as their enemies.
No, these would never do. On the other hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P.
Sherman, in his youthful if somewhat belated ardor, revolting so
conscientiously against the “naturalism” and crude expression of
current efforts that, in his defense of _belles-lettres_, of the
fine tradition of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the
intensest brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because that
clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human conduct. No, Mr.
Sherman would do even less adequately. His fine sympathies were as
much out of the current as was the specious classicism of Professor
Shorey. He would have to look for the critics among the young men who
had an abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form.
They would be men who had not been content to live on their cultural
inheritance, but had gone out into the modern world and amassed a fresh
fortune of their own. They would be men who were not squeamish, who did
not feel the delicate differences between “animal” and “human” conduct,
who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorki as well as Romain
Rolland, and at the same time were thrilled by Copeau’s theater.
Where was a better program for culture, for any kind of literary
art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere
expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it
was found! Appreciation to be as far removed from the “I know what
I like!” as from the textbook impeccability of taste! If each mind
sought its own along these lines, would not many find themselves
agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell’s attempt to outline
the tendencies in American poetry in a form which made clear the
struggles of contemporary men and women with the tradition and
against “every affectation of the mind.” He began to see in the new
class-consciousness of poets the ending of that old division which
“culture” made between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were
now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar
temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up
became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that
perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness
towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his
shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with
the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence.
Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting
the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might
be better to write for one’s own band of comprehenders, in order that
one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob
of the “bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals who had been dividing
the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely
self-conscious groups than the issues that had filled _The Atlantic_
and _The Nation_ with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the
mind that aspired towards “culture” to be told not to conform or
worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community
of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic
contact.
It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of
other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these
days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt
more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they
did with the variegated “prominent authors” of their own land. Winston
Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybashev.
The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of
its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it
had imported its alien culture in the form of “comparative literature.”
It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox
canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in
getting the proper rank and reverence for what he borrowed. The new
critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want
to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is
nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The
American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He
cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in
which he is saturated, with its questions and its colors, can be the
material for his art. But he can be international--and must be--in the
sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a “young world,”
and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and
revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.
Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending
will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The
last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that “classic”
which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in
overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which
was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It
will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future
he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls “inventing a usable
past.” Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted
with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of
bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and
Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal
human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build
out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality
with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of
the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out
into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of _The Masses_ group
a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals
following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekhov, he smiles at the thought
of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they
are dead.
It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation
immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a
goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world.
To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the
master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our
minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,--here
was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of
culture had been lost. And it was an ideal that appealed with peculiar
force to Americans. For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had
the energy and perseverance could reasonably expect to acquire by
taking thought that orientation of soul to which Arnold gave the magic
name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was a matter
of acquisition--with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still
a matter of adding little by little to one’s store until one should
have a vision of that radiant limit, when one knew all the best that
had been thought and said and pictured in the world.
I do not know in just what way the British public responded to Arnold’s
eloquence; if the prophetic wrath of Ruskin failed to stir them, it is
not probable that they were moved by the persuasiveness of Arnold. But
I do know that, coming at a time when America was producing rapidly an
enormous number of people who were “comfortably off,” as the phrase
goes, and who were sufficiently awake to feel their limitations, with
the broader horizons of Europe just opening on the view, the new
doctrine had the most decisive effect on our succeeding spiritual
history. The “land-of-liberty” American of the era of Dickens still
exists in the British weeklies and in observations of America by callow
young journalists, but as a living species he has long been extinct.
His place has been taken by a person whose pride is measured not by
the greatness of the “land of the free,” but by his own orientation in
Europe.
Already in the nineties, our college professors and our artists were
beginning to require the seal of a European training to justify
their existence. We appropriated the German system of education.
Our millionaires began the collecting of pictures and the endowment
of museums with foreign works of art. We began the exportation of
school-teachers for a summer tour of Europe. American art and music
colonies sprang up in Paris and Berlin and Munich. The movement became
a rush. That mystical premonition of Europe, which Henry James tells
us he had from his earliest boyhood, became the common property of the
talented young American, who felt a certain starvation in his own land,
and longed for the fleshpots of European culture. But the bourgeoisie
soon followed the artistic and the semi-artistic, and Europe became so
much the fashion that it is now almost a test of respectability to have
traveled at least once abroad.
Underlying all this vivacious emigration, there was of course a real
if vague thirst for “culture,” and, in strict accord with Arnold’s
definition, the idea that somehow culture could be imbibed, that from
the contact with the treasures of Europe there would be rubbed off
on us a little of that grace which had made the art. So for those
who could not travel abroad, our millionaires transported, in almost
terrifying bulk and at staggering cost, samples of everything that the
foreign galleries had to show. We were to acquire culture at any cost,
and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We
followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally
sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some
sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at
their heels.
This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe.
In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated
breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or
Browning, is always cause for amusement. And the Frenchman is always a
little puzzled at the crowds who attend lectures in Paris on “How to
See Europe Intelligently,” or are taken in vast parties through the
Louvre. The European objects a little to being so constantly regarded
as the keeper of a huge museum. If you speak to him of culture, you
find him frankly more interested in contemporaneous literature and art
and music than in his worthies of the olden time, more interested
in discriminating the good of to-day than in accepting the classics.
If he is a cultivated person, he is much more interested usually in
quarreling about a living dog than in reverencing a dead lion. If he
is a French _lettré_, for instance, he will be producing a book on
the psychology of some living writer, while the Anglo-Saxon will be
writing another on Shakespeare. His whole attitude towards the things
of culture, be it noted, is one of daily appreciation and intimacy, not
that attitude of reverence with which we Americans approach alien art,
and which penalizes cultural heresy among us.
The European may be enthusiastic, polemic, radiant, concerning his
culture; he is never humble. And he is, above all, never humble before
the culture of another country. The Frenchman will hear nothing but
French music, read nothing but French literature, and prefers his own
art to that of any other nation. He can hardly understand our almost
pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our
humility of worship in the presence of art that in no sense represents
the expression of any of our ideals and motivating forces.
To a genuinely patriotic American this cultural humility of ours is
somewhat humiliating. In response to this eager inexhaustible interest
in Europe, where is Europe’s interest in us? Europe is to us the land
of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the
best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the
land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires
and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness
to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of
thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does
he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? Not at
all. Our humility has kept us from forcing it upon his attention, and
it scarcely exists for him. Our advertising genius, so powerful and
universal where soap and biscuits are concerned, wilts and languishes
before the task of trumpeting our intellectual and spiritual products
before the world. Yet there can be little doubt which is the more
intrinsically worth advertising. But our humility causes us to be taken
at our own face value, and for all this patient fixity of gaze upon
Europe, we get little reward except to be ignored, or to have our
interest somewhat contemptuously dismissed as parasitic.
And with justice! For our very goal and ideal of culture has made us
parasites. Our method has been exactly wrong. For the truth is that the
definition of culture, which we have accepted with such devastating
enthusiasm, is a definition emanating from that very barbarism from
which its author recoiled in such horror. If it were not that all our
attitude showed that we had adopted a quite different standard, it
would be the merest platitude to say that culture is not an acquired
familiarity with things outside, but an inner and constantly operating
taste, a fresh and responsive power of discrimination, and the
insistent judging of everything that comes to our minds and senses. It
is clear that such a sensitive taste cannot be acquired by torturing
our appreciations into conformity with the judgments of others, no
matter how “authoritative” those judgments may be. Such a method means
a hypnotization of judgment, not a true development of soul.
At the back of Arnold’s definition is, of course, the implication
that if we have only learned to appreciate the “best,” we shall have
been trained thus to discriminate generally, that our appreciation of
Shakespeare will somehow spill over into admiration of the incomparable
art of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson. This is, of course, exactly to reverse
the psychological process. A true appreciation of the remote and
the magnificent is acquired only after the judgment has learned to
discriminate with accuracy and taste between the good and bad, the
sincere and the false, of the familiar and contemporaneous art and
writing of every day. To set up an alien standard of the classics is
merely to give our lazy taste a resting-point, and to prevent forever
any genuine culture.
This virus of the “best” rages throughout all our Anglo-Saxon campaign
for culture. Is it not a notorious fact that our professors of English
literature make no attempt to judge the work produced since the death
of the last consecrated saint of the literary canon,--Robert Louis
Stevenson? In strict accordance with Arnold’s doctrine, they are
waiting for the judgment upon our contemporaries which they call the
test of time, that is, an authoritative objective judgment, upon which
they can unquestioningly rely. Surely it seems as if the principle of
authority, having been ousted from religion and politics, had found
a strong refuge in the sphere of culture. This tyranny of the “best”
objectifies all our taste. It is a “best” that is always outside of
our native reactions to the freshnesses and sincerities of life, a
“best” to which our spontaneities must be disciplined. By fixing our
eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we
effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only
sincere “culture.”
Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the
chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous
culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not
necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other
nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from
such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. But we have passed
through that period of learning, and it is time for us now to set up
our individual standards. We are already “heir of all the ages” through
our English ancestry, and our last half-century of European idolatry
has done for us all that can be expected. But, with our eyes fixed
on Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs
up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative
need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment?
Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our
cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard,
we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign
countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require
the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates.
The only remedy for this deplorable situation is the cultivation of
a new American nationalism. We need that keen introspection into the
beauties and vitalities and sincerities of our own life and ideals that
characterizes the French. The French culture is animated by principles
and tastes which are as old as art itself. There are “classics,”
not in the English and Arnoldian sense of a consecrated canon,
dissent from which is heresy, but in the sense that each successive
generation, putting them to the test, finds them redolent of those
qualities which are characteristically French, and so preserves them
as a precious heritage. This cultural chauvinism is the most harmless
of patriotisms; indeed it is absolutely necessary for a true life of
civilization. And it can hardly be too intense, or too exaggerated.
Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York,
with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad
they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling
degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other
country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us
feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at
our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in
quantity, if we would only see it.
In the contemporary talent that Europe is exhibiting, or even in the
genius of the last half-century, one will go far to find greater poets
than our Walt Whitman, philosophers than William James, essayists
than Emerson and Thoreau, composers than MacDowell, sculptors than
Saint-Gaudens. In any other country such names would be focuses to
which interest and enthusiasms would converge, symbols of a national
spirit about which judgments and tastes would revolve. For none of
them could have been born in another country than our own. If some of
them had their training abroad, it was still the indigenous America
that their works expressed,--the American ideals and qualities, our
pulsating democracy, the vigor and daring of our pioneer spirit, our
sense of _camaraderie_, our dynamism, the big-heartedness of our
scenery, our hospitality to all the world. In the music of MacDowell,
the poetry of Whitman, the philosophy of James, I recognize a national
spirit, “l’esprit américain,” as superbly clear and gripping as
anything the culture of Europe has to offer us, and immensely more
stimulating, because of the very body and soul of to-day’s interests
and aspirations.
To come to an intense self-consciousness of these qualities, to
feel them in the work of these masters, and to search for them
everywhere among the lesser artists and thinkers who are trying to
express the soul of this hot chaos of America,--this will be the
attainment of culture for us. Not to look on ravished while our
marvelous millionaires fill our museums with “old masters,” armor, and
porcelains, but to turn our eyes upon our own art for a time, shut
ourselves in with our own genius, and cultivate with an intense and
partial pride what we have already achieved against the obstacles of
our cultural humility. Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit
and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our
strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures
of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We
shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art
and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in
terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of
heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in
foreign galleries and books? When shall we learn to be proud? For only
pride is creative.
Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be
than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her
inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be
articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but
there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity
were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling
to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she
was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant
shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against
your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of
your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber
irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt
her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become
bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna
which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights
glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in
her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of
your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to
some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this
fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.
I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come
for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her
living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and
I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin
intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to
the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at
her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft
intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several
nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write
novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded
anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting
detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her
writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay,
and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your
soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable
false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my
interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport
between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make
up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly
George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove
adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult
in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking
over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of
epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their
hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy
the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth
working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines.
You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at
you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation
was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then
you quarreled.
When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would
always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for
herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite
likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would
not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world
in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make
for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant
journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education,
the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to
appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer
and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her,
that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even
if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured.
It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so
subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more
brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support.
She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If
you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always
bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She
would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a
fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood,
and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were
tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of
personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but
you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul,
and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.
I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic.
She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of
the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an
“affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much
interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama
of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever
hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow
copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would
have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate
for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch
of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite
intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal
virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious
she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an
impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her
up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who
violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of
playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared.
Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had
a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex,
her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be
breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.
Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged
against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could
rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness
and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she
spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for
them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen,
a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various
repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain
people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.”
They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been
impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual
ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness.
But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a
mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.
Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men.
She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they
slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end
of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state
suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and
serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had
affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She
felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the
exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate
from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke
of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.
When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken
up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted
world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had
seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old
annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would
have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done
little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely
conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way,
was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any
one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not
acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe
that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity.
Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been
spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the
women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly
discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in
to be mystically mingled with her circle.
Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern.
Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine
tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these
married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has
become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of
these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied
themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the
victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle,
inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of
woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they
see jealously adoring their wives.
Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but
it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to
say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and
she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by
means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives
without them.
I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined
her against the background of that impeccable New England town from
which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with
houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching
away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large
princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine
nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those
pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people.
This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid
of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals.
Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within.
Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands,
while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of
sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife
never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I
think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the
things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.
Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than
she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated
her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was
her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who
exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap
them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged
childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly
homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.
No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the
chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should
unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures
you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without
the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college,
where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct
towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven
above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste.
She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English
literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere
an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has
probably forgotten herself.
For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin
stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been
invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who
desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of
the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little
teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position
with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the
dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate
her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is
the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can
be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling
freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an
indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very
hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game
with the odds against them.
I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years,
and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives
into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by
a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the
great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed
checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down
with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off,
and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of
weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and
book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should
like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness,
and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to
disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more
subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.
There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine
Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in
vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of
wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots
to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous
action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article
an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work
from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy.
Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of
writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One
would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But
her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no
sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice
that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the
twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound
interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner
group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio
in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York
will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is
going to be bright.
How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience
and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons
than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have
lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the
Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the
terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness
still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as
good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold
feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New
England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance.
In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of
the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba.
These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings
after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses
into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her
personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her
to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly
to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she
sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably
abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What
Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated
into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before
journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often
give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of
her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus
sent flying.
Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a
self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the
white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil
shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her
own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life
which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make
Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent
reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained
down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or
a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries
of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them
are.
Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the
subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very
tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But
she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound
depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious
of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a
symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried
woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to
mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality
about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring,
and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto.
To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which
must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have
made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful
bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.
She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but
she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine.
She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend
Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of
ideals.
She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom
is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person
who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately,
with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than
mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a
young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was
nineteen and had just completed her studies.
These studies formed a useful introduction when she received me in
the little old-fashioned apartment in the Batignolles quarter on my
first visit. She had made them ever since she was five years old in
a wonderful old convent at Bourges; and in the town had lived her
grandmother, a very old lady, whom she had gone lovingly to see, as
often as she could be away from the watchful care of the nuns. In
her she had found her real mother, for her parents had been far away
in Brittany. When the old lady died, my friend had to face an empty
world, and to become acquainted all over again with a mother whom
she confessed she found “little sympathetic.” But she was a girl of
_devoir_, and she would do nothing to wound her.
She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky
richness of the Musée Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed
to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and
how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother’s
eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to
postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the
beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that
wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized
by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which
runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away
from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the
patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father’s people had been
sea-folk,--not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and
niggardly shores,--and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was
in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the
Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful
articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of
Cottet and Breton and Carrière. She understood these people.
But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the
profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The
fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but
her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from
some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we
abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of
ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I
explored at will.
I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied
that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She
scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said,
but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for
books, which she adored.
She believed in God. “Et le théâtre!” I said, which delighted her
hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and
cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas
outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and
Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and
its dogmas?
She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened
Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying
his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it
might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that
“enfants de cinq ans” afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid
intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata
of equivocation and compromise.
Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical
road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still
believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,--she told
me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases
squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest
in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess
to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was
odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She
would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist,
though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy
water as we entered Notre Dame one day.
Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?--Oh, they were
all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them?
This amazing soul of modern France!--which pervades even the walls of
convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of
the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just
as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without
hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear
life to be lived.
Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found
her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly
and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all
my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions.
How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she
passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so
freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her
answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that
at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been
settled: “_Je me permets!_”--I allow myself. She gave me to understand
that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no
longer any question of her “living her life”--_vivre sa vie_. And she
really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless
trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality.
As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the
adventure of life. But she knew what was there.
The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see
her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic
ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was
of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in
this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her
glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling
and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too
palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger
generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so
beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant
that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of
intricacies avoided.
In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one
afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli,
where normal Britishers were reading _Punch_ and the _Spectator_
over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the
hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families
and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her
dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British
atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like
flame with which she burned.
As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the
iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocadéro, our
friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of
following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating
my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was
the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about
God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social
currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been
immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same
interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life
which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something
effective against the misery of poverty.
I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and
in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood--of all
places!--on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching
story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and
her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity
accomplished very much, and flamed at the word “Socialism,” although
she had not yet had its program made very clear to her.
But mostly she was feminist,--an ardent disciple in that singularly
uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so
practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that
liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes,
is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was
a cardinal dogma in my friend’s faith. She was already taking a
secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living;
and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career.
Marriage was in considerable disfavor; it had still the taint of the
Church upon it, while the civil marriage seemed, with the only recently
surrendered necessary parental consent, to mark the subjection of the
younger to the older generation. These barriers were now removed, but
the evil savor of the institution lingered on. My friend, like all the
French intellectuals, was all for the “union libre,” but it would have
to be loyal unto death. It was all the more inspiring as an ideal,
because it would be perhaps hard to obtain. Men, she was inclined to
think, were usually _malhonnête_, but she might find some day a man of
complete sympathy and complete loyalty. But she did not care. Life was
life, freedom was freedom, and the glory of being a woman in the modern
world was enough for her.
The French situation was perhaps quite as bad as it was pictured.
Friendship between a girl and a young man was almost impossible.
It was that they usually wished to love her. She did not mind them
on the streets. The students--oh, the students!--were frightfully
annoying; but perhaps one gave a _gifle_ and passed rapidly on. Her
parents, before she had become genuinely the captain of her soul, had
tried to marry her off in the orthodox French way. She had had four
proposals. Risking the clean candor of the French soul, I became
curious and audacious. So she dramatized for me, without a trace of
self-consciousness, a wonderful little scene of provincial manners.
The stiff young Frenchman making his stilted offer, her self-possessed
reluctance, her final refusal, were given in inimitable style. These
incidents, which in the life of a little American _bourgeoise_ would
have been crises or triumphs, and, at any rate, unutterably hoarded
secrets, were given with a cold frankness which showed refreshingly to
what insignificance marriage was relegated in her life. She wished, she
said, to _vivre sa vie_--to live her life. If marriage fitted in with
her living of her life, it might take her. It should never submerge
or deflect her. Countless Frenchwomen, in defiance of the strident
Anglo-Saxon belief, were able both to keep a household and to earn
their own living; and why not she also? She would always be free; and
her black eyes burned as they looked out so fearlessly into a world
that was to be all hers, because she expected nothing from it.
About this world, she had few illusions. To its worldlinesses and
glitter she showed really a superb indifference. I brutally tried to
trap her into a confession that she spurned it only because it might
be closed to her through lack of money or prestige. Her eloquent eyes
almost slew me with vivacious denial. She despised these “dolls” whose
only business in life was to wear clothes. Her own sober black was
not affectation, but only her way of showing that she was more than a
_poupée_. She did not say it, but I quite appreciated, and I knew well
that she knew, how charming a _poupée_ she might have made.
Several of her friends were gay and worldly. She spoke of them with
charming frankness, touching off, with a tone quite clean of malice,
all their little worthlessnesses and futilities. Some of this world,
indeed, shaded off into unimaginable _nuances_, but she was wholly
aware of its significance. In the inimitable French way, she disdained
to use its errors as a lever to elevate her own virtues.
Her blazing candor lighted up for me every part of her world. We
skirted abysses, but the language helped us wonderfully through. French
has worn tracks in so many fields of experience where English blunders
either boorishly or sentimentally. French is made for illumination and
clear expression; it has kept its purity and crispness and can express,
without shamefacedness or bungling, attitudes and interpretations which
the Anglo-Saxon fatuously hides.
My friend was dimly sensible of some such contrast. I think she had
as much difficulty in making me out as I had in making her out.
She was very curious as to how she compared with American girls.
She had once met one but had found her, though not a doll, yet not
_sympathique_ and little understandable. I had to tell my friend how
untranslatable she was. The Anglo-Saxon, I had to tell her, was apt to
be either a schoolchild or a middle-aged person. To the first, ideas
were strange and disturbing. To the second, they were a nuisance and
a bore. I almost assured her that in America she would be considered
a quite horrible portent. Her brimming idealism would make everybody
uncomfortable. The sensual delight which she took in thinking, the way
her ideas were all warmly felt and her feelings luminously expressed,
would adapt her badly to a world of school-children and tired business
men. I tried to go over for her the girls of her age whom I had
known. How charming they were to be sure, but, even when they had
ideas, how strangely inarticulate they sometimes were, and, if they
were articulate, how pedantic and priggish they seemed to the world
about them! And what forests of reticences and exaggerated values
there were, and curious illogicalities. How jealous they were of their
personalities, and what a suspicious and individualistic guard they
kept over their candor and sincerities! I was very gay and perhaps a
little cruel.
She listened eagerly, but I think she did not quite understand. If one
were not frankly a doll, was not life a great swirl to be grappled with
and clarified, and thought and felt about? And as for her personality,
the more she gave the more she had. She would take the high risks of
friendship.
To cross the seas and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating
with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune. It was like coming
upon the same design, tinted in novel and picturesque colors of a
finer harmony. In this intellectual flirtation, carried on in _musée_
and garden and on quay throughout that cloudless April, I began to
suspect some gigantic flattery. Was her enthusiasm sincere, and her
clean-cutting ideas, or had she by some subtle intuition anticipated
me? Did she think, or was it to be expected of me, that I should fall
in love with her? But perhaps there was a touch of the too foreign
in her personality. And if I had fallen in love, I know it would not
have been with herself. It would have been with the Frenchness of her,
and perhaps was. It would have been with the eternal youth of France
that she was. For she could never have been so very glowing if France
had not been full of her. Her charm and appeal were far broader than
herself. It took in all that rare spiritual climate where one absorbs
ideas and ideals as the earth drinks in rain.
She was of that young France with its luminous understanding, its
personal verve, its light of expression, its way of feeling its ideas
and thinking its emotions, its deathless loyalty which betrays only at
the clutch of some deeper loyalty. She adored her country and all its
mystic values and aspirations. When she heard I was going to Germany,
she actually winced with pain. She could scarcely believe it. I fell
back at once to the position of a vulgar traveler, visiting even the
lands of the barbarians. They were her country’s enemies, and some day
they would attack. France awaited the onslaught fatalistically. She
did not want to be a man, but she wished that they would let women be
soldiers. If the war came, however, she would enlist at once as a Red
Cross nurse. She thrilled at the thought that perhaps there she could
serve to the uttermost.
And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long
since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among
the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France
which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she
was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol.
My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the
divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in
order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the
creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic
desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic
form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There
is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff
old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a
man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for
him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old
Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic
girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the
slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus
is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green
plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney,
its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of
an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that
would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and
his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.
The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was
brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to
be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of
his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future.
His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus
himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met
him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school.
The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced
him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he
looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent
their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in
their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an
exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and
he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance
broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted
reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in
the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music
notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.
Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory,
but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled
him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he
produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a
flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music,
somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages
of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a
pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there
was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine
study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not
instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two,
and he could not grasp or control it.
When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was
insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours
of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the
privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I
had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to
offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple
board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest
of his pastoral day for writing music.
Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this
proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left
him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum,
discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him.
Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato
in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked
in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the
pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his
own historic galleries.
When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon
him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with
Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed
persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in
his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his
helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble
world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had
never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather
as one who had been bereft of all these things.
Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard
a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional
violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks
he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic
church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him
to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in
irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with
Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.
He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so
strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra
of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen
dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense
of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the
lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and
he gave the work up.
All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain
economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical
education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His
mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and
had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had
obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater.
Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before
him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or
whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus
himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself
justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He
did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the
successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him,
but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined
to engage him.
After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach,
and that his training had made him a professional musician. His
personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he
saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable
competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he
told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his
lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has
practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was
uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.
Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life.
His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds
tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I
do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around
him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many
philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and
this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing
him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that
have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated
friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly
to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven.
Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in
his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something
haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think
of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and
Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of
her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons
very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness
of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That
impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry
cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes
wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him
an artist.
But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of
noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest
is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy
bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_,
calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies.
On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is
perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not
demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into
it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think
he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not
important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder
if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like
Fergus, a work of art one’s self.
The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune
of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic
of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time
of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of
young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all
this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing
seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon
in our contemporary life.”
In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for
literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and
courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of
their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time
when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his
scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships.
The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these
literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they
knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and
felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout
the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or
sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from
men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the
scholar and the gentleman.
The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth
he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and
made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he
had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars.
With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining
faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion
against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the
sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best
that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely
begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry
contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America.
He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when
he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while
his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated
“Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like
a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the
scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative
artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too.
And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published
his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the
Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary
scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world
of poetry.
His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion
of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in
one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable
opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him.
His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although
his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan
literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of
carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my
boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for
themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the
Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with
the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have
heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the
insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.”
Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned,
he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come
for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early
canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him,
but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the
Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our
judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those
lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes
asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author,
never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the
Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious.
The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not
confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the
college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural
issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy.
“In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study
philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet
of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely
stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly
allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined
to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of
proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical
thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he
tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial
circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he
encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom.
Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought,
protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition.
And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill
and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally
as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it
is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think.
Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of
the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the
past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college.
A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present
generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The
empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his
most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes
from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the
sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past
him, unmindful of the eternal things.
I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks
on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is
a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop;
and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the
table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very
manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep
and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’
Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor
steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene.
All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like
the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true
the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a
world of change he keeps the faith pure.
When Dr. Alexander Mackintosh Butcher was elected to the presidency
of Pluribus University ten years ago, there was general agreement
that in selecting a man who was not only a distinguished educator but
an executive of marked business ability the trustees had done honor
to themselves and their university as well as to the new president.
For Dr. Butcher had that peculiar genius which would have made him as
successful in Wall Street or in a governor’s chair as in the classroom.
Every alumnus of Pluribus knows the story told of the young Alexander
Mackintosh Butcher, standing at the age of twenty-two at the threshold
of a career. Eager, energetic, with a brilliant scholastic record
behind him, it was difficult to decide into what profession he should
throw his powerful talents. To his beloved and aged president the young
man went for counsel. “My boy,” said the good old man, “remember that
no profession offers nobler opportunities for service to humanity
than that of education.” And what should he teach? “Philosophy is the
noblest study of man.” And a professor of philosophy the young Butcher
speedily became.
Those who were so fortunate as to study philosophy under him at
Pluribus will never forget how uncompromisingly he preached absolute
idealism, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or how witheringly
he excoriated the mushroom philosophies which were springing up to
challenge the eternal verities. I have heard his old students remark
the secret anguish which must have been his when later, as president
of the university, he was compelled to entertain the famous Swiss
philosopher, Monsfilius, whose alluring empiricism was taking the
philosophic world by storm.
Dr. Butcher’s philosophic acuteness is only equaled by his political
rectitude. Indeed, it is as philosopher-politician that he holds the
unique place he does in our American life, injecting into the petty
issues of the political arena the immutable principles of Truth.
Early conscious of his duty as a man and a citizen, he joined the
historic party which had earned the eternal allegiance of the nation
by rescuing it from slavery. By faithful service to the chiefs of his
state organization, first under the powerful Flatt, and later under the
well-known Harnes, himself college-bred and a political philosopher of
no mean merit, the young Dr. Butcher worked his way up through ward
captain to the position of district leader. The practical example
of Dr. Butcher, the scholar and educator, leaving the peace of his
academic shades to carry the banner in the service of his party ideals
of Prosperity and Protection has been an inspiration to thousands
of educated men in these days of civic cowardice. When, three years
ago, his long and faithful services were rewarded by the honor of
second place on the Presidential ticket which swept the great states
of Mormonia and Green Mountain, there were none of his friends and
admirers who felt that the distinction was undeserved.
President Butcher is frequently called into the councils of the
party whenever there are resolutions to be drawn up or statements of
philosophic principle to be issued. He is in great demand also as
chairman of state conventions, which his rare academic distinction
lifts far above the usual level of such affairs. It was at one of
these conventions that he made the memorable speech in which he
drew the analogy between the immutability of Anglo-Saxon political
institutions and the multiplication table. To the applause of the keen
and hard-headed business men and lawyers who sat as delegates under
him, he scored with matchless satire the idea of progress in politics,
and demonstrated to their complete satisfaction that it was as absurd
to tinker with the fundamentals of our political system as it would be
to construct a new arithmetic. In such characteristic wisdom we have
the intellectual caliber of the man.
This brilliant and profound address came only as the fruit of a
lifetime of thought on political philosophy. President Butcher’s
treatise on “Why We Should Never Change Any Form of Government” has
been worth more to thoughtful men than thousands of sermons on civic
righteousness. No one who has ever heard President Butcher’s rotund
voice discuss in a public address “those ideas and practices which have
been tried and tested by a thousand years of experience” will ever
allow his mind to dwell again on the progressive and disintegrating
tendencies of the day, nor will he have the heart again to challenge on
any subject the “decent respect for the common opinions of mankind.”
President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political.
The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an
immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology.
Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust
contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The
Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American
literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the
impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal
merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been
a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept
sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their
own weakness and failure into a criticism of society.
Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the
American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has
made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured
before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and
he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most
of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite
of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan
of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated
into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith,
he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of
industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He
has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and
foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his
millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries.
Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public
life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university
administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in
America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity
surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States.
The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees
of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where
he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy
of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with
which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the
appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President
Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most
beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which
he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate
world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its
leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of
absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President
Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of
learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the
President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of
its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings
by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the
thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens
of millions.
None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises
of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His
resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the
crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave
him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair--the historic
chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus--surrounded by tier
upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university,
President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his
emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against
everything new, everything untried, everything untested.
Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet
even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long
to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting
him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the
plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God
prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the
idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace,
President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of
the time.
I read with ever-increasing wonder the guarded defenses and discreet
apologies for the older generation which keep filtering through
the essays of the _Atlantic_. I can even seem to detect a growing
decision of tone, a definite assurance of conviction, which seems to
imply that a rally has been undertaken against the accusations which
the younger generation, in its self-assurance, its irreverence for
the old conventions and moralities, its passion for the novel and
startling, seemed to be bringing against them. The first faint twinges
of conscience felt by the older generation have given place to renewed
homily. There is an evident anxiety to get itself put on record as
perfectly satisfied with its world, and desirous that its sons and
daughters should learn anew of those peculiar beauties in which it has
lived. Swept off its feet by the call to social service and social
reform, it is slowly regaining its foundation, and, slightly flushed,
and with garments somewhat awry, it proclaims again its belief in the
eternal verities of Protestant religion and conventional New England
morality.
It is always an encouraging sign when people are rendered
self-conscious and are forced to examine the basis of their ideals. The
demand that they explain them to skeptics always makes for clarity.
When the older generation is put on the defensive, it must first
discover what convictions it has, and then sharpen them to their finest
point in order to present them convincingly. There are always too many
unquestioned things in the world, and for a person or class to have to
scurry about to find reasons for its prejudices is about as healthy
an exercise as one could wish for either of them. To be sure, the
reasons are rarely any more than _ex post facto_ excuses,--supports
and justifications for the prejudices rather than the causes thereof.
Reason itself is very seldom more than that. The important point is
that one should feel the need of a reason. This always indicates that
something has begun to slide, that the world is no longer so secure as
it was, that obvious truths no longer are obvious, that the world has
begun to bristle with question marks.
One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the
younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy,
its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that
all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older
to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is
decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point
out the irreconcilable things in the universe. Just as you have made
a tacit agreement to call certain things non-existent, it is highly
discommoding to have somebody shout with strident tones that they are
very real and significant. When, after much struggling and compromise,
you have got your world clamped down, it is discouraging to have a
gale arise which threatens to blow over all your structure. Through so
much of the current writing runs this quiet note of disapprobation.
These agnostic professors who unsettle the faith of our youth, these
“intellectuals who stick a finger in everybody’s pie in the name of
social justice,” these sensation-mongers who unveil great masses of
political and social corruption, these remorseless scientists who would
reveal so many of our reticences--why can’t they let us alone? Can they
not see that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world?
Now I know this older generation which doth protest so much. I have
lived with it for the last fifteen years, ever since I began to wonder
whether all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I
was educated by it, grew up with it. I doubt if any generation ever
had a more docile pupil than I. What they taught me, I find they
still believe, or at least so many of them as have not gone over to
the enemy, or been captured by the militant youth of to-day. Or, as
seems rather likely, they no longer precisely believe, but they want
their own arguments to convince themselves. It is probable that when
we really believe a thing with all our hearts, we do not attempt to
justify it. Justification comes only when we are beginning to doubt it.
By this older generation I mean, of course, the mothers and fathers and
uncles and aunts of the youth of both sexes between twenty and thirty
who are beginning their professional or business life. And I refer
of course to the comfortable or fairly comfortable American middle
class. Now this older generation has had a religion, a metaphysics,
an ethics, and a political and social philosophy, which have reigned
practically undisputed until the appearance of the present generation.
It has at least never felt called upon to justify itself. It has never
been directly challenged, as it is to-day. In order to localize this
generation still further, we must see it in its typical setting of
the small town or city, clustered about the institutions of church
and family. If we have any society which can be called “American,” it
is this society. Its psychology is American psychology; its soul is
America’s soul.
This older generation, which I have known so well for fifteen years,
has a religion which is on the whole as pleasant and easy as could
be devised. Though its members are the descendants of the stern and
rugged old Puritans, who wrestled with the devil and stripped their
world of all that might seduce them from the awful service of God,
they have succeeded in straining away by a long process all the
repellent attitudes in the old philosophy of life. It is unfair to
say that the older generation believe in dogmas and creeds. It would
be more accurate to say that it does not disbelieve. It retains them
as a sort of guaranty of the stability of the faith, but leaves them
rather severely alone. It does not even make more than feeble efforts
to reinterpret them in the light of modern knowledge. They are useless,
but necessary.
The foundation of this religion may be religious, but the
superstructure is almost entirely ethical. Most sermons of to-day are
little more than pious exhortations to good conduct. By good conduct
is meant that sort of action which will least disturb the normal
routine of modern middle-class life: common honesty in business life,
faithfulness to duty, ambition in business and profession, filial
obligation, the use of talents, and always and everywhere simple human
kindness and love. The old Puritan ethics, which saw in the least issue
of conduct a struggle between God and the devil, has become a mere code
for facilitating the daily friction of conventional life.
Now one would indeed be churlish to find fault with this devout belief
in simple goodness, which characterizes the older generation. It is
only when these humble virtues are raised up into an all-inclusive
program for social reform and into a philosophy of life, that one
begins to question, and to feel afar the deep hostility of the older
generation to the new faith.
Simple kindness, common honesty, filial obedience, it is evidently
still felt, will solve all the difficulties of personal and social
life. The most popular novels of the day are those in which the
characters do the most good to each other. The enormous success with
the older generation of _The Inside of the Cup_, _Queed_, and _V.
V.’s Eyes_, is based primarily on the fact that these books represent
a sublimated form of the good old American melodramatic moral sense.
And now comes along Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee with his _Crowds_,--what a
funny, individualized, personal-responsibility crowd he gives us, to
be sure,--and his panacea for modern social ills by the old solution
of applied personal virtue. Never a word about removing the barriers
of caste and race and economic inequality, but only an urging to step
over them. Never a trumpet-call to level the ramparts of privilege,
or build up the heights of opportunity, but only an appeal to extend
the charitable hand from the ramparts of heaven, or offer the kindly
patronage to the less fortunate, or--most dazzling of all--throw
away, in a frenzy of abandonment, life and fortune. Not to construct
a business organization where dishonesty would be meaningless, but to
be utopianly honest against the business world. In other words, the
older generation believes in getting all the luxury of the virtue of
goodness, while conserving all the advantages of being in a vicious
society.
If there is any one characteristic which distinguishes the older
generation, it is this belief that social ills may be cured by personal
virtue. Its highest moral ideals are sacrifice and service. But the
older generation can never see how intensely selfish these ideals are,
in the most complete sense of the word selfish. What they mean always
is, “I sacrifice myself for you,” “I serve you,” not, “We coöperate
in working ceaselessly toward an ideal where all may be free and none
may be served or serve.” These ideals of sacrifice and service are
utterly selfish, because they take account only of the satisfaction
and moral consolidation of the doer. They enhance his moral value;
but what of the person who is served or sacrificed for? What of the
person who is done good to? If the feelings of sacrifice and service
were in any sense altruistic, the moral enhancement of the receiver
would be the object sought. But can it not be said that for every
individual virtuous merit secured by an act of sacrifice or service
on the part of the doer, there is a corresponding depression on the
part of the receiver? Do we not universally recognize this by calling
a person who is not conscious of this depression, a parasite, and the
person who is no longer capable of depression, a pauper? It is exactly
those free gifts, such as schools, libraries, and so forth, which are
impersonal or social, that we can accept gratefully and gladly; and it
is exactly because the ministrations of a Charity Organization Society
are impersonal and businesslike that they can be received willingly and
without moral depression by the poor.
The ideal of duty is equally open to attack. The great complaint of
the younger against the older generation has to do with the rigidity
of the social relationships into which the younger find themselves
born. The world seems to be full of what may be called canalized
emotions. One is “supposed” to love one’s aunt or one’s grandfather
in a certain definite way, at the risk of being “unnatural.” One gets
almost a sense of the quantitative measurement of emotion. Perhaps the
greatest tragedy of family life is the useless energy that is expended
by the dutiful in keeping these artificial channels open, and the
correct amount of current running. It is exactly this that produces
most infallibly the rebellion of the younger generation. To hear that
one ought to love this or that person; or to hear loyalty spoken of, as
the older generation so often speaks of it, as if it consisted in an
allegiance to something which one no longer believes in,--this is what
soonest liberates those forces of madness and revolt which bewilder
spiritual teachers and guides. It is those dry channels of duty and
obligation through which no living waters of emotion flow that it is
the ideal of the younger generation to break up. They will have no
network of emotional canals which are not brimming, no duties which are
not equally loves.
But when they are loves, you have duty no longer meaning very much.
Duty, like sacrifice and service, always implies a personal relation
of individuals. You are always doing your duty to somebody or
something. Always the taint of inequality comes in. You are morally
superior to the person who has duty done to him. If that duty is not
filled with good-will and desire, it is morally hateful, or at very
best, a necessary evil,--one of those compromises with the world which
must be made in order to get through it at all. But duty without
good-will is a compromise with our present state of inequality, and
to raise duty to the level of a virtue is to consecrate that state of
inequality forevermore.
It is the same thing with service. The older generation has attempted
an insidious compromise with the new social democracy by combining the
words “social” and “service.” Under cover of the ideal of service it
tries to appropriate to itself the glory of social work, and succeeds
in almost convincing itself and the world that its Christianity has
always held the same ideal. The faithful are urged to extend their
activities. The assumption is that, by doing good to more individuals,
you are thereby becoming social. But to speak of “social democracy,”
which of course means a freely coöperating, freely reciprocating
society of equals, and “service,” together, is a contradiction of
terms. For, when you serve people or do good to them, you thereby
render yourself unequal with them. You insult the democratic ideal.
If the service is compulsory, it is menial and you are inferior. If
voluntary, you are superior. The difference, however, is only academic.
The entire Christian scheme is a clever but unsuccessful attempt to
cure the evils of inequality by transposing the values. The slave
serves gladly instead of servilely. That is, he turns his master
into a slave. That is why good Christian people can never get over
the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over
another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow
the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the
mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest
pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older
generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the
cause of all the trouble.
The notorious Victorian era, which in its secret heart this older
generation still admires so much, accentuated all the latent
individualism of Christian ethics, and produced a code which, without
the rebellion of the younger generation, would have spiritually
guaranteed forever all moral caste divisions and inequalities of
modern society. The Protestant Church, in which this exaggerated ethic
was enshrined, is now paying heavily the price of this debauch of
ethical power. Its rapidly declining numbers show that human nature
has an invincible objection to being individually saved. The Catholic
Church, which saves men as members of the Beloved Community, and not
as individuals, flourishes. When one is saved by Catholicism, one
becomes a democrat, and not a spiritual snob and aristocrat, as one
does through Calvinism. The older generation can never understand that
superb loyalty which is loyalty to a community,--a loyalty which,
paradoxical as it may seem, nourishes the true social personality in
proportion as the individual sense is lessened. The Protestant Church
in its tenacious devotion to the personal ideal of a Divine Master--the
highest and most popular Christian ideal of to-day--shows how very far
it still is away from the ideals and ethics of a social democracy, a
life lived in the Beloved Community.
The sense of self-respect is the very keystone of the personality in
whose defence all this individualistic philosophy has been carefully
built up. The Christian virtues date from ages when there was a vastly
greater number of morally depressed people than there is now. The
tenacious survival of these virtues can be due only to the fact that
they were valuable to the moral prestige of some class. Our older
generation, with its emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and service, shows us
very clearly what those interests were. I deliberately accuse the older
generation of conserving and greatly strengthening these ideals, as a
defensive measure. Morals are always the product of a situation; they
reflect a certain organization of human relations which some class or
group wishes to preserve. A moral code or set of ideals is always the
invisible spiritual sign of a visible social grace. In an effort to
retain the _status quo_ of that world of inequalities and conventions
in which they most comfortably and prosperously live, the older
generation has stamped, through all its agencies of family, church and
school, upon the younger generation, just those seductive ideals which
would preserve its position. These old virtues upon which, however, the
younger generation is already making guerilla warfare are simply the
moral support with which the older generation buttresses its social
situation.
The natural barriers and prejudices by which our elders are cut
off from a freely flowing democracy are thus given a spiritual
justification, and there is added for our elders the almost sensual
luxury of leaping, by free grace, the barriers and giving themselves
away. But the price has to be paid. Just as profits, in the socialist
philosophy, are taken to be an abstraction from wages, through the
economic power which one class has over another, so the virtues of the
older generation may be said to be an abstraction from the virtue of
other classes less favorably situated from a moral or personal point of
view. Their swollen self-respect is at the expense of others.
How well we know the type of man in the older generation who has been
doing good all his life! How his personality has thriven on it! How he
has ceaselessly been storing away moral fat in every cranny of his
soul! His goodness has been meat to him. The need and depression of
other people has been, all unconsciously to him, the air which he has
breathed. Without their compensating misfortune or sin, his goodness
would have wilted and died. If good people would earnestly set to
work to make the world uniformly healthy, courageous, beautiful, and
prosperous, the field of their vocation would be constantly limited,
and finally destroyed. That they so stoutly resist all philosophies
and movements which have these ends primarily in view is convincing
evidence of the fierce and jealous egoism which animates their so
plausibly altruistic spirit. One suspects that the older generation
does not want its vocation destroyed. It takes an heroic type of
goodness to undermine all the foundations on which our virtue rests.
If then I object to the ethical philosophy of the older generation on
the ground that it is too individualistic, and, under the pretense
of altruism, too egoistic, I object to its general intellectuality
as not individual enough. Intellectually the older generation seems
to me to lead far too vegetative a life. It may be that this life
has been lived on the heights, that these souls have passed through
fires and glories, but there is generally too little objective
evidence of this subjective fact. If the intuition which accompanies
experience has verified all the data regarding God, the soul, the
family, and so forth,--to quote one of the staunchest defenders of the
generation,--this verification seems to have been obtained rather that
the issues might be promptly disposed of and forgotten. Certainly the
older generation is rarely interested in the profounder issues of life.
It never speaks of death,--the suggestion makes it uncomfortable. It
shies in panic at hints of sex-issues. It seems resolute to keep life
on as objective a plane as possible. It is no longer curious about
the motives and feelings of people. It seems singularly to lack the
psychological sense. If it gossips, it recounts actions, effects; it
rarely seeks to interpret. It tends more and more to treat human beings
as moving masses of matter instead of as personalities filled with
potent influence, or as absorbingly interesting social types, as I am
sure the younger generation does.
The older generation seems no longer to generalize, although it
gives every evidence of having once prodigiously generalized, for
its world is all hardened and definite. There are the good and the
criminal, and the poor, the people who can be called nice, and the
ordinary people. The world is already plotted out. Now I am sure
that the generalizations of the truly philosophical mind are very
fluid and ephemeral. They are no sooner made than the mind sees their
insufficiency and has to break them up. A new cutting is made, only in
turn to be shaken and rearranged. This keeps the philosopher thinking
all the time, and it makes his world a very uncertain place. But he
at least runs no risk of hardening, and he has his eyes open to most
experience.
I am often impressed with the fact that the older generation has grown
weary of thinking. It has simply put up the bars in its intellectual
shop-windows and gone off home to rest. It may well be that this is
because it has felt so much sorrow that it does not want to talk about
sorrow, or so much love that to interpret love tires it, or repulsed
so many rude blows of destiny that it has no interest in speaking of
destiny. Its flame may be low for the very reason that it has burned
so intensely. But how many of the younger generation would eagerly
long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them!
And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally
interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious
fervor,--all the heated weapons with which the younger generation
attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. The
spirit, in becoming reconciled to life, has lost life itself.
As I see the older generation going through its daily round of
business, church, and family life, I cannot help feeling that its
influence is profoundly pernicious. It has signally failed to broaden
its institutions for the larger horizon of the time. The church remains
a private club of comfortable middle-class families, while outside
there grows up without spiritual inspiration a heterogeneous mass of
people without ties, roots, or principles. The town changes from a
village to an industrial center, and church and school go through their
time-honored and listless motions. The world widens, society expands,
formidable crises appear, but the older generation does not broaden, or
if it does, the broadening is in no adequate proportion to our needs.
The older generation still uses the old ideas for the new problem.
Whatever new wine it finds must be poured into the old bottles.
Where are the leaders among the older generation in America who,
with luminous faith and intelligence, are rallying around them the
disintegrated numbers of idealistic youth, as Bergson and Barrès
and Jaurès have done in France? A few years ago there seemed to be
a promise of a forward movement toward Democracy, led by embattled
veterans in a war against privilege. But how soon the older generation
became wearied in the march! What is left now of that shining army and
its leader? Must the younger generation eternally wait for the sign?
The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder
the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and
revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as
our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy
of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear
that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the
best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking
for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and
purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and
disintegrated us.
No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or
Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling
that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing
in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the
Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and
communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered
houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished,
well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the
people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a
hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides
of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one
really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a
new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to
live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams.
Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York”
from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago
draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not
only habitable but radiant and palatial.
Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased
to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of
its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual
malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have
accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the
East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle
West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes
it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory
as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner
with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write
so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr.
Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence
is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of
itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes
with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s
articles not so much for the information they give us as for the
attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people
he is talking for think important.
It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously
have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and
Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras
and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers
on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he
is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He
sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated
Western wonders and significances that have been not only common
material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration
on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He
is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural
production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is
almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock.
Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No
one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous
Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent
world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in
thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the
ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common
good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social
stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be
any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have
no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social
mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual
_nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities?
Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness
in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very
vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius
for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The
Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality
than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic
seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and
attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually
outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war,
society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the
East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo
in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too
much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce
those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so
recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely
saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it
takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its
dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social
conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and
democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow
expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd
chooses to do.
I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as
if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did,
but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in
the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he
cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in
mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against
their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute
the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is
quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all
the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have
comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He
marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably
be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes,
and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the
“folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for
him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the
bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of
bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is
for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs,
and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is
for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into
politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned
with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic
foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe.
Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages
that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly,
a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable
profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers
are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He
hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given
to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of
state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and
selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities
of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious,
conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation;
he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s
pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and
conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best
moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To
the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something
remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions
that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window
of a limited train.”
It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that
sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle
West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population.
Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an
urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands
all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great
productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in
plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself
as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and
social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this
light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an
analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country
town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to
say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising
sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public
or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local
interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local
businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business
community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the
part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country
town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its
beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation
in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get
something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment
of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement
and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto)
loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common
bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly
masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic
pride, and the like.”
In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things,
is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard
to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West--that minority urban
class--who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial
or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or
landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying
the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is
carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town,
by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the
farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product.
And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the
society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the
organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war
on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds
them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious
reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself
economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the
Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in
a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme
in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the
economic absolutism of property.
A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle
West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible
reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However
thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe
and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle
West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such
analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes
are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole
truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in
which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking.
The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of
complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of
its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of
Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial
Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most
piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind.
ERNEST: OR, PARENT FOR A DAY
I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children.
They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely
prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly
upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a
household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little
boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had
seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer
civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious
little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at
you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into
wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in
the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the
fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every
hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in
whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody
else--these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence.
They interested and perturbed me.
The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek,
was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting.
The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and
in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet
so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere
presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on
his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves.
You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness
look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and
see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his
mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to
accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little
breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me
intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would
come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling,
and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find
that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would
arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother
would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly
way.
The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother,
for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be
transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most
disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with
an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some
smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should
never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes
one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which
he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and
his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s
life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent.
I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of
their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid,
a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility.
All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a
group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies
of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils
and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at
having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I
was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at
any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused
aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the
point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a
self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit
suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress
himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily
that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated.
There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real
responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of
bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the
women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I
had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my
intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a
day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the
rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my
becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest;
and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not
survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think
that they trusted me.
I had a sense of being caught in an inescapable net, prisoner of my own
theories. If children of six were no longer tyrants, the possession
of Ernest would not interfere with my work or my life. I had spoken
confidently. I had a reputation among my friends of speaking eloquently
about “the child.” And I always find it almost impossible to resist the
offer of new experience. I hesitated and was lost. I even found myself
naming the day for Ernest’s momentary adoption. And during all that
week I found it increasingly impossible to forget him. The night before
Ernest was to come I told myself that I could not believe that this
perilous thing was about to happen to me. I made no preparations to
receive Ernest in my tiny bachelor apartment. I felt that I was in the
hands of fate.
I was not really surprised when fate knocked at the door next morning
in the person of my grinning friend, and swiftly left a well-bundled
little boy with me. I have rarely seen a young woman look as
maliciously happy as did his guide when she left, with the remark that
she couldn’t possibly come for Ernest that evening, but would take him
at nine o’clock on the morrow. My first quick resentment was stilled by
the thought that perhaps an official day was a day plus a night. But
Ernest loomed formidably at me. There would be problems of sleeping.
Was I a victim? Well, that is what parents were! They should not find
me weak.
Ernest expressed no aversion to staying with me. He was cheerful, a
little embarrassed, incurious. The removal of his hat disclosed a
Dutch-cut of yellow hair, blue eyes, many little freckles, and an
expression of slightly quizzical good-humor. I really had not had the
least conception how big a boy of six was likely to be, and I found
comfort in the evidence that he was big enough to be self-regulating,
and yet deliciously small enough to be watched over. He could be played
with, and without danger of breaking him.
Ernest sat passively on a chair and surveyed the room. I had thought a
little pedantically of exposing him to some Montessori apparatus. I had
got nothing, however. The room suddenly became very inane; the piano
a huge packing-box, the bookcases offensive, idiotic shelves. A silly
room to live in! A room practically useless for these new and major
purposes of life. I was ashamed of my surroundings, for I felt that
Ernest was surveying me with contempt and reproach.
It suddenly seemed as if little boys must like to look at pictures.
Ernest had clambered up into a big chair, and was sitting flattened
against its back, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and
a look of mild lassitude on his face. He took with some alacrity the
illustrated newspaper supplement which I gave him, but my conscience
tortured me a little as to whether his interest was the desperate
one of demanding something for his mind to feed on, however arid it
might be, or whether it was a genuine æsthetic response. He gave all
the pictures exactly the same amount of time, rubbing his hand over
each to make sure that it was flat, and he showed no desire to talk
about anything he had seen. Since most of the pictures were of war,
my pacifist spirit rebelled against dwelling on them. His celerity
dismayed me. It became necessary to find more pictures. I had a sudden
horror of an afternoon of picture-books, each devoured in increasingly
accelerated fashion. How stupid seemed my rows of dully printed books!
Not one of them could disgorge a picture, no matter how hard you shook
it. Despair seized me when I found only a German handbook of Greek
sculpture, and another of Michelangelo. In hopeful trepidation I began
on them. I wondered how long they would last.
It was clearly an unfamiliar field to Ernest. My attempts to test his
classical knowledge were a failure. He recognized the Greeks as men
and women, but not as gods, and there were moments when I was afraid
he felt their nudity as indecent. He insisted on calling the Winged
Victory an angel. There had evidently been religion in Ernest’s career.
I told him that these were pictures of marble statues from Greece,
of gods and things, and I hurriedly sketched such myths as I could
remember in an attempt to overtake Ernest’s headlong rush of interest.
But he did not seem to listen, and he ended by calling every flowing
female form an angel. He laughed greatly at their missing arms and
heads. I do not think I quite impressed him with the Greek spirit.
On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He
proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him
with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him,
and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard.
When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should
I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his
infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the
temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy
mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve
was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly
information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain,
hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I
confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the
prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls.
But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there
were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were
sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He
crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable
objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects
and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult
thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my
ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination
came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a
wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town
on a journey--the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at
the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me
with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield.
Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with
much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there
unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate
for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was
unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little
boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business
of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced
me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own
eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction;
but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth
escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his
lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his
face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one
minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll
which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the
gates.
When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most
detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked
him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He
expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which
Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his
self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window,
casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed
the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s
character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest
a moral life.
Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was
interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of
sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a
river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be
called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his
seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other
trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going.
I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living
in life’s essential,--excitement,--and neither the future nor the past
mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without
that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I
found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal.
In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I
was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of
his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity
for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another
mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how
pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby,
yellow-haired little boy of six.
Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned
somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was
trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his
hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized
him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught
him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud
and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in
mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and
he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and
watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he
lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at
the thought of his escape from my ogredom.
Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him.
We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable
way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We
wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father,
and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him
forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing,
and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I
could not let him go.
And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed.
His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a
very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden
realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of
little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths
were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I
could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for
him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going
in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and
he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I
felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult
goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own.
“I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote
me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being
ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made
Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for
the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of
the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his
legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had
diminished again to his size.
Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my
fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid
thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup
and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching
Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had
answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now
I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him.
When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic
men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he
was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic
problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic
rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he
became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a
line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a
little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need
not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the
midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest
to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven--incredible to me, and yet
perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with
which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had
been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was
conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to
go to bed at all!
When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling
asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his
pillows--the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which
nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity!
Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to
bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched
him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest,
“Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big
chair and helpless slumber.
I repented of my brutality. I tried to read, but my parental conscience
again smote me. Ernest looked forlorn and maladjusted, his head
sinking down on his breast. I thought that Ernest would thank me now
for reminding him of his bed. He showed astonishing force of will.
I recoiled from the “I don’t want to go to bed!” which he hurled at
me. I tried reason. I called his attention to his uncomfortableness.
But he was unmoved, and insisted on going to sleep again after every
question. I hardened my heart a little. I saw that stern measures would
have to be adopted, Ernest’s little clothes taken off, Ernest inserted
into his flannel nightgown, and tucked into bed. Yet I had no idea
of the parental technique for such situations. Ernest had been quite
irresponsive to my appeal that all good little boys went to bed at
seven o’clock, and I could think of no further generalizations. Crisis
after so happy a day! Was this parenthood?
The variety of buttons and hooks on Ernest’s outer and inner garments
bewildered me. Ernest’s dead sleepiness made the work difficult. But
finally his little body emerged from the midst, leaving me with the
feeling of one who has taken a watch apart and wonders dismayedly how
he will ever get it together again. Ernest, however, was not inclined
to permit the indignity of this disrobing without bitter protest. When
I urged his coöperation in putting on his nightgown, he became voluble.
The sunniness of his temper was clouded. His tone turned to harsh
bitterness. Little angry tears rolled down his cheeks, and he betrayed
his sense of extreme outrage with an “I don’t _want_ to put on my
nightgown!” hurled at me with so much of moral pain that I was chilled.
But it was too late. I could not unscramble Ernest. With a sinking
heart I had gently to thrust his little arms and legs into the warm
flannel, trundle him over the floor, bitter and sleepily protesting,
roll him into his bed, and cover him up. As he curled and snuggled into
the covers his tears dried as if by magic, the bitterness smoothed out
of his face, and all his griefs were forgotten.
In the next room I sat and read, a pleasant warmth of parental
protection in my heart. And then Ernest began to cough. It was no light
childish spasm, but a deep racking cough that froze my blood. There
had been a little cold in him when he came. I had taken him out into
the raw December air. I had overexerted him in my thoughtless haste.
Visions of a delirious and pneumonic child floated before me. Or what
was that dreadful thing called croup? I could not keep my thought on
my book. That racking cough came again and again. Ernest must be awake
and tossing feverishly. Yet when I looked in at him, he would be lying
peaceful and rosy, and the cough that tore him did not disturb his
slumbers. He must then be in a state of fatigue so extreme that even
the cough could not wake him. I reproached myself for dragging him
into the cold. How could I have led him on so long a journey, and let
him play with a strenuousness such as his days never knew! I foresaw
a lurid to-morrow: Ernest sick, myself helpless and ignorant, guilty
of a negligence that might be fatal. And as I watched him, he began to
show the most alarming tendency to fall out of bed. I did not dare to
move him, and yet his head moved ever more perilously near the edge. I
relied on a chair pushed close to the bed to save him. But I felt weary
and worn. What an exacting life, the parent’s! Could it be that every
evening provided such anxieties and problems and thrills? Could one let
one’s life become so engrossed?
And then I remembered how every evening, when we went to bed, we
used to ask our mother if she was going to be home that evening, and
with what thankful security we sank back, knowing that we should be
protected through another night. Ernest had not seemed to care what
became of me. Having had no home and no parents, he had grown up into
a manly robustness. He did not ask what you were going to do with him.
He was all for the moment. He took the cash and let the credit go. It
was I who felt the panic and the insecurity. I envied Ernest. I saw
that contrary to popular mythology, there were advantages in being an
institutional orphan, provided you had been properly Binet-ed as of
normal intelligence and the State got you a decent boarding-mother.
How much bringing up Ernest had escaped! If his manners were not
polished, at least they were not uncouth. He had been a little shy
at first, nodding at questions with a smile, and throwing his head
against the chair. But there was nothing repressed about him, nothing
institutionalized, and certainly nothing artificial.
His cough grew lighter, and as I looked at his yellow hair and the
angelic flush of his round cheeks, I thought of the horrid little
puppets that had been produced around me in conventional homes,
under model fathers and kind and devout mothers. How their fears and
inhibitions contrasted with Ernest’s directness! His bitter mood
at going to bed had a certain fine quality about it. I recalled
the _camaraderie_ we had established. The box of lemon-drops, only
half-exhausted, stared at me from the pocket of his little sweater. I
became proud of Ernest. I was enjoying again my vicarious parenthood.
What did that obscure and tangled heredity of his, or his most
problematical of futures, matter to him or to me? It was delightful
to adopt him thus imaginatively. If he turned out badly, could you
not ascribe it to his heredity, and if well, to your kindly nurture
and constant wisdom? Nothing else could be very much thought about,
perhaps, but for the moment Ernest seemed supremely worth thinking
about. There would be his education. And suddenly it seemed that I did
not know very much about educating a child. It would be too absorbing.
There would be no time for the making of a living. Ernest loomed before
my imagination in the guise of a pleasant peril.
And then morning came. As soon as it was light Ernest could be
heard talking and chuckling to himself, with no hint of delirium or
pneumonia, or the bogies of the night. When I spoke he came running in
in his bare feet, and crawled in with me. He told me that in spite of
my valiant chair he had really fallen out of bed. He did not care, and
proceeded to jump over me in a vigorous acrobatic way. He did not even
cough, and I wondered if all the little sinister things of childhood
passed so easily with the night. It was impossible to remember my fears
as he tossed and shouted, the perfection of healthiness. Parenthood now
seemed almost too easy to bother with.
Ernest caught sight of my dollar watch on the chair, and I saw that he
conceived a fatal and instantaneous passion. He listened to its tick,
shook it, ogled it amorously. He made little suggestive remarks about
liking it. I teased him with the fact that he could not tell time.
Ernest snorted at first in good-natured contempt at the artificial
rigidity of the process, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded
that I was not fooling him. And my heart swelled with the generosity
which I was about to practise in presenting him with this wonderful
watch.
But it suddenly became time to dress, for my parental day was to end
at nine. And then I discovered that it was as hard to get Ernest into
his clothes as it was to get him out of them. It was intolerable to
him that he should leave his romp and the watch, and he shouted a No
to my every suggestion. A new parental crisis crashed upon me. What a
life of ingenuity and stratagem the parent had to lead! To spend half
one’s evening persuading a sleepy and bitter little boy to take off his
clothes, and half the morning in persuading a vivid and jubilant little
boy to put them on again--this was a life that taxed one’s personal
resources to the utmost. I reasoned with Ernest. I pointed out that
his kind friend was coming very soon, and that he must be ready. But
Ernest was obdurate. He would not even bathe. I pointed out the almost
universal practice of the human race of clothing themselves during
the early morning hours. Historic generalizations had no more effect
on Ernest in the morning than they had had in the evening. And with
a sudden stab I thought of the watch. That watch I knew would be an
Aladdin’s lamp to make Ernest my obedient slave. I had only to bribe
him with it, and he would bathe, dress, or do anything which I told him
to do. Here was the easy art of corruption by which parents got moral
clutches on their children! And I deliberately renounced it. I would
not bribe Ernest. Yet the mischief was done. So intuitive was his mind
that I felt guiltily that he already knew my readiness to give him the
watch if he would only dress. In that case, I should miss my moral
victory. I could not disappoint him, and I did not want to bribe him
inadvertently.
There was another consideration which dismayed me. Even if Ernest
should prove amenable to reason or corruption, where was my ability to
reconstruct him? Unbuttoning a sleepy and scarcely resisting little
boy in the evening was quite different from constructively buttoning
a jumping and hilarious one in the morning. And time was flowing
dangerously on. Only a sudden theory of self-activity saved me. Could
Ernest perhaps dress himself? I caught him in one of his tumbles and
asked him. His mind was too full of excitement, to be working on
prosaic themes. And then I shot my bolt. “I don’t believe you know how
to dress yourself, do you?” To that challenge Ernest rose. “Hurry!” I
said, “and see how quickly you can dress. See if you can dress before
I can!” Ernest flew into the other room, and in an incredibly short
time appeared quite constructed except as to an occasional rear-button,
washed and shining, self-reliant, ready for the business of the day. I
glowed with the success of my parental generalship. I felt a sense of
power. But power gained in so adroit and harmless a way was safe. What
a parent I would make! How grateful I was to Ernest to be leaving me at
this height!
I gave him the watch. Though he had longed, the fulfillment of his
desire struck him with incredulity. The event awed him. But I showed
him how to wind it, and seemed so indifferent to its fate that he
was reassured as to my sincerity. He recovered his poise. He sang as
he ate his breakfast. And when his guide and friend came, amused and
curious, he went off with her as unreluctantly as he had come, proud
and self-possessed, the master of himself. He strutted a little with
his watch, and he politely admitted that he had had a good time.
I do not know whether Ernest ever thought of me again. He had been an
unconscious artist, for he had painted many new impressions on my soul.
He had been sent to me to test my theories of parenthood, but he had
driven away all thought of theory in the obsession of his demands. How
could I let him go so cheerily out of my door? It wasn’t at all because
I minded having my time absorbed, for I like people to absorb my time.
Why did I not cling to him, buy him from his protector, with a “Dear
boy, you shall never leave my pleasant rooms again”? Why did I not rush
after him down the street, stung by a belated remorse? I was conscious
enough that I was missing all the dramatic climax of the situation. I
was not acting at all as one does with tempting little orphan boys.
But that is the way life works. The heart fails, and the vast and
incalculable sea of responsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go
with no more real hesitation than that with which he went.
The later life of Ernest I feel will be one of sturdy self-reliance.
That all the aspects of his many-sided character did not become
apparent in the short time that I held him was clear from the report I
heard of a Christmas party to which he was invited a few weeks later.
Ernest, it seems, had broken loose with the fervor of a modern Europe
after its forty years of peace. He had seized chocolate cake, slapped
little girls, bitten the hand of the kind lady who fed him, and ended
by lying down on the floor and yelling in a self-reliant rage. Was this
the effect of a day with me? Or had I charmed and soothed him? I had a
pleasant shudder of power, wondering at my influence over him.
The next I heard of Ernest was his departure for the home of an
adopting family in New Jersey, from which he was presently to be
shipped back for offenses unknown. My respect for Ernest rose even
higher. He would not fit in easily to any smug conventional family
life. He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied. I began to
wonder if, after all, we were not affinities. He had kept the peace
with me, he had derived stimulation from my society. Should I not have
called him back? Shall I not now? Shall I not want to see him with me
again? I wonder.
Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting
sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine
discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds
which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this
country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action
is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of
talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put
into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an
insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents
still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion
of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and
effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points
are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So
conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside
of our personal contacts.
Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire.
An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is
popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man,
a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have
met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them
go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving
for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without
some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it
important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color
of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten
of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and
approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of
their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all
doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world,
all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education,
all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of
journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack
of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can
smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are
using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and
because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they
should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as
in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find,
is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which
stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious
of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid
platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in
thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless
realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a
measuring-stick for human conduct, another a social goal towards
which he works. Concepts emerge which to half the company represent
a mental vacuum, and to the other half imply a warm blow of virtue.
World-philosophies which might be recognized are shabbily ignored. The
feeble sparring of their distorted shadows is taken for discussion, and
the company separates with a vague feeling of having occupied itself
for an evening with something profitably mental.
All the time, however, it is these fundamental philosophies which
are the real antagonists, and not the concrete ideas which are the
subjects of discussion. A good discussion passes rapidly into an
examination of those presuppositions. It is more interested in charting
out the minds of the other talkers than in winning small victories or
getting agreements. Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering
the hidden categories and secret springs of emotion that underlie
“opinions” on things. It seeks that common background and store of
meanings in which alone diverse opinions can really meet and operate.
We can no longer tolerate reasons which are only retrospective props
for action that was really impulsive in its origin. No more should
we tolerate in discussion that stubborn voicing of attitudes which
seem axiomatic to the speaker only because he has never examined the
structure of his own thought. It is popular nowadays to welcome the
expression of every new attitude. But a discussion should be tolerant
and hospitable only after the ground has been cleared. You must be
very sure that what you have to deal with is a real attitude and not
a counterfeit. Discussion remains mere talk if it remains content
with the expression of an “opinion” and does not put the expressor
to immediate cross-examination to discover in the name of what
Weltanschauung the opinion came.
Discussion should be one of the most important things in the world, for
it is almost our only arena of thinking. It is here that all the jumble
of ideas and impressions that we get from reading and watching are
dramatically placed in conflict. Here only is there a genuine challenge
to put them into some sort of order. Without discussion intellectual
experience is only an exercise in a private gymnasium. It has never
been put to the test, never had to give an account of itself. It is
some such motive that impels people to discussion; though they are
too often content with the jousting of pasteboard knights. But a good
discussion is not only a conflict. It is fundamentally a coöperation.
It progresses towards some common understanding. This does not mean
that it must end in agreement. A discussion will have been adequate if
it has done no more than set the problem in its significant terms, or
even defined the purpose that makes such a setting significant. You
turn up things in your mind that would have remained buried without the
incision of some new idea. The effort to say exactly what you mean,
sharpening your idea to the point that will drive home to others, is
itself invigorating. A good discussion tones up your mind, concentrates
its loose particles, gives form and direction. When all say exactly
what they mean, then for the first time understanding--the goal of
discussion--is possible.
Discussion demands a mutual trustfulness, a mutual candor. But this
very trustfulness makes discussion vulnerable. It is particularly open
to the attack of the person who sees in the group a forum. The physical
signs of such a misinterpretation are familiar. The eye becomes
slightly dilated, the voice more orotund. The suggestion develops
into an exposition, the exposition into an apologia or recrimination.
Discussion is slain. Another enemy is the person who sidetracks a
sentence and then proceeds in a leisurely way to unload its freight
into his own wagon. But in a good discussion the traffic is kept
constantly moving in both directions along a rather rigid line of
track, and the freight arrives somewhere. Some people have a fatal gift
of derailment. Wit is perhaps the most common means. Discussion has no
greater enemies than those who can catch an idea and touch it off into
a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it.
Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be
rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely
realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces
the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and
anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly
what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He
studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for
advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and
phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches
indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full
freight of significance intended.
The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking.
A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes
part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means
becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are
personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who
instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences
have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group.
The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment
where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an
instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not
lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue.
THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER
To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so
devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him.
In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism
against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence.
Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch,
finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there
were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr.
Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more
intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old
dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the
puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a
question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of
more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation
will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments,
and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in
sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which
is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who
have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of
“making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize
the new intelligentsia.
Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being
puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice.
Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new
denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to
its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness
arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when
convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a
sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men
coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to
the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened
by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent,
but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and
turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are
subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We
become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This
new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality
be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it
always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to
interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my
puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal
devil lurking in the universe.)
This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and
exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real
enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he
works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For
he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the
dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover
just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from
what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are
flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if
life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan,
of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from
ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the
flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan
has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural
current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards
hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control
is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just
this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the
light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan
becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal
sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously
cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are
not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful
and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a
“natural” man as you or I.
But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature
called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the
ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and
gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could
an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in
subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power
from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest
impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and
being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the
contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of
satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the
self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself
wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment
of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful
amalgam of both.
What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of
the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for
in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for
life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige
that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing
intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But
its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself
as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the
naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive
and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He
renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes
himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to
excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan
does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were
deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full
play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This
control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes
for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe
in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that
it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over
self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all
satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our
self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap
his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.
Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a
position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with
the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance.
He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility
and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made
the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would
be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his
self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are
strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions
of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter
ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true
puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce
it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its
being an instrument of his terrorism.
The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most
self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give
up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny
of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this
doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of
benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his
renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that
pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere.
Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with
self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you
come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan
but the saint.
The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through
the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard.
Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The
puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural
men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world
where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the
puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of
energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For
the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet
exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his
bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on
others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough
to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as
a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal
must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced.
In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of
puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing
you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And
so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions,
one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two
apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of
the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the
puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated
he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are
more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.
The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the
artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a
crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls,
their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than
to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the
rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches
them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of
the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten
because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased
on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is
irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe
seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature
of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little
puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous.
The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow
beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for
power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from
self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our
humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a
real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender
it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There
is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and
loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get
stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded
as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and
endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks
miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only
strut outside.
Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our
puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing
pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of
love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us,
a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely
self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be
really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.
It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when
his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public
every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have
lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment
of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in
this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian
will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from
Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening
of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our
forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far
more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have
once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic
fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous
normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a
sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the
sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay
of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance,
you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade
of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray
and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our
middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of
“movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions,
and its “registering” of a few simple moods.
You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these
novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition
of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational
creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely
contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever
forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly
in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the
norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done
so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar
novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the
deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be
conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The
charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated
Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the
sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and
the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no
falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that
really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw
the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a
class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes.
Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that
dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is
a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call
this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this
is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind
that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What
becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however,
is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no
sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or
even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it
is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted
out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology.
I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which
I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly
incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I
feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky
has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows
you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than
even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the
reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the
full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of
the understanding analysis of the soul.
This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That
is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story
of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with
the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their
subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story.
He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before
your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the
writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only
English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed
intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of
the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in
it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence
could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange,
breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk
of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know,
with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of
the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line
of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its
striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s
novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also
is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself
the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The
extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own.
Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply
into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly.
We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can
our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of
human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life
itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense
of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life.
Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering
and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living
experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned
toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and
heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the
decisive force we need on our American creative outlook.
Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune to evoke a peculiar quality
of pugnacious interest among the younger American intelligentsia
such as has been the lot of almost nobody else writing to-day unless
it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature seriously
enough to quarrel over it. Or else we take it so seriously that we
urbanely avoid squabbles. Certainly there are none of the vendettas
that rage in a culture like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems to
have made himself, particularly since the suppression of “The Genius,”
a veritable issue. Interesting and surprising are the reactions to
him. Edgar Lee Masters makes him a “soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking
the earth, stalking life”; Harris Merton Lyon saw in him a “seer of
inscrutable mien”; Arthur Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing
throng of figures, “labored with immortal illusion, the terrible and
beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life”; Mr. Powys makes
him an epic philosopher of the “life-tide”; H. L. Mencken puts him
ahead of Conrad, with “an agnosticism that has almost passed beyond
curiosity.” On the other hand, an unhappy critic in _The Nation_ last
year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time in a neat antithesis
between the realism that was based on a theory of human conduct and the
naturalism that reduced life to a mere animal behavior. For Dreiser
this last special hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and simian
activities of his characters were rather exhaustively outlined. At the
time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s
latest book, “A Hoosier Holiday,” it becomes nonsensical. For that wise
and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic of very common
human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic, with an
artist’s vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life.
This book gives the clue to Mr. Dreiser, to his insatiable curiosity
about people, about their sexual inclinations, about their dreams,
about the homely qualities that make them American. His memories give a
picture of the floundering young American that is so typical as to be
almost epic. No one has ever pictured this lower middle-class American
life so winningly, because no one has had the necessary literary skill
with the lack of self-consciousness. Mr. Dreiser is often sentimental,
but it is a sentimentality that captivates you with its candor. You
are seeing this vacuous, wistful, spiritually rootless, Middle-Western
life through the eyes of a naïve but very wise boy. Mr. Dreiser seems
queer only because he has carried along his youthful attitude in
unbroken continuity. He is fascinated with sex because youth is usually
obsessed with sex. He puzzles about the universe because youth usually
puzzles. He thrills to crudity and violence because sensitive youth
usually recoils from the savagery of the industrial world. Imagine
incorrigible, sensuous youth endowed with the brooding skepticism
of the philosopher who feels the vanity of life, and you have the
paradox of Mr. Dreiser. For these two attitudes in him support rather
than oppose each other. His spiritual evolution was out of a pious,
ascetic atmosphere into intellectual and personal freedom. He seems
to have found himself without losing himself. Of how many American
writers can this be said? And for this much shall be forgiven him,--his
slovenliness of style, his lack of _nuances_, his apathy to the finer
shades of beauty, his weakness for the mystical and the vague. Mr.
Dreiser suggests the over-sensitive temperament that protects itself
by an admiration for crudity and cruelty. His latest book reveals the
boyhood shyness and timidity of this Don Juan of novelists. Mr. Dreiser
is complicated, but he is complicated in a very understandable American
way, the product of the uncouth forces of small-town life and the vast
disorganization of the wider American world. As he reveals himself, it
is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul.
Mr. Dreiser seems uncommon only because he is more naïve than most
of us. It is not so much that his pages swarm with sexful figures
as that he rescues sex for the scheme of personal life. He feels a
holy mission to slay the American literary superstition that men and
women are not sensual beings. But he does not brush this fact in the
sniggering way of the popular magazines. He takes it very seriously,
so much so that some of his novels become caricatures of desire. It
is, however, a misfortune that it has been Brieux and Freud and not
native Theodore Dreiser who has saturated the sexual imagination of the
younger American intelligentsia. It would have been far healthier to
absorb Mr. Dreiser’s literary treatment of sex than to go hysterical
over its pathology. Sex has little significance unless it is treated
in personally artistic, novelistic terms. The American tradition had
tabooed the treatment of those infinite gradations and complexities of
love that fill the literary imagination of a sensitive people. When
curiosity became too strong and reticence was repealed in America,
we had no means of articulating ourselves except in a deplorable
pseudo-scientific jargon that has no more to do with the relevance
of sex than the chemical composition of orange paint has to do with
the artist’s vision. Dreiser has done a real service to the American
imagination in despising the underworld and going gravely to the
business of picturing sex as it is lived in the personal relations
of bungling, wistful, or masterful men and women. He seemed strange
and rowdy only because he made sex human, and American tradition had
never made it human. It had only made it either sacred or vulgar, and
when these categories no longer worked, we fell under the dubious and
perverting magic of the psycho-analysts.
In spite of his looseness of literary gait and heaviness of style
Dreiser seems a sincere groper after beauty. It is natural enough
that this should so largely be the beauty of sex. For where would a
sensitive boy, brought up in Indiana and in the big American cities,
get beauty expressed for him except in women? What does Mid-Western
America offer to the starving except its personal beauty? A few
landscapes, an occasional picture in a museum, a book of verse perhaps!
Would not all the rest be one long, flaunting offense of ugliness and
depression? “The ‘Genius,’” instead of being that mass of pornographic
horror which the Vice Societies repute it to be, is the story of a
groping artist whose love of beauty runs obsessingly upon the charm
of girlhood. Through different social planes, through business and
manual labor and the feverish world of artists, he pursues this lure.
Dreiser is refreshing in his air of the moral democrat, who sees life
impassively, neither praising nor blaming, at the same time that he
realizes how much more terrible and beautiful and incalculable life
is than any of us are willing to admit. It may be all _apologia_, but
it comes with the grave air of a mind that wants us to understand just
how it all happened. “Sister Carrie” will always retain the fresh
charm of a spontaneous working-out of mediocre, and yet elemental and
significant, lives. A good novelist catches hold of the thread of human
desire. Dreiser does this, and that is why his admirers forgive him so
many faults.
If you like to speculate about personal and literary qualities that are
specifically American, Dreiser should be as interesting as any one now
writing in America. This becomes clearer as he writes more about his
youth. His hopelessly unorientated, half-educated boyhood is so typical
of the uncritical and careless society in which wistful American talent
has had to grope. He had to be spiritually a self-made man, work out
a philosophy of life, discover his own sincerity. Talent in America
outside of the ruling class flowers very late, because it takes so
long to find its bearings. It has had almost to create its own soil,
before it could put in its roots and grow. It is born shivering into
an inhospitable and irrelevant group. It has to find its own kind of
people and piece together its links of comprehension. It is a gruelling
and tedious task, but those who come through it contribute, like Vachel
Lindsay, creative work that is both novel and indigenous. The process
can be more easily traced in Dreiser than in almost anybody else. “A
Hoosier Holiday” not only traces the personal process, but it gives the
social background. The common life, as seen throughout the countryside,
is touched off quizzically, and yet sympathetically, with an artist’s
vision. Dreiser sees the American masses in their commonness and at
their pleasure as brisk, rather vacuous people, a little pathetic in
their innocence of the possibilities of life and their optimistic
trustfulness. He sees them ruled by great barons of industry, and yet
unconscious of their serfdom. He seems to love this countryside, and he
makes you love it.
Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,--the
flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides. “The Titan” and “The
Financier” are unattractive novels, but they are human documents of the
brawn of a passing American era. Those stenographic conversations, webs
of financial intrigue, bare bones of enterprise, insult our artistic
sense. There is too much raw beef, and yet it all has the taste and
smell of the primitive business-jungle it deals with. These crude and
greedy captains of finance with their wars and their amours had to be
given some kind of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a sort
of raw epic out of their lives.
It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and
the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases
are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must
develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For
Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism
that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize
how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly
un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate.
Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary
censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the
first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true,
flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these
were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books
a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic
attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that
lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch
him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without
the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of
America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk,
and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of
forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel
in that growth.
Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned
in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which
to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried
everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote,
and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia
Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective
sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism
brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most
emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In
that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable
ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times.
Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged
into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I
found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or
what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests
less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with
certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was
faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied
that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most
pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.
Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith
was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all
that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons
he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of
unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse
that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same
sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats
away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an
uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it
only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to
belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching
your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have
really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious
in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of
religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of
feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable
feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The
more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma.
Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under
the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s
approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach
towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying
his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings.
Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic
state.
How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the
reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that
he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and
sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this
to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was
not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the
thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a
cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism
which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay
in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world
seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could
not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The
tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of
Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent
form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_
lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human
“pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty
an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed
him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of
intellectual religion.
Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a
pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma.
And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his
_Apologia_, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us
what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma.
The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate
religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional
religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial
bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again
in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the
mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way
the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a
way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate
his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.
How these attitudes are implied in the _Apologia_ I can only suggest
through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had
always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to
a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms
of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented
every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For
the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the
intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There
is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course
did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and
flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants
thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance
satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman
interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire.
He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual
authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his
significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great
religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with
our modern attitude.
Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was
not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the
Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as
sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive
craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was
because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the
Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice.
His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity
of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was
nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their
vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the _Apologia_. But this
craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of
proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that
lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the
acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman
deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he
valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new
issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One
of the best things in the _Apologia_ is the appendix on Liberalism,
where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new
faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is
precious to him, yet his intuition--he wrote it not many years after
the Reform Bill--has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of
liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and
concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he
flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to
self-prostration.
Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not
like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The
air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church.
She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger
than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment
to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of
the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called
down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the
challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was
not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a
fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in
his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he
loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was
not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems.
Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what
he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult
art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that
arise out of them.
Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the
Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of
reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He
knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible
with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn
of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and
personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity,
following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible
Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life.
He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding
to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the
English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the
established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries
around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy
and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the
contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his
life. Nothing is clearer from the _Apologia_ than Newman’s sense of the
hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to
purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it
should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted
to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make
fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the
mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which
we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the
letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood.
But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one
puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes
to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one
need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the
strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of
the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds
for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered
with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win,
not certitude--for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault
than they are in your pocket--but assurance that you will not have to
see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them
against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of
inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible
that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely
significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing
could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this
belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his
understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God?
On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to
anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging
his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in
the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It
merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no
tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems
to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be
weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.
And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in
Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation
of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena.
Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with
things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner
reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any
such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much
as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as
easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as
it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable
by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be
infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely
prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights.
It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would
otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which
to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas,
while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting
aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is
infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a
few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to
infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk
of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you
are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of
dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity
of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the
human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic
the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary
dialectics.
Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy
of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this
healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to
intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual
judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between
dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible
Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic
moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in
an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the
eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic
in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more
empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate,
because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to
any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where
a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would
work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth.
The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least
defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily
into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief.
The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or
towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral
code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic,
dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in
endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its
workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion
becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is
lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack
endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside
will ever find the slightest interest in having proved.
If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman
did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression.
There need never have been any warfare between theology and science.
Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its
spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and
ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not
stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the
Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused
any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had
insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas
of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect
generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where
scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful
Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of
science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would
have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the
Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting
gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that
fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we
have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a
scrupulous ignoring of her.
In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a
heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to
mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he
were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much
a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which
he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the
storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels
are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by
the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted
in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the
intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand,
to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels.
Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge
with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore
theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness
which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he
should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will
scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic.
On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most
modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma.
Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let
them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence.
The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was
due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through
Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by
the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread
disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the
soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has
acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong.
Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept
thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their
vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed
theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light.
Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is
spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to
bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the
dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really
the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant
reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add
another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in
the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude
which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to
cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is
our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude
which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never
hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others.
The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political,
sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort
to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the
supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science
without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is
doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from
adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true”
or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth
confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting
about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his.
All this seemed to me implicit in the _Apologia_. But if the use Newman
made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less
destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for
getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce
the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution.
When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes
irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can
touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any
human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the
divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church
will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power
and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to
temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic
life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through
the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal.
Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you
throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the
futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved.
If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by
slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as
surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating
the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it
in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are
similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic
ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal
significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious
sect.
Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic.
For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault
of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such
an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s
argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the
politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal
ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept
this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single
Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy.
Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as
well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would
certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth”
that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being
developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in
terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But
poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And
dogma is poetry.
To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer
has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole
structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to
believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a
fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is
at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing
one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly
and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But
Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely
insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep
soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine
issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are
passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude,
has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific
attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to
“believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it
has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would
imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our
common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief
any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have
to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we
can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so.
Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative,
questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief
has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern,
rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is
coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have
difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility
to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire
driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from
belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief
has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the
other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors
converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and
not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say
that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But
what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection.
They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The
place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard
clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the
growing end we wish to achieve.
Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the
more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it.
As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and
forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the
more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has
remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through
its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it
cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical
society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of
men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent
and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church
declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining
of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an
organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion,
whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart.
Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious
intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future.
He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in
his own _Apologia_ an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of
infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief.
IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE 1913-14[1]
It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this
University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding
the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general
acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus
able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of
a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can
predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems
true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform,
and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most
eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to
be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in
Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of
vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want
of capital, wasted in the war.
[1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914.
No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact,
this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply
defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far
less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent
hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly
of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German
invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new
three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at
the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of
reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb
irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have
expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation
of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of
their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst
of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general
strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism.
Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the
drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some
gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be
made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the
spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled
to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to
envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and
costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that
all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige
of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks
and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply
refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and
people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How
I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war
I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests
take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge
of a volcano’s crater.
I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent
mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless
hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first,
a clear impression of the physical body in which each country
clothed itself,--the aspect of town and countryside, villages,
farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns,
styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of
modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of
various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such
acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could
not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual
“sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various
capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk
with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels
and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers,
go to church and court-house and school and library and university,
and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off
from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the
foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to
assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom
one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic
illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of
European countries,--a matter of years of acquaintance and not of
months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an
attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among
the many who were conducting historical and political researches at
the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the
political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended
with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology.
The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things,
perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards
certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for
a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I
could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity,
therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty
for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step
into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means
of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little
passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is
built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is
living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions.
One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out
only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially
introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in
which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness
of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France
is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the
amateur and curious American student to visit.
These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,--that
my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and
homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries,
England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was
a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted
each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social
organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as
most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just
human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks”
like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs,
I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments,
distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied,
not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different
meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war,
for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most
American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a
complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a
French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes
and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each
of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and
justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel
that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty.
We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of
national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,”
unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to
our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of
the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters,
but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other
cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint,
the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual
differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various
cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength,
their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness
and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,--this is the
educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine.
The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with
a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French
Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive,
about European countries, must be read with the constant realization
that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the
temperamental traits, the soul which animates all their activities and
expressions, have all been omitted from consideration by the author.
I can only give fragmentary hints in this short article of the
incidents which built up my sense of these differences of national
cultures. London was the place where I had the best opportunities for
meeting people through letters of introduction. There were glimpses of
the Webbs at a meeting of the Fabian Society, which seems to retain the
allegiance of its old members rather than enlist the enthusiasm of the
younger generation. At their house Mr. Webb talked, as he lectures,
with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward
children, and Mrs. Webb, passive by his side, spoke only to correct
some slight slip on his part; there was another picture of her sweeping
into the _New Statesman_ office and producing a sudden panic of
reverent awe among the editorial staff. Lectures by Shaw and Chesterton
on succeeding nights--Shaw, clean, straight, clear and fine as an
upland wind and summer sun; Chesterton, gluttonous and thick, with
something tricky and unsavory about him--gave me a personal estimate
of their contrasted philosophies. Then there was Professor Hobhouse,
excessively judicial, with that high consciousness of excellence
which the Liberal professor seems to exude; Graham Wallas, with his
personal vivacity of expression and lack of any clear philosophy,
who considered the American sociologist a national disaster; H. G.
Wells, a suggestive talker, but very disappointing personally; John A.
Hobson, whom I cannot admire too much, a publicist with immense stores
of knowledge, poise of mind, and yet radical philosophy and gifts of
journalistic expression, a type that we simply do not seem to be able
to produce in this country.
I expected to find the atmosphere of London very depressing. On the
contrary, a sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to reign everywhere on
the streets, in middle-class homes, even in the slums. This impressed
me as the prevailing tone of English life. Wells and Bennett seem to
have caught it exactly. As for the world that Mr. Galsworthy lives in,
though I looked hard for his people, I could find nothing with the
remotest resemblance. Such a tone of optimism is possible only to an
unimaginative people who are well schooled against personal reactions,
and against the depressing influences of environment--slums and fog
and a prevailing stodginess of middle-class life--that would affect
the moods of more impressionable peoples. In certain educated circles
this tone gave an impression of incorrigible intellectual frivolity.
London has fashions in talk. Significant discussion almost did not
exist. A running fire of ideational badinage, “good talk,” took its
place. Every idea tended to go up in smoke. You found your tone either
monstrously prophetic, as of a young Jeremiah sitting at the board, or
else unpleasantly cynical. Irony does not seem to be known in England.
The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular
books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest
about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues
of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance
of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an
Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of
permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so
large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely
gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements
of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities
that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of
the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just
as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather
confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out
to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on
his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer--even
had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a
‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys
in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful
morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their
black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing
fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and
the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the
dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their
boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each
other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large
and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks
talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St.
John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted
me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their
“English” lack of imagination--she came from New Zealand--the inanely
facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain
beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well
the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of
classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect
epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London
a world.
Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one
weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its
reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest
and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist”
leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris,
hit the English labor situation off beautifully,--Longuet, arguing
that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had
written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the
unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if”
syndicalist ideas were spreading.
The Lloyd George land campaign for the bettering of rural labor
conditions was beginning, but was arousing so little enthusiasm that,
with the intense dissatisfaction over the Insurance Acts that rose from
every class, one wondered if the energy of the Liberal social program
had about spent itself. The London press, solidly Tory--extraordinary
situation for a Liberal country--was finding, besides its social
grievances, the Ulster theme to play upon. Indefatigable industry,
worthy of a better cause, was apparently being exercised to drum up
reluctant English sentiment against Home Rule. All that autumn we lived
ostensibly on the brink of a civil war, whose first mutterings did not
even occur till the next July.
The suffragettes were quiescent, but their big meetings at
Knightsbridge gave one a new insight into the psychology of the
movement. As one watched this fusion of the grotesque and the tragic,
these pale martyrs carried in amidst the reverent hush of a throng as
mystically religious as ever stood around the death-bed of a saint; or
as one heard the terrific roars of “Shame!” that went up at the mention
of wrongs done to women, one realized that one was in the presence of
English emotion, long starved and dried from its proper channels of
expression, and now breaking out irrepressibly into these new and wild
ways. It was the reverse side of the idolized English “reticence.” It
was a pleasant little commentary on the Victorian era. Suffragettism
is what you get when you turn your whole national psychic energy into
divorcing emotion from expression and from intellect.
A hysterical Larkin meeting in Albert Hall; meetings of the Lansbury
people in the East End, with swarms of capped, cheerful, dirty, stodgy
British workmen; a big Churchill meeting at Alexandra Palace, from
which seventeen hecklers were thrown out, dully, one after the other,
on their heads, after terrific scrimmages in the audience; quieter
lectures at the Sociological Society, etc.; churches and law-courts,
and tutorial classes, and settlements, and garden cities, and talks
with many undistinguished people, rounded out my London impression, and
in December I moved my stage to Paris.
The weeks of getting a hearing acquaintance with the language were
spent in reading sociology at the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève,
exchanging conversation with students at the Sorbonne, and attending
still not understood lectures, in the hope that some day the electric
spark of apprehension might flash. I soon felt an intellectual
vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel
ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and
wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests
and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves
in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into
intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and
attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of
the world. In England, unless you were a “social reformer,” you did
not know anything about anybody but your own class; in France there
seemed to be scarcely any social reformers, but everybody assumed an
intelligent interest in everything. In short, a democracy, where you
criticized everything and everybody, and neither attempted to “lift”
the “lower orders” nor “ordered yourself lowly and reverently towards
your betters.” There was a solid, robust air of equality, which one
felt in no other country, certainly not our own. The labor movement
had an air of helping itself, and its leaders showed an intellectuality
that ranked them with the professional men. In fact, the distinction
between the “intellectual” and the non-intellectual seems to have
quite broken down in France. Manners, styles of speech, pronunciation,
ideas, the terms in which things are phrased, seem to flow rather
freely over all the classes. Class-distinctions, which hit you in the
face in England and America--I mean, differences of manner and speech,
attitudes of contempt or admiration for other types--are much blurred.
The language has remained simple, pure, usable without the triteness
and vulgarity which dogs English, and which constitutes the most subtle
evidence of our inherent Anglo-Saxon snobbery. It was a new world,
where the values and the issues of life got reinstated for me into
something of their proper relative emphasis.
With few letters of introduction, acclimatization was much more
difficult than in London. One had to hew one’s way around by the aid
of the newspapers. These are infinitely more expressive of every
shade of political opinion than is the London press. They provided
a complete education in the contemporary world. Supplemented by
the interesting symposiums in the reviews, and the mapping-out of
the various French intellectual worlds which the young _agrégés_
and instructors I met were always eager to give me, the Paris press
provided a witty, interpretative daily articulation of the French
mind at work. It is a very self-conscious and articulate mind,
interested in the psychological artistic aspects of life rather than
the objective active aspects which appeal to the English. Life to
the Anglo-Saxon is what people are doing; to the Latin, rather the
stream of consciousness, what individuals and also what groups are
thinking and feeling. This all makes for clear thinking, constant
interpretation--I noticed that my young lawyer friend was all the
time saying “Voilà! mon explication!”--and an amount of what might be
called social introspection that makes France the easiest as well as
the most stimulating country to become acquainted with. The French are
right in telling you that their scholarship is not the collection of
insignificant facts, but the interpretation of significant ones, the
only kind of scholarship that is worth anything.
In Paris, I continued my general policy of running down the various
social institutions, churches, courts, schools, political meetings,
model tenements, etc., in order to get, at least, a taste of French
society in operation. I poked about the various quarters of town and
countryside, and talked to as many people as I could meet. After the
lectures at the Sorbonne became intelligible, I followed the public
courses of Bouglé and Delacroix and Burkheim in sociology, and when
the campaign for the parliamentary election came I plunged into that,
following the bulletin boards of the parties, with their flaring
manifestoes--among them the royalists’ “A Bas La République!” calmly
left posted on the government’s own official bulletin-board, as
evidence of the most superb political tolerance I suppose any country
has ever shown!--and attending the disorderly meetings held in the
dingy playrooms of the public schoolhouses or in crowded cafés. French
freedom of speech has been struggled for too long not to be prized
when won, and the refusal to silence interrupters made each meeting a
contest of wits and eloquence between the speaker and his audience. The
most extraordinary incident of “fair play” I ever saw--Anglo-Saxons
simply do not know what “fair play” is--was at one of Bouglé’s
meetings, where the chairman allowed one of his political opponents,
who had repeatedly interrupted Bouglé, to take the platform and hold
it for half an hour, attacking Bouglé and stating his own creed. When
he had finished Bouglé took him up point by point, demolished him, and
went on with his own exposition. This at his own meeting, called by his
own Radical Party, to forward his candidature! When I left at 12:45 A.
M. the meeting was still in progress. At a Socialist meeting an old
Catholic, looking exactly like Napoleon III, was allowed to hold forth
for several minutes from a chair, until the impatient audience howled
him off. _Young normaliennes_, representing the suffrage movement,
appeared at meetings of all the parties, and were given the platform
to plead the cause of women as long as the crowd would listen. These
young girls were treated exactly as men; there was no trace of either
chivalry or vulgarity, the audience reacted directly and intensely to
their ideas and not to them. The first impulse of a Frenchman actually
seems to be, when he hears something he doesn’t like, not to stop
the other fellow’s mouth, but to answer him, and not with a taunt,
or disarming wit, but with an argument. In the Chamber of Deputies
the same spirit prevailed. The only visible signs of parliamentary
order were Deschanel’s clashing of his big bell and his despairing
“Voulez-vous écouter! Voulez-vous écouter!” The speaker in the tribune
held it as long as he was permitted by his hearers; his interrupter
would himself be interrupted and would exchange words across the
chamber while the official speaker looked resignedly on. The Left would
go off as one man in violent explosions of wrath, shake their fists
at the Center, call out epithets. Yet this was a dull session that
I saw, only a matter of raising the pay of generals. Certainly the
campaign of that election against the new Three Years’ Military Law
seems very far away now. The crowd outside the Mairie of the Vᵐᵉ the
night of the election shouting “A--Bas--Les-Trois-Ans,” in the same
rhythmic way that the law-students a few weeks earlier had marched down
rue St. Jacques yelling “Cail--laux--as-sassin!” knew no more than I
how soon they would need this defence of more soldiers. The cheers of
the crowd as the splendid cortege of the English sovereigns swept
along the streets seem more important than they did to me at the time.
Doumergue’s stand-pat ministry, with which my stay in Paris almost
exactly coincided, and during which the income-tax, lay-instruction,
and proportional representation issues slowly made progress, appears
now in the light of a holding everything safe till the election was
over, and the President could stem the tide of reaction against the new
military laws. France was waiting for the blow to fall that might be
mortal.
On the first of May I was in Nîmes, delightful Southern city,--where
gaunt Protestants gave out tracts in the cars, and newspapers devoted
to bull-fighting graced the news-stands,--reading the big red posters
of the socialist mayor, summoning all the workmen to leave off work and
come out to celebrate the International. Indeed a foreign land!
I arrived in Genoa the evening the Kaiser landed from Corfu, and
witnessed the pompous and important event. In Pisa, I stepped into
a demonstration of students, who were moving rapidly about the city
closing the schools and making speeches to each other, as a protest
against harsh treatment of Italians by the Austrian government in
Trieste, the passionate _leit motiv_ of Italia Irredenta that runs
through all current Italian thought and feeling. In Florence I began to
understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which
arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the
young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the
dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome,
where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual
ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century.
Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the
twentieth, has left its traces. It is the one city in Europe to study
western civilization, an endless source of suggestion, stimulation and
delight. It is the one city where the ancient and the ultra-modern live
side by side, both brimming over with vitality. The Church and the most
advanced and determined body of social revolutionists living side by
side; the Vatican galleries faced by the futurist; a statue of Ferrer
just outside Bernini’s colonnade; rampant democracy confronting Prince
Colonnas and Borgheses; Renaissance palaces, and blocks of monstrous
apartments built in the mad speculation after 1870; all the tendencies
and ideas of all Europe contending there in Rome, at once the most
ancient and the most modern city we know. What is a month in Rome!
I could do little more than disentangle the political currents, get
familiar with certain names in the intellectual world, and plot
out the city, historically and sociologically, after a fashion. A
noted psychologist, Dr. Assagioli in Florence, had gone over the
philosophical situation for me; and in Rome, Professor Pettazoni of
the university told me of the political tendencies. A young Modernist
priest, discharged from his theological professorship for suspected
connection with the “Programma,” who talked about as much English as I
did Italian, proved very friendly and informing, and gave me a sense
of that vast subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing
movement in the Church. Various types, Italian cavalry officers,
professors of pedagogy, Sicilian lawyers, an emotional law student
from Lecce, who took me to the university and talked republicanism to
me, passed through the pension. And in Rome anyway you simply seeped
Italy in, from the newspapers, as vivid and varied as those in Paris,
and the host of little democratic and political weeklies, most of
them recent, but fervent and packed with ideas that indicated a great
ferment of young intellectual Italy. The young Florentine Papini gives
in his picturesque books the picture of the Italian soul struggling
with French, English and German ideas, and trying to hew some sort
of order out of the chaos. One got the impression that Nietzsche was
raging through the young Italian mind. But I was all for the candor and
sympathy and personality of this expression. Papers like “La Voce,”
published by Papini’s friends, have an idealistic sweep such as we
simply cannot imagine or, I suppose, appreciate in this country. I had
touched a different national mind. Expressions which seem wild to us
fell there into their proper and interpretative order.
My impression was that almost anything might happen in Italy. While
I was in Rome, the Pope was drawing protests from even the most
conservative clerical dailies for his obscurantism. The country seemed
to be disillusionizing itself about representative government, which,
though it had become perfectly democratic, and had the most sweeping
program of social reform, was clumsy and ineffective, and had utterly
failed to carry out the popular hopes. The Crown scarcely seemed to be
taken much more seriously than in Norway. Republican sentiment cropped
up in unexpected places. Nationalism grew apace, cleverly stimulated
by the new capitalistic bourgeoisie and the new industry, which first
impressed you as you came through the long string of gayly-colored,
swarming factory towns on the coast between Ventimiglia and Genoa.
Political parties, Nationalist, Constitutionalist, Republican,
Socialist, etc., seemed as numerous as in France, but there was not the
same fluctuation, for the expert governmental hand kept a majority, in
the Camera. This body gave little of the impression of dignity that one
had felt in the French Chamber. One felt that while in Italy democratic
feeling was almost as genuine and universal as in France, political
democracy had by no means proved its worth. That Latin passion for
intellectual sincerity and articulation--that quality which makes the
Latin the most sympathetic and at the same time the most satisfactory
person in the world, because you can always know that his outward
expression bears some relation to his inward feeling--had resulted, as
in France, in the duplication of parties, which were constantly holding
congresses and issuing programs, and then splitting up into dissentient
groups. This trait may be unfortunate politically; but it certainly
makes for sincerity and intelligence, and all the other virtues which
our Anglo-Saxon two-party system is well devised to destroy.
This Latin quality of not being reticent, of reacting directly and
truthfully, had its most dramatic expression in the great general
strike of June, which I witnessed in Rome. Disgust and chagrin at
the Tripolitan war, a general reaction against militarism, had been
slowly accumulating in the working classes, and the smouldering feeling
was touched off into a revolutionary explosion by the shooting of
two demonstrators at Ancona by the police on the festival day of the
Statuto. This was followed in Rome, as in most of the other cities
of Italy, by a complete suspension of work. No cars or wagons moved
for three days; no shops or stores opened their doors; none of the
public services were performed; the only newspaper was a little red
“bolletino” which told of the riots of the day before. One did nothing
but walk the garbage-littered streets, past the shuttered windows and
barricaded doors, and watch the long lines of infantry surrounding
the public squares, and the mounted carabinieri holding the Piazza
del Popolo, to prevent meetings and demonstrations. The calm spirit
of the troops, surrounded by the excited crowds, was admirable. And
the overwhelming expression of social solidarity displayed by this
suspended city made one realize that here were radical classes that had
the courage of their convictions. On the third day, the conservative
classes recovered their breath, and I saw the slightly fearful
demonstration of shouting youths who moved down the Via del Tritone
while great Italian flags swung out from one window after another,
greeted with wild hand-clapping from every thronged bourgeois balcony.
The next day the darting trolley-cars told the strike was over, but
two days later I alighted at the Naples station into a fortress held
by Bersaglieri against a mob who had been trying all day to burn the
station. The shooting kept us inside until the last rioters were
dispersed, and the great protest was over, though it was days before
the people of the Romagna, where railroads and telegraphs were cut,
were convinced that the monarchy had not fallen and a republic been
proclaimed. The government had kept very quiet, except for the floods
of oratory that rolled through the Camera; if it had not, there might
have been a real revolution, instead of merely the taste and thrill of
one.
My last political experience in Italy was election night in Venice,
with the triumph of the conservatives, who had made no bones of the
economic interpretation of politics, but had placarded the city with
posters recalling to gondolieri, hotel-keepers and shop-keepers, the
exact amount of money they had lost by reason of the general strike and
the wild scurry of foreigners out of the country. This rather appalling
sum was apparently a final and clinching argument, and we heard the
gratitude of the Patriarch from his balcony by San Marco expressed to
the citizens who had “saved” their country. Such incidents are symbols
of the candors and delights of the Latin temperament and of everything
in the Latin countries.
Switzerland, besides its holidaying, contributed the Bern Exposition,
the intensely significant spectacle of a nation looking at itself.
If, as was said, every Swiss schoolchild saw the exposition not once
but three times, our day was one of those times. All Switzerland was
there studying and enjoying itself. In this little epitome of its life,
one had a sense of the refreshing value of living in a small country
where its activities and spirit could all, in some sort of fashion, be
grasped, understood, contemplated, as one might a large picture. Most
suggestive, perhaps, were the great water-power development projects,
electrical engineering schemes, and mountain railroading, planned ahead
in a broad way for fifty years or so. A country that knew what it was
about, that knew how to use its resources for large social ends!
My German tour of the last two weeks of July, cut short by the war,
was more definitely sociological. I had been through the Rhine country
to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich, the preceding summer. This trip
went straight north from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. There were the
famous town-planned cities to be seen, and housing-schemes, which I had
followed rather closely in all the countries, and a general “sizing-up”
of German “Kultur.” I missed my settling down in Berlin; newspapers
and people had to be taken on the wing. But then the German spirit and
expression was much more familiar to me through study than had been the
French and Italian. My most striking impression was of the splendor of
the artistic renaissance, as shown particularly in the new architecture
and household and decorative and civic art. These new and opulent
styles are gradually submerging that fearful debauch of bad taste which
followed the French war, and which makes the business quarters of the
German cities so hideous. But the newer quarters, monuments, public
buildings of the last ten years have a massive, daring style which
marks an epoch in art. I have yet to come across an American who likes
this most recent German architecture; but to me buildings like the
University at Jena, the Stuttgart theater, the Tietz shops, etc., with
their heavy concrete masses and soaring lines, speak of perfectly new
and indigenous ideas. And if artistic creation is a mark of a nation’s
vitality, the significance of this fine flare and splurge of German
style, the endless fecundity of decorative design in printing and
furniture, etc., the application of design to the laying out of towns
and suburbs, the careful homogeneity and integrity of artistic idea,
should not be overlooked. These things are fertile, are exhilarating
and make for the enhancement of life. The Germans are acting exactly
as if they no longer believed, as we do, that a high quality of urban
life can be developed in a rag-tag chaos of undistinguished styles and
general planlessness.
Specifically, I visited the municipal workingmen’s cottages in Ulm
and saw the town-planning charts of the city in the office of the
_Stadtbaurat_; the huge apartments, municipally built and owned,
in Munich; the big _Volksbad_ in Nuremberg, and the garden-city
workingmen’s suburb at Lichtenhof, with the schoolchildrens’ garden
allotments; the model garbage-disposal plant at Furth, a miracle of
scientific resource and economy; the extraordinary model municipal
slaughter-house at Dresden, so characteristically German with its
_Schlachthof_ and _Direktorhaus_ at the entrance; and, lastly the
famous garden-city of Hellerau, inferior, however, on the whole, to
the English Hampstead Suburb at Golders Green. Towns like Rothenburg
and Nordlingen were little laboratories of mediæval and modern
town-planning. The _Stadtbaurat_ at Rothenburg went over for us the
development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the
government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality.
Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and
spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace--who seemed to have
no sense of being excluded from “rights”--what they really wanted, far
more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure, this epitome
of the German political scheme served to convince us that we were in a
world where our ordinary neat categories of political thought simply
didn’t apply. It was futile to attempt an interpretation in Anglo-Saxon
terms. There was no objective evidence of the German groaning under
“autocracy” and “paternalism.” One found oneself for the first time in
the presence of a government between whom and the people there seemed
to exist some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony of spirit and
ends.
It was dramatic to sweep up through the endless billowing fields and
carefully tended forests and imposing factory towns--Germany, caught at
mid-summer, in the full tide of prosperity--and come into Berlin on
the morning of “the historic day,” July 31st, 1914, with the agitated
capital on the brink of war; to see the arrival of the Kaiser and
the princes at the Schloss; to watch the Crown Prince’s automobile
blocked twenty feet away from us by the cheering crowd;--“der _wahre_
Kriegesmann,” as the papers were calling him in contemptuous contrast
to his peaceful father; to hear the speech of the latter--grim,
staccato-voiced, helmeted figure, very symbol of war--from the balcony
of the palace; to watch next day the endless files of reservists
marching through the streets to the casernes to “einkleiden”; and
then to hear the finally fatal news of Russia’s refusal with the
swarming crowds on Unter den Linden, hysterical from both fervor and
anxiety. If ever there was a tense and tragic moment, when destiny
seemed concentrated into a few seconds of time, it was that 5 P. M. on
the afternoon of August first, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin.
A midnight flight to Sweden, with a motley horde of scared Russians
and Scandinavians, and two weeks in the distressed and anxious
northern countries ended my year. Nothing but the war; regiments
of flaxen-haired Danish boys, mobilizing along the country roads of
Denmark, the _Landsturm_ lolling along the Stockholm streets, even the
Norwegians drilling against none knew what possible attack. The heavens
had fallen. An interview with Herr Branting, the Swedish Socialist
leader, and the depth of his personal feeling and the moving eloquence
with which he went over the wreck of socialist and humanitarian hopes,
gave us the vividest sense of the reverberations of the shock on a
distinguished cosmopolitan mind. The librarian of the Royal Library
in Copenhagen, the pastor of the Swedish church, and the editor of
“Dagens Nyheter,” in Stockholm, whom we were able to talk with, very
kindly answered our questions on Scandinavian affairs. And we have
the pleasantest memories of Herr Hambro in Christiania, editor of
the leading Conservative daily, who had just finished La Follette’s
autobiography, and would have preferred to talk about America even
to showing us how the Radical parties in Norway were lording it over
their opponents. One got the sense in these countries of the most
advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern
intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to
be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth-century possibility. There
was a mood of both gravity and charm about the quality of the life
lived, something rather more Latin than Teutonic. This is an intuition,
reinforced by a sense that nowhere had I seen so many appealing people
as on the streets of Copenhagen. Valid or not, it was the pleasantest
of intuitions with which to close my year.
This sketch, I find, has, in fact, turned out much more impressionistic
than I intended. But impressions are not meant to be taken as dogmas.
I saw nothing that thousands of Americans have not seen; I cannot
claim to have brought back any original contribution. There was only
the sense of intimate acquaintance to be gained, that feeling of
at-homeness which makes intelligible the world. To the University which
made possible the rare opportunity of acquaintance with these various
countries and cultures, the contact with which has been so incompletely
suggested in this sketch, my immeasurable thanks!
TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA
No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public
opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The
discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien
population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought
out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We
have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at
the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer
at patriots like Mary Antin who write about “our forefathers.” We
have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned
by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in
this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles,
while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly
assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly
label “American.”
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this
country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had
marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were
thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the
war, we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock
that these movements had been making great headway before the war even
began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it
might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they
became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous,
to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural
traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of
washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely
real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American,
did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or
Polish.
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take
a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong
cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and
colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to
admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure
of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what
Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal
has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to
assert a higher ideal than the “melting-pot.” Surely we cannot be
certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations
within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions,
we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency.
We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own
terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate
machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political
naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it
neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that
America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and
not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were
the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This
is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and
general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.
Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign-born as the
people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they
could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon
other Mayflowers, but upon a “Maiblume,” a “Fleur de Mai,” a “Fior di
Maggio,” a “Majblomst.” These people were not mere arrivals from the
same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers
to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had
to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial
characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to
make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a
level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if
distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some
other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with
motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be
assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the
culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention
of “giving themselves without reservation” to the new country. They
came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape
from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make
their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework.
Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been
accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were
conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the
objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their
social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial
people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of
the “Revolution,” our whole legal and political system remained more
English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England
itself law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.
It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief
obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order
of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to
save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate
Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is
raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a
socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities
are being educated in the amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe
that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle
of Japan’s sudden jump from mediævalism to post-modernism should have
destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who
are to “evolve.” We are dealing with their children, who, with that
education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us
cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent
in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of
inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These
peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are
now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become
in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.
We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic
generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see
the one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and
the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future. To
think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America,
while we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes
only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference
between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither
in motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the
homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to
the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the
ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States.
English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English
literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities,
have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’
breasts. The distinctively American spirit--pioneer, as distinguished
from the reminiscently English--that appears in Whitman and Emerson
and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other
cult, unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No
country has perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little
influence on the country’s traditions and expressions. The unpopular
and dreaded German-American of the present day is a beginning amateur
in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York
and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically
in England’s cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of
ethical independence of thought, carries along European traditions
which are no more “American” than the German categories themselves.
It speaks well for German-American innocence of heart or else for its
lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a “Tu
quoque!” If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they
should be affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of
time to be made American where the German had had only half a century.
Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus,
showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the
English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only
because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the
epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of “hyphenated
English-Americans.” But even our quarrels with England have had the
bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of
to-day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate
way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our
younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as “colonials.”
America--official, controlling, literary, political America--is
still, as a writer recently expressed it, “culturally speaking, a
self-governing dominion of the British Empire.”
The non-English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes
thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as little more than
a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first
immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased
to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in
transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly
woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have
come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture
which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently
they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon
immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer
has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute
the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible
for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for
amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the
care and labor which they have devoted to absorbing the immigrant.
His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost a
pathetic eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or
disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary
communication, but for all the amenities of life.
If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as
one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom,
and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment
of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic coöperation
in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social
institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and
the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race
is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own
culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has
been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality.
And the war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of
“Americanizing,” that is to say, “Anglo-Saxonizing,” the immigrant has
failed.
For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other
peoples, talk about their “arrogance,” scold them for not being melted
in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose
which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession
of a racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the
so-called “hyphenates.” Let the Anglo-Saxon be proud enough of the
heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let
him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants,
where he would have been living to-day. To those of us who see in the
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red _leit-motif_ of our
civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama
as the waves of immigration broke over it.
Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these
races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the
non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which
has remained the most distinctively “American,” the South. Let him
ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes
Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how
superior this native civilization is to the great “alien” states of
Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have
self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while
being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how
much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come
out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The
South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still
remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed
culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally
sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like
the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin
and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a
new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and
Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new
potency. The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation”
of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their
assimilation of us--I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures
have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous
Americanism, but have remained distinct but coöperating to the greater
glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native
“Americanism” around them.
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities
should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.
Already we have far too much of this insipidity,--masses of people
who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor
nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country
seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its
schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural
nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible
gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost.
Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign
names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they
have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle Westerners. It
does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that,
letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have
substituted for it only the most rudimentary American--the American
culture of the cheap newspaper, the “movies,” the popular song, the
ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them
assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done
its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill
with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is
accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal
is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor
product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the
self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these
fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his
fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous
to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a
mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports
the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the
Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so
surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture
do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual
country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those
of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes
of American life. The influences at the center of the nuclei are
centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which
mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains
this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American
community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal,
anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who
came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and
jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with
its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the
absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns,
our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces
of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our
time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the
other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating
force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our
loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious
folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose
be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours.
But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we
not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from
the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual
toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and
dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted
Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered
in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here
inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not
fuse.
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of
imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of
so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old
nationalism,--belligerent, exclusive, in-breeding, the poison of which
we are witnessing now in Europe,--is to make patriotism a hollow sham,
and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a
follower and not a leader of nations.
If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give
up the search for our native “American” culture. With the exception of
the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to
be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American
culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of
cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made
it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This
will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous
genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry,
philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough,
American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are
least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness,
action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where
is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction,
the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity,
are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and
mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting
into impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor
is it any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective
of all the arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we
profess to idealize. But in the finer forms--music, verse, the essay,
philosophy--the American genius puts forth work equal to any of its
contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius has expressed
the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a
colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many
races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm.
And only as that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the
American culture. As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the
“melting-pot,” our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was
something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light
of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox
that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be
what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of
attacking the future with a new key.
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become
something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-century
Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox
nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital
enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national
self-feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content
to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in
Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness.
Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend
this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to
fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which
armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of
honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded
by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and
not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical
violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that
in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred
honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the
signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror
and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among
the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and
realistic America of the twentieth century.
We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what mediæval
codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted
European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it
and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign
peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America,
“hyphenated” to bitterness, is somehow non-explosive. For, even if
we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war
has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the
other side of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic
harmlessness.
What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in
this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In
that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic--between the
hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American--there
have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional
attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues
of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious
struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen
the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history
on which Victorian England throve and made itself great in its own
esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a
contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies
as the incarnation of virtue-on-a-rampage; the fierce envisaging of
their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and
democracy--all this has been thrown with intensest force against the
German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and
the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual
battleground of the nations.
The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American
democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever
American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will
have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto
encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find
that we have all unawares been building up the first international
nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous
nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal,
however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and
tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved
has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of
foreign cultures, from which the sting of devastating competition has
been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature,
the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved
that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character
substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the
sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of
misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the
outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new
orientation of the American mind in the world.
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this
cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful
purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study
of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic
geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people
of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is
still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture,
but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown
into cosmopolitanism, and his motherhood is not one nation, but all
who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague
sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world--a
sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war--may be the
modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the
American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His
provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his
imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a
vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among
his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the
acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them
he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the
children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his
old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious
to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so
provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from
the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has
scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes
a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for
unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton
philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He
may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all
the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at
least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential
to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western
world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar
evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them.
Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet
retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national
spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other
for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it
not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and
which they all equally possess.
A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree,
has within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual
world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of America will
be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond the mere
exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold recording of
facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until
it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and
felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make
understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite
and not divide.
Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself “patriotism”
and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself “preparedness”
the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold
it are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an
integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is
integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or
for predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do
not want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the
truculent assertion of a mediæval code of honor and of doubtful rights.
They believe that the most effective integration will be one which
coördinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward
working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They
demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness
of enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony
within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that
its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of coöperation,
this feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of
America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow
“Americanism” or forced chauvinism.
In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship
which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship
we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international
citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have
assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the political life
of the United States must cut the new citizen off from all sympathy
with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of devotion
from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of moral
treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant
whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his
European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive,
just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no
warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit
a formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a
citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some
other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns.
Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships
he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and
right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the
formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become
intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What
makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness,
so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some
degree dwell still in his native environment.
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practise a
dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American
who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in
love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and
seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least
a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels
himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this
expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his
native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of
the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races
and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees
the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of
aliens, waiting to be “assimilated,” waiting to be melted down into
the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads
of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves
into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an
Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be
moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America
those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning
how to live together.
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free
and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native
land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have
to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider
justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien
who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land,
only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow
nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant
is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.
This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled
laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last
dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them
return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve
their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical
outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the
primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has
already raised the material standard of living in many regions of these
backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly
what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural
resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating
these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast
masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek,
therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American
asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming,
in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and
traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this
cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American--and in this category
I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the
pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas--has the chance to
become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a
nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with
the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement
which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one
color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this
cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut
ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb
the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to
admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns
us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an
ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with
our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America--by
confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or
broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been
vaguely sketching?
We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and
moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing
the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it
is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of
Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of
our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held
the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The
inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We
must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these
later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new
consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the
world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel
for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until
we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all
can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment
of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past,
which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities,
can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite,
which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more
warmly.
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a
younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration
into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which
should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but
infinitely strong.
Gilbert was almost six years old when they all--Mother, Olga, and
baby--went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his
expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements
and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is
smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was
freed forever from the back-street.
Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your
meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a
blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and
trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you
went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after
he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and
stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy
brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.
Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the
water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout
over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished
pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue
or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you
entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it
brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water which to Gilbert
tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which
they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt
Nan’s room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning.
Only on wash-day was that pump interesting when the servant filled
great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and
beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white
garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran
too close under them when you were playing.
The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in
winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with
a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm
his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and
stuffy, for it was lighted only by two windows at the top which were
level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the
shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer,
this hollow would fill with water and as Gilbert sat there eating his
lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the
water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then
Annie would have to be hastily called, and with many ejaculations she
would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to
bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly
through rain-streaming panes this huge slopping figure, throwing
pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the
dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come
out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast
closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which
Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind
the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its
glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert
loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the
ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to
be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked
the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie
shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the
blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the
basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood
by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that
opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was
that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old
frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.
Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie
changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her
guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street,
Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna’s house one naturally had a
servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first
understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish
young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of
growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently,
with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert
would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day
to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her
serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up
potatoes, and listening to his mother’s earnest expostulations. In
a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps
crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about
in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the
other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where
she had begun. To Gilbert’s mother, the living and successive tissue
of Annies became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed
in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which
Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of
this strong, docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to
her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that
downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose
dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert
could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.
Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna’s house better. The front parlor was a
vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated
only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the
sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front
parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around
subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows,
and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always
kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you
sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over
the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which
stretched along the wall.
Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and,
besides, you could not climb up its slippery edges very easily. And
once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you
would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable
bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna’s feet, as she
rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far
back for fear of the grand-father’s clock that stood in the corner
behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours.
Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute
or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later
would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock,
as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When
Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole
long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was
beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled
off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would
have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother’s room, into
which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter,
though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was
warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from
Mother’s room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed,
where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert’s clothes
were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey
in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked,
“Everything Lovely,” the other showing him in the blizzard before a
locked stabledoor, with “Nobody loves me!” Against the tall window,
at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood
flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope
plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun
and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pots and
put them in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered
in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a
winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the
leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted
tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,--fierce dragomans
with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round
helmets, or animals such as Gilbert had seen at the Zoo--camels with
misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was
very startling to wake up, lying on one’s back and gazing out where
this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures.
The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given
place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could
plants look so terrifyingly like heads? Everywhere he looked there
appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of
strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he
was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the
greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that
the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless
juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a
familiar begonia frond. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had
ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could
make him see the things he had seen.
It was in this room that Gilbert’s mother put the children to bed every
night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just
slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cozy and
comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening
thought, “Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!”
For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the
heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door,
but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty,
that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and
everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant
muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little
round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail.
The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity,
of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were
infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a
little, and fell off asleep.
Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of
time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a
minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you
said, “Mother!” in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief
and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert
got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going
out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not!
He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted.
In Gilbert’s new house, you could go upstairs in two ways--the
front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight
and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet.
They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door.
The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth.
They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlor
with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight
that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages
in Gilbert’s house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never
go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one
unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the
delights of sliding down the banisters, and Gilbert, although he could
never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful
guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The
rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and
gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga,
who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too,
and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that
Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and,
having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let
one’s fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go.
Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert’s
legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential
crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that
she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all
the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall,
carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought
Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then
there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant
whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slid on
again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat
to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance
where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of
that slide.
Gilbert’s house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna’s big room
you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was
putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not
care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one
of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna.
At nine o’clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly,
sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their
eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole
town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o’clock the great bell would
ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let the people know
that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten
the bell would begin its real earnestness,--slow and solemn strokes,
each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next
one began.
At the first stroke of the ten o’clock bell, Gilbert would rush to
Garna’s room, where he would find her putting on her black silk dress
and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe veil,
which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead, would be
spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring, and Garna had
not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gilbert’s heart. They
would be late! The maddening slowness with which Garna put the last
touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert into a delirium of anxiety.
Finally they were out on the elm-shaded streets, Gilbert fairly tugging
and straining to get them there before service began. Mother and Olga
were always late, but that was because Olga cried. He could abandon
them. He did not know what would happen to Garna and him if they were
late, but he felt that it would be something namelessly awful.
But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew several
minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed outside, up in
the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a sense of security
and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the hymn and looking
up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the pew.
In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down on the
pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other people did,
but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with ducking his
head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut until he
heard the “Amen” which sent them all upright again. Why people had to
conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave
him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more
solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of
bent backs.
The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented
squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous
chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were
sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight.
There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by
slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a
narrow ledge. Gilbert’s imagination would perform perilous adventures
along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and
up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to
the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister’s
desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert
saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he
would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so
tightly.
When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange
figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked
like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black
points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes
imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving
down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their
frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went
out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle
ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines
of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the
line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert
would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of
holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when
his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets
and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing.
Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus’s family was away, Garna and
Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as
big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In
front of you was the clock, the face of which you could not see, for it
looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could
hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there,
under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with
its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. Yet it was
all very august, and religion seemed to have attained its most solemn
worthiness when you sat in Uncle Marcus’s pew.
The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white tie.
Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and unctuous
hand on Gilbert’s head, as he sometimes did in Sunday School. For
after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her go home, and you
stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old brick building, which
stood a little distance from the church. The light poured through the
big windows, and you could see the lilac-bushes outside. The room swam
with very fluffy little girls, but when they had sung several hymns,
Gilbert and half a dozen other little boys were shepherded into a
corner and sat on their little chairs in a circle around Miss Fogg,
while she taught them the lesson for the day. Gilbert always knew his
golden text, and he was often the only little boy who did. Miss Fogg
would smile at him, which would make him uncomfortable, and he would be
glad when they all stood up and marched around the room to drop their
pennies into a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang:
“Hear the pennies dropping,
Listen while they fall,
Every one for Jesus.
He will have them all.”
Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was
not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had
them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself
unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert ran
home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast beef and
potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays.
Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every Sunday
as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a little
leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a card with
a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost his card
while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day or two. But
he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good
boys, after they had got a prodigious number of golden stars, were
each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when
Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black
Bible, with his name--Gilbert Shotwell Harden--stamped on the cover
in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along
for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to
you out of the blue sky. Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents
if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got
farther than “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him
forever.” Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base
commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that
this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into
proclaiming it.
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam
had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built
and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac,
and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into
the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should
have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been
shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the
housetops;--all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to
obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday
School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was
expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in
his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg
would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong
drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could
hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized
exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as
a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and
wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked,
and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which
this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine
crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization
of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of
drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special
favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great
éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:
“Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
Is not--wise!”
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early
learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from
our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him
about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the
New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus,
who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons,
when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the
back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved
God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with
a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew
equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in
one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago,
and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his
mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of
tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor
was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and
square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert
certainly did not like him.
Much more nearly like God was his father’s father, whom he had once
been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired,
white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and
repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not
feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it
was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit
there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would
grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thought on the
majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel
that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who
was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of
those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the
picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion
within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart
towards the benignant being in the blue robe.
He was always present, because before every meal they would all put
down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they
would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it,
sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their
mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil.
Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would
put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and
mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said
their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The
prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven,
and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly
Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked
God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that
if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to
Heaven with yours.
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of
church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he
love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he
felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was
a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She
spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she
would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in
her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted
her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not
well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not
make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna’s
house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted.
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not
always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were
let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing
about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always
sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed
spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and
look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed
to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he
would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she
laughed and pretended to arrange it again.
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate
that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half
appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would
take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see
Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force.
How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga
would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity
into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream,
and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden
would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On
the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had
ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna
would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting
her daughter, Gilbert’s mother, settle the whole affair, as far away
as if she were in Pampelune. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the
inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going
eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna,
the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from
his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
Between Garna’s chair and the window was a high, chintz-colored box
which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In
the corner just behind Garna’s chair was the tall secretary-desk, with
its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy
writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports
that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box
and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most
satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window
looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just
behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat,
shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing,
or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the
ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back
of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in
which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and
account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna
gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and
paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations
of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of
her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of
restless and devastating mischief. Sometimes, to make sure that no one
interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But
Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt
Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the
doors could ever have become locked.
In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit
sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face
against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder,
and listen to Garna’s stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert
learned about her father’s house in Burnham, which he should some day
see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his
mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the
West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug,
when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on
which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of
those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house
in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had
come to live with Garna.
So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with
its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until,
in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing
until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna’s high bed. Every now
and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed
to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other
sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the
back-parlor, it was with a “I’m going to sleep with you to-night!” Then
he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the
great feathery soft bed in Garna’s room. He would sink off to sleep in
billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning
he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting,
dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed
against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be
there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to
her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before.
Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked
Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room
in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone,
for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far
back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which
and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might
be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a
sky-light, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan’s room was
shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that
Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined
the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and
comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while
Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she
would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out
as “Psychology. James.” She had several books on shelves over her desk,
and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung
on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said
she was a teacher, and lived in New York.
Aunt Nan was very tall and slender and very straight, and she had very
black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always
wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness
about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than
Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her
walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like
to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green
lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black
bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and
blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert
sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in
to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to
the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery
lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The
long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its
flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and
raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend
the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable
garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert
and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done. They all seemed to be
wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright,
shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the
garden on the gravelly paths with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork.
She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften;
she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel
the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished
garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and
the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth.
The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went
around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the
rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week
the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds,
the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on
the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine
renovation would take place all over again.
Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for
dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little
weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated
by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless
passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that
she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little
fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how
little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert
much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him.
Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted.
Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could
resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly
cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one
was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she
was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you
to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness,
because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and
uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert
soon got the habit of ignoring his mother’s expressed desires and
wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his
own desires.
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain,
a principality. It was years before he had really explored it
thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and
bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the
back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he
had found them, something down very deep in him told him that this was
what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
You rushed out the side-door--for the front door was just as heavily
interdicted as the front stairs--and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles
and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and
grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two
tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert’s shutter by his bed
when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn,
covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from
growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards
the neighbor’s fence, but just before it reached there it turned into
a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that
climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the
right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly
pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees
Grove.” The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious,
almost as big as Gilbert’s room. It could be turned into a house, or a
shop or a church, at a moment’s notice. The big trunks stretching up
above Gilbert’s head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he could
not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or
seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines
and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all
through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day
to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and
carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told
him, they had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so
had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces
of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the
side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full
of rakes and hoes and wheel-barrows, but there were deep bins where
still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a
manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you
could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that
there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger
and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses.
If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and
gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by
this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of
blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the
broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert
could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to
eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden.
Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard,
ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past
the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle
Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden,
was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas,
which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an
open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes
lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating
past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of
fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the
street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to
the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which
Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on.
Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink
and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that
Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole
side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and
red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green
balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge
that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of
the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within
which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green
clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground.
Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the
barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the
covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them
on a stone.
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor
when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in
Mother’s room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when
spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers
come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good
in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be
playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent
of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the
manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the
cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his
fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the
pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine
anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the
house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never
entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the
rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep
them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street
and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and
yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them
in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly,
insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to
sleep, the tædium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave.
He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow
dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if
alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking
an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The
world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of
eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when
you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept
Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never
occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there
was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed
to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tædium
vitæ was transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly
municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert
imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which
God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the
earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there
was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert’s imagination
was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation
of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but
frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body,
all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him,
would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this
immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he
feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the
clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to
look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which
you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really
blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like
a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have
been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in
this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked
solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep
again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last
afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness
and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds
drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.
The first break in Gilbert’s world came when his mother decided that he
and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when
his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather
pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach
him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and
write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books
he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne’s Wonder Tales, and
read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would
forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What
did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his
multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about
the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known
since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her
out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street.
Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious
air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At
the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he
would carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any
horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga
precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under
the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron’s.
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss
Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes
touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all
the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga
and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room
over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that
children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell.
So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter
work.
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed
absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through
the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully
to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the
words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that
“retire” meant “go to bed,” because he had seen it mean that in a book
he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead
with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight
back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the
corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink
at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron’s sisters would
come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert
not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he
would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything,
and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o’clock,
and they all went home for the day.